45 years have passed since his priestly ordination. And he, Don Mauro Taverna, head of the Regina della Famiglia Pastoral Community to which the parishes of the Madonna in Campagna and of Saints Nazaro and Celso of Gallarate refer, retains the enthusiasm of the first day. “I have been a priest – he explains in an open letter to the Community – a happy priest for forty-five years, they have been forty-five rainbow years, just like a set of splendid colors that have marked, crossed, made multiple experiences, so different from each other, flourish and flourish again. in the various parishes where I have been, in the schools where I have taught, but above all in the faces I have met, in the moments of joy, pain, choice, faith, doubt, disbelief, faces and hearts to which I have close because you can see a smile from afar but tears are transparent and you can only see them in intimate proximity”. Over the years, the main mission contained in his heart and always eager to translate into the concreteness of everyday life has been to “give a glimpse of the merciful face of God and to show that every evangelical page, especially that of the Beatitudes, describes to us what becomes possible to who abandons himself to God, I have tried and try to be a priest who lives not as in an old marriage, letting abandonment to the other become a habit, but as a lover”. In short, in the words of the Gallaratese priest reigns the untouched freshness of when he decided to consecrate himself to God at a young age. And, for the future, he has a resolution firmly planted in his heart: “I thank and pray for these forty-five years and for the time that is given to me to come – he states – I pray to always be the man of deep relationships who knows how to bring out the Well”.
