29 October 1972

Venerable Brothers and Dear Sons,

Let us bless the Lord!

Here we are: Don Rua has been proclaimed ‘Blessed’ by Us!

Another wonder has been achieved: held up above the throng of humanity by the arms of the Church this man, posessed and uplifted by grace received, aided by what a heroically faithful heart has made possible, stands out on another, more luminous plane, attracting the admiration and devotion permitted those of our brothers and sisters who, having passed to the other life, have achieved beatitude in the kingdom of heaven.

The lean and well-worn profile of a priest, all meekness and kindness, duty and sacrifice, can now be discerned on the horizons of history, and will remain there forever: he is Fr Michael Rua, "Blessed"!

Are you happy? It would be superfluous to ask this of the threefold Salesian Family rejoicing here with us today and around the world, instilling joy throughout the Church. Wherever the sons of Don Bosco are, today is a feast day. And it is a feast especially for the Church in Turin, the newly beatified's home territory, which now sees a new priestly figure as part of what we can term its modern band of elect, documenting the virtues of its civil and Christian lineage, and which certainly promises future fruitfulness of the kind.

Don Rua, "beatified". Now is not the moment for Us to describe his life, nor give a panegyric. His story is already well known to everyone. The good Salesians certainly never fail to celebrate their heroes; and it is this due homage to their virtues that, by popularising them, extends the reach of their example and multiplies its beneficial effects; it creates an epic for the edification of our times.

So at this moment when joyful commotion fills our being, we prefer to meditate rather than to listen. Well then, let us meditate for a moment on a characteristic feature of Don Rua, the aspect which defines him, and says everything with a mere glance, permits us to understand him. Who is Don Rua?

He is the first successor of Don Bosco, the Saintly Founder of the Salesians.

And why is Don Rua now beatified, that is to say, glorified? He is beatified and glorified precisely because he is a successor, that is to say one who continues something: a son, disciple, imitator; someone who has made - along with others, we well know, but firstly amongst others - a school of the Saint's example, an extended institution of his personal work we could say, throughout the world; made history of his life, a spirit of his rule, and a type, a model of his holiness; from a spring welling up he has created a river.

Recall the Gospel parable: "the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the biggest shrub of all and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and shelter in its branches" (Mt. 13:31-32). The prodigious fruitfulness of the Salesain Family, one of the greatest and most significant phenomena in the perennial vitality of the Church over the last century and in our own, had its origins in Don Bosco, and its continuity in Don Rua.

He is the follower who, from those humble beginnings in Valdocco, served the Salesian work in its expansive virtuousness, understood the happy nature of the formula, developed it with textual consistency, but always with intelligent newness. Don Rua was the most faithful, therefore the most humble and the most worthy of the sons of Don Bosco. This is already very well known; We will not offer quotations which documents on the life of the newly beatified provide with exuberant abundance; but We will make just one reflection, one which especially today We believe to be very important; it regards one of the most dicussed values in the good and bad of modern culture; it is tradition we are talking about. Don Rua began a tradition.

Tradition, which has its scholars and admirers in the humanities, in history, for example, or philosophy, is not so honoured in the practical sciences where it becomes rather a case of breaking with tradition - revolution, headlong renewal, originality which has little time for other schools of thought; independence from the past, freedom from every bond. This seems to have become the norm for modernity, the condition for progress.

We are not arguing with what is salutary and inevitable in this attitude of life tending to the future, moving on in time, in experience and in the conquest of reality around us; but We warn of the danger and the damage of blindly repudiating the inheritance that the past, through wise and selective tradition, passes on to new generations. If we do not take due account of this process of transmission, we could lose the treasure which has accumulated in civilisation, and would be forced to see ourselves regressing rather than progressing, oblige to start all over again with exhausting effort. We could lose the treasure of the faith, which has its human roots in decisive moments of past history, to find ourselves shipwrecked in a mysterious troubled sea of time, with neither concept nor capacity for the road ahead.

This is an immense discourse, but one that arises from the early pages of human pedagogy and which hints, at least, at what merit nurturing the wisdom of our elders may still have. For us children of the Church, it hints at the duty and need we have to draw from tradition the perennial, friendly light with which the distant and recent past illuminates our forward journey. For us however the discourse, faced with Don Rua, is simple and elementary, but no less worthy of consideration for this.

What does Don Rua teach us? How was he able to rise to the glory of Paradise and the exultation which the Church gives him today?

Precisely, as we were saying, Don Rua teaches us to be people who continue on with something; that is followers, pupils, teachers, if you wish, because we are disciples of a greater Master. Let Us extend the lesson that comes to us from him: he teaches the Salesians to remain Salesians, ever faithful sons of their founder; and then for everyone else he teaches reverence for the magisterium which presides over the thinking and economy of Christian life. Christ himself, as the Word proceeding from the Father, and who as Messiah is the executor and interpreter of revelation concerning him, said of himself: "My teaching is not from myself; it comes from the One who sent me" (Jn. 7:16).

The disciple's dignity depends on the wisdom of the Master.

The disciple's imitation is no longer passive, nor is it servile; but it is leaven, perfection (cf. 1 Cor. 4:16). The pupil's capacity to develop his own personality derives in fact from the abstract art of the tutor, which is called, precisely, education, an art that guides the logical, but free and original expansion of the virtuous qualities of the pupil.

We are trying to say that the virtues which Don Rua models for us and which the Church has recongised for his beatification, remain the evangelical ones of humble adherents of the prophetic school of holiness; the humble to whom are revealed the highest mysteries of divinity and humanity (cf. Mt. 11:25).

If Don Rua can truly be described as the first to continue the example and work of Don Bosco, we would be pleased to always think of him and venerate him from this ascetic aspect of humility and dependence; but we can never forget the active aspect of this great little man, even more so when we, who are not alien to the thinking of our times, are inclined to measure the stature of a man by his capacity for action. We see that we stand before an athlete of apostolic activity, always with Don Bosco’s stamp about him, but with developing dimensions of his own which confered spiritual and human proportions of greatness on Don Rua.

In fact his was a grand mission. Biographers and critics of his life have discovered heroic virtues there which are the prerequisites of the Church for a positive outcome for the Cause of beatification and canonisation, and which presuppose and attest to an extraordinary abundance of divine grace, the first and greatest cause of holiness.

The mission that makes Don Rua great spreads in two outwardly distinct directions, but ones which in the heart of this powerful worker in the kingdom of God are entwined and based, as usually happens, in the kind of apostolate that Providence assigned him: the Salesian Congregation and the Oratory, that is works for youth, and other crowning works.

Here our praise should be addressed to the threefold religious family that took root first from Don Bosco and then from Don Rua, successively: the Salesians, the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians and the Salesian Cooperators, each of whom saw marvellous development under the methodical and tireless impulse of our Blessed. It is sufficient to recall that in the twenty years of his governance the 64 Salesian Houses founded by Don Bosco during his life grew to 34 in number. The positive sense of the words of the Bible, "The finger of God is here" (Ex. 8:19) come to our lips.

By glorifying Don Rua, we give glory to the Lord who wanted through him, the growing ranks of his Confreres and the rapid increase of the Salesian work, to show his goodness and his power, able to raise up inexhaustible and marvellous vitality in the Church even in our own times, offer its apostolic effort new fields of pastoral work that an impetuous and disordered social development has opened up to Christian civilisation. And celebrating with them in joy and hope, we salute all the sons and daughters of this young Salesian Family who today under the friendly and paternal gaze of the newly beatified, tread with greater assurance on the solid, direct path of the already tried and proven tradition of Don Bosco.

Then the Salesian works shine before us, illuminated by their Holy Founder and the new splendour of the blessed continuer.

It is to you whom we look, young men of the great Salesian school! In your faces and shining in your eyes we see the reflection of the love of which Don Bosco and Don Rua and all their confreres of yesterday, today, and certainly tomorrow, have made you a magnificent display. Because you are so dear to Us, you are beautiful for Us, and We gladly see you happy, lively and modern; you are young people who have grown up and continue to grow in the multi-faceted and providential Salesian work! How moving are the extraordinary things that the genius of charity of St John Bosco and Blessed Michael Rua and thousands and thousands of followers have been able to produce for you; especially for you, children of ordinary people, for you who are in need of assistance and help, instruction and education, training for work and for prayer; for you if you are children of misfortune, or in foreign lands waiting for someone to help with the wise, preventive pedagogy of friendship, kindness, joy. They know how to play and dialogue with you, make you good and strong by making you serene and pure and good and faithful. They help you discover the meaning and beauty of life, and teach you to find all things harmonised in Christ! We also salute you today, and We want all of you, from the smallest to the largest pupils of the happy, hard-working, studious Salesian training ground, with all your contemporaries in the cities and countryside, schools and sports fields, all of you who toil and suffer, all of you learning you catechism in classrooms and churches, yes, we want to call all of you immediately “to attention”, and invite you to lift your gaze towards our new Blessed Fr Michael Rua, who loved you so much and who now blesses you by Our hand, which wants to be the hand of Christ, one by one, and all together.

(Osservatore Romano, 30 October 1972).