FIFTEENTH GENERAL CHAPTER OF DAUGHTERS OF JESUS

VATICAN CITY, MAY 26, 2001 (VIS) - This morning the Holy Father received the participants in the fifteenth General Chapter of the Daughters of Jesus, and said that, through the chapter, "you desire to discern the will of God for your Institute in this moment of history, at the dawn of the new millennium."

After recalling that the foundress of the Institute, Blessed Candida Maria de Jesus, "knew how to travel the journey of sanctity with faithfulness and constancy," John Paul II affirmed: "It is your task to make this spirit bear fruit, with an ever more radical dedication to your vocation and the continual aspiration to be, with the witness of your life, a sign of Christ's presence and the channel of God's call."

"The educational pastoral ministry," the Pope added, "is one of the greatly distinctive characteristics of your charism and of your tradition." The Pope assured the religious that those who "are rooted in Christ, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, will not be content to give children and youth a mere collection of knowledge, but will arouse in them the desire to progress in all aspects of human existence. ... Before such a sublime commitment, the educator cannot remain uninvolved in what is taught."

John Paul II concluded his discourse by emphasizing that "to pass on knowledge and culture with competence, to awaken social responsibility, to impart to the moral conscience the highest ethical values and enlighten the lofty vocation to transcendence of every human being, are undoubtedly essential tasks, especially in a world frequently tempted by banality or by immediate material profit."

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