Called to share what we received

Dear friends,

on January 10th we had a private audience with Pope Francis. After such a gift to WUCWO, I decided to tell you about this wonderful experience in this message for the month of February 2020. What an immense grace to share!

I went with Father Gerry, our Ecclesiastical Assistant, and Andrea Ezcurra, Board member for Argentina who is only in Rome for a few months, temporarily acting as Secretary General.

The Holy Father received us with great warmth and with his usual sense of humour, and immediately made us feel very comfortable, as if we were at home.

We gave him some gifts and thanked him for all his efforts on behalf of women, especially those who suffer most.

We presented WUCWO to him, explained our resolutions in harmony with his teaching and a significant part of our history.

We told him how you daily try to embody the holiness “next door,” as he called it in Gaudete et Exsultate, through examples of the very rich range of concrete actions you carry out in your organisations.

The conversation focused on women in the Church. It was very nice to hear him talk about how he wrote the homily of January 1 of this year: he did so in one go, because it came out of his heart in this way; he also talked about how generally one thinks only of the “functionality” of women, and it is necessary to open also the other field proper to “being,” that is the femininity of women; about how he longs for our active participation in the synodal experience the Church is carrying on; about why the strongest ideological threat of this time is the ideology of gender. At the end he added: “It is women who carry the Church forward without holding official positions.”

The dialogue took place in a free and joyful atmosphere. We told Pope Francis about some of the projects in progress and he gave us concrete suggestions.

At the end of the meeting, he gave us a blessing for each one of you, your families, organisations and countries. He left us a very encouraging message, which filled us with joy and strength:

“Take charge with courage! Look at Mary Magdalene: she was a little crazy, because she announced to the apostles the Resurrection of Jesus, even if they refused to believe her. Without craziness there is no holiness.”

This is the message that the Pope wishes to convey to each of you. Please spread it!

And let us thank God for being women members of WUCWO organisations!

María Lía Zervino, Servidora

WUCWO President General

Proposal: pray and reflect from Pope Francis’ Homily of 1 January 2020

All the relevant material can be found on our website: www.wucwo.org