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Friday, May 27 2011 15: 01

Saints yes, but how? Featured

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Let's prepare an event for Don Guanella

by Angelo Forti

The Holy Spirit has been defined as the "great iconographer", the one who paints the faces of male and female saints with the features of the Saint par excellence Christ Jesus; the saints, therefore, according to the definition of the Carmelite Father Jesús Castellano, are a masterpiece of the "holy and sanctifying" Spirit.
The action of the Spirit is not the fruit of magic or the consequence of a miracle, but requires that a collaboration be established between the energy of the Holy Spirit and man in his concrete, daily history. Holiness is a story written by both hands, a living and life-giving page of the gospel of Jesus.  
So, when the Church proclaims the sanctity of a person, announces that God is still in action on behalf of our poor humanity, God renews his trust in man and that "Father who is in heaven" is still embracing the earth and it makes fertile ground for holiness.

 

With the proclamation of the sanctity of Don Guanella, the waves of the Spirit transmit the closeness of God in our affairs in such a way as to make his voice resonate within us and transmit to us the warmth of a personal love, so strong that it even makes us suspend our thoughts. laws of nature to work a miracle for the benefit of a human creature, so as to make us feel the tenderness of his hand as support on the paths of life.
A person declared saint by the Church is always a witness, a reliable spokesperson; through the faces of the saints, the blessed and the venerable we discover the multiplicity of the faces of the holiness of Jesus reflected in the life of his Church. Let us not forget that the sum of spiritualities, specific characteristics of each saint, are road signs to reach the very heart of God through Jesus. This is why new saints continually make the image of the Church new.
The face of the saints is a bible that even illiterates and superficial people can recognize, because their works glorify the splendor of divine glory.
The canonization of the founder, Don Guanella, calls us to enjoy a moment of consolation, but also to a challenge, on two fronts: the first towards the Church in helping her to bring out the power of the Spirit who acted in an extraordinary way in the earthly existence of Don Guanella, but there is also a challenge-proposal, equally important towards the contemporary world.
In recent times, Pope Benedict XVI has launched the need for religious dialogue with those who stand at the mercy of spiritual values. The Pope called this challenge "the Courtyard of the Gentiles"; a "courtyard of the Gentiles" with which to launch a bridge of dialogue towards those who walk on the margins of faith or nostalgic for the "unknown God" hidden in the heart of every human creature.
In this dialogue we must present the double face of the medal of sanctity: we must say that there is the nature of sanctity that the community of believers expects, pursues, conquers and witnesses in the light of the indications expressed by the documents of the Second Vatican Council. The second effigy of the medal is the semblance of the holiness that today's world expects from Christians. it is true that we live our experience of holiness in a distracted, tired, disheartened world, closed "in the anguishing desert of solitude", spectator and consumer of a fast, approximate, rapid, shapeless and "liquid" world like that of the internet. The canonization of Don Guanella also offers us a time to think about two different and complementary faces of holiness, which does not consist in doubling the nature of holiness, but rather conceiving and cultivating it as the Church supports it, cultivates it, encourages it: a hug of God who, through the exemplary life of a person, connects heaven with earth.
It lowers the divine qualities in a person's life to elevate human prerogatives into the very sphere of God.
Saint Ignatius of Antioch said that whoever reads the gospel becomes the flesh of Christ and that the expression of his glory is contained in the flesh of living man.

 

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