Pope: "Different in language, nationality and social condition”, saints for the sake of the Gospel
Vatican City (AsiaNews) - "Different
in language, nationality and social condition ", seven evangelizers were today
proclaimed saints by Benedict XVI. An
event which has leant even greater meaning to today's celebration of World
Missions Sunday and during the Synod for the New Evangelization.
The
Pope speaks of "a happy coincidence" and indicated in the words of
the Gospel The Son
of Man came to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (cf. Mk 10: 45), "how to be evangelizers, called to
bear witness and to proclaim the Christian message, configuring ourselves to
Christ and following his very path. This is true both for the mission ad
Gentes and for the new evangelization in places with ancient Christian roots. "
And
the canonization of Jacques Berthieu, Pedro Calungsod, Giovanni Battista
Piamarta, Maria del Carmelo Sallés y Barangueras, Marianne Cope, Kateri
Tekakwitha, Anna Schäffer real models of this desire to proclaim the Gospel.
Those
words of Jesus, the Pope says, "the Church listens again to these words of Jesus, spoken by the Lord
during his journey to Jerusalem, where he was to accomplish the mystery of his
passion, death and resurrection. They are words which enshrine the meaning of
Christ's mission on earth, marked by his sacrifice, by his total self-giving" . "These
words - he adds - were
the blueprint for living of the seven Blessed men and women that the Church
solemnly enrols this morning in the glorious ranks of the saints. With heroic
courage they spent their lives in total consecration to the Lord and in the
generous service of their brethren. They are sons and daughters of the Church
who chose the path of service following the Lord".
As did Pedro Calungsod. " was born around the year sixteen fifty-four, in
the Visayas region of the Philippines. His love for Christ inspired him to
train as a catechist with the Jesuit missionaries there. In sixteen
sixty-eight, along with other young catechists, he accompanied Father Diego
Luís de San Vitores to the Marianas Islands in order to evangelize the Chamorro
people. Life there was hard and the missionaries also faced persecution arising
from envy and slander. Pedro, however, displayed deep faith and charity and
continued to catechize his many converts, giving witness to Christ by a life of
purity and dedication to the Gospel. Uppermost was his desire to win souls for
Christ, and this made him resolute in accepting martyrdom. He died on the
second of April, sixteen seventy-two. Witnesses record that Pedro could have
fled for safety but chose to stay at Father Diego's side. The priest was able
to give Pedro absolution before he himself was killed. May the example and
courageous witness of Pedro Calungsod inspire the dear people of the
Philippines to announce the Kingdom bravely and to win souls for God!".
Benedict
XVI also canonized the first Native American Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, born in today's New York state in
sixteen fifty-six to a Mohawk father and a Christian Algonquin mother, and who died in Canada at the age of 24;
the Italian Giovanni Battista Piamarta, a priest from
Brescia and founder of the Congregation of the Holy Family of Nazareth and of
the Congregation of the Sisters Humble Servants of the Lord, who lived between
1841 and 1913, the Frenchman Jacques Barthieu, professed Jesuit missionary in
Madagascar where he worked for the promotion of the human population and
where he was killed in 1896, the German Mother Marianne, born Barbara Cope,
professed nun of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Third Order of St.
Francis of Syracuse, better known as Mother Marianne of Molokai, the name of
the leper colony where she devoted herself bravely to
the sick, and died in 1918, the German Anna Schaffer, a lay woman, who lived in
the late nineteenth and the first three decades of the twentieth century, who
became an invalid in a domestic incident and who transformed her infirmity into
an occasion to welcome and proclaim of the Gospel, the Spanish religious Maria
del Carmen, foundress of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception Missionaries
in Teaching, who died in 1911, after a life dedicated to the education of
girls.
"They
are the sons and daughters of the Church, who have chosen the path of service
following the Lord. Holiness in the Church always has its source in the mystery
of Redemption, which is prefigured by the prophet Isaiah in the first reading:
the Servant of the Lord is the just one, he shall justify the many, their iniquity he shall bear" (Is 53.11), Jesus Christ,
Crucified, Risen and living in glory. Today's canonization is an eloquent
confirmation of this mysterious salvific reality. The tenacious profession of faith
of the seven generous disciples of Christ, their conformation with the Son of
Man today shines in the whole Church. "
"Let
us now - he said a little later, before the Angelus - turn to the one who is
the Queen of all the saints, the Virgin Mary, with a thought for Lourdes,
affected by severe flooding of the Gave River, which has also flooded the cave
of Apparitions
of the Virgin Mary. Specifically, today I wish to entrust to the maternal
protection of the Virgin Mary, the missionaries - priests, religious and laity -
all over the world who are spreading the good seed of the Gospel. We pray for
the Synod of Bishops, which in
recent weeks is facing the challenge of the new evangelization for the
transmission of the Christian faith. "
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