“God’s
hand upon me, from 1900 to 1960” – Fr. James Alberione afffirms.
“God’s will has been accomplished, notwithstanding the misery of him
who had to be its instrument”.
God’s
hand constantly upon us: heirs of that promise of resurrection
still luminous; apostles of Christ the Master; communicators of
universal salvation that continues to radiate in history through
every instrument that human intelligence and progress put at our
disposition.
God’s
hand on all of history that in the future will have to be built
through the courageous yes of those to whom the Lord will
give the same “apostolic” charism entrusted to Fr. Alberione and
that in Saint Paul finds its identical source.
Upon us, a
gentle and decisive hand that writes in each one, in daily and
personal amens pronounced with only the force of love, an
extraordinary history of grace and mercy. Of this history Fr.
Alberione becomes a prophet and apostle for today, a docile
instrument - unsuited in his own words – of a mission, the Pauline
one, that in itself is universal, audacious, voluntarily “kenotic”
and originally apostolic.
To go, employing
every possible means of announcement that communication opens.
To teach, in the
deeply evangelical sense of leading peoples and cultures to the
Master as disciples who find in Him the sense of every journey.
To baptize, that
is, opening every heart to personal encounter with the Father.
These are the verbs
that characterize the mission of every Pauline, in the same way that
they characterize the journey of the Twelve from Galilee to the
ends of the world.
We continue to look at
Fr. Alberione to perceive in the power of his words – aflame only
for one who knows how to hear them until the end and overcoming the
roadblocks of a dry style or those of a memory perhaps still too
much tied to the past or made up of too sloganized inflated phrases
–, the actuality of a prophecy that asks each of us his children a
courageous renewal.
The
prophecy of Fr. Alberione has been his manner of living
evangelization: free and
universal announcement of Christ, Word and Eucharist, made
flesh, paper, word, music, film…
communication: unstoppable
pulpit from which to diffuse Light and Grace; womb and culture
in which to inculturate the Gospel;
consecration: life grafted in
Christ, continually watered by Him; life to which are connected
inseparably millions of other lives;
PRAYER:
intimate and irradiating union, enlightened by science and by
the wisdom of the Scriptures in which the Spirit, through a
continuous process, forms Christ;
TIME:
a very precious and not to be missed resource to study new ways
for purposes of Good.
UNITY:
not debatable, but essential and constitutive of a Family in
which ten specific styles of announcement compose one great
symphony, in response to one charism: to live and to communicate
to the world Jesus Christ Way, Truth and Life.
Blessed
James Alberione is a son of his time and Father of all who in
themselves are called to live fully and decidedly their own time.
Far from being restrained by memories, Fr. Alberione forcefully
consults our consciences: the personal ones and those that are
communitarian; the congregational and the Family.
His strong
and prophetic affirmation of the pastorality of a predication
accomplished by the modern pulpit of cinema, radio, television,
satellites, printed paper, internet is prophecy that,
intrinsically apostolic, cannot but want to communicate itself in
its born power to all those who still have the courage to ask it.
“Aspire
after the gifts of the Spirit, writes Paul to the Corinthians, but
above all after prophecy”. A prophecy that knows that it is in the
deep awareness of a human person, poor and fragile, a precious
instrument in the hands of God to construct, exhort, and give light
to all those who the Father wants to meet today.
