Fr Gheddo: My 60 years of priesthood
Milan (AsiaNews) - On Saturday and Sunday, 20 to 21 April 2013, I was in Tronzano Vercellese, my hometown, to celebrate my 60 years of priesthood. A young confrere, Fr Alberto Caccaro, who recently became the director of the PIME missionary centre in Milan after coming back from Cambodia, spoke on Friday and Saturday, 19 to 20 April, to primary and secondary school students on the topic of missions. On Saturday afternoon, I celebrated Mass in Salomino, a hamlet in Tronzano. In the evening, I gave a lecture on 'Being missionaries today' to Tronzano friends and neighbours in the new, bigger town hall building, located in the former Albergo del Sole (where, despite the cold and rain, my heart was happy). Fr Guido Bobba introduced me whilst Mayor Andrea Chemello oversaw the evening and the many questions people had about my life as a missionary, the countries I visited in my travels, the interviews I had with Italian missionaries, and about what I learnt with regards to the many situations of the mission to the nations.
Sixty years of priesthood: Seemingly impossible and yet true. On 28 June 1953, the Blessed Card Ildefonso Schuster ordained me and 119 other priests in Milan's Duomo. As I remembered that ceremony as well as my first Mass in Tronzano on 29 June, feast day of Saints Peter and Paul, the town's patron saints, I was moved.
To my relatives and neighbours, who on Sunday morning streamed into the big and beautiful church, with the mayor and town authorities sitting in the front row, I said:
Today is Good Shepherd Sunday. Jesus came to reveal the face of the good and merciful Father, and then chose the apostles, ordained them as priests to pass on his words and examples. Each priest is and must be a Good Shepherd even though such responsibility is well above our little virtues and weak forces.
Contrary to what people might think and say today, namely that real vocations to the priesthood are born in adult age (the so-called late vocations), I thank the Lord who called me to follow him in my childhood years because I never had any other ideal than to be a priest. As relatives told me, when I was already seven-eight years old, when asked-'Piero, what will you do when you are grown up?'-I would answer assertively, "a priest".
I later found out that my parents, Rosetta Franzi and Giovanni Gheddo, who got married in 1928, asked God for the grace of having many children, and that at least one be a priest and one a nun. I was born in 1929, the eldest of the two servants of God Rosetta and Giovanni. After sixty years of priesthood and mission, I can tell you that it is nice to be a priest, and this for two reasons:
1) Faith tells me that a priest is "another Christ", that he represent Jesus Christ, and that this is highest ideal in which a man can hope to realise himself. As I get older, I understand it better and better and I am fully realised by following Jesus. I too have had doubts, faced crises, confronted sins and difficult moments for heeding the Lord's call, but I have always felt that Jesus would never let me down, that he would forgive me, that he comforts, enlightens, warms, accompanies and gives us the strength and the joy to take every day the path towards love and emulation of Christ. This is the youth of Christian life. And as much as the body may age, Christians, priests who follow Jesus (i.e. those who try to follow Jesus with love and fidelity), remain young in spirit since the diseases, failures, misunderstandings and sins that inevitably accompany their life do not harden their hearts, or sadden them too much. Everything passes, only Jesus Christ remains, forever. He is but the only riches we have.
As a priest, I have no other ambitions or purposes in life but to love and emulate Christ. The fascinating adventure of Christian life is to start over every day with new enthusiasm, new projects of kindness, giving and loving. Every day I ask the Lord to give me the excitement and emotion of my first Mass. Although the body ages, the love of Christ keeps you young. The confreres of the Blessed Fr Clemente Vismara, who lived 65 years among the tribes of Burma (where he endured hunger, thirst, war, extreme poverty, isolation, untreated diseases), used to say about him that "He died at the age 91 without getting old."
2) The second reason to be joyful is that a priest's ideal is to bring God to men and men to God, to serve his people in order to pass onto them the deep and consoling experience of God's love for all men. When I was in middle school at the diocesan seminary of Moncrivello (Vercelli), my vocation to leave our beautiful Italy to bring Jesus to all the people who still do not know him was born from reading missionary magazines and books written by missionaries. The missionary vocation was a major turning point that opened my horizons to all the nations and continents where the church, two thousand years after Christ, had yet to be born.
In September 1945, at the age of 16, I came to the PIME, in Via Monterosa 81, Milan. Like the city, the PIME building had been bombed. For eight years, we studied to become priests in an unheated place. Whatever food we had, it was limited and not that great. Rules were strict, calling for sacrifices and self-denial. But the great ideal of bringing Christ to the nations sustained and enthused us, warmed our hearts and boosted our sense of brotherhood, kindness, joy, commitment, optimism, and hope for the future.
After my ordination, I was supposed to leave for India, but my superiors kept me in Italy to help out the editor of PIME magazines, an old missionary from China. What was supposed to last a year ended up lasting a lifetime. I obeyed but it was hard to swallow and I had a crisis over it until superior general Mgr Aristide Pirovano set me straight. "For you, I am the voice of God. Stay where you are because you are doing it well. If in the future, I change idea and send you to a mission, I'll tell you myself."
Missionary journalism is always in the service of the ideal; it was and is my mission. I started to work with non-religious newspapers, with radio and TV stations. I travelled to missions in four continents, where I met missionaries and young churches. I brought back to Italy stories about the wonders the Holy Spirit was performing wherever a new Church was born. Even today, at 84, I continue to encourage Italians through my writings and speeches, talking about life in the missions and about the newest Churches. In return, I hear many things of how these messages are good seeds that are bearing fruit with God's help.
I ended my speech saying that Good Shepherd Sunday is the day to pray for priestly and religious vocations. When I became a priest in 1953, there were nine priests and 27 nuns from Tronzano. When I was at the seminary of Moncrivello, several from the seminary told me I was lucky, because "Tronzano is one of the best towns in our diocese."
Today Italy is certainly facing a serious political and economic crisis. However, the root of this decline lies in the crisis of faith and Christian life. If we abandon Jesus Christ and the Gospel, we lose our soul and the meaning of life.
We are a democratic people, educated, with many graduates, rich (compared to billions of poor people elsewhere in the world), but we are also soulless. I urged the people of Tronzano to come back to Jesus Christ and the Gospel, to a Christian life and religious practice, to a type of family where everyone prays together and stays together, so that we can rediscover life's joy as well as have hope in the future and give the Church new priests, new nuns, and new missionaries.
After my address, the parish priest, Father Guido, read a long and friendly letter of good wishes from Mgr Henry Masseroni, archbishop of Vercelli, as well as a scroll with a message from Rome with Pope Francis's wishes for my 60 years of priesthood.
After Mass, I had lunch with many friends at La Bruschetta restaurant, with traditional Vercelli food, such as the unforgettable panissa (bread-like dish) of my teenage years.
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