We may sometimes feel like that piccolo player – that we don’t have much to offer, that if we stopped our ministry no one would notice anyway. Yet the Great Conductor notices, and needs us to complete his orchestral masterpiece!

The Vincentian Family, devoted to the poor, should be one of the loudest voices advocating for real and permanent change of the systems and structures and decisions that make and keep people poor.

We can learn from Pope Francis how little things can be so significant in a “culture of encounter.”