THE MESSAGE OF THE VICAR
Fr. Stefano Martoglio, SDB
A HEART AS LARGE
AS THE SHORES OF THE SEA
A new time is given to us: from
the Heart of God to the heart of humanity,
mirrored in the great heart of Don Bosco
Dear friends and readers, this month I address you with my best wishes for a new year! We find ourselves in a new time that is given to us to live with intensity and with “newness of life,” which I make my own, as a propitious and opportune wish. I’m speaking of the gift that the Holy Father has given us in recent days: his encyclical letter Dilexit Nos on the human and divine love of the Heart of Jesus Christ.
We Salesians are used to singing: “God has given you a heart as big / as the sands of the sea. / God has given you His Spirit: / He has set your love free.”
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| Sacred Heart statue Mary Help of Christians Center, Tampa |
Pope Pius XI, who knew him well,
said that Don Bosco had a “beautiful peculiarity”: he was “a great lover of souls” and saw them “in
the thoughts, in the Heart, in the Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Indeed,
in the coat-of-arms of our Congregation there is a burning heart.
Pope
Francis himself introduces paragraph no. 2 of Dilexit Nos in
this way: “The symbol of the heart has often been used to express the love of Jesus Christ. Some have questioned whether this symbol is
still meaningful today. Yet, living as
we do in an age of superficiality, rushing frenetically from one thing to
another without really knowing why, and ending up as insatiable consumers and slaves
to the mechanisms of a market unconcerned about the deeper meaning of our
lives, all of us need to rediscover the importance of the heart.”
How strong is this teaching
of our Pope to show us a new way of living, in a new
time that is given to us, the year to come.
In no.
21, Pope Francis writes: “This profound core, present in every man and woman, is not that of the
soul, but of the entire person in his or her unique psychosomatic identity. Everything finds its unity in the heart, which
can be the dwelling-place of love in all its spiritual, psychic, and even
physical dimensions. In a word, if love
reigns in our heart, we become, in a complete and luminous way, the persons we
are meant to be, for every human being is created above all else for love. In the deepest fiber of our being, we were
made to love and to be loved.”
And
he adds in no. 27 of his encyclical: “Before the heart of Jesus, living and present, our mind, enlightened by
the Spirit, grows in the understanding of his words and our will is moved to
put them into practice. This could
easily remain on the level of a kind of self-reliant moralism. Hearing and tasting the Lord, and paying him due
honor, however, is a matter of the heart. Only the heart is capable of setting our other
powers and passions, and our entire person, in a stance of reverence and loving
obedience before the Lord.”
I won’t dwell on
this any longer, hoping to have piqued your interest
to read this splendid encyclical letter, which is not only a great gift to live
in a new way the time that is given to us, which would already be enough, but
it also gives us a profoundly “Salesian” quality: Don Bosco wrote and did much to spread
devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as the divine Love that accompanies our
human reality.
A magnificent incentive
In the Biographical
Memoirs, VIII, 119, we find the following: “A most ardent devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus
animated all his activities and rendered his familiar talks fruitful and his
sermons and priestly ministry persuasive. Seemingly, the Sacred Heart helped him also by
special charisms as he went about his arduous mission.”
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| Sacred Heart Church, Rome (ANS) |
The testimony of Don Bosco’s devotion to the Sacred Heart is “concretely” identified with the basilica of that name that he built in Rome at the request of Pope Leo XIII. The material building refers to and recalls to all of us Don Bosco’s “monumental” devotion to the Sacred Heart. As for our Lady, so also for the Sacred Heart: Don Bosco’s devotion is manifested in the churches he built because devotion to the Sacred Heart is ultimately devotion to the Eucharist and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.
Don Bosco’s heart, constantly in love with the Eucharist, is a magnificent personal drive to make this alive and true for
us in the New Year. This is a true and deep wish for a happy new year
lived to the fullest.v As the song continues: “You formed men / with
healthy and strong hearts: / you sent them out into the world to proclaim / the
Gospel of joy.”
I’ll conclude this brief message by wishing everyone
a happy new year from the bottom of my heart, with the image that Pope Francis
reports in the first pages of the encyclical, referring to the teachings of his
grandmother on the meaning of the name of carnival sweets, the “busie”[1]... because
during cooking the dough swells and remains empty. Therefore it has an
exteriority which corresponds to an emptiness inside; they seem big from
the outside but they are not, they are “bugie.”
May the New Year be full and rich in substance for
all of us, concretized in welcoming our God who comes among us. May his coming bring peace and truth – that what
is seen from the outside corresponds to what is inside!
Best wishes to all of you!
Fr. Stefano Martoglio
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