Friday, November 17, 2017

Pope Francis Commemorates Ceferino Namuncura

Pope Francis Commemorates Ceferino Namuncurá’s  Witness
and Desire to Be a Priest
(ANS - Vatican City - November 15) - “It makes me feel very good to think of Ceferino’s desire to be a priest to serve his people. That is how it must be. The priest always identifies with his people in such a way that his time, his life, and his person are for his brothers.” With these words, in a letter to Bishop Esteban Maria Laxague, SDB, of Viedma, Argentina, Pope Francis recalled Blessed Ceferino Namuncurá, son of the Mapuche people, who embraced faith in Jesus Christ and the Salesian Family, and died of tuberculosis in Rome in 1905, at only 19 years of age.

In the letter, sent on the tenth anniversary of Ceferino’s beatification (November 11, 2007), also marked the 131st anniversary of his birth (August 26, 1886). The Pontiff described the ceremony of beatification: “I was impressed by that crowd of people coming from different areas, and those faces filled with joy for the beatification of one of their own, one who had never forgotten his roots, his people, his culture.” [As archbishop of Buenos Aires at the time, Cardinal Bergoglio had been influential in the arrangements for the rite to be celebrated in Chimpay rather than the capital, and he had attended it.]
In addition to praising Ceferino Namuncura’s desire to be a priest at the service of his people, in his letter the Pope emphasizes that “youths know how to answer with generosity when Christ is presented to them through a witness of authentic and truthful life, such as Ceferino’s.” He adds a wish “that many young people today find in Jesus the love of their lives and the impetus to give of themselves to others.”

Blessed Ceferino Namuncurá represents the most convincing proof of the fidelity with which the first missionaries sent by Don Bosco could repeat what Don Bosco had done in the Oratory of Valdocco: form young saints. The formation received was part of an educational process based on the Preventive System. But what launched his formation toward the highest peaks was to learn about the life of Dominic Savio, whom Ceferino ardently imitated, and his First Communion, by which he made a covenant of absolute fidelity with Jesus, his great friend.
Source: Vatican Radio

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