On 15 August each year, God’s holy Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s Assumption.
Let us ask ourselves: what does this solemnity mean? Why do I invite us to reflect on it? Don’t we already know everything?
Here, the danger is precisely this: to presume to know everything, I too have experienced this presumption, this error. Fortunately, in the 1970s, when at the Alberoni College in Piacenza, run by our confreres, I followed the courses of the first cycle of theology, there was Father Giuseppe Toscani C. M. as a teacher of anthropology; Christology and Trinitarianism. His courses opened my mind to the new theology that came out of the Constitutions of the Second Vatican Council and made me understand the gratuitous love of the Father towards all people: it was a great liberation. To better understand what I have written, I warmly invite you to read Father Toscani’s trilogy on Vincentian spirituality: Mysticism of the Poor; Love Contemplation and Theology; and Woman in Charity. Sister Assunta Corona, the author of Woman in Charity, will forgive me, but I know she will be pleased, because in this text she too has drawn heavily from Fr Toscani, being a faithful disciple of his. I consider the Trilogy to be the best work on Vincentian spirituality to date.
In this context Fr Toscani taught us that in glory is the same Mary who lived in Nazareth and followed Jesus, despite the difficulties this entailed.
She is the one who was born in Nazareth, the famous town of which the Pharisees claimed: nothing good ever came out of Nazareth! This is the logic of it has always been done this way , which still hides the talent, leads to the closure of the Mission Houses and those of the Daughters of Charity, and kills the Provinces!
Mary of Nazareth, the last, the little esteemed; a woman who lived in a mundane everyday life, of which no one speaks. In fact, the gospels of Matthew and Luke speak very little about Mary and the Family of Nazareth, why? Because she lived like all the other families of her country, experiencing the joys and sorrows. In such a family the Son of God freely chose to be born and to live for thirty years!!!
The Virgin Mary is the model of the Christian who hears the word of the Father, meditates on it in his heart and puts it into practice. Jesus says this of Mary in the gospel. She is in glory because she lived this way!
And we, priests of the Mission and Daughters of Charity, do we daily try to take example from the Assumption?
Do we try to be sincere people, or do we adapt ourselves in the community or even in the diocesan Church to the majority opinion? Let us remember that it was the majority, during the trial of Jesus, before Pilate who shouted: crucify him!
Do we know, following the example of Our Lady of the Assumption, how to value the everyday: living the silence of small things; listening with love and attention to a brother or sister who is experiencing a moment of difficulty? Like the Assumption, do we know that all the good that is accomplished in silence is the work of the Holy Spirit, or do we tend to let those who want to know and those who do not want to know know know all that we accomplish and our promotions, attributing to us the good done, so as to occupy the place of the Holy Spirit and, at the wedding banquet, seek the first places and then finish last?
To live well with humility, let us follow the Nazareth life of the Assumption and be happy, even though in this life, to follow Christ, one may run the danger of being discarded stones as he was. Or prophets ill-accepted in their own homeland. But, we are sure that the Lord is close to us and will offer us a hundred for one as He was for the Assumption.
P. Giorgio Bontempi C.M.
