Dear brothers and sisters, I would like to set out again with you from the morning of Easter, from a garden, from an empty tomb. Mary Magdalene is there, at dawn, while it is still dark, and the darkness she is in is not only that of the night not yet ended. It is the darkness of one who has lost someone, who seeks and does not find, who bends over and weeps. The Gospel, however, does not leave her in that weeping. A man approaches her, whom she mistakes for the gardener, and he asks her two questions: "Why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?" (Jn 20:15).

These two questions, dear friends, I would like them to inspire the coming journey of the Diocese of Rome. I believe that we can hear them addressed, today, to our Church and to the whole city: "Why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?" They touch the anxious search for hope that you perceive in the parishes, in meetings and in daily life, whenever you have listened to one another and to the people. Mary Magdalene is awake before dawn and has already run to the tomb, because in her there is life, there is expectation! So too in Rome there are many people who begin again each morning, and also parish communities, associations, movements, groups and ecclesial realities that work with generosity in evangelization, in charity, in the service of liturgical prayer. Of course, alongside this richness you have honestly acknowledged certain difficulties. There is the bewilderment of those who can no longer find where the Lord is to be met. An experience we share with many brothers and sisters, but which happens to us too. At times proposals, activities and meetings multiply, and the center, the evangelical meaning of what is done, is lost.

And then, in the Gospel, a single word makes Mary Magdalene turn: her name, "Mary!" (Jn 20:16). This is how one meets Jesus Christ: by feeling oneself called by name by Him, in the many ways this can happen. This is where every pastoral action must start again: not so much asking "what" to do, but rather "whom" and "how" to encounter. In our communities one can remain anonymous, invisible and misunderstood, or one can be seen, known and called by name. And whoever truly meets Christ, like Mary Magdalene, feels the heart fill up and then cannot remain still, but runs and goes to announce. "I have seen the Lord!" (v. 18), the woman says to the disciples. Not a memory, not a private fact, but a deep joy that generates community.

For this reason, brothers and sisters, I am not handing you today a new pastoral program. We are not starting from zero, and nothing of what we have lived is to be filed away. The work on the "spiritual illnesses" has taught us to recognize what, in our ecclesial life, asks to be healed, corrected or converted. The Synodal Path has taught us how to listen and discern together, co-responsible for the one mission. Instead, I wish to propose that you develop a third dimension: that of pastoral verification.

To verify, in the light of the Holy Spirit, means to stop, to reread what has happened, to recognize what has borne fruit, to understand what has not worked and to seek the reasons for it together. It means, in a word, to make truth. I invite you to carry out this verification involving the whole community and, as far as possible, listening also to people who do not attend it and see things, so to speak, "from outside."

To help you practice pastoral verification, I indicate a few points of attention, which I distinguish but which form a single dynamism.

The first point of attention: to encounter Christ and to bring others to encounter Him. The Church does not exist for herself, but to lead every person to meet the Lord; and so it is not enough to ask whether an activity is well organized, whether it is well attended, whether it has lasted for many years; one must ask whether it truly leads to Christ, whether it brings the Gospel to meet people's concrete lives.

The second point of attention: to generate community. From Christ's Easter new, free, reconciled communities are born. Let us have the courage to tend to what is essential, so as to leave room for true relationships, within which people feel part of a people: feel welcomed, accompanied, valued, co-responsible. Let us commit ourselves to offering young people time and listening, within and beyond initiatives.

The third point of attention: to dwell in and serve the city. Rome is not the indifferent backdrop of our communities: it is the place of our mission. The community generated by the Risen One cannot remain closed in on itself, but shares people's expectations, fragilities and questions; and it learns to recognize, in what happens in the various settings of the city, the questions to which the Gospel can respond, if welcomed anew.

To these three points of verification a fourth is added, which runs through them all: the formation of the People of God. Do our activities help people grow in faith? Do they form missionary disciples? Do they help ecclesial responsibilities to mature? Do they generate an adult faith, capable of being translated into concrete choices of life and of service?

The heart of the method I propose to you, however, is a very simple question: "why?" It means stopping together and asking, for everything we do: why do we do it? What evangelical intention moves us, what real need do we intend to respond to, in what way does this choice correspond to the mission of the Church? And then, the second step: why do we obtain these results and not others? Why do some initiatives generate journeys and others remain isolated? Why do some people take part and others remain on the margins? From the encounter between the reasons for our choices and the reasons for their effects an authentic discernment is born, which allows us to recognize what should be maintained, valued, corrected, abandoned or begun.

So that all this does not remain a good intention, the journey will have its own "rhythm," and I thank the Cardinal Vicar and the other co-workers for having prepared the stages that will be presented to you.

I therefore ask you to give yourselves the time to walk together — not a year, but a journey — so that it may be a true discernment and not one more initiative added to the others. The Bishop is not asking you to plan new activities: he is proposing to you a common method of listening, discernment, verification and conversion. The contents and priorities remain entrusted to the responsibility of your communities, in the five areas that are catechesis and Christian initiation, young people, the family, charity, and vocations, because the goal is to share a pastoral style, not to make experiences uniform. And in this the Prefectures are called to become ever more places of encounter, dialogue and shared pastoral elaboration.

Dear brothers and sisters, it is true: a method alone has never converted anyone. So, that what I have proposed to you may not remain abstract, I also remind you of a face. I have in fact approved with joy the decision to take the necessary steps for the diocesan inquiry to be opened into the life, virtues and reputation for holiness of Fr Luigi Di Liegro, a priest of this Church, who died on 12 October 1997. The gift he gives to our journey does not lie first of all in the works he carried out: Fr Luigi, before building anything, wanted to "see." In 1969 he commissioned a survey on the religiosity of the Romans, because he had learned that there is no incarnation of the message without listening to reality. In his last address, a few weeks before he died, Fr Luigi said to his co-workers: "Discernment is this question: Lord, where are you?"

Dear friends, this brings to mind the question of Mary Magdalene at the tomb of Jesus. It is the question with which we begin again today. What signs of the Kingdom and what appeals of the Holy Spirit emerge today from the life of Rome, and what form must the Church take on in order to recognize and serve them? Keeping this question alive within us will help us to be a Church in solidarity with the destiny of this city, in contact with its wounds, its expectations and its transformations.

I would now like to say a word about ordained ministry in Rome. But first I wish to say "thank you," and not as a mere formality. Thank you to the Cardinal Vicar, to the Auxiliary Bishops, to the Prefects and to all who serve in the offices of the Vicariate. Thank you to the parish priests and parochial vicars; to elderly and sick priests, to the chaplains of hospitals, prisons, schools and universities; to the priests who have come from other Churches and other countries, who serve in this city as if it were their own. Thank you to the permanent deacons and their families. Thank you to men and women religious; to those who in silence sustain Rome through intercession; and to those who meet it every day in schools, hospitals, shelters, on the outskirts. Thank you to the catechists, the educators, the workers of charity. We know it: goodness makes no noise, the Lord knows it, and today I too wish to acknowledge it. Thank you!

I also know that pastoral service today is more demanding than it used to be. I urge you not to carry these burdens alone. And I tell you clearly that the art of pastoral verification does not ask you to do more: rather, it gives you permission to do less and better. If pastoral verification were to become yet another burden on your shoulders, we would have betrayed its meaning. I would like then to offer you a few considerations on the face of the priests that Rome needs. The priest should be a man who listens before answering, who discerns before deciding. A person who remains before the Lord, because he cannot lead others to an encounter he himself is not living. The question "why?" is first of all his own personal question: why am I a priest? Does my day still correspond to the reason for which the Lord called me by name? The priest does not concentrate every responsibility in himself. He recognizes charisms, forms consciences, makes possible the co-responsibility of the laity: not for lack of strength, but out of fidelity to the nature of the Church. A community in which everything depends on the parish priest is a fragile community, and to preside does not mean to do everything. It means to generate communion, to value the energies of others, to connect people and realities, to safeguard unity. The priest, finally, joins and desires to belong to a community capable of reading its own neighborhood, of sharing its wounds and its hopes, responsible for the life of all, even of those who do not cross the threshold of the church. This is the form that charity takes in pastoral presiding, and it is what keeps a parish from folding in on its own self-preservation.

No one is called to live all this alone. The presbyterate is not the sum of priests who meet out of organizational necessity: it is a fraternity, and it is the first place in which to verify whether what we do truly generates communion. I wish the Prefectures to be, even before being instruments of coordination, real places of priestly fraternity, where one can also speak of one's own struggles without shame. Beside you, the deacons remind the whole Church that she exists to serve; and men and women religious, with the gratuitousness of their lives, remind Rome that no efficiency saves mankind and that primacy belongs to God.

A particular thought goes to our seminarians. Dear young men, you are preparing to be priests for this Diocese. I invite you to take part, already now, in this journey of verification, learning to make it your style during the years of formation. And let yourselves be formed both by books, which are necessary in order to meet good teachers, and by faces: by the poor, by the sick, by the people of our parishes. To you and to your formators I express my gratitude and my trust. Young people do not give themselves to a role, but follow men and women who appear happy with who they are.

I know that this journey of verification will require patience, and perhaps also the courage to let go of something to which we are attached. But it is the same courage of Mary Magdalene, who had to let go of the desire to hold on to the Lord in order, instead, to run and announce Him. From this pastoral discernment, I hope, a phase of sharing renewed experiences will be born, and then the building of a common path that will prepare us, together, for the Jubilee of the Redemption in 2033.

Dear brothers and sisters of Rome, do not be afraid to let yourselves still be called by name! The living Lord lets himself be met by those who, like Mary at the dawn of Easter, still have the courage to seek him, even in tears, even in the dark. May the Mother of God, Salus Populi Romani, who was the first to believe and to bring Christ into the world, accompany you. And upon all of you, upon your communities and upon this city, may my blessing come.