Domenico Agasso and AA. VV.
On April 27 the Founder of the Pauline Family will be beatified
FR. ALBERIONE: THE APOSTLE OF THE MEDIA

He utilized all the modern means for spreading better and ever more the Gospel: newspapers, books, radio, television. He gave to the world men and women who are able "postmen of God."

Since a young man, he used to introduce himself the Piedmontese way, with his family name first then with his given name: Alberione Giacomo. As time went, he was gradually known as Don Alberione, Signor Teologo, Primo Maestro. And soon, he shall be Blessed Alberione to the universal Church, the "apostle of communication," he who has put under the service of the gospel all the media, from books to magazines, and then to movies and radio, from television to the modern Internet network.
  
Perhaps, he is not much known in person while everyone knows his work throughout the world: the newspapers, the publishing offices, the religious families he founded, and everything else that found life through him. His work is better known than the worker. And this fits very well his style as a principal actor standing on the sides. When in the world Pauline initiatives were being inaugurated and he had to take part in them, he used to push to the places of honor ministers, prelates and every other authority; then he would be out of sight, gone. It was out of humility, certainly. But it also was because there was no ceremony that could stop him from or shorten his daily prayer time of four hours.
  
One could hear others call him "the Father of newspapers" (founder of Famiglia Cristiana) or "… of books". Or else as the one who let the nuns take the vows along with the driver’s license (in many places the first religious women seen to drive cars were his, the Daughters of St. Paul). These are partial definitions but basically right to describe him as the man of new things. Or things done in a new manner, with a liveliness quite unknown to the militant Church of his time.
   
To his own people, he used to say, "The Bible is the letter God has written to people". In the Catholic world, however, only quite a few had received it through the centuries, till our times. Till his time, we might dare say, although during his time meritorious associations and sodalities were working for the spread of the Word of God. It was he, however, who brought about the absolute novelty: his religious men and women were not mere active members, but persons with vows to render this service, as apostles, as auxiliaries in the apostolate. Thus, Giacomo Alberione turned himself into the mail carrier of "God’s letter" in all languages, printed, turned to movies, spread through radio, entrusted to all the "fastest and most effective" media of the times. These were his words, his rule: to neglect updating is a mistake for all, but for the men and women of Giacomo Alberione, it is sin.
   
His was a hard life, in times and from places that did not give anything for free. A son of a landless family of tenant farmers, he was born in 1884 in San Lorenzo di Fossano in the province of Cuneo in North Italy. He studied in the village of Cherasco, not far away from his birthplace, then a seminarian in Bra, then in Alba, in the same Piedmont region and then, in the city of Genoa, he graduated in Theology. His Bishop, Giuseppe Francesco Re, gradually entrusted to him the guidance of the seminarians and the directorship of the diocesan weekly Gazzetta d’Alba. He made the most of the young man. But this kept within himself an otherwise different project, still "in a sealed envelope."
   
On the night of 1 January 1901, while he participated in the rites of the closing of the Jubilee Year 1900 at the Cathedral of Alba, he felt mysteriously called to "serve the Church, and the men of the new century and to work with others": it was a sort of an intense, but broad, call, without any indication as to paths and programs. He felt obliged to "do something for the Lord" and ideas would become clearer and clearer to him in the turn of so many years, with drafted then changed plans, until the decisive moment to get to work: on 20 August 1914 he founded in Alba the Society of St. Paul with but two boys (they would become six at the end of the year). In 1915, he founded the Daughters of St. Paul. With the first women coming in, the group would first be called "workshop for women," just as the group of boys was called "printing school." And this was in order not to make, on one hand, the enemies of priests suspicious and, on the other, the other priests themselves; the former threatened to burn the printing press, the others were stirring up fire in parishes and at the Bishop’s house.

The bishop silently helped Fr. Alberione. However, it was the learned and enlightened Canon Francesco Chiesa, his friend, counselor, guarantor and defender who supported him most. By then, Alberione could no longer stop. He was lucky to find in those two first groups an elite group of "serenely courageous" persons. They were children of a bitter history, of families that struggled against drought and hailstorms, against life-threatening sicknesses. And he instinctively guessed (he is one of them) the right teaching system for turning them to apostles: always ask for more.
   
Among those who would be in Rome for the beatification, there still would be those who had him as Primo Maestro. Those who felt being asked to do the impossible, because he used to ask it from everyone else, and it is surprising to find out how they responded and what resources they developed, and what creativity they revealed, all under obedience.
   
Giacomo Alberione used to send them across the oceans without any prior support of bishops (and sometimes with discouraging reception from their part). And they, men and women, just went. Coming from small, limited area of the province of Cuneo, they were making every continent and island, every metropolis, their home. There were those who left with tickets paid by him, but with the obligation to pay back as soon as possible because another Pauline man or woman was just about to leave. They were ready to "move to Macedonia" at the first light of any other dawn if the signal came. The story of Giacomo Alberione ought – must – branch out into the stories of every individual member, in the successes and in the failures of so many initiatives, in the stories of many of those who have become protagonists also of religious, cultural, social life of the countries that offered them hospitality.
   
None of them ever had dreams of such dimensions before getting to know him, the way in a famous speech, Paul VI described him: "Here he is: humble, silent, untiring, ever vigilant, always recollected in his thoughts that run from prayer to work…, always intent to scrutinize the ‘signs of the times,’ that is, the most ingenious form of reaching souls…" On the level of history, as Pope Montini also affirmed it, Giacomo Alberione "has given to the Church new instruments to express herself, new means to give vigor and broadness to her apostolate…" And on the level of persons, of names and of faces, he pushed men and women to reach the highest forms of achievement. To find out that they were protagonists themselves.

Domenico Agasso
   

I greet, with esteem and gratitude, the faithful readers of Famiglia Cristiana, and I extend to them my best wishes for the New Year. In this dawn of the year 2003, I desire above all to share with them the joy that comes from an event that means so much to us: the just announced beatification of Fr. Giacomo Alberione, founder of our magazine. He was 47 years old when he began publishing Famiglia Cristiana. He lived for another 40 years and launched institutions and apostolic initiatives that are so widely spread that he deserved to be called by Pope Paul VI, "a marvel of our century."
   
What he might represent for the Church and for Catholic culture is not easy to briefly summarize. I would like to mention only what he was, instead of what he did. And I believe his image could be drawn with but few lines.
   
Above all, Fr. Alberione was a man of God. Those who came to know him have remained impressed by his attitudes of faith during moments of trials and of great choices.
   
The depth of his interior life was extraordinary, as well as his preoccupation to know and set into action the will of God. Fr. Alberione was an apostle impassioned for the salvation of brothers and sisters. He shared the anxiety of the Apostle Paul face to face with the great problem: "This human family, which like a river flows into eternity, towards where, how does it flow, towards what goals does it tend: will it be saved, will it be lost forever?" In behalf of this humanity, he set himself, with all his energies, to bring the light of Christ.
   
Finally, he was a prophet. His intuition indicated to him the growing importance of the media of mass communication in a time when they were looked upon with distrust. Fr. Alberione understood that the media would give the Church a new voice, and he put them at the service of evangelization.
   
The solemn declaration of his sanctity makes Fr. Alberione a point of reference for one’s personal and professional life. He had promised that in Heaven he would busy himself with interceding before God for all those who would use the "new means for doing good." We are certain that he would do it joyfully for all of us.

Fr. Pietro Campus
Superior General of the Society of St. Paul.
   

In January, the third and last stage of the survey by the Catholic site www.santiebeati.it looking for the Saint-Protector of the Network, of Internet users and of computer programmers. Nominated for voting by internet surfers were the first three in classification in each of the two preceding stages. In the first, held last June and October, the preferences were for St. Alphonsus Maria de’ Liguori, St. John Bosco and St. Gabriel, the Archangel, while in the second round, Giacomo Alberione, founder of the Pauline Family and future blessed, has been voted upon by 43 per cent of about 10,000 voters, followed by Claire of Assisi (24 per cent) and Maximillian Kolbe (12). With the strict rule of "one computer, one vote," that blocks communities to have a broader advantage by representation, the voting begins from zero and will end on Easter. Especially interesting, in the website www.santiebeati.it are the comments and the motivations given by the voters of different languages. In order to get to know better the spirituality of Fr. Alberione, we advice as well the site www.sanpaolo.org, the official site of the Society of
St. Paul.

Mauro Broggi
   

WHAT THEY SAY OF HIM

I think Fr. Giacomo Alberione has anticipated, with a technologically prophetic vision, the idea that it is not quite possible to evangelize without taking into consideration the media of mass communication. I also believe that he has, in many senses, perfected and anticipated two personalities. The first is the blessed Cottolengo, by way of the same extraordinary ability to organize and achieve, for that idea that they had in common regarding financial resources that must bear fruit only for God’s sake.
   
Fr. Alberione, however, has in a certain manner, also anticipated the pontificate of Pope Wojtyla. That charism that has been utilized and continues being so is the same charism through which Pope John Paul II fascinates the crowds of the world.

Gaspare Barbiellini Amidei
   

Fifty years ago, Italy was preparing itself for a second and more decisive modernization that had, as protagonists not just the factories, but also the newspapers, movies, radio. The Italians discovered the role of mass media and, perplexed, they were asking themselves about the new forms of culture that they were bringing in.
  
Fr. Alberione’s intuition was to challenge this new culture in its own grounds, by identifying forms of communication that would allow supplying families with information and orientations attentive to the present, but also bound to a tradition on which the sensibility of Christians were grafted. Today that the media revelation is completed and, by now it seems new horizons and new demands are emerging, that intuition reveals all its profitability.
  
Also today, it all is a matter of understanding the times wherein we live, its ways of communicating, its worries, in order to continue with a discourse that has much more profound roots. To speak the language of the times, in order to continue pronouncing the Word.

Francesco Casetti
  

It seems to me that the genius of Fr. Alberione has been to gather one of the principal problems of evangelization, which is communication; and to feel it strongly in the moment wherein the Italian society and its culture were changing: from the tiny illiterate and rural Italy to a new schooled (at least a little) and industrialized Italy. In this country which was radically changing, the press assumed an ever great importance, influencing (or in certain areas even substituting) the culture that came from the traditions of homes and churches. The newspaper and the book, also with due credit to the socialist movement, appeared in the hands of great masses till that time "reared" but orally.
   
Much later, Fascism would impose its own dominion over all the media: press, book publication, radio, movies, theater… The intuition of Fr. Alberione (to inject "the good press" in a world in full effervescence and often inspired by an ideological facetiousness explicitly and implicitly anti-Christian) transformed itself into the building of spaces of freedom and of cultural pluralism and of information. Because of this, it remains most valid also today, while we witness a new attempt of conquering the monopoly of the mass media.

Ettore Masina
   

With the acceleration of the time of canonical processes, it seems so many those thirty years that passed from the death of Fr. Alberione to his beatification. One comes to think, however, that this process with the pace of farmers that fits well with the style of this Piedmontese of controlled and guaranteed origins. A man of broad prospects, but brought to reach those oversized goals calmly, prudently, thoughtfully. And then, there is the desire not to appear so obvious, to go after results than for "decorations." Fr. Alberione somehow a personally so great as much as he is "hidden." We are most happy regarding what the Pope will soon proclaim. Perhaps, Alberione is still reluctant; although later, with his usual impression of wanting to cut things short, shall benevolently participate in our own celebration.

Vittorio Messori
   

Fr. Giacomo Alberione is one of those saints whose charisma and whose works perceive and interpret a turning point of man, in need of witnessing and prophecy.
   
In fact, he shall be the saint of the communication of values that have to be kept through time when the breakthrough of new knowledge and action transforms simply information into a system of new relationships capable of modifying existential, psychological, civil and ethical structures of universal dimensions. In particular, owed to him is the gift of having captured and faced a phenomenon wherein man would have been immersed in a new dimension, at the same time involving, in an absolutely unknown perspective, between the intellect and morals.
   
I do not have a special predilection for actions raising persons to sanctity, but when these represent a victory of man over his compromises and drifting, then, yes, I do respect the mysterious and real grace that animates these extraordinary diviners and defenders of human dignity.

Sergio Zavoli