“Confirmation is a gift, and we must conserve this gift, take care of the gift,” Pope Francis said in his May 21 address. “And how is it conserved? First of all with prayer, asking the Lord to give us the strength to go forward, that this strength of the Holy Spirit that we have all received may be conserved.”

“And the second thing is friendship among you, because in the Church we are not ‘me alone,’ me and God, no, we are all of us, in community,” the Pope added.

The Pontiff also referred to his own family’s roots as he spoke to the Confirmation candidates about generosity. “They say that generosity is not a Genoese virtue, I don’t know. But this is the generosity of money: the Genoese are stingy, they say; I too have Genoese blood on my mother’s side, I understand well. But generous, always generous.”