Places and family (6)
{flv}Theletter{/flv}
These videos are the precious legacy, discovered and experienced as the secret of secrets: the love of others. In the faces, in the stories there is news that tells a living, revolutionary Gospel, capable of overturning things: making what is 'normally' thrown away, hidden, buried a source of love.
The images tell how love for others makes existences considered useless, harmful, problematic and discarded precious.
They still say that human frailties were embraced by Don Luigi Guanella and by those who, even today, make his charisma alive.
The videos, therefore, are not an advertising campaign by the Servants of Charity or the Daughters of Saint Mary of Providence, but an invitation to seek the footsteps that lead to the discovery of the precious pearl of the Gospel.
by Enrico Ghezzi
The words of the Second Vatican Council on the education of children by parents - «It is up to parents to create within the family that atmosphere enlivened by love and piety towards God and men» (Second Vatican Council, Gravissimum educationis , 3) - are the fruit of long reflection and experimentation with the holiness of many of our families who, with biblical example and wisdom, have raised children destined by God for holiness. At the beginning of that extraordinary event of grace, which was the Council, there was a man full of light and goodness, Pope John XXIII, a manifestation of evangelical life, cultivated in the family by two holy peasant parents. Not unlike what happened in the Guanella family.
The environment and habitat of the family defines us in a decisive way. How to understand heroes or saints? No person, man or woman, is what he or she has become as an adult, without referring to the roots of his or her childhood and adolescence. The story of Don Bosco, Cottolengo, Don Guanella, Don Orione or Pope John XXIII are the fruit of the popular, simple, peasant or worker origins of their families. If I think of John XXIII, in his very high dignity as Pope, he brought with him the sweet and strong, peasant and wise gaze of his holy parents, of his uncles, of the priests who had collaborated with sacrifice and sanctity in his education. The 'good Pope', the people will call him.
by Giacomo Martina
Alongside the reforms implemented by Pius IX for the restoration of a complete common life in the ancient religious institutes and for easier dismissal (with the introduction of simple vows before the solemn ones in 1857), we witness the very lively proliferation of new foundations, especially female: 183 in the nineteenth century in Italy alone! Until then, female religious life was strictly linked to the cloister (according to the apostolic constitution Circa pastoralis of Pius V of 1566). Now, however, women consecrate themselves with simple vows, are truly "religious" (even if legal recognition came only in 1900 with the apostolic constitution Conditae a Christo, and this will save the new congregations from suppression) and dedicate themselves to school and 'assistance.
by Domenico Saginario
The legacy of solidarity from his people reached Luigi Guanella through his family. He enters that social fabric and communicates with his entire being, he takes on the situation, he is marked by it. To be fully understood, it will be necessary to take into account his radical belonging to the mountain people, to the Guanella family and, more particularly, to that of Pa' Lorenzo and Mamma Maria Bianchi.
There is consistency in Pa' Lorenzo, robust in body and spirit, who instills security, stable and strong like a mountain; and sweetness in mother Mary.
Don Attilio Beria traced a synthesis of the different and complementary influence of the two parents: «...Luigi Guanella... spent his infancy and childhood cultivated by the rough hand of his father, a typical figure of the mountaineer of those places, and by the sweet one of the mother, a creature of those who live on earth without leaving their home, unnoticed, but who will fill us with amazement when we read the history of our world written by God. As sweet as the father was severe, humble, strong of God , she greeted at the door, and sent thirteen children into the world, more than one of whom, perhaps, worthy of being venerated as a saint."
by Angelo Forti
Those who start to have graying hair remember Ermanno Olmi's film The Tree of Clogs. The title of the film comes from an episode of poverty. The boy, who has to walk six kilometers a day to go to school, comes home one day with broken shoes. There's no money for a new pair, so the father cuts down a poplar tree to get a new pair. The owner of the land notices the theft and fires him, forcing him to emigrate to another country, where out of love he is welcomed by his relatives. In that family lived grandfather Anselmo, an ingenious and wise elderly farmer. Anselmo is an elderly man much loved by children and is the continuer of popular culture, made up of proverbs and nursery rhymes, ingenious tricks that are handed down orally from generation to generation.