To the communities of Fede e Luce, and especially to those I had the joy of meeting on that unforgettable Easter pilgrimage to Lourdes, I offer my affectionate greeting in the Lord.
I carry with me the most grateful memory of those luminous days. For me, they were among the most moving celebrations of the Lord's passion and resurrection.
The stations of the cross and Calvary are essential to Lourdes, even part of its landscape; but the central point, where all converges, is the grotto. From there, the Immaculate Queen of Heaven spoke to her small confidante Bernadette, and continues to speak to countless souls suffering in body and spirit, longing for her gaze and her word as mother: "I will not make you happy in this world, but in the next."
Not that she asks us to despise this world; not that she fails to understand—and often to honor—our human desire to pass our few days here in peace. It was she herself who took care to obtain nothing less than a miracle—the first miracle Jesus performed—so that a wedding feast would not be troubled by a small mishap. But if the Son of God came into this world, he had far more to promise and offer us than the chance to enjoy undisturbed a brief celebration. He came to promise and offer us his own immortal life: what gives meaning and hope to our fleeting and restless sojourn here below.
Hardly "opium" or vain illusion or forced renunciation! It is the "living hope" founded in the risen Christ, as the Apostle Peter says: the hope of an inheritance sure, imperishable and undefiled, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time (from the First Letter of St. Peter).
And at Lourdes, the Immaculate, assumed into heaven, in the fullness of the joy of the Resurrection, how joyfully she announces and gives this blessed hope!
It is so, especially in this Easter light, that human life appears as an indestructible treasure, a gift beyond price. And it is a gift not merely received and possessed but returned and enlarged through a solidarity that makes us debtors to one another and binds us all to the common source of life, which is love and providence.
Salvatore Satta, a Catholic writer now being rediscovered, writes:
"In the world everything is subject to a law, mysterious as you like, but indubitable—the law by which no being was ever or is ever created in vain, the law by which each one, conscious or unconscious, serves a purpose and for this reason enters into the order of the universe."
The human person, the highest expression in the universe, is always wholly interpenetrated by this mysterious yet indubitable law, what we believers call Divine Providence.
To recognize Divine Providence even in certain hours, across certain horizons of human experience, is truly difficult. We need a light, at least some ray of light, coming from above.
This gift, mysterious as well, is given by the source of light and life, of grace—we say it with a word supremely Christian. But it also passes through our hands, and we are called to the honor and responsibility of becoming its carriers.
"Let your light shine before others—the Lord has told us—so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father" (Mt. 5:16), that is, so they may have faith and hope in God's love and providence.
When speaking of Divine Providence, Jesus pointed to the lilies of the field, clothed in beauty as even Solomon in all his glory could not adorn himself (Mt. 6:29).
But when he called our humble good works luminous, he meant that there are flowers of goodness, even more beautiful and more fragrant with God's grace than any perfume.
Remigio Ragonesi - auxiliary bishop in Rome