BROTHERS:

First of all I want to thank God for having looked upon my person with compassion. As I face the great responsibility that the Institute, through you, has entrusted to me this morning, there are three certainties that encourage me, just as they did our Founder: the certainty that the Lord is always close, the certainty that the Lord conducts and guides the history of men and women with wisdom and love, and the certainty that we are engaged in the work of God.

Brothers, I want to thank you for the enormous confidence that you have manifested in me. Only by counting on your support as the Body of the Institute and with the secure knowledge of a community and corresponding team of government do I dare to accept this ministry of animation.

I would like to share with you Brothers the experience that I am living at these very moments. I am not speaking as yet of a message of my program but I want to let my heart speak a bit. My first sentiment, as I expressed this morning, is that the principal thing for me, before and now, is to be a Brother and that to be Superior General is an adjective that is surely important but temporal and subordinate to the first. Brother is the noun and it is what I want to go on being: a Brother that listens, that respects, that understands, that encourages, that commends the ministry and the needs of the Brothers to God. I want to be a Brother who animates in the discernment of the signs of the times, the creative responses, the fidelity to the Gospel values, who is open to the cries of the poor and the needs of the young.

To paraphrase the well-known expression of St. Augustine cited in Lumen Gentium, I believe that I can say: If I am frightened by what I am for you, I am consoled by what I am with you; for you I may be the superior, with you I am Brother. That first name speaks of duty, the second, of a grace; the first of a danger, the second, of salvation." What is certain is that being Brothers is our secret, our strength, our greatest treasure.

This is so because, as a fact, one of the most beautiful and extraordinary experiences of this Chapter has been the fraternal atmosphere that we have lived together. At these moments I find comfort in the unity, the friendship, the support of all of you. Would that it become the sign of what we want for our Institute-Brothers open to all, capable of renouncing self interests for the common good, uniting forces, carrying out projects in union with our associates, incarnating the Lasallian charism in the world of the poor, being spiritual masters for youth, youngsters who, today more than ever and in spite of some appearances, look for meaning for their lives and who have a thirst for God.

My sentiments are directed as well in these moments toward concrete persons although it is impossible to mention all of them. I think about my parents, now deceased, my brothers and sister. They were for me the first school of human and Christian values. They always supported my Lasallian vocation even though this meant leaving my country when I was but fifteen years old and have had to live in foreign lands ever since But I have to express doubt about this too because in each country where I have lived-Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Spain and Italy-I have felt very much at home.

I am thinking about the Brothers whom I have encountered in the course of this journey, my formators and especially my Brothers of the young District of Central America with whom I have lived the adventure of forging new pathways in inculturation and the growth of the Institute there, together with the unconditional support of Brothers coming from outside the district. I am thinking too of the discovery of the world of the indigenous people of Guatemala, with their great treasure of wisdom and their undeniable values of love and respect for the earth, their mother, of their contemplative worldview, of their intuitive and simple religiosity, of their profound family relationships, of their welcome to us, their solidarity, hospitality, primitive art and their ethic of quality relationships. The contact with the indigenous world changed many of my criteria and ways of looking at life. It brought me closer to the poor.

I think about Brother Santiago Miller, assasinated in 1982, and I remember that on the day of his murder, an elderly North American couple came to show me a letter from Brother Santiago. It made mention of a young man of the Indian Boarding
School of Huehuetenango, the place that today bears Santiago's name. The Brothers of the community had taken the decision to expel this young man because of his disorderly conduct. Brother Santiago told this couple, that was paying for his fees, that he had succeeded in convincing the Brothers not to expel the lad, that he would take the trouble to accompany him and call him in each night to counsel him. In that way he was sure that the lad was going to change. For that reason, when Santiago died, the sentence of our Founder that we most remembered was that one telling us to love our disciples so much that we will be disposed to give our life for them in our ministry. The reason he was killed, as we know, was simply because of his commitment to the promotion of those young Indian boys. It was also the reason for the deaths of more than thirty of the former students of the Santiago Indigenous Institute where I had worked, simply because they were rural school teachers striving to better the life of their people. That cannot be forgotten.

I am thinking, too, of so many Brothers of different districts and regions that have marked my life at its various stages. Symbolic of all of them, I would want to remember Brother Michel Sauvage who introduced me to the thrilling spiritual journey of the Founder. Also, Brother Noé Zevallos, spiritual master, who urged me set out along the paths of a more incarnated charism in the Latin American Continent and in the world of the poor.

When I was Visitor of the District of Central America, the letters that Brother John would send almost every four months were greatly encouraging for me. One that especially impressed me was the one of December, 1990, in which Brother John shared with us one or the other of the texts of the Founder. These texts, that speak of the relations of the Brothers with his students, we could apply as well to our relations with the Brothers that the Lord had confided to our ministry of animation. Brother John shared one of these with us and wrote that he kept a copy and frequently would meditate on it: "When you come up against difficulties in governing your disciples. have recourse to God without hesitation and beg Jesus Christ insistently to animate them with His Spirit, for He has chosen them to carry out His work. Turn your eyes to Jesus Christ as the Good Shepherd. And, seeing that you are taking His place, implore from Him the graces you need to bring about the conversion of their hearts. (MTR 4.1). I believe that this confidence, more than many words, helps us to see the profound spiritual quality of Brother John, how dear we have all been to his heart during these recent years and the ardent zeal that has animated him.

I think that I do not have to convince anyone in affirming that the person, the example and the animation of the Institute that Brother John has accomplished, has had great transcendency and has profoundly marked the Institute over these past two decades. I would like to feel that I am the spokeman of all of you in thanking him, as I was at the moment of the inauguration of the oil portrait that today adorns our Casa Generalizia, for his energetic and pro-active spirit, his vision for the future, the quality of his witness and his reflections, his tenacious work, his rectitude, his profound love of, and interest in, each Brother and each one of the Regions of the Institute. We all have admired his extraordinary memory and ability to know the names and traits of thousands of Brothers. We have seen his concern for the defense of the Rights of Children, his up-to-the-minute attention to situations of injustice in the world, of wars, of catastrophes, of human problems. We have witnessed his restlessness to do something about them and to urge us, as Institute, to respond as well to these situations. And finally, we know of his openness to lay persons, the results of which we gathered as a harvest in this Chapter with the challenging theme of Association for the educational service of the poor.

I believe that I have grasped, as well, the feeling of all of you that the Lasallian charism has truly been in very good hands.

Besides the participation of Brother John in the Union of Superiors General, his nine years as Vice-president and his participation in three Synods have opened up the Institute more to the dimensions of Church. We give thanks to God for this, and we are grateful to you, Brother John, with our whole heart asking God to continue to fill you with His blessings, secure in the knowledge that you will continue to make valuable new contributions to our Institute.

I also want to manifest my gratitude to the Brothers of the General Council: Pierre, Gerard, Martín, Marc and Raymundo, and naturally not forgetting Brother Dominique Samné, whose memory will always be fresh. With them I formed community during the last seven years. Their profound human and Lasallian qualities have made possible the community life that was fraternal, welcoming, respectful and enriching.

In his last pastoral letter Brother John invited us to live our foundational story and in these days we have many times spoken of the charism received from St. John Baptist de La Salle, that charism of which we feel ourselves to be the heirs and which today goes beyond the limits of the Institute. It certainly is a gift but it is a duty as well. I believe that our charism is an original synthesis in which the Founder's ardent love of God and his ardent love for the children of artisans and the poor found concrete translation in our association for their service through education.

Probably we ought to speak today of the charism built up by St. John Baptist de La Salle and those first Brothers in the light of faith, based on the encounter with the sons of artisans and the poor. Those children, those young people, were the providential means that gave rise to our charism. And for the Founder the presence of God in them was so evident that he asks us to make an act of adoration, the most profound act of the relationship that a creature can have with God, when we ourselves are with them. "Recognize Jesus Christ under the poor rags of the children that you instruct. Adore Him in them." (Med. 96, 3)

Shouldn't we be living our charism today for those same children and young people that continue to be the most fragile and vulnerable members of our societies? Besides the problems of lack of affection and abuse that we come across in families and broken homes, in many places the children are mired in no less degrading situations. Without pretending to take on all of them, we should think of child workers, of street kids, of children who are soldiers, or victims of war, children sold into slavery, undernourished children, children without schools. Shouldn't they be the ones to dynamize and re-vitalize our charism? Will it not be in them where God principally reveals Himself to us?

The love of a God who wants all men and women to be saved, but who has a special predilection for the littlest ones, such as the Gospel shows us and St. John Baptist de La Salle understood so well, urges us to be creative and efficacious. Our Institute was born on the frontier of a dehumanization: a world of youth far from salvation, without the possibilities of becoming fully Christian and human. To be faithful to our charism today means that we respond with creativity to the new forms of dehumanization, to the new forms of poverty, to the calls that the world of the excluded make to us in the new scenarios that today present themselves to us.

I believe that the spirit of the 43rd General Chapter is that we be converted to the future, open to the educational needs of the poor, attentive to the signs of life, disposed to continue in the generous dedication of which our elder Brothers have been so fine an example, animating us with their witness of fidelity. In this journey our young Brothers and our young men in formation urge us forward. Would that we can pass on to them the creative protagonism and the confidence that they deserve. And if we are faithful to our life we cannot forget the pastoral ministries of youth and vocation.

We speak of conversion to the future because when it is a matter of conversion we tend to think of the past. But conversion should mean looking to the future as a sign of something qualitatively better. It has to do with making present the values of the Kingdom of sonship and brotherhood that should be our overall horizon. We cannot close ourselves in on the past and live turning our backs on the realities of today. If we want to speak of the Institute of the future we ought to do so in terms of creative imagination, of a courage capable of running risks, of boldness that is unafraid and which does not confuse fidelity with pure repetition of the past.

The needs of the poor are immense, the problems of our young people are more and more complex, ecumenical and interreligious dialogue is every day more pressing, for that reason we need to grow in order to give life, to respond to the new forms of poverty and the problems of today. We need to share our charism with our Associates so that together we can better reach more of those who need us. A presence in solidarity should stimulate us to a fruitful creativity in our own initiatives and in cooperation with the initiatives of other agencies. The challenge is enormous but we know that the Lord does not abandon His work, that His renewed presence in prayer makes possible what might seem but a dream to us.

For that it is important also to fortify our mystique and today make visible an ever stronger "memory of Jesus Christ" and the "memory of the beginnings" that give meaning to our vocation and invite us to live it with creative imagination looking to the future. What the world expects of us is that, above all else, we be searchers for God and that we offer it pathways for its own search. Guides, humble and without pretensions, aware of our own incoherencies, but capable of accompanying the people of our times in their own journey of faith, assuming their weaknesses, their doubts and fragility. We must offer to the world of youth, starting with that of the poor, hearts disposed to listen to them, understand them, set them off once more on the road, communities willing to receive them and guide them, centers of education that place more worth in their persons than on programs or prestige.

Brothers, let us maintain alive the flame that was ours at the birth of the Institute. The 43rd General Chapter is tracing out actions that can achieve this and actualize our forces to begin once more. Let us make a reality what the Cuban poet and hero said when he wrote: The best manner of speaking is doing. May the "Yes" of Mary continue being for us a source of inspiration and may St. Joseph, under whose protection the Founder wished to put the Institute, help us to live with faith and confidence our ministry of Christian and human education.