Apostles, witnesses and good Samaritans
- Parent Categories: Spirituality
In the month of October, in addition to the recitation of the Holy Rosary, it seems that the liturgy has the task of reminding us of the copious and tasty fruits of holiness, offered by the example of the saints remembered in the liturgical calendar in this month. The month of October commemorates the feminine genius with two holy "doctors", experts in doctrine and sanctity: Saint Teresa of Lisieux, on October 1st, and Saint Teresa of Avila, on October 15th. Both saints lived a spirituality greatly inspired by the example of Saint Joseph. The first, who desired "to be like the heart for the Church", in the flowerbed of holiness, is a delicate, fragile and gentle flower. Due to her wise journey into holiness, during the XII Youth Day in 1997 in Paris, John Paul II proposed her to young people as a model of possible holiness. On October 18, the Church will also canonize the father and mother of Saint Therese. The second, Saint Teresa of Avila, both in character and spirit of enterprise, completes the characteristics of Saint Therese's holiness.
The Lord also lives in the high mountains of our house
From a story by Oreste Forno
by Graziella Fons
In the history of every soul "there are many hidden passages and winding corridors", but also unexplored peaks that offer the exhilaration and a sweet nostalgia of a joyful past to make one return and rediscover the footsteps erased by the wind and sand. There are many heady circumstances capable of deviating from a path considered fulfilling and safe. At times, stormy circumstances, missed appointments, paralyzing tiredness, have caused the splendor of ideals even though cultivated with such passion to be lost. In Luoghi dell'Infinito, a monthly magazine of Art and Culture, published as an attachment to the newspaper Avvenire, Oreste Forno, mountaineer and journalist, recounted his experience of rediscovering faith thanks to the encounter with the natural beauty of the Alps, especially with the gaze bewitched by the Lombardy peaks, which were the backdrop to Don Guanella's life.
For Michelangelo, death is mother
- Parent Categories: Pious Union initiatives
Observing the three "Pietàs" of the great artist
by Mario Carrera
Faith not only inspires the artist's imagination, but works and shapes his very life. This consideration is evident in Michelangelo's artistic works and, in particular, in the three "Pietàs" that he sculpted. At the age of twenty-four he sculpted the "Pietà", the best known one, the "Pietà" par excellence that we admire in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. It is a hymn to the love of a young mother who loses a child in a dramatic way. A hymn to faith and resignation. As the years pass, the drama of dying knocks on the artistic vein of the Florentine artist and death takes its face in the "Pietà". The sculptures of the three "Pietàs" have an almost private itinerary in the artist's life. At twenty-four he sculpted a sumptuous beauty, even in the drama of the death of the Son of God. The last two "pietas", that of the Museum of the Cathedral of Florence and that of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, are the mirror of his state of mind as a facing death. “The unfinished”, in Florence, in the physiognomy of Nicodemus holding Christ, gives us his self-portrait, his face. The “Pietà” in Milan, usually referred to as the “Pietà Rondanini”, is Michelangelo's last work. The Master dedicated his last thoughts and even the last hours of his life to it.