Dear Cardinal Martini, how much has been written and said about you these past days! Your life has been examined episode by episode, your choices recalled one by one, your reflections published across newspapers and magazines. Now that the media attention around you has quieted a bit, we write to you from this small magazine with affection and simplicity to offer our thanks as well.
Thank you for the way you welcomed us and listened when, over the course of several years, we came to share with you the uncertainties and struggles of Fede e Luce. Each time, you treated us as your preferred conversation partners while guiding us to recognize the signs of Gospel teaching in our young people and in our life with them.
Thank you, too, for all those who never met you in person but who felt respected, heard, and understood by you as a man of the Church. I mean those men and women living in desperate circumstances who faced extreme and troubling choices, often condemned harshly by religious and civil authorities. Your calm, illuminated, profoundly Gospel-centered reflection was always like an outstretched hand—a watchful and knowing gaze—for each of them, and especially for those among them who felt themselves and wanted to be Christians.
Thank you for witnessing in word and deed that those who believe in Christ and his Church need not abandon their conscience or refrain from acting on it, even when it means facing misunderstanding and accepting sacrifice.
Thank you for giving attention, friendship, and a listening ear to so many lay people and non-believers, for engaging with them without fear and showing us that the truths of our faith need not shrink from dialogue with others. Instead of keeping the light of the Gospel locked within our churches, we must raise it high so that all can encounter it, letting it illuminate every ordinary act.
Thank you for being a man of God in these desperate days of ours, a prophet in this corrupted world. Thank you because we know the seed you planted cannot die.