“First of all, accompany your clergy with patient affection. Please, bring to your priests the Pope’s embrace along with his appreciation for their active generosity”. Pope Francis said this as he received in audience today the participants in the annual formation course for the new bishops jointly organised by the Congregation for Bishops and the Congregation for Oriental Churches. “Try to strengthen” in your priests, he added, “the awareness that it is Christ their ‘fate’, their ‘lot and source of inheritance’, the share they have to drink from the ‘chalice’. Who else other than Christ will be able to fill the heart of a servant of God and His Church? I also ask you to act with great prudence and responsibility in accepting candidates and allocating priests to your local Churches. Please, exercise prudence and responsibility in this. Please, remember that, since the very beginning, we have always aimed at achieving stable relationships between the local Church and its priests, and that a clergy on the move, moving from one place to another, has never been accepted. This is an illness of our time”. Finally, Pope Francis called on the new bishops to “seek to accompany all families, rejoicing for their generous love and encouraging them to keep up their good work in the world. Accompany all families, especially the most wounded. Do not ‘pass by’, ignoring their frailty, but stop and let your hearts as pastors be transfixed by the sight of their plight. Get close to them with tenderness and without fear. Let them see the joy of true love and the grace by which God raises them up to share in His love. Many need to rediscover it, others have never known it, other again long for redeeming it, and many others are burdened by the thought of having lost it forever. I beg you, accompany them in their discernment with empathy”.