The Augustinian-Recollect International Solidarity Network proposes for this pastoral year a campaign aimed at channeling personal and community solidarity from the ecclesial message, shared by the Recollect Family, of the Jubilee 2025.
On December 5, the Augustinian-Recollect International Solidarity Network, ARCORES, presented its new annual Solidarity Heart Day campaign for the 2024-2025 academic year, whose motto is “Awaken the heart, activate hope.”
This annual Day is an initiative to celebrate, promote and practice solidarity in all places where it is possible. Each of the communities and ministries of the Recollect Family has the freedom to celebrate the Day on a specific date in accordance with its pastoral programming.
Since 2025 will be the Jubilee “Pilgrims of Hope” with the motto “Hope does not disappoint” (Romans 5:5), the ARCORES campaign has joined this ecclesial time: “At ARCORES we think that, if we activate the heart, hope awakens; if we awaken, we activate peace, social justice, solidarity, human rights and our humanity.”
The ways of participating in this Solidarity Heart Day are very varied, for all tastes, options and possibilities: you can contribute with resources, you can learn and celebrate by following the celebratory, educational or catechetical materials available, you can raise awareness in your immediate surroundings or you can support on social networks with the hashtag #ActivaCorazónDespiertaEsperanza.
All materials are now available on the ARCORES website. In addition, you can see the results of the previous campaign (2023-2024, with the motto “Great in small things”) and find out which cooperation projects and solidarity actions the resources raised will be directed to.
In addition, a video has been released to promote this Day.
The prior general of the Augustinian Recollects, Miguel Ángel Hernández, has sent a message of encouragement to participate in the Day: “We have to work and become supportive,” he says, once the “social commitment to the disinherited” is part of the Augustinian Recollect charism.
He recalls that “the dream of ARCORES is the dream of the entire Augustinian-Recollect Family: to work for a world without poverty in which the promotion of human, economic, social and cultural rights prevails; in which social justice, solidarity, peace and the integrity of creation are above economic or political interests; where all people and peoples can develop, without any discrimination, and can exercise their right to participate equitably, to improve their well-being.”
The Solidarity Heart Day 2025 is an opportunity to “change things” and “the lives of some people.” And it recalls an Augustinian idea: “Saint Augustine invites us to advance along the path with love and charity, forgetting temporal things because this path requires strong and not lazy people.”
ARCORES and the Augustinian Recollect Family invite you to join this campaign, which is a tangible, concrete, viable and specific way of sowing hope with concrete actions, gestures and projects. May our solidarity not remain in words and in writing. As the Pope Francis says in the jubilee message, our time and our world need signs of hope to be transformed.
