(ANS – Rome – June 28) – Under the painting of the
Sacred Heart in the center of the basilica built in Rome in honor of the Sacred
Heart by Don Bosco, there is a double portrait. The first is dedicated to St. Francis
de Sales, the second to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, from whom devotion to the
Sacred Heart began, after the revelations she received starting in December
1673. St. Francis de Sales had founded with Saint Jane Frances de Chantal the
Order of the Visitation, to which Margaret Mary Alacoque belonged. It is not
just a question of historical references.
The heart is like the synthesis of the message of
Francis de Sales, communicated with his life even more than in his writings. He
intended the Treatise on the Love of God as a follow-up to a Treatise on the
Love of One’s Neighbor, for which he had drawn up an outline; but he was not
able to carry out his plan on account of his death at just 55 years of age (in
1622).
Francis was able to enrich the Church’s journey
with a charitable love without boundaries. It is the result of a maturation
begun during his years of study and then continued in his nine years as a
priest, seven of which he lived as a missionary in the Calvinist Chablais area,
facing hostility of all kinds. His strategy was to reconquer hearts one by one,
with patience and sweetness. The same approach he maintained as a bishop: “God drew
me away from myself to take me for Himself and give me to his people. That is,
He transformed me from what I was for myself to what I had to become for them,”
he wrote in a letter to Jane Frances de Chantal about the day of his episcopal
ordination.The “heart” is the whole of his entire life and his spiritual heritage, from which also comes the gift that, through Margaret Mary Alacoque, has reached the whole Church.
Don Bosco’s spiritual history is like a big tree
that comes from the same root. He wanted those who would continue his mission to
adopt the name of Francis de Sales because it is the same heart that gives life
to everything that was born from Don Bosco.
Two particular moments are like a testament and
symbol of Don Bosco’s heart, both of which he experienced at the basilica of
the Sacred Heart. The letter from Rome in May 1884, where he confides
everything that is dearest to him and asks his Salesians to have the same heart
that he has for young people; and the only Mass he celebrated in the basilica,
on May 16, 1887, when the Lord allowed the whole journey of his servant’s life
to emerge from the memory of the heart, lived as “the only movement of charity
toward God and toward his brothers” (C. 3).
Returning to these roots opens the way to a path of
renewal, which recreates the ‘new heart,’ with which to be Salesians, according
to Don Bosco’s heart, for today’s young people.
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