Our Minister General, Massimo Fusarelli OFM, has called for Prayer and Fasting on Good Friary for the Gift of Peace in the Holy Land and in our world.

By explicit will of the Apostolic See, we Franciscan friars have been present as Custodians of the Holy Places for seven centuries, and we remain there in a spirit of service in her name.

We do not take sides against anyone. We take sides for peace and for the smallest and most vulnerable, those most exposed to the logic of the powerful of this world.

And we do so steadfastly, persistently, and in an evangelical spirit. For peace is nota political position: it is the name of God waiting to resound in the streets of every wounded city, in the heart of every person who desires to live and not to die.

Francis of Assisi went to meet the Sultan without weapons, without armies, with no other wealth than the Gospel and fraternity. He did not obtain immediate peace. Yet he opened a gateway that time has not closed. That gateway we are called to keep open today, eight hundred years later.

Our unarmed weapon is prayer. To this we add fasting — a free choice of deprivation that makes us one with those who have lost everything — and conversion: to words of peace where division is sown, to gestures of reconciliation where walls are built, to courageous choices where it would be easier to remain silent.

I ask you, brothers and sisters: let us live this Holy Week, and especially Good Friday, as a day of offering and of a cry raised to God. On behalf of those who have no voice. On behalf of children who have not chosen war, of the elderly who remember when there was peace, of those — Christians, Jews, Muslims — who still believe that God desires something different for this land than what our eyes now see.

The Crucified does not ask us to resolve what we cannot resolve. He asks us not to turn away. To remain beneath the Cross — like Mary, like John, like the women of the Gospel — and never to cease believing that the final word is not death, but life.

Peace is possible. We believe in it. And we proclaim it through our poor lives, through our prayer, through our presence.

Read the full message. https://ofm.org/messaggio-del-ministro-generale-per-il-venerdi-santo-2026.html