Dearest Jean, to have this chance to write you an open letter is a precious gift. It pulls me back more than twenty-five years, to when I first met you as a young seminarian on the path toward priesthood, at a gathering called "Katimavik" on Lake Como, in Lierna.
It was the first time I heard Scripture explained that way—a way that could speak to life itself, that reached the heart. My theology and Bible studies at that time were something altogether different, but I believe that encounter marked my formation for priesthood and my first years as a priest in a way I can only describe as profound. Without quite knowing it, you accompanied me and taught me, really, how to be a priest.
Your way of looking at young people—that fundamental task you always called "revealing to others their own beauty"—illuminated something in me. Because I think that is still, all these years later, the very heart of the Gospel. It was how Jesus looked at everyone, especially at the small, the poor, the forgotten. But I discovered it was also how you looked at me, and that taught me to make peace with my own fragility and limits. A priest is not always helped to see his own fragility, and that is why he cannot accept it—or accept it in others.
For about ten years, I guided the formation of young priests in the Diocese of Milan, and I found myself constantly drawing from your books and your retreats, taking precious insights and reflections to shape the spiritual and human growth of seminarians. I was borrowing from you without always knowing it.
Today, even now after so many years, if I am still an assistant with Fede e Luce; if I find myself speaking with parents of children facing difficulties in the parish where I serve; if I can speak of Jesus and the Gospel in a certain way—I owe it to you. To your witness. To the way you explained Scripture, with all those stories and examples you always shared. I don't think I've ever said it, but I want to thank you now. And I thank God for that providential meeting with you—you and Cardinal Martini, who always held you in such high regard—because you are, for me, for my faith and for my ministry, the two foundational witnesses to faith itself and to the face of God.