A parish should be a home with open doors

The parish should be at the center of the community, a place where God’s presence is felt and hope and love are shared with the world, Pope Francis told Catholics in Bulgaria, Monday.

May 07, 2019

By Hannah Brockhaus
The parish should be at the center of the community, a place where God’s presence is felt and hope and love are shared with the world, Pope Francis told Catholics in Bulgaria, Monday.

“The parish, in this way, becomes a home in the midst of homes,” he said May 6. “It manages to make the Lord present there, where every family, every person tries to earn their daily bread.”

The parish should be “a family among families, open to bearing witness in today’s world… open to faith, hope and love for the Lord and for those whom he has a preferential love. A home with open doors.”

The pope pointed to the testimony he heard from a Catholic Bulgarian family who said the parish, for them, “has always been a second home, the place where they always found strength to carry on, amid community prayer and the support of loved ones.”

“To see things with the eyes of God, we need other people,” he added. “We need them to teach us to look and feel the way Jesus looks and feels, to let our heart beat with his own feelings.”

Pope Francis met with the Bulgarian Catholic community at the Church of St. Michael the Archangel in Rakovski during a May 5-7 visit to Bulgaria and North Macedonia.

Catholics in Bulgaria are a small minority – estimated to be fewer than 50,000 in a population of more than 7 million. Rakovski, a town of around 20,000 people, is mainly Catholic.

In his remarks to the Catholic community, Francis spoke about his experience that morning at a refugee center, where volunteers told him the heart of the center’s life and work “is the recognition that every person is a child of God, regardless of ethnicity or religious confession.”

Love, he stated, does not ask to see someone’s curriculum vitae; it “precedes, it takes the first step.”

“Those who love do not waste time in self-pity, but always try to do something concrete.”--CNA