Y
OUTHFUL
HOLINESS
by Pascual Chávez Villanueva
THE FRUITS OF THE PREVENTIVE SYSTEM
LAURA AND PAOLA
Each month this year I shall be reflecting on some of the magnificent fruits that have come from the application of Don Bosco’s System. For January two extraordinary girls, Laura and Paola.
L
aura Vicuña
born in Chile in 1891, a
contemporary of Maria Goretti, like her knew how to bear witness to a
life in which she defended her own human dignity and her Christian
faith. Both of them were able to make quite astonishing decisions
considering their age, resisting the assaults of depraved men in
order to preserve their physical integrity and their spiritual
innocence. This resistance cost Marietta
her life, and Laurita
had to put up with unspeakable assaults and humiliations. What makes
them models to imitate
is love taken to the total sacrifice of oneself, which in Laura’s
case was for her mother’s conversion. The biography of this little
Chilean girl, in fact, tells us that two years before her death she
offered her life to the Lord for her mother who, in order to provide
for her babies, had agreed to live with the owner of an estancia
(farming estate).
It had been the death of her father when Laura was six and the critical situation this created that forced the little family to emigrate to Junin de los Andes, in Argentina, where they began to experience painful trials, but where Laura and her little sister had the good fortune to meet the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians and to find a second family where they could grow up peacefully and content. The experience at school (1900-1904), gave Laura the opportunity to discover a great friendship for Jesus and the “life of grace”. Her first Communion became for her as it had been for Dominic Savio, a great turning point in her life with three resolutions that she always kept: 1º My God I want to love you and serve you all my life; I give you my soul, my heart, my whole self. 2º I want to die rather than to offend you and so I intend to mortify myself in everything that might take me away from you. 3º I resolve to do whatever I can to make you known and loved; and to make reparation for the offences you receive every day from people and especially from members of my own family. It was this boundless love for God that led her to recognise the illegal union of her Mamma with a facendero as something evil, and to grow in the desire to offer herself to God for her conversion. Further unwelcome attention from the shady character living with her mother made her ill, and from this she never recovered. Before she died she told her Mamma her special secret: she had offered all her sufferings and even her life so that she would leave that man for ever. And in tears Mamma Mercedes, swore that she would. On 22 January 1904 Lauretta died certain that she had brought her Mamma back to the right path.
A
Lmost sixty years later in Naples, on 24 October 1963 Paola Adamo, was born, the daughter of Claudio and Lucia, architects. Her Papà was responsible for the church of St. John Bosco in Taranto, where the Adamo family were living, and it was there in the shadow of the salesian house that Paola lived her life. Papà and Mamma were Salesian Cooperators and catechists, and it is they who prepared their very special little girl to meet Jesus. From being very young she showed great sensitivity and intelligence. At 9 years of age she began keeping a secret diary in which she wrote something that throws light on the interior life of this young girl: “If you believe in God you have the world in your hands.” There are those who express doubt that it is possible to be a saint at that age, but we believe that big decisions have their beginnings precisely at that stage in life: a time of spring-like growth. Don Bosco also thought so; and it is this that is at the heart of his “preventive” thinking. Those who knew her were won over by her spontaneity, by her love for life and beautiful things. An extraordinarily normal girl, with her joys and her crosses, with her dreams and her disappointments. Paola is a fascinating model of holiness lived in the things of everyday life: at home, in church, at school, with friends. Those places where she passed her days were lit up by her presence and became the places where she grew up in human and spiritual terms, places where she felt loved, and learned to love, where she made courageous decisions putting Jesus at the centre, where she came to understand that life is grace and should be lived as grace. She overflowed with affection for her parents and was happy to play the guitar and sing to them, to be kind to her companions even those who were a bit catty towards her. She said: “If God is the source of every thing only He can make us really happy!”. She died at 15, on 28 June 1978, struck down by infectious hepatitis. A short time had been enough for her to understand what the Psalmist says: “Help us to count our days and we shall gain wisdom of heart.” In her bedroom there was a life of Don Bosco: she used to read a few pages in the evening. Who then is Paola? A girl of today, with a holiness for today, made up of duties towards God and our neighbour, of serene but conscious giving, of love for her parents. She didn’t work miracles nor do anything heroic, but she carried out her duties to the full, for love and with love. ◙
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