Fr. Sosa in Albania: “United in diversity”

Father General presided at the celebration of Pentecost on Saturday afternoon, at the Sacred Heart Parish in Tirana. “I do not think it is necessary to explain to you, here in this country, how oppressive it is to live in a world of one-sided thinking, where only one point of view is allowed and differences are erased, eliminated,” he highlighted in his homily.

“You have experienced first-hand what this means, and it has cost so much suffering and so many lives, even of so many Jesuits who have passed through this Church. So perhaps the story of Babel tells us something else: to the sin of humanity’s pride, God does not respond with punishment, but with an act of redemption: he frees humanity from the uniformity of a single thought, of black and white, and forces it to enter into the kaleidoscope of the multiplicity of languages and cultures, to experience difference. And this is not a step backwards, but a step forward in God’s plan for humanity.

The Spirit needs differences in order to manifest itself. The Synod asks people to come together, to talk to each other and, above all, to listen to each other. It calls us today to follow this path, in the Synod, but above all in the ordinary life of our communities. The cultural and social centre dedicated to Fr. Giuseppe Valentini and the bookshop are signs of a place where people can meet, talk to each other, discover the beauty of their differences and allow the harmony of the spirit to slowly emerge through them.