On year before his death, Don Orione summarized his work and belief in a mystical and pastoral writing.
…Let us open up a new divine world to many peoples, let us yield with loving sweetness in understanding the small, the poor and the humble.
May we always want to boil over with faith and charity.
May we always want to be holy, alive to others and dead to ourselves.
Our every word should be a breeze from the open skies: all people should feel the flame that burns in our hearts, and the light of our inner fire; finding there God and Christ.
Our devotion should not leave people cold and bored, for it must be truly and wholly alive and full of Christ.
We must thirst for martyrdom.
Serving in men the Son of man.
In order to conquer for God and to win others over, we need, first, to live are intense life of God within ourselves, to have inside us a dominating faith; a great ideal – the denial of ourselves for others – should be the flame that burns and shines in us, setting our lives on fire in an idea and a sacred love which is stronger.
No one who serves two masters – the senses and the spirit – can ever discover the secret of winning souls.
We must say the words and perform the tasks that will outlive us.
Mortification of ourselves in silence and secret.
We must be saints, but we must be such saints that our saintliness does not limit itself to the faithful, nor remain only within the Church, but transcends and throws such a shining light, such a great life of love of God and man on society, that we are more than saints of the Church; we are saints of the people and saints of social wellbeing.
We must be a very deep vein of mystic spirituality that penetrates every social stratum: meditative and active spirits, ‘servants of Christ and the poor’.
Do not give yourselves over to the vanity of letters, do not let yourselves swell up with worldly things.
Communicate with your brothers only to edify them, communicate with others only to spread the Lord’s goodness.
- Love Christ in all men.
- Serve Christ in the poor.
- Renew Christ in us, and restore Christ in everything.
- Save, always save all people, save at the cost of every sacrifice, with redeeming passion and a redeeming holocaust.
The great souls, the great and magnanimous hearts, the strong and free Christian consciences, that feel their mission of truth, faith and great hope, of holy love of God and man, walk in the light of a great, great faith, ‘that faith’ in divine providence. They walk without stain, without fear, per ignem et acquam [1], through the filth of so much hypocrisy, so much perversity and dissolution.
Let us carry with us, and indeed inside us, that divine treasury that is God, and though we must go out among peoples, let us keep that heavenly silence in our hearts, a silence no earthly noise can interrupt, and the inviolate cell of the humble perception of ourselves, where the soul speaks to the angels and to Christ the Lord.
Around us there will be no shortage of scandal and the false shame of the scribes and Pharisees, nor of malevolent insinuations, nor of calumnies and persecution. My sons, we should not have the time to ‘turn our heads to guide the plough’, for as much as our mission of charity drives and presses us, as much as our love of our neighbor burns within us, so much will the divine, scorching fire of Christ consume us.
We are intoxicated with charity, fools of the Cross and Christ crucified.
Above all, in our humble, holy lives full of good, we must take the small and the poor into our charge, and follow God’s path. We must live in a radiant sphere, intoxicated with light and the divine love of Christ and the poor, and of heavenly dew, like the lark that soars upward, singing in the sun.
Let our table be like the ancient Christian agape[2]. Souls! Souls!
Have great hearts and the divine folly of souls!
From notes without precise date of January 1939
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