We Salesians are used to singing: "God has given you a heart as big / as the sands of the sea. / God has given you His Spirit: / He has set your love free."
Pope Pius XI, who knew him well, said that Don Bosco had a "beautiful peculiarity": he was "a great lover of souls" and saw them "in the Thoughts, in the Heart, in the Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ." Indeed, in the coat-of-arms of our Congregation there is a burning heart.
Pope Francis himself introduces paragraph no. 2 of Dilexit Nos in this way: "The symbol of the heart has often been used to express the love of Jesus Christ. Some have questioned whether this symbol is still meaningful today. Yet living as we do in an age of superficiality, rushing frenetically from one thing to another without really knowing why, and ending up as insatiable consumers and slaves to the mechanisms of a market unconcerned about the deeper meaning of our lives, all of us need to rediscover the importance of the heart."
How strong is this teaching of our Pope to show us a new way of living, in a new time that is given to us, the year to come.
In no. 21, Pope Francis writes: "This profound core, present in every man and woman, is not that of the soul, but of the entire person in his or her unique psychosomatic identity. Everything finds its unity in the heart, which can be the dwelling-place of love in all its spiritual, psychic and even physical dimensions. In a word, if love reigns in our heart, we become, in a complete and luminous way, the persons we are meant to be, for every human being is created above all else for love. In the deepest fiber of our being, we were made to love and to be loved."
And he adds in number 27 of the same Encyclical Letter: "Before the heart of Jesus, living and present, our mind, enlightened by the Spirit, grows in the understanding of his words and our will is moved to put them into practice. This could easily remain on the level of a kind of self-reliant moralism. Hearing and tasting the Lord, and paying him due honor, however, is a matter of the heart. Only the heart is capable of setting our other powers and passions, and our entire person, in a stance of reverence and loving obedience before the Lord."
I will not dwell on this any longer, hoping to have piqued your interest to read this splendid Encyclical Letter which is not only a great gift to live in a new way the time that is given to us, which would already be enough, but it also gives us a profoundly "Salesian" quality: Don Bosco wrote and did much to spread devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as the Divine Love that accompanies our human reality.
A magnificent incentive
In the Biographical Memoirs in volume VIII, p. 119, we find the following written: "A most ardent devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus animated all his activities and rendered his familiar talks fruitful and his sermons and priestly ministry persuasive. Seemingly, the Sacred Heart helped him also by special charisms as he went about his arduous mission."
The testimony of Don Bosco's devotion to the Sacred Heart is "concretely" identified with the Basilica of the same name built by Don Bosco in Rome at the request of the Pope of the time. The material building refers and recalls all of us to Don Bosco's "monumental" devotion to the Sacred Heart. As for Our Lady so also for the Sacred Heart, Don Bosco's devotion is manifested in the churches he built because devotion to the Sacred Heart is ultimately devotion to the Eucharist and Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.
Don Bosco's heart, constantly in love with the Eucharist, is a magnificent personal drive to make this alive and true for us in the New Year. This is a true and deep wish for a happy new year lived to the fullest. As the song continues: "You formed men / with healthy and strong hearts: / you sent them out into the world to proclaim / the Gospel of joy."
I would like to conclude this brief message by wishing everyone a happy new year from the bottom of my heart, with the image that Pope Francis reports in the first pages of the encyclical, referring to the teachings of his grandmother on the meaning of the name of carnival sweets, the "busie"*... because during cooking the dough swells and remains empty... therefore it has an exteriority to which corresponds an emptiness inside; they seem big from the outside but they are not, they are "busie."
May the New Year be full and rich in substance for all of us, concretized in welcoming Our God who comes among us. May His coming bring Peace and Truth – that what is seen from the outside corresponds to what is inside!
Best wishes to all of you!
Don Martoglio
* “Busie,” also known as Cenci di Carnevale, Chiacchiere, Crostoli, and Bugie are Italian fried pastries, often called “elephant ears” in English. The term used in the Vicar’s article refers to the Italian “bugie” which is translated as “lies.”
