Presentation Ceremony of Strenna 2025

Presentation Ceremony of Strenna 2025
“Anchored in hope, pilgrims with young people”

 

(ANS – Rome – December 30, 2024) – The ancient and traditional yet always significant delivery of the Salesian strenna for the New Year was repeated on Friday, December 27, at the generalate of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians (FMA) in Rome. In the presence of the mother general, Mother Chiara Cazzuola, her sisters, and many Salesians and members of the Salesian Family, Fr. Stefano Martoglio, vicar of the rector major, currently at the head of the Salesian Congregation, officially presented the message and the video that illustrate the guiding theme that will accompany the Salesian Family in 2025, the Jubilee Holy Year, and the 150th anniversary of the first Salesian missionary expedition: “Anchored in hope, pilgrims with young people.”

In a room filled to the back rows, among the many notable guests, Mother Chiara Cazzuola’s sisters of the FMA general council, Fr. Gildasio Mendes, Salesiangeneral councilor for communications, and Antonio Boccia, world coordinator of the Association of Salesian Cooperators, stand out in particular.

Before this audience, Sr. Leslie Sandigo, FMA general councilor for the Salesian Family, opened the ceremony with a welcome to all those present and those who were connected online through direct streaming, and then led the introductory prayer, focused on peace: “Together, as a Salesian Family, we want to thank Fr. Stefano for the gift of the strenna, which invites us to look in the same direction, following the footsteps of Don Bosco and the origins of our charism, toward the needs of young people and today’s society who cry out for peace, hope,, and no more war. We are called, as a Family, to give ourselves and to build peace where we live.”

Afterwards, Sr. Sandigo introduced the vision of the strenna presentation video, made by IME Comunicazione, screened as a world premiere.

“Hope in the Lord, be strong, let your heart be refreshed, and hope in the Lord” (Psalm 27). Where the present makes noise, it’s there that our hope must forcefully burst forth. But how do you do so?”

This is the beginning of the video, which through the stories of some young people from different situations around the world, commented on by Fr. Stefano Martoglio, speaks about hope in daily life with dreams, expectations, worries: “Hope isn’t the conviction that something will go well regardless, it’s not something that eliminates worries, but the certainty that something makes sense, beyond its result.”

After the video, Sr. Ausilia De Siena, FMA councilor for communications, opened an interesting moment of debate, in which Flaminia, a high school student at the FMAs’ Mary Help of Christians Institute in Rome, and Antonio, a young radio presenter, began a conversation on stage with Fr. Martoglio, to develop further the theme of Strenna 2025. The vicar of the rector major recalled that the meaning of life for a Christian is to “anchor oneself to Christ,” and that the theme of the 2025 Jubilee is that of “hope of the encounter with Christ.”

Again, Fr. Martoglio stressed the need to consider “the double movement of hope, first of God toward us, and then of us toward God,” because, often, he noted, “we take the opposite path; we put ourselves at the center: ‘I believe, I do not believe....’ But the news of the Jubilee is that God believes in you, God hopes in you, God hopes in humanity!”

The 3-way conversation then touched on many other topics, from educational challenges to the throwaway culture, from ways of transmitting hope to young people and to society as a whole, to the missionary commitment that must involve the entire Salesian Family in the proclamation of the Christian message. And the vicar, for his part, continuously focused attention on hope as a vital energy originated by God that arouses and moves the deepest cords of humanity, which allows us to act and commit even where the future appears compromised by wars, poverty, migrations, environmental challenges, etc. And, with a couple of quotations, he reiterated at first that “young people are not the future, they are the present of humanity,” as Fr. Pascual Chavez Villanueva, rector major emeritus, often asserted; and then he encouraged us to continue with confidence, recalling the last words spoken by Don Bosco: “Forward, ever forward.”

After some comments and questions from the room, Mother Chiara closed the evening, thanking Fr. Martoglio for the beauty and richness of the strenna’s contents, “which can mark a path and also a renewal for us, in the sense of our being a Salesian Family, of our personal and community vocation, because we share a great charism, and also to revive our missionary spirit.”

The delivery of Strenna 2025 ended with a final significant gesture when several representatives of the Salesian Family and a missionary lit a candle which represented Christ, with the commitment to bring light to their areas of daily commitment, “to be artisans of peace, men and women of hope.”

The full presentation ceremony of Strenna 2025 can be viewed on the web:

Italian: https://youtube.com/live/7TRMfmrz8C8?feature=share 
English: https://youtube.com/live/pGxPZnSl3D0?feature=share 
Spanish: https://youtube.com/live/3LcrYWxbLHE?feature=share 
Portuguese: https://youtube.com/live/f3KvtnfGZ9o?feature=share 
French: https://youtube.com/live/qVroiWc_rwA?feature=share