Vatican City, 12 November 2015 (VIS) –
This morning in the Vatican's Paul VI Hall the Pope greeted five
hundred members of the Family of St. Luigi Guanella, known simply as
Don Guanella (1842-1915), the Italian priest who founded the
Congregation of the Daughters of St. Mary of Providence and the Order
of the Servants of Charity. He was beatified in 1964 and canonised in
2011.
The Don Guanella Family's pilgrimage to
Rome coincides with the first centenary of the saint's death and, in
his address to the pilgrims, the Holy Father imagined what Don
Guanella might have said to his followers to confirm them in faith,
hope and charity, using three verbs: to trust, to look, and to make
haste.
The first verb is to trust. “The life
of Don Guanella had as its centre the certainty that God is the
merciful and provident Father. This was for him the heart of faith:
knowing himself to be an always beloved son, for whom the Father
cared, and therefore a brother to all, called upon to inspire trust.
… I think that it displeases the heavenly Father greatly to see
that His children do not fully trust in Him; they perhaps believe in
a distant God, rather than in a merciful Father. In many people there
arises the doubt that God, while being Father, may also be a master.
… But this is a great deception; the ancient deception of the enemy
of God and man, which conceals reality and disguises good as evil. It
is the first temptation: to distance oneself from God, intimidated by
the suspicion that His paternity is not truly provident and good. God
is instead love alone, pure provident love. He loves us more than we
love ourselves, and knows what is truly good for us. He therefore
hopes that in the course of life we become what we are at the moment
of our Baptism: beloved children, able to vanquish fear and not
ceding to lamentation, because the Father takes care of us”.
The second verb is to look. “The
Father, the Creator, also inspires creativity in those who live like
His children. They then learn to look at the world through new eyes,
made more luminous by love and hope. They are eyes that enable us to
look within with truth, and to see far in charity. … In the world
there is never any lack of problems, and in our time there are
unfortunately new forms of poverty and many injustices. But the
greatest famine of all is that of charity: we need, most of all,
people with eyes renewed by love and a gaze that inspires hope”.
“At times, our spiritual point of
view is short-sighted, as we are not able to see beyond our own ego.
At other times we are long-sighted: we like to help those who are far
away but are not able to stoop to those who live next to us.
Sometimes, indeed, we prefer to close our eyes, as we are tired and
overcome by pessimism. Don Guanella, who recommended that we look at
Jesus starting from His heart, invites us to have the same gaze as
the Lord: a gaze that inspires hope and joy, able at the same time to
feel a 'profound sentiment of compassion' towards those who suffer”.
Finally, to make haste: “The poor are
the favoured sons” of the Father, St. Luigi said, and he liked to
repeat that 'those who give to the poor, lend to God'. Just as the
Father is delicate and concrete with regard to his smallest and
weakest children, so we too cannot expect our brothers and sisters in
difficulty to wait as, again in the words of Don Guanella, 'misery
cannot wait. And we cannot stop as long as there are poor people to
tend to'”.
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