Speech by Ms. Monique Bodhuin

I am very grateful to Cardinal Farrell for the honour he has bestowed on me by inviting me to speak here on behalf of Life Ascending International (LAI), a Catholic action movement with some forty thousand members spread over all the continents and whose mission is based on three pillars: friendship, spirituality and social engagement.

This First World Day of Grandparents and the Elderly is a beautiful event. I thank the Cardinal and his team for having organised it. It is a first that cannot be without follow-up.

The Holy Father’s message gives the meaning and the tone of this day. We can draw guidelines from it, and its content is a source of beautiful great hope for all older people.

The quotation from Matthew that opens the Holy Father’s message, “I am with you always”, is like a declaration of great tenderness. This closeness to the Lord to which Matthew’s words refer can be expressed in the daily life of the elderly by a few simple gestures or instances. It is the child’s hand that they hold and that gives them the confidence to walk, it is the joy of children’s laughter that brightens up their loneliness and breaks the silence of the passing hours. It is up to each of us to find ways of expressing the affectionate presence and sincere tenderness that the elderly need to nourish their desire to live.

This desire to live has been undermined for more than a year by the pandemic. Long before the Covid-19 virus turned the world upside down, Pope Francis never missed an opportunity to tell the Church and the world that caring for the elderly is the duty of every man and woman worthy of the name. He maintains that a civilisation that neglects its elders is a lost civilisation... The elderly have paid a heavy price for the pandemic. Those living alone have experienced moments of increased solitude, very restrictive measures in care institutions, in nursing homes and rest homes, and this has taken from their desire to live. What can we say about the suffering of those who were hospitalised and not allowed visits and who then died alone and abandoned? How can our conscience as Christians not be challenged by these situations?

With this First World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly, we want to tell grandparents and the elderly that they have a central place in our hearts and more, and that they are recognised by the Church community as an integral part. This event invites us to be the bearers of this message of closeness and to play the role of angels −- the Greek word annguelos, from which it derives, means “one who proclaims”. We will be those angels on that day, aware that we are called to continue to do so for weeks in order to give this day its full meaning.

I find, in the Holy Father’s words, the objectives of the international congress organised in Rome at the end of January 2020 under the title “The Richness of Years”. This Congress was underpinned by some powerful ideas: to recognise the charisms of old age, to give older people a full place in the ecclesial community together with the younger generations. They are entitled to this by virtue of their human experience which brought them both joys and hardships suffered and overcome, as well as their life of faith.

The words of the Holy Father emphasise the importance of the intergenerational link. Likewise, the Year of the Family, which began on 19 March, invites us to implement this dimension, since grandparents are part of the family. Grandparents play a crucial role in the family, any family, as witnesses of life for the younger generations. It is based on their heritage, on the memories they carry, on their life experience, all of which helps them to understand what is essential, on their “knowing how to be”, and on their relationship with Christ who gives meaning to their lives. It is on this intergenerational link, between grandparents and grandchildren, but also more widely, between young people and the elderly, that the MCR, Mouvement Chrétien des Retraités, the French branch of LAI, has designed the celebration on 25 July. I will just say a few words about it. It is called “Time for a snack” with the slogan “young and not so young, let’s share our dreams and let’s build the world of tomorrow”. This project has given rise to a partnership between VMI and the MCR and will be officially launched on 6 July in Taizé, in the presence of Brother Alois, in which I will participate.

This event must not allow us to forget those who could not participate in the celebration of the Day. We must go to them, to those people who are alone and particularly in need of our presence. We can read with them the message of the Holy Father and recite with them the prayer of the Holy Father which refers to the unfailing presence of the Lord in their everyday lives. This is a way of inserting these isolated elderly people into the pastoral community and recognising their dignity as beloved sons and daughters of God. And we must not stop there...

For me, this first celebration of grandparents and the elderly is a starting point as it carries with it a dimension of openness to the future. In order to be faithful to our mission as baptized people, “we must always set out on a journey, but above all we must leave ourselves, in order to undertake something new”, as the Holy Father writes. This “something new” could be:

- training opportunities on the art of being grandparents or simply elderly people: the challenge is to be authentic “transmitters and awakeners of faith”:

- transversal ways in which the elderly and young people will meet to exchange in truth on the “art of being” to which the elderly can bear witness, but also with the desire on the part of each young person to build this alliance between young people and the elderly, as Pope Francis is calling for.

I will conclude by quoting the Holy Father, because these few words are rich in hope for the future and give direction: “Who better than the young to take the dreams of the elderly and transform them into reality. But in order to do this, we must continue to dream”.