Scouts and Catholics, we feel we are spiritual children of Abraham, who discovered, a long time ago already, that ¨faith¨ is a pilgrimage. He left his house without knowing where he was going, living in tents, because he knew citizens of Heaven. It was not so long ago, but soon it will already be a hundred years that Baden Powell proposed a great project to boys and girls, Scouting, which is also learned in steps, like faith.

Two big adventures converge, the faith in Abraham’s God and Scouting, perhaps because the very same Scouting is born out of a biblical essence. Furthermore, Scout pedagogy has helped to recover spirituality and biblical pedagogy. It is a long story with many stages and many characters, but now we are interested in the central stage: The God who inhabited the mount and in the meeting tent in the desert, finally takes his backpack and ¨plants his tent among ours¨ in the valley of the humans. He is Jesus of Nazareth, he is one of us. This happened two thousand years ago and now it is time to celebrate it. With scout style. This is what Jubilee 2000 is about.

There are many ways of starting your Christian faith and Scouting, but one of the best is to share life and to listen to the stories of older brothers in the warm welcoming light of the campfire, in the shared silence of the night.

Well, those older brothers, the Israelis, the People whose twelve tribes lived in tents and reserved the best for the High One, in desert cloth and in stone in the Temple of Jerusalem, began to celebrate the alliance with their parents' God every fifty years.

We, Scouts and Catholics, also want to celebrate next to the youths of the other eleven tribes of New Israel, the Church, summoned by our older brother, John Paul II successor of Peter in Rome. What reason do we have for Happiness, for Joy (Jubilee)? A few come to mind:

- the Joy of being part of a utopia, Scouting, who is an educator because he helps us to enter into another great Utopia: the Kingdom of God. Creators of a Universal Brotherhood, we collaborate to establish a New Civilisation of love as an anticipated stage of our definitive citizenship, Heaven, the Kingdom of God.

• the Joy of knowing that we can collaborate with the same God in the beautiful task of preserving and improving God’s Creation, making of our Earth a livable planet for all species, men, plants and animals. Saint Francis of Assisi, Patron of the Wolves, marked the style of a way of respect, communion and brotherhood between us and among all created things, especially the most weak and fragile.

Antonio Matilla
Scout Chaplain