Take off your slippers, go out, share the faith, pope says

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The world needs Christians who do not “stay in their slippers on the couch,” but get out and share the Gospel, especially through acts of charity, Pope Francis told members of an Italian fraternity that promotes a spectacular devotion to St. Rose of Viterbo.

The “Bearers of St. Rose” carry a 98-foot-tall tower weighing 11,000 pounds through the streets of Viterbo every Sept. 3, the feast of St. Rose.

The men who carry the tower and the “mini-facchini,” children who carry a scaled-down version of it, met with Pope Francis at the Vatican Jan. 11. The pope did not read his prepared speech to them but rather distributed the text as he had done earlier with diocesan priests who are members of the Secular Institute of the Missionary Priests of the Kingship of Christ.

St. Rose, who lived in the 13th century, was a mystic dedicated to charity, Pope Francis wrote in his text.

Restless in spreading the Gospel, she could be called “an agitated saint,” the pope said. “Her inner experience could not remain hidden but spread like the light of a lamp that illuminates the whole house.”

“We need such saints, even today: people who do not sit on the couch in slippers but who, burning with the irrepressible desire to live and proclaim the Gospel with passion, become contagious in holiness,” he wrote.

Carrying the tower through Viterbo, the pope said, should not be just a folkloric oddity, but an occasion to make known the Gospel of Jesus.

Just as it requires a team of about 100 people to carry the tower, sharing the faith requires being united and in step with each other, he said. “In the procession and in life, such a great feat cannot be accomplished alone.”

In the text prepared for and distributed to the priests, Pope Francis urged them to value their identities as diocesan priests, what the church terms as “secular” priests as opposed to religious-order priests.

“The church, every baptized person, is in the world, is for the world, but is not of the world,” he said.

The secular institute to which they belong, a group founded in Italy in the 1930s by Father Agostino Gemelli, embraces a Franciscan spirituality that encourages “humble, ready and fraternal service,” the pope said. Doing so in imitation of “the kingship of Christ consists in serving, in giving yourself with generosity, in being in solidarity with the poor and excluded.”