Ordo Fratrum Minorum Capuccinorum EN

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updated 11:54 AM UTC, Mar 20, 2024

VIII Plenary Council of the Order: Instrumentum laboris

In the Programmatic Letter for the 2012-2018 sexennium, the General Minister, with his Council, announced the plan to convoke a PCO (the eighth) on the theme of "the grace of working."

In the letter that followed to call PCO VIII (November 1, 2013) there was established a working group that would commit itself to the preparation of the same PCO.

The group met in Rome for some days, three times, to develop above all a questionnaire to send to all the friars of the Order and then to synthesize the responses that came, so as to then compose an Instrumentum laboris for the participants in the PCO.

The text that we are presenting, more than a document, is precisely a synthesis of the responses received. Its purpose is to give a voice to the friars, beginning with their feelings and their experience. These promptings, in fact, are many and varied and often have need of deeper study or of being contextualized, but we believe that they are near and incarnate in the realities in which we live.

In the text one can read, in fact, a certain continuity with the other PCOs, especially the last two on poverty and minority, in as much as work that makes for or expresses power or work that is simply for making money cannot be work for a Franciscan who is called to be minor and subject to all. Nor can it be an honest work as St. Francis intended.

If work is a grace, we can be grateful to the Lord for the tasks that he entrusts to us and, also by means of this tool, let us put ourselves to work.

Rome, 21 April 2015
Memorial of St. Conrad of Parzham

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