Saturday, May 26, 2012

Contemplative and Active Spirits


From some notes written in January, 1939

Let us open a new and divine world to many people; let us yield with charitable gentleness to an understanding of the little, poor and humble ones.
We want to be boiling with Faith and with charity.
We want to be living saints for others, and dead to ourselves.
Each of our words must be a breath from an open heaven: everyone must feel there the flame that burns in our hearts, and the light of our interior fire, to find Christ and God there.
Our devotion must not leave people cold and bored, because it must be truly alive and filled with Christ.
Follow in the footsteps of Christ right up to Calvary, and then rise with Him on the Cross, or die at the foot of the Cross of love with Him and for Him.


Thirst for martyrdom.
Serve the Son of Man, in men.
To win God and seize others, it is necessary, first of all, to live an intense life of God in ourselves, to have within us a dominant Faith, a great ideal which should be a flame which burns us and shines out - to renounce our very selves for others - to burn our life in an idea and in a stronger, sacred love. Nobody who obeys two masters - the senses and the spirit - will ever find the secret of winning souls.
We must say words and create works which survive us.
Do penance silently and secretly.
Follow your vocation and be faithful to your Vows.
Be proud of being able to perform the humblest domestic services.
 We must be saints, but become such saints 
that our sanctity does not belong only to the faith of the people, nor remains only in the Church, but transcends and casts into society such a splendor of light, such a lively love of God and men, to be saints of the people and the public welfare, more than saints of the Church.
We must be a most profound inspiration of mystical spirituality which pervades all levels of society: contemplative and active spirits ‘servants of Christ and of the poor’.
 Do not give yourselves up to the vanities of the arts, nor let yourselves be puffed up by worldly matters.
Communicate with your brothers solely to edify them, communicate with others solely to spread the goodness of the Lord:
1) Love Christ in everyone;
2) Serve Christ in the poor;
3) Renew Christ in ourselves and restore all things in Christ;
4) Save always, save all, save at the cost of every sacrifice, with redeeming passion and redeeming holocaust.
Great souls and great and generous hearts; strong and free Christian consciences which sense their mission of truth, Faith, of high hopes, of holy love of God and men, and in the light of great, great Faith, really ‘of that’ in Divine Providence, marching without stain or fear, through fire and water, and also through the slime of so much hypocrisy, perversity and dissolution.
Let us carry with us, and deep within us the divine treasure of that charity which is God, and while having to pass through the people let us keep in our hearts that heavenly silence that no noise in the world can shatter, and that inviolate cell of a humble self-knowledge, where the soul speaks with the angels and with Christ Our Lord.
We no longer have the time that has passed; we cannot be certain of having the time to come; therefore, it is only this present moment of time that we have, and nothing more.
Around us there is no shortage of scandals and the false modesty of the Scribes and the Pharisees; nor malevolent insinuations, calumnies and persecutions.
  But, my sons, we must not have time to ‘turn our heads and look back at the plough’, so urgent is our mission of charity pressing us on, so ardent is our love for our neighbour, so much does the divine, burning fire of Christ consume us.
We are drunk with charity and fools for the cross of Christ Crucified.  
Train the little ones and the poor to follow the way of God, above all by a life that is humble, holy and full of good.
Live in a luminous sphere, drunk with light and with the divine love of Christ and of the poor, and with heavenly dew, like the lark soaring and singing in the sun. Let our table be like the ancient Christian agape.
Souls!  Souls!
Have a great heart and the divine folly for souls.


On the way with Don Orione, 324-327

Saturday, May 19, 2012

A Man of Our Time


Homily delivered by Card. John Carmel Heenan[1], Archbishop of Westminster,  in Westminster Cathedral. London, 10th October 1972.

Luigi Orione, my dear brethren, was not the kind of person the Church looks for when she wants to recruit priests. He was not much at home in the cloister, he was much more at home with the labourers who worked for his father, and he joints the gang and returned gang whoever he could.
Cardinal John Carmel Heenan
When the Church is considering candidates for the seminary one of the things they look for is stability, determination, the kind of person who makes up his mind and perseveres. Luigi Orione wasn't like that, he was Just the reverse. By the time he was seventeen, he had tried two religious orders and failed in both. He tried to be a Franciscan first, and that didn't work, then he went to be a Salesian and that didn’t last long, and this was all by the time he was seventeen year old. The bishop gave him his chance and admitted him to the seminary. How did he get on there? Not very well.  He didn't get on with his studies, he was always minding somebody else's business. Whose business was he always trying to mind? The answer to that reveals the secret of Luigi Orione’s holiness of life. The people he for were those whom nobody else wanted; he was a man of tremendous compassion, the hopeless and the helpless they were the ones he wanted. In fact we can say that he was a man of our time. I say of our time because, despite all the evils of which we complain, in many ways this is an age of compassion. You can say what you like about young people, but we have to admit that they are much more caring than use were years ago. And that’s the first thing to notice about Don Orione, that he looked after those whom nobody else wants. People always looked after children. They cherished the orphans; they knew that these innocent little ones were calling upon them. But anyone can look after those who as full of hope. Where character and holiness of life is seen is to look after the hopeless eases, to look after the imbecile, to look after the senile, the helpless this is the work that Don Orione set himself, and set all the Sons of Divine Providence to do. And I've seen that work in many places, in this country both north and south, and also in far away Latin America, and the work of the Son of Divine Providence is quite characteristic. Again they look for the hopeless, they want the unwanted, but I can assure you that their apostolate in Chile is the most wonderful missionary work in all the world. There are those missionaries who come from Europe and from America, who make politics one of their chief concerns, but not the Sons of Divine Providence.


            They preach their mission by their works of mercy. They preach the Word by the example, and above all, there as everywhere, they let for the people whom nobody else wants. And this is the reason why we are gathered simply to thank God for Luigi Orione, the manna of our times. We have people today who share his views, people like Theresa who cares for the outcast, Leonard Cheshire, who cares for the incurable sick. Yes, Don Luigi Orione is a saint for today and so we thank God for him.
We thank God for the Sons of Divine Providence and we pray that their work will be abundantly blessed and that many apostles will join them in caring for the most abandoned of Christ’s little ones. May God bless the Sons of Divine Providence. 


Resource: Don Orione nel centenario della nascita (1872-1972). (Documenti e testimonianze), Edizioni Piccola Opera della Divina Provvidenza, Rome, 1974, pp. 449 – 450.





[1] John Carmel Heenan (26th January 1905 – 7th November 1975) was Archbishop of Westminster from 1963 until his death, and was elevated to the cardinalate 1965.

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Don Orione Remembering his Mother


In a letter to his religious (7th February 1923), St. Luigi Orione remembered the love of his mother, her work, her sacrifices and her teaching.    

“… My mother dressed me, her fourth son, in the clothes of my eldest brother who is 13 years older than me, and the poor woman had already dressed three others in those clothes before me; but she left us a little money which, in part, went to the first orphans of Divine Providence, and she brought us up well, respected in the sight of the world as they say: she was able to join all the rags together and make clothes out of them, and the family triumphed in honest and discreet poverty.  One of my sisters-in-law, who has no children, came to see me: she has a pension paid to my brother, an ex-railway man, she has her own house, she has two vineyards; and yet they are in poverty!  What does this mean?


It means that that poor old countrywoman, my mother, got up at 3 in the morning to set to work, and she seemed like a spindle in motion, and she always worked and busied herself and did a woman's work and, with her sons, even had to act as a man, because our father was far away, working at Monferrato: she wielded the sickle to make hay, and sharpened it herself, without taking it to the knife-grinder; she made cloth with hemp spun by herself; and my brothers used up so many sheets, so much good linen - my poor mother!  She even looked after the broken knives, and this has been my heritage.  She did not hurry off to buy, unless she was absolutely obliged to; and when she died, we put her wedding dress on her again, 51 years after her wedding: she had had it dyed black, and she still looked beautiful, and that was her best dress!


Do you see, my dear sons, how our holy and beloved old people got by? And she always told me the story of how Jesus got down from a horse to pick up a little piece of bread. It is a story that I found later on in an apocryphal Gospel: but who can say that it might not be true?  It is certainly very significant!  My dear people, let us imitate our old folk and our Saints!...”

Saturday, May 5, 2012

Don Orione and Fr. Vaccari S.J: Two Friends with the Same Ideal

In his letter "Only one thing is needed", Fr. Flavio Peloso tells us a very nice story about the friendship and estimation between Don Orione and the famous biblical lecture, Fr. Alberto Vaccari, SJ.

Thinking about a realization of Martha and Mary, I recall what Cardinal Angelo Sodano narrated recently about Don Orione and Father Vaccari. 
Cardinal Angelo Sodano

“I was preparing my doctorate in theology at Rome, at the Pontifical Gregorian University. It was the spring of 1952 and I had called on Father Vaccari, S.J., the famous biblical scholar, the author of many of the texts we were studying. Well on in years, he spoke fondly of his place of birth, the Diocese of Tortona in Piedmont. He then went on to talk about another great personality of his homeland, Don Orione, now Saint Luigi Orione, ending thus: “He really has done good things, he really has served the Church of today. Instead, I have always had to work on paper, dealing with the Hebrew, Greek and Latin languages and without direct contact with people”. 

Fr. Vaccari and Pope John XXIII

His words moved me – Cardinal Sodano goes on – because shortly before I had read in the life of Don Orione that the Saint of Tortona used to say, speaking about his fellow citizen and friend: “How much good can Fr Vaccari accomplish through teaching at the Pontifical Biblical Institute. How many people can thus know the Word of God better and live it. I, instead, must be busy every day in much more practical issues, at the service of many youths and many poor people!”[1]

Don Orione at San Filippo School (Rome)
 
Two great and holy priests who, at the age of twenty, had signed in blood a challenge: 1° Who would directly save more souls; 2° Who will be more holy”. Both, in a different way, were busy and set on the “only one thing is needed”: Jesus[2].
 
 You can read the whole letter, please visit:  


[1] L'Osservatore Romano, 3,12,2005, p. 5.
[2]I have already told you – Don Orione used to say to his seminarians – that in order to truly love the Lord, Our Lady, the holy things, the Church, one needs almost to make it a fixation… We must care only for what pertains to the love and the glory of God and of the Most Holy Virgin and the salvation of the souls… What was the attitude of Mary towards Jesus? You know it: she lived exclusively for Him! She did not speak except of Him and for Him, suffered and prayed willingly for Him; I would say, she thought what Jesus was thinking – if that were possible – in as much as her love wanted to be close in feelings, thoughts and affection to that of Jesus… to live as one, in everything, with Jesus ”. What a beautiful exegesis of the “only one thing is needed” of Lk 10, 42; from On the steps of Don Orione, p. 88.