MESSAGE OF THE RECTOR MAJOR

FATHER ANGEL FERNANDEZ ARTIME

TO FLY HIGHER

AND GO FARTHER

I believe that one of the greatest gifts we can give Don Bosco for his 200th birthday is the gift of a Salesian Family that’s more missionary, more apostolic, more “outgoing,” as Pope Francis reminds us.

My dear friends in the Salesian Family, the greetings of the Salesian Bulletin this month come to us when we’re already well into this jubilee year, this year of grace that is the bicentennial of Don Bosco’s birth.

World Missionary Month has barely gone by. I’ve been repeating and have already shared with you many times that it would be really beautiful if in this bicentennial year of our beloved father Don Bosco, and in the following years, we were able to count on a strong animation of our youth ministry throughout the Congregation and the Salesian Family, an animation that would be translated into an abundant harvest of missionary fruit, in the form of the missio ad gentes of our whole apostolic family. This missionary character is very much “ours,” an essential part of our charism.

At this moment the missionary commissioning celebration over which I had the grace and the joy of presiding in the Basilica of Mary Help of Christians at Valdocco on September 28 is very alive in my memory and my heart. It was the 145th Missionary Expedition. I thought a lot about the first expedition, over which Don Bosco presided with emotion and determination, when he sent his first sons, captained by John Cagliero, into far-off Argentina, on that not so very long ago November 11, 1875. Statistics tell us that 11,000 Salesians of Don Bosco and 3,500 Daughters of Mary Help of Christians have departed since then from the Basilica.

Rummaging through the baggage of my own experience, I can relate that during my service in the province of South Argentina in these recent years, particularly in dialog with the Salesian confreres of Patagonia, I could examine with greater attention and admiration the heroic pages of our missions and the extraordinary apostolic dimensions of those first sons of Don Bosco, as well as the daring of our sisters, those young Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, in the South American continent. And I could appreciate once again the human quality, the apostolic courage, and the holiness of those first missionaries. In his biography of Cardinal Cagliero, Father Raul Entraigas has written, “It seemed that those men knew how to draw out of Don Bosco’s heart the secret of his holiness.”

In the celebration in the Basilica a month ago, I fixed my gaze and my heart on each of the Salesians, Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, and lay persons who was receiving the cross and being commissioned at Valdocco as a missionary, and I quickly reviewed every member of the Salesian Family throughout the world. That little group wasn’t meant to be a simple group of privileged people or persons selected in some exclusive manner; rather, was meant to be a pinch of yeast in the mass, a stimulus for everyone in the whole world because we’re always, wherever we may be, authentic evangelizers and missionaries of the young. I believe that one of the greatest gifts we can give Don Bosco for his 200th birthday is the gift of a Salesian Family that’s more missionary, more apostolic, more “outgoing,” as Pope Francis reminds us.

To reawaken the imagination for charity

Therefore, in this missionary month of our jubilee year I invite every group of our family to take some time at the various levels of responsibility to carry out a sincere missionary self-evaluation that leads them to ask how they might be more missionary, better missionaries, according to the particulars of the group’s charismatic identity. My invitation is addressed also to every friend of Don Bosco, every youth who feels the inspiration and love of the Father of the young, every couple and every family who consider Don Bosco as their protector and model.

This means asking ourselves what goal Don Bosco is inviting us to aim for, personally, as a family, or as a group in this missionary jubilee year. I’m convinced that if we sincerely ask it of Don Bosco, especially in prayer, numberless initiatives and new Salesian missionary paths will open up little by little, right where it seemed that hope had been stifled. It’s enough to think of the wonderful example of the group of young people who in recent months in Sierra Leone, inspired by Don Bosco and Dominic Savio, have decided to roll up their sleeves and risk their lives to save the lives of so many of their brothers and sisters who are tragically beset by the Ebola virus.

In this we perceive an essential element of the missionary renewal of the Salesian Family: to know how to reawake in our youngsters the “imagination for charity,” as Saint John Paul II liked to say.

There, where we adults who are with Don Bosco can run the risk of “getting bogged down” in complex old structures that don’t always respond completely to the urgent needs of the poorest, most excluded, and most endangered people, the young, animated and inspired by the experience of adults, can find “new heavens and a new earth.”

So we mustn’t be afraid to give youths room to soar, to go farther, and thus with their whole Salesian Family to fly higher and go farther. They can be more missionary and more apostolic, as Don Bosco conceived the Family, dreamt it, and shaped it.

A warm embrace with much affection, invoking on all of you the intercession and blessing of Don Bosco.

Angel Fernandez Artime

Rector Major