Concluding the speech addressed yesterday to all of you, around sixty thousand of whom gathered in Piazza San Pietro for the Audience reserved for you, Pope Francis mentioned the theme of synodality. He said that “there is a need for synodal men and women who know how to dialogue, speak and search together”. For our meeting this evening, it was recalled at the beginning that our prayer “is enriched by the company of the saints, women and men who with words and example help us to wear our baptismal dignity”.
It is precisely this that Saint John Chrysostom meant when he preached that the name of the Church is “system and synod”. He was alluding to a non-random, non-homogeneous and disorderly assembly, but to a choir in which the voice of the angels and saints is joined by that of the Church on earth to form a single whole in praise of God. He said it while commenting on Psalm 149 , which begins: «Sing to the Lord a new song; praise of him in the assembly of the faithful” (v.1).
The Church is not a song with a single voice, but a concert
The song, Chrysostom explained, must first of all be “new”, because thanksgiving must be expressed in deeds before being expressed in words. In fact, just as in the art of music one is required to have a good voice in tune before being part of a choir, so in the praise of God words alone are not enough, but a virtuous life is necessary. The Church then is not a song with a single voice, but a concert where there are many voices singing in harmonic form (Cf. Exp. in PS. 149, 1: PG 55, 493).
This is what we undertake to do in every celebration of the Eucharist when, as each Preface concludes, “heaven and earth unite in a new song of adoration and praise” and we “united with the angels and saints, we sing one voice” the glory of God. This is what the Pope reminds us of in the apostolic exhortation Enjoy and rejoice of which we listened to some passages together. «We are all called to be saints by living with love and each offering our own testimony…». Let’s reflect for a few moments. We can translate that holiness is a “choir”; in it everyone has their own voice, but we are all called to be saints!
The universal vocation to holiness. This is for everyone
L’universal vocation to holiness it was the rediscovery of the Second Vatican Council (cf. Lumen gentium, Postal Code. 5). The statement is ancient. Saint Ambrose already compared the Church to a garden where many species of plants flourish: the violets of confessors, the lilies of virgins, the roses of martyrs (cf. In Cant. Song. II, 3: PL 15, 1871). More well known, I think, is what Saint Francis de Sales wrote inIntroduction to the devout lifethat is, it would be heresy “to claim to eliminate the devout life from the soldier’s barracks, from the craftsman’s workshop, from the prince’s court, from the intimacy of the spouses” (I, 3).
Some things, however, are forgotten and then it is necessary. In Enjoy and rejoice in the lines written immediately before those that were read, Francis says: «To be saints it is not necessary to be bishops, priests, religious men or women. Many times we are tempted to think that holiness is reserved for those who have the ability to keep their distance from ordinary occupations, to dedicate a lot of time to prayer. It is not so…”.
Every saint is a mission, it is a project of the Father and to embody the Gospel
In my service as Prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints I often ask myself: “What type of saints does the Church need today?”. I often ask myself this, because more and more often I am reminded of the distinction made by HU v. Balthasar between habitual sanctity and representative sanctity. There are, he said, male and female saints who are like flowers that the Spirit makes bloom and that the Church presents to God as its own first fruits and this is habitual holiness, paths of holiness that from the body of Christ ascend towards the Head. Then there are missions of holiness which “fall upon the Church like celestial lightning, as they must make her aware of God’s unique and unrepeatable will for her”.
He concludes: «since it is more important for the Church to comply with God’s desires and not vice versa, it is also more important for her to carefully seek out and welcome those saints that he clearly, without a shadow of a doubt, sends her…» (Sisters in Spirit, Milan 1991, p. 26-27). This is the meaning of my question! Of course, as we heard from the Pope’s words, «every saint is a mission; it is a project of the Father to reflect and embody, in a specific moment of history, an aspect of the Gospel” (n. 19). Here, however, it is a question of answering the question: this specific moment in history that we are experiencing, what do you particularly need?
A Church that is unattractive and not very close to people’s choices
In an interview given to Catholic Civilization Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, archv. of Bologna and President of the CEI, said: «We must ask ourselves why the Church manages to communicate too little, so much so that it is identified with a system of moral rules of which however we do not explain the content: we insist on the letter, but we are unable to explain its spirit . In short, a Church that is unattractive and not very close to people’s choices, in an individualistic and nihilistic context.” And a little further on: «We struggle to be creative. Maybe we don’t even have to be, but certainly at least we have to believe more that the Gospel generates life and changes it much more than we imagine! But we must live it and communicate it!» (Catholic Civilization 2024/ I [quad. 4167]280.281).
Eschatological hope does not diminish the importance of earthly commitments
Even our daily newspaper Future started a debate on the issue. Among those who spoke, for example, Agostino Giovagnoli spoke of an inadequacy of Catholics in Italy in translating scientific reflections, literary productions, artistic creations, etc. capable of entering into dialogue with cultures are the requests that come from Pope Francis, when he speaks of war or emigration, of attention to the poor and of an orientation towards charity (cf. Future of 14 April 2024, p. 19). These are provocations that certainly have to do with holiness, if it is true that “eschatological hope does not diminish the importance of earthly commitments, but rather gives new reasons to support their implementation” (Gaudium et spes, n. 21).
Dear friends of the ACI, yours is a lay association and among you there are saints who encourage you in this. I’ll just name a few; names – I quote the Pope again in yesterday’s speech – “of people shaped by the Spirit, of “pilgrims of hope”, as the theme of the Jubilee now approaching says, men and women capable of tracing and following new and challenging paths”.
Barelli, Toniolo and Frassati have a lot to tell us
Here, then Armida Barelli. On 30 April 2022, presiding over the rite for her beatification in Milan, I quoted these words from the Message of the CEI: «… also acting on the social level for the valorization of women, Armida was the promoter of an inclusive, welcoming and universal Catholicism. In the season of the return to democracy in our country after the devastation of the war, she encouraged women, called to vote for the first time, to “understand what the social principles of the Church are in order to exercise our duty as citizens” because “we are a force , in Italy, we women””.
On April 29th ten years earlier he had been proclaimed blessed Giuseppe Toniolocalled theGod’s economist. That Sunday, in the prayer of Queen Caeli Pope Benedict XVI said that his message «is very timely, especially in this time: Blessed Toniolo indicates the path of the primacy of the human person and of solidarity. He wrote: “Above and beyond the legitimate goods and interests of individual nations and states, there is an inseparable note that coordinates them all into unity, namely the duty of human solidarity”.
This evening, lastly, I would like to remember the Blessed in particular Piergiorgio Frassati, whose canonization is now looming for the next Jubilee year. In the homily for the rite of his beatification, which took place on 20 May 1990, Saint John Paul II called him man of the Beatitudes; he also said that «in Catholic Action he lived his Christian vocation with joy and pride and committed himself to loving Jesus and seeing in him the brothers he met on his path or that he sought in places of suffering, marginalization and abandonment to make them feel the warmth of his human solidarity and the supernatural comfort of faith in Christ”.
With feelings of mercy for the sufferings of all…
At the end the Pope summarized Blessed Piergiorgio’s earthly day thus: «Wholly immersed in the mystery of God and entirely dedicated to the constant service of others». In these words I seem to hear those with which Saint Gregory the Great describes the role of the pastor in the Church, which is also the duty of every Christian: singulis compassion proximus, prae cunctis contemplatione suspensus…“close to everyone in sharing their pain, but more than anyone else dedicated to contemplation to be able to take on board the suffering of all with feelings of mercy…” (Past Reg. II, 5: PL 77, 32).
What a wonderful model of Christian life! Yesterday, in his speech to you, Pope Francis underlined that “your associative life, which is multifaceted and finds its common denominator precisely in the embrace of charity”. And wasn’t Piergiorgio’s earthly life like this? There is a question that in one of his works entitled New portraits of saints.2 (Milan 2016) Antonio Sicari places himself precisely in relation to him and it is this: why the land where he lived, which even at the end of the 19th century was so rich in “social saints” (among which Piergiorgio himself is counted today) Is it so de-Christianized today? What happened? The question applies to our entire country. I mentioned it before.
Conceive associationism as Christian friendship destined for the birth of a social Catholicism
Sicari believes that an answer can be found in Piergiorgio Frassati. In his holiness, he says, there is a value of continuity with the tradition of his land: he, in fact, was involved in the work of defending the faith, through the charity lavished in the field of marginalization, produced by the then nascent context industrial. There is also, however, an element of novelty and it is the fact of having tried to compare the value of faith with the entire range of human experience, operating charitably in every sphere: in the university environment, at work, in the press (Pier Giorgio collected subscriptions not for his father’s newspaper, but for the Catholic one), in political and party commitment, and wherever it was necessary to defend social freedoms, always trying to conceive and foment associationism, how Christian friendship destined for the birth of a social Catholicism.
Is this the right answer? Yesterday, concluding his speech and also alluding to the reasons for your XVIII National Assembly, recalling Rm 12.10 the Pope wished you to live these experiences «as moments of communion, moments of co-responsibility, ecclesial moments, in which you can infect each other with embraces of affection and fraternal esteem».
In his work Anyone who believes is not a bourgeois beingJean de Saint-Cheron reports this anecdote: Gerard Manley Hopkins, an English Jesuit and poet who lived in 1800, was asked: how to believe in God? Hopkins simply replied: give alms! (ed. LEV, 2023, p. 186).
Fraterna Domus – Sacrofano (RM), 26 April 2024
Marcello Card. Semeraro
