Rector's letters

A small group of young men knock on the Seminary door this summer. This number, without being negligible in times of a shortage of vocations, is however smaller when compared to the five last years. Nonetheless, we will have - as we have already done for three consecutive years! - to ask the new candidates to share their rooms. Next school year we will have 91 seminarians, apart from our brothers, three professed, two novices and two postulants. Lastly, our teaching staff will be composed of seven priests. At the beginning of the school year, 105 men will be living at the Seminary - something that will demand some ingenuity on our part, as our building is designed to receive comfortably only 75!

Lepanto 1571, Vienna 1683... These are names and dates that resound like clarion calls of victory. But these triumphs too often remain sunken in oblivion, as we exhume them only twice a year when the Church, in the Divine Liturgy, invites us to celebrate these victories due to the intervention of Our Lady and the prayer of the Rosary.  

Man cannot be satisfied by vegetating in a dull mediocrity; a law inscribed in the depths of his soul pushes him to outdo himself. A healthy dissatisfaction afflicts him and gives him no rest until he rises to the conquest of a goal that both exceeds and ennobles him.

The flower of a society is its youth, the fragile promise of fruit for tomorrow. Do we still dare to hope for tomorrow's fruit? We do – by the virtue of hope that demands that we laugh daringly at pessimistic omens and defy the sarcastic remarks of cowards. We cannot deny that the cancer of liberalism has increased the weakness of our young. But if the misfortunes of the present times hide the deep reality of things, they do not remove that reality and we must rest upon it to heal a misled youth: the key to the resurrection of our youth is education.

A man who does not love is not a man, but a selfish, vile being, led by his passions and dazzled by his own excellence. Therefore, it is very important to know what love is. The task is not simple. It is easy to err when talking about love, as it is a word with multiple and extremely different meanings. Moreover, the fact that the modern world is based upon a deviant form of love does not help us to understand the greatness and value of this noble reality.

Common sense is no more, destroyed by the monstrous god of modern technology. The famous saying of Descartes, asserting that "common sense is the most shared thing in this world," makes us smile today! What is, indeed, the use of this saying when man learns how to use a computer even before learning the rudiments of grammar and arithmetic? The computer screen is, for the child, not only a physical reality: it cuts him off, often permanently, from the indispensable tools of knowledge which will allow him to judge and understand the reality that surrounds him as an adult.

The Church invites us to enter into the spirit of Lent with faith and generosity, to be effectively what we are already essentially since our baptism - that is, "other Christs" or, according to the expression of St. Thomas Aquinas, "Christs in miniature." It is, therefore, necessary for us to enter into the soul of Christ to embrace all that He desires and is drawn to.

Who doesn't know those distressing moments when we advance painfully on the steep road of life, strongly feeling the burden of our sins? Bent under the weight of our faults, our souls are seized by a black despair, and it seems that we are caught in a terrible vice which, unrelentingly, tightens upon us.

We are temples of the Holy Ghost, and the Trinity lives in our souls as in its sanctuary. Our Christian vocation is noble, calling us to adore God in spirit and truth, to aim well above transitory things, and to refuse to be satisfied by the momentary pleasures that the world promises to those who submit to its yoke.

After His Resurrection, Our Lord sent His Apostles on their mission: "Go, teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." There is no ambiguity in these words: religion cannot be restricted to the purely private domain.