The Pope, My Sweetest and Greatest Love

            In a Christmas letter, written in 1922, St. Luigi Orione invites us to be faithful to the Pope, “the sweet Christ on earth”, and to consume our lives serving the Church.

I now embrace you spiritually, each and everyone, with a holy kiss, and I encourage you to practice virtue, my sons, who are my soul. I urge you always to have the greatest confidence in Divine Providence, my sons, and to love one another, to love one another together, to love one another very much, and to love souls… Souls! Always seek the humble and the abandoned.

 

This is the desire upon which my soul is set. But even before that, my sweet and great love is the Pope, that is, Christ. For you and for me, the Pope is Jesus Christ himself: “the sweet Christ on earth”, –as Catherine of Siena used to call him. Loving the Pope is loving Jesus Christ. Therefore, we must be able, through a particularly heavenly grace, to use, consume, and offer our lives humbly and faithfully at the feet of the Church, for the holy Church, for the bishops and for the Pope.

In this way,

–faithful to the internal and mysterious action of the Spirit,

–obedient to that eternal Truth which is the source of our freedom,

–guided by the authentic and infallible Magisterium

–living in the Church alone, in a spirit of love and of gentle, sacred and fraternal communion,

may the Sons of Divine Providence, with the help of God, believe, hope, struggle, suffer and love!

May they walk confidently the right path of the Lord, with “their loins girt” and “their lamps lit” in their hands, with their faces and their hearts uplifted to the celestial Virgin. May they grow in all things to arrive at the one who is our Master, Jesus Christ. For the Church and for the Pope, let us ascend to Christ!