After five long months during which the disease prevented me from sharing the common work, here I am again among you.
To all, companions, community members, committees’ activists, friends who bring help through different services, readers of « Hunger and Thirst », let me tell you from the bottom of my heart thank you very much. For, not only during these months Emmaus has not suffered, but thanks to your generosity I find this vast group grown up, consolidated and robust and ready for new tasks.
Since my return I could visit almost all the groups, the communities, the camps in the Paris region. I could go to Lille and see the excellent work done there. Soon I will go to Rennes.
Now these days, in order to keep a promise made six months ago to a great friend, Jacques Maritain, I am going far away for three weeks, to talk to the Americans. You know what I will tell them: your message of you all, the message of Emmaus, the affirmation that the first foundation of peace is justice, international justice and social justice and that they can not come true without someone having enough love to participate voluntarily in the condition of those who suffer most, in order to understand it, not in a distant way, but in all its tragic sense.
After traveling these past ten years around many countries, Austria, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Scandinavia, England, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, etc. to carry in many different ways the same message, today I feel deeply how, thanks to your presence by my side, I can go testify stronger than ever such fundamental problems, problems of the universal man overwhelmed by his present anxieties, in view of anyone on earth holding power, power capable of producing so many benefits or so many and such an irremediable desolation.
See you soon. Upon my return, you know it, especially you, my friends living in the communities, it is here with you that, again, I will be able to live most of my time. Here is the foundation of all our utility past and future”.
Faim et Soif Editorials
April 1955