Delivering the General Chapter’s keynote address, Michèle Altmeyer, OFS, first pointed to Saint Paul’s comment on Jesus: “He loved us.”
And “so begins Pope Francis’ encyclical of 24 October 2024, “Dilexit nos”, “He has loved us””.
Then she pointed to St. Francis of Assisi. “At the height of his spiritual life, an immense praise of God rose from the heart of Francis… (He) blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: ‘You are beauty, You are wisdom’, and so on. And the heart of his praise: ‘You are Love’!”
Thus, a theme is identified “as necessary for our Order today” — “You are Love.”
Michèle’s presentation, a tome of 30 single-spaced pages, is perhaps worthy of a course, or series of workshops. Here are some highlights.
With the gradual transformation of Francis into the image of the beloved Christ, and with the development of the articles of our Rule and General Constitutions, “the treasure that the Church has placed in our hands” is simply responding “to Love with Love.”
The Bible tells us that “God is love,” with the proof of it in giving his only Son for our redemption.
Michèle quotes:
God is love, he creates out of love, he reveals his beauty and love in his creation. By calling me into existence, God creates me free, in his image and likeness! God lives in me, he is in me! The most important reality is that God loves man “first”: “This is love: we did not love God, but he loved us” (1 Jn 4:10). Everything else depends on this, including our very ability to love God: “And we love, because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19)
How do we respond to God’s love? The answer is “to believe in Love, and to love my brothers and sisters as Jesus loved me. And to walk together: God, myself and others, in trust.”
She adds: “Self-love, the claim of the ‘I’, the withdrawal into ourselves, is the first movement of our wounded nature, disorientated by original sin (Cf. 1Reg 22, 19-20). How can we determine to turn our gaze eagerly towards the Father: Father, what do you want me to do now? The secret lies in prayer, in the life of prayer, where, fixing my eyes on Jesus (cf. Heb 12:1-3), I let him transform me, passing from my life in me to his life in me, to the point of divine likeness.”
“So,” she advises, “let the first act of our day when we wake up be to give our heart and our day to the Lord. Likewise, the last act before going to bed: let it be to hand over our life to the Lord…”
Service to the “lowest and the poor” is another aspect of responding to God’s love, she notes, and adds: “On Mount Verna St. Francis helps us to understand that it is not enough to declare ourselves Christian in order to be Christian, or even to try to do good works. We have to allow ourselves to be conformed to Jesus through a slow, progressive effort to transform our being into the image of the Lord…”
She continues: “This is the path we set out on when we accepted our vocation to the Secular Franciscan Order: a loving response to the Father’s first love, in fidelity to the grace of our Baptism.”
Together with the other Franciscan orders, “we can be heirs to the vocation, charism and mission of Francis, and achieve the perfection of Christian charity.”
Brief Bio of Michèle Altmeyer, OFS
Michèle Altmeyer discovered YouFra with her five brothers and sisters at the same time as her parents were discovering the OFS in Bitche, France. She was 18 years old. The spiritual Assistant of this Fraternity was Fr. Marie-Joseph, Capuchin (1907-1993) His cause of beatification was opened in 2017 in the diocese of Metz. At the age of 22, she made Profession in the OFS, with dual membership of the OFS and YouFra. Together with other young people, she was involved in Franciscan children’s and teenagers’ groups, and discovered her personal vocation: to be more closely united to Jesus in the life of consecration according to art. 36 of the General Constitutions. Called upon in 1992 by Fr. Ben Brevoort, OFS General Assistant, to translate articles for the CIOFS Bulletin, she took part in the “Formation for Formators” in Rome, and in the “International Chapters” in Assisi and Budapest. She introduced Elisabeth of Hungary to the elective Chapter in Budapest (2008), during which she was elected to the CIOFS Presidency Council (2008). One of her missions will be to accompany the national fraternities of French-speaking Africa, as well as Madagascar, Haiti, Lebanon, etc. Professionally, after her theology studies, she taught for over 30 years in a public secondary school. She has also worked in the Family Pastoral Care, at the service of Catholic Family Association.