Muchas gracias, padre Arturo [Sosa, President of the Union of Superior Generals], por sus palabras.

Dear brothers,

I am pleased to meet you on the occasion of your one hundred and fortieth General Assembly. As you know, I too carried out the ministry that has been entrusted to you, and I know the importance of coming together to listen and to discern, in the light of the Holy Spirit, what the Lord asks of you and your Orders and Congregations for the good of the Church.

For this assembly, you have chosen the theme: “Connected Faith: Living Prayer in the Digital Age”. It touches on three areas that are very important for religious life nowadays: our relationship with God, our encounter with brethren, and our engagement with the digital world.

Let us start by considering the first: our relationship with God. In the Bull of Indiction of the ongoing Jubilee, Pope Francis, inviting us to be “pilgrims of hope”, wrote: “In the history of humanity and our own individual history [we] are not doomed to a dead end or a dark abyss, but directed to an encounter with the Lord of glory. … In this spirit, we make our own the heartfelt prayer of the first Christians with which sacred Scripture ends: ‘Come, Lord Jesus!’ (Rev 22:20)” (Spes non confundit, 19).

Our hope is based on the awareness of walking towards the encounter and full communion with God, who was the first to offer his friendship (cf. Saint John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation Vita consecrata, 27). Therefore, prayer is fundamental in the existence of every consecrated person: it is the relational space within which the heart opens to the Lord, learning to ask and to receive, with trust and gratitude, his love that heals, transforms and enflames the mission (cf. Vatican Ecumenical Council II, Decree Perfectae caritatis, 6). In this way, we bear witness to what we truly are: creatures in need of everything, surrendered to the provident and good hands of the Creator.

It is important, for our life and apostolate, for us to cultivate this faith so that it does not fade, perhaps due to escapism or defensiveness, or suffocated by anxiety or the presumption of feeling that we are “managers of many services” (cf. Lk 10:40). Then, dazzled by the floodlights of efficiency, clouded by the fumes of compromise or paralyzed by fear, we risk coming to a standstill, or turning our journey as pilgrims into a disorderly and tiring race, forgetting its source and its destination. To this end, the Jubilee offers us a valuable opportunity to return to what matters, clinging to God’s ardent heart, so that his light and warmth may guide and nourish our personal journey and our community paths!

This brings us to the second value to consider: the encounter with our brethren. In this regard, Pope Francis invited us to “unite as a family that is stronger than the sum of small individual members” (Encyclical Letter Fratelli tutti, 78), to “[find and share] a ‘mystique’ of living together” (Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii gaudium, 87). In this dynamic, the Institutes, Orders and Congregations whom you represent are, so to speak, charismatic bodies, in which everyone is profoundly connected by the same humanity, by the same faith, by belonging to Christ and by the calling that unites us in fraternity. In this way, in the Church, the “communitarian and historical subject of synodality and mission” (Final Document of the Second Session of the 16th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, 17), links are transformed into sacred bonds, into channels of grace, in living veins and arteries that perfuse a single body with the same blood.

And this leads us to the third aspect: our engagement with the digital world. Indeed, information technology represents a challenge also for consecrated people. On the one hand, it offers immense opportunities for good, both for community life and for the apostolate. It would be shortsighted to ignore the extraordinary opportunities it provides to communion and the mission, allowing us to reach faraway people, to share faith through new languages, and to reach even those who, through ordinary means, find it difficult to approach our communities. At the same time, however, these resources can strongly influence, and not always for the better, the way we build and maintain relationships. It is easy, for example, to be tempted by the idea of putting mere virtual connections in the place of real relationships between people, where presence, prolonged and patient listening, and the deep sharing of ideas and feelings are indispensable (cf. Francis, Apostolic Exhortation Christus vivit, 88).

As Superiors, you have the responsibility to safeguard fraternity and communion in this area too, ensuring that technical means neither compromise the authenticity of relationships, nor reduce the spaces necessary to cultivate them. In particular, I would like to emphasize that traditional instruments of communion such as Chapters, Councils, canonical Visitations and moments of formation cannot be relegated to the sphere of “remote connections”. The effort of coming together for dialogue and the exchange of ideas is an integral part of our evangelical identity. In this landscape of lights and shadows, a challenge awaits us: that of integrating nova et vetera (cf. Mt 13:52) in a balanced way, preserving and cultivating our relationship with God and with our brothers and sisters, without neglecting or burying, out of idleness or fear, the new talents that the Lord places in our hands (cf. Mt 25:14-30).

Dear friends, thank you for the difficult and delicate task you perform. I bless you from my heart, and I pray for all of you and for your communities. Thank you!

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Holy See Press Office Bulletin, 27 November 2025