ASC 310 - October-December 1983

LETTER OF THE RECTOR MAJOR

Father Egidio VIGANÒ

Introduction - Don Bosco's canonization - Our religious consecration - The main qualities In salesian

holiness - Serve the Lord in gladness - An oratorian heart - Attracting the love of our charges - The asceticism of the daily grind - Close to Jesus Christ our Redeemer - The two most harmful enemies of our holiness - A final word of farewell.

Dear confreres,

The time is fast approaching for our General Chapter: let us intensify our prayers of supplication and homage to God; let us beg him to grant the abundant enlightenment and gifts of his Holy Spirit to the members of the Chapter, one and all. The Act of Entrustment to Mary Help of Christians that we shall make at the beginning of the Chapter will be a reminder to us of Don Bosco's devotion to our Mother and Guide: she will intercede for us that our efforts to be interpreters and exemplars of our Founder's spiritual and apostolic heritage may be faithful and relevant.

The six-year mandate of your Rector Major and Superior Council is drawing to a close. My colleagues have labored hard in brotherly union. In their name I wish to thank all provincials and confreres for the cooperation and spirit of communion they have shown us during these years that carried such a heavy workload but were so full of hope. As for myself: now is the time for me to ask forgiveness of the Lord and all my friends for my inevitable failings and inadequacies in my dialoguing and in my ministry of animation and government of the Congregation.

We all need to increase our vitality and efficiency in the mission bequeathed to us by Don Bosco - which means achieving that maturity that belongs to his distinctive holiness.

In 1984 we shall commemorate the 50th anniversary of the canonization of our Father and Founder (1 April 1934). May this event be a spur to us "to strive with fresh resolve for our distinctive salesian holiness" in accordance with Strenna 84) our practice for the corning year.

It was the desire of Pope Pius XI that Don Bosco should be canonized on Easter Sunday, at the conclusion of the Jubilee Year of our Redemption.

A re-reading of the Acts of the Superior Council and the Salesian Bulletin of the time evokes the extraordinary emotion of those days; one can sense the all-pervasive festive joy and the deeper appreciation of the salesian vocation. The Rector Major, Fr Peter Ricaldone, wrote, "This canonization day is the most glorious event the Congregation has ever experienced; there will never be, I venture to say, another like it."¹ He compared Easter Day of 1934 with that of 1846, when Don Bosco "had suffered rebuff after rebuff; he had been ousted from every part of the city where he had to make a start with his work; he found himself without the smallest patch of land which he could use for the good of his young charges. It was on that Easter Day that Providence put him in possession of enough land to settle into and make a solid start with his mission. These two Easter Days open and close an era in the history of salesian action and lodge it soundly within the annals of Church history.”²

For a religious family the canonization of its Founder is of special importance and invested with a practical ecclesial significance. Such a Founder is publicly proclaimed as a transcendent expression of the vitality and holiness of the Church. The canonized Founder is not the "private property" of his religious family: he becomes a very special part of the universal heritage of the People of God, and is thus invested with a genuine spiritual authority for the benefit of his followers. In a religious family the Founder's canonization is of greater ecclesial importance than the approval of the Holy Rule - and the procedure followed by the Holy See in the two cases bears this out. The first article. of our Constitutions tells us that the canonization of Don Bosco is one of the principal actions of the Church in officially recognizing the hand of the Holy Spirit in the founding of our Society. Well may we say, "With humble gratitude we believe the Salesian Society came into being not only by human agency but by the providence of God.”³

In my letter to the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians on the occasion of the centenary of the death of Saint Mary Domenica Mazzarello, I made the point that the holiness of a Founder has a very special character quite different from that of a canonized saint who is not a Founder; and this is not only because of his particular personal and historical features, but because of his distinctive I and unique holiness and apostolate and the "experience of the Holy Spirit" that he transmits to his followers to be lived, safeguarded, deepened and constantly developed by them in harmony with the Body of Christ continually in the process of growth.⁴

In Don Bosco we find the Saint and the Founder so blended as to make him our perfect father and model. To this end the Holy Spirit fashioned him by endowing him with a practical holiness that was further enriched by his talent for attracting and forming spiritual children so that he could say with the Apostle, "Be imitators of me as I am of Christ.”⁵

The events of history show us clearly that the only way open to Don Bosco to achieve his vocation and holiness was to be a Founder. As I wrote to our Salesian Sisters, "he was led by the Lord, and was practically obliged to embark on a brand new kind of sanctification and apostolate, a personal interpretation of the Gospel and the mystery of Christ with a special adaptation to the signs of the times. This originality meant a new fusion of the common elements of Christian holiness that was balanced, congenial and perfectly regulated; the virtues and the means to holiness had their own proper place, quantity, symmetry and beauty that were wholly characteristic.”⁶

We know that what distinguishes our spiritual family in the Church from any other is not Christianity but a special way of translating into its life Christianity's message and mission. Thus the Salesian Family reads the Gospel through the eyes of Don Bosco and his distinctive holiness.

This concept is all-important for us; it establishes that our holiness is intimately related to that of our Founder to whom we are bonded by the religious consecration we made by our perpetual profession; and this religious consecration must grow and manifest itself in our salesian holiness.