By Communications Department - Archdiocese of Miami
VATICAN CITY | In the first Pope Video for 2023, Francis emphasizes the importance of educators, as he has done repeatedly during his pontificate.
The Holy Father asks that they add new content to their teaching: fraternity, a key ingredient in the search for a world that is closer to those who are most vulnerable.
Francis wants educators to be credible witnesses, who see fraternity as the best path for helping those most in need.
That is the prayer intention that the Holy Father is entrusting to the entire Catholic Church through the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network. To inaugurate this eighth year of the Pope Video, 2023, Francis has chosen to send a message to educators with a unique proposal: “add new content to their teaching: fraternity.”
Francis wants to broaden the reach of education, so it will not be centered only on content. For the pope, educators are witnesses of fraternity who not only pass on “their mental knowledge, but also their convictions, their commitment to life.”
In this way, educators will be able to be “heeded much more attentively and will be community builders.”
“Educating,” the Holy Father said last year in a conversation with a delegation from the Global Researchers Advancing Catholic Education Project, “is taking a risk in the tension between the mind, the heart and the hands: in harmony, to the point of thinking what I feel and do; feeling what I think and do; of doing what I feel and think. It’s a balance.”
The pope’s video for January – which begins with the word fraternity written on a blackboard as if it were a school subject – accompanies Francis’ reflection with the narration of a story which takes place at a school.
A boy, marginalized by his classmates during soccer games, stays alone in a corner until a teacher recognizes his plight and decides to help him. He doesn’t do it with words, but with his testimony of life: He stays with him, day after day, and passionately and perseveringly teaches him how to play. This goes on until one morning he finds the boy together with those same classmates who had marginalized him earlier: He’s playing with them, and when he makes his first goal, he dedicates it precisely to that teacher, the credible witness who helped him.
