Homily for Memorial of St. Louis Guanella

Homily for the Memorial of
St. Louis Guanella

October 24, 2018

Collect
Don Bosco Cristo Rey, Takoma Park, Md.

St. Louis Guanella was a “faithful and prudent steward who distributed the food allowance” (Luke 12:42) to the Lord’s people.  He wasn’t a Salesian but was inspired in part by Don Bosco, with whom he collaborated for three years on leave from his diocese.

Louis came from a rugged, trackless region of northern Italy above Lake Como, so remote that the people didn’t even have horses and wagons to help them tend their livestock and do whatever other farming they did.  His family was very poor, but generous benefactors helped him go to the seminary, and he became a diocesan priest.  He immediately displayed care for the poor in his parish and promoted schooling for poor youngsters.

In 1875 he went to Turin and joined Don Bosco in oratory work for 3 years.  Down the street from the Oratory, almost a neighbor, is the Little House of Divine Providence, founded by St. Joseph Cottolengo in the 1820s to provide for the aged and incurably sick and others whom society had no use for.  Fr. Louis drew inspiration from both of these works, Don Bosco’s educational work for youth and Cottolengo’s for the abandoned.

St. Louis Guanella in 1912,

3 years before his death.

Recalled to his diocese, he founded schools, orphanages, homes for the sick and elderly and physically and mentally handicapped—whom he called “the favorites of Divine Providence.”  He and his work were beloved, and Providence took good care of them.  He founded a congregation of men, the Servants of Charity, and one of women, the Daughters of St. Mary of Providence, to carry on his work.

Nevertheless, he met great opposition, especially from anticlerical politicians, who resented his popularity with the common people and felt threatened by it.  They harassed and persecuted him, and on one occasion a mob burned down one of his homes for the elderly.

But thruout, St. Louis maintained an absolute trust in Divine Providence.  Asked whether he didn’t lose sleep with financial and political worries, he answered, “I worry until midnite, and then I let God worry.”

St. Louis models for us concern for the poor, including the young, the work that we’re doing here, and complete trust in God’s goodness and care for us.