EAO Good Night Talk (64)

 

Pent-3

 

Holy Land Pilgrimage

       July 1, 2019

 

 Do you make Salesian saints known?

(Brother Cosimo – Sacro Cuore, Rome)

 

Dear Friends and Salesian Family members,

 

    Receive my heartfelt greetings from the Holy Land of Jesus, where he was born as one of us in Bethlehem, where he grew up in an ordinary human family in Nazareth and where he was crucified, died and was risen in Jerusalem. Be sure, that with the whole General Council and the Don Bosco’s Successor on this pilgrimage we also bring your intentions to these holy places.

 

    I’m more and more convinced that listening is the key to any good event in our communities, our families and all groups of the Salesian Family. After one Thursday morning Mass in the Don Bosco rooms at Sacro Cuore with the Rector Major and the Council, I spent a few minutes talking to Br. Cosimo, a passionate senior custodian of the Don Bosco rooms. His custom is to ask every pilgrim or visitor to write a short prayer intention on the back of a Don Bosco holy picture and then offer them on the altar where Don Bosco celebrated his Masses during his last stay in Rome. At the end of his sharing he can’t avoid sighing: “Usually, lay people are more attached to our Saint than Salesians SDB. Do you know why?” And his answer is very simple: “Now the young Salesians don’t speak so much about Don Bosco, simply because they don’t know him enough! Reading Teresio Bosco’s Life of Don Bosco is not enough.” As a former missionary in Ecuador who speaks fluent Italian, Spanish and English, Brother Cosimo is an excellent guide and passionate disciple of Don Bosco. You may spot many holy pictures of Don Bosco at the altar, each with a handwritten intention in some language or other, asking for some grace through the intercession of our Father.

 

    Holy Land, holy People, holy Places… sanctified with the presence of the Son of God in his native Holy Land. Likewise, the holy places of Don Bosco are not only in Italy: Piedmont, Rome, Becchi, Chieri or Valdocco, but they are all around the world.

 

    Where the sons and daughters of Don Bosco try to know him better, love him more, imitate him with their whole heart and invoke him often – they easily make Don Bosco known to the young, to other educators or other people. If their heart is full of Don Bosco, he overflows from their lives.

 

Fr Václav Klement, SDB

EAO Regional Councillor