CONCLUSION

Towards the Jubilee

38. This document is addressed to the Churches of Europe at time in which the People of God is preparing to celebrate a time of grace and mercy, of conversion and renewal in the Jubilee of the year two thousand. The Congress on vocations, too, is part of this journey of preparation and in some way contributes to guiding it in two directions.

The first is an invitation to conversion. The vocations crisis that we have seen and are still living must encourage us to reflect also on our own responsibility, as believers and people called to spread the gift of faith and to encourage in every brother and sister an openness to the call.

All of us, in different ways, must admit to not having fully responded to this call, of having made the Church less faithful to the task of mediating the voice of the Father who calls us to follow the Son in the Spirit; the Church of our families and work places, of our parishes and dioceses, of our religious congregations and secular institutes. We shall come through the vocations crisis only if this process of conversion is sincere and gives fruits of newness of life.

The second direction that this document would like to contribute to the Church's pilgrimage towards the Jubilee is an invitation to hope. An invitation that emerges from the whole of the Congress and that we wish now to stress with all our strength of faith. Perhaps there is no other area of the Church's life more needing to open itself to hope than pastoral work for vocations, especially where the crisis is most strongly felt.

Therefore we reaffirm, at the conclusion of this reflection, our certainty that the Lord of the harvest will not allow His Church to lack workers for His harvest. Indeed, if hope is founded not on our predictions and calculations, which have often been betrayed by history, but "on your Word", then we can and will believe in a renewed flowering of vocations for the Churches of Europe.

This document seeks to be a hymn to the optimism of faith filled with hope, in order to reawaken it in children, adolescents and young people, in parents and those involved in education, in pastors and priests, in consecrated men and women, in all those who serve life with the new generations, in all the People of God in Europe.