Message of the Rector Major, Fr Angel Fernandez Artime
The Salesian Family is missionary
Pope Francis has invited the Universal Church to be a Church on the move, that is, a Church that goes towards people, a Church set on mission. For our Salesian Family this project is fully and concretely realised in syntony with the Salesian charism shared by the thirty or more branches of our Family.
My dear Salesian Family, friends of Don Bosco, readers of the Bulletin, I greet you all with affection. I send you these greetings as if they were a family letter because I feel sincerely and deeply the need to tell and to remember what we are living.
The bicentenary celebrations of Don Bosco’s birth continues its joyful unfolding and it reveals itself ever more what it was meant to be, a year of rich grace gifted to us by the Lord.
As I pen down these lines, I carry a fresh and life-giving memory of meeting the 24 Salesians of Don Bosco that I had the pleasure of knowing at Valdocco, just a few days ago, to greet them and wish them a safe journey before they will leave in the coming weeks for the most diverse and distant countries of the world and to the place to which their missionary vocation will take them.
Likewise, I greeted a group of Daughters of Mary Hep of Christians and of Lay collaborators who were readying themselves for the same call.
This will be the 146th missionary expedition since the day Don Bosco sent his first missionaries. The joy and enthusiasm of those young Salesians, of our sisters, and of our collaborating brothers, their deep desire to go to those who are waiting for them and share with them their life experience, to offer them the service of their own life, to walk along with the young and the poor – all this touches me deeply and gives me great joy.
The whole of Valdocco was alive with enthusiasm and celebration.
All this leads me to reflect of a fundamental dimension of our Salesian Family. In fidelity to our charism we are a religious family with a missionary vocation. From the very beginning, Don Bosco started working toward sending his Salesians and the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians to the missions. At the time of his death in 1888, the Salesian sent to America numbered 154 (20 per cent of the whole Salesian Congregation at the time), and Don Bosco himself would knock at the door of many lay people seeking their help to maintains and sustain his missionary work. The whole of Valdocco was alive with joy and enthusiasm, and every time “fresh news” would arrive from America, the place would lit up with emotion and desire to go and accompany those first missionaries.
Today the language, the anthropological, cultural, and theological vision are no longer those of Don Bosco’s times, but the missionary character of our family must be the same.
Pope Francis has invited the Universal Church to be a Church on the move, that is, a Church that goes towards people, a Church set on mission. For our Salesian Family this project is fully and concretely realised in syntony with the Salesian charism shared by the thirty or more branches of our Family.
My wonderful dream.
As in Don Bosco’s times, also in our Salesian Family, all the branches with their particular charismatic specificity within ‘the common home’, are called to be present and active in the four corners of the world.
The number of requests that we receive far outnumber our possibility of being present wherever they call us. It is the same as it was at the time of Don Bosco. However we have a great opportunity. We can commit ourselves to be like him: to give rise to that missionary passion that inflamed and filled with enthusiasm so many young hearts.
Experts tell us that ours is no longer an age of “great narratives”. What they really mean to say is that the post-modern era has obliterated from our world the great utopias and the great ideals. However, I for one, believe that those very sociological hypothesis head for failure to the extent that there are no longer people, individuals, institutions or communities that believe that things can be different. And we Salesians do believe that things can be different.
Within the context of what I am saying, the fundamental difference for the Salesian Family lies in a dream. A magnificent and wonder-filled dream: That the story and the fruit of this Bicentenary year be a missionary passion that keeps on growing stronger in the next few years. To be religious and lay people committed together to realise again that intense and driving missionary passion that Don Bosco lived.
May Don Bosco, in the Bicentenary of his birth, continue to intercede for us all with the Lord!
