To the Episcopate, to the Clergy, and to all the Faithful of the entire world

Venerable brothers and dear sons and daughters: health and the Apostolic Blessing.

Rejoice in the Lord always; the Lord is near to all who call upon Him in truth! [¹]

Dear brothers and sons and daughters in Christ, many times already in the course of this Holy Year we have exhorted the People of God to correspond with joyful enthusiasm to the grace of the Jubilee. As you know, our invitation is essentially an appeal to interior renewal and reconciliation in Christ. It is a question of people's salvation, of their complete happiness. In this time, when throughout the world believers are preparing to celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit, we invite you to implore from Him the gift of joy.

On our own part indeed, the ministry of reconciliation is being exercised in the midst of many contradictions and difficulties,[²] but it is sustained and accompanied in us by the joy of the Holy Spirit. Likewise we are truly able to adopt as our own and address to the universal Church the confidence of the Apostle Paul in his community at Corinth: "...you are in our hearts, to die together and to live together. I have great confidence in you...I am filled with comfort. With all our affliction, I am overjoyed." [³] Yes, it is for us, too, an exigence of love to invite you to share this abounding joy which is a gift of the Holy Spirit. [⁴]

We have therefore felt it as a happy interior need to address to you in the course of this year of grace, and very fittingly on the occasion of Pentecost, an Apostolic Exhortation whose theme is precisely: Christian joy -- joy in the Holy Spirit. It is a sort of hymn to the divine joy that we would like to utter, so that it may awaken an echo in the whole world, and first of all in the Church: may joy be poured out in hearts together with the love of which it is the fruit, by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.[⁵] Thus we wish that your voice may be joined with ours, for the spiritual consolation of the Church of God and of all those who are willing to lend their hearts and minds to this celebration.