This morning, His Eminence, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints presided over the celebration of a Mass inside the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, during which Clelia Berloni, foundress of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was Beatified.
Dear brothers and sisters,
The word of God that has been proclaimed helps us to appreciate the essential components of the human and Christian experience of Blessed Clelia Merloni, highlighting the essential elements of her spiritual face. Hers is the face of a woman whose existence has been impressively marked by sufferings and tribulations: the cross has been the seal of all her life! But her gaze, especially at the time of trial, was always turned to God.
In the second reading, the apostle Paul addresses the Christians of Corinth pointing to charity as the most sublime way to attain the greatest charisms (cf 1 Cor 12:31), and he affirms: Charity is magnanimous, benevolent, it is not envious, ... it does not get angry, it does not take into account the evil it has received ... It excuses all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things (1 Cor 13:4-6). For his part, the evangelist Luke puts these words on the lips of Jesus: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you (Lk 6:27).
These exhortations seem to find a new relevance in the life of Mother Clelia, who radically made them her own, especially when she was hit by slanders that determined her dismissal from the government and then even her removal from the Institute she founded. It was the period of her ordeal. A hard and exhausting personal ordeal, made of loneliness and isolation, of weakening health and hardship, at the limit of despair. It was the moment of the meeting with her Spouse, the crucified Jesus. How can we fail to see her unified with the One who suffered abandonment, contempt, ignominy, failure, stripping of all human dignity on the cross? Blessed Clelia, following the example of Mary who remained firm and unshakeable at the foot of the Cross, did not doubt her faith in God, in the One who never abandons her children in every season of existence, especially in the painful hours, many times difficult to understand and hard to accept.
She shared the wounds of the Heart of Jesus, responding to hostility and contempt with charity. She placed every opposition at the foot of the Tabernacle: there she found her point of support. Before the Heart of Jesus she recognized her desire for reconciliation with everyone, finding the strength to forgive those who persecuted her. Despite having a strong character, she showed extraordinary tenderness in forgetting the injuries that she suffered, thus bearing witness to the overwhelming power of charity, which does not get angry, does not take into account the evil that has been received, excuses all and bears all. She never spoke to the detriment of anyone, even those who, especially within her Congregation, were hostile to her; she embraced sufferings, offering them to the Lord and seeing in them the various facets of God's love for her.
Thus, with her life given in total oblation, she was the founder of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, witnessing the charism of the Institute in her flesh - a current and fascinating charism: to offer oneself totally and joyfully to the Heart of Jesus in order to be a living and credible sign of God's love for humanity.
The centre of her faith always remained focused on Christ, encountered above all in the Eucharistic mystery, in long hours spent in the chapel, even at night and while she was sick. An eyewitness says: After serious events, she took refuge in the chapel and many elderly nuns who saw her reported that they had to shake her with their hands in order to make her answer because she sank into the contemplation of God and in Him, she often stopped as in deep ecstasy (Information, 67).
This Eucharistic centrality flowed in her attention to the decoration of the altar, the liturgical functions, the churches, the solemnity of feast days, and especially to priests, ministers of the altar, for whom she prayed especially, especially for those in crisis.
She was a religious who always looked only to God; her motto was God alone. God above all and above all things. It was worthwhile choosing Him as her only Ideal of life and trusting only in Him, above all in the light of the experience - experienced in her own flesh - of the collapse of so many human certainties. She could rightly recommend to her sisters: Impress in your heart that God alone is your only good and your only refuge.
Entirely and only of God, she savoured His continuous presence, living plunged into the supernatural, to the point of being transformed into a flame of love.
In fact, in Blessed Clelia, the life of contemplative prayer was intense and constant. The testimonies agree in asserting that she prayed continuously, keeping her gaze fixed on God, scrutinizing His Word and interweaving her prayer with all her actions: her life had become prayer. She was so attached to prayer that the inner union with God led her to skip meals. When asked: 'Mother, how do you live without eating?', she replied that her meal was prayer (Information, 35).
But here is another line of the spiritual face of Blessed Clelia Merloni: precisely because she was a woman entirely of God, she was a woman entirely of brothers and sisters, especially the little ones, the poor, the simple, the defenceless. Her love for God was necessarily reflected but incarnated in love for man, the living and palpitating image of God. His heart was open to all people, especially to the sick and the suffering; she knew how to respond to the needs of others, even to the point of often depriving herself of what was necessary; she always showed a special tenderness, an innate compassion for all sorts of suffering, for subjection to which she submitted to any discomfort and effort, extinguishing that thirst for charity and zeal that burned in her. In works of charity she did not know limits and she fully identified himself with the problems of others; those who lived alongside her assert: If she saw a needy man and could not help him, she felt that she was faint. In the face of charity she understood nothing (Information, 53).
Dear brothers and sisters, the saints and the blesseds are for us living and lived messages of God. This is why the Church proposes them to us as examples to be venerated and imitated. Let us therefore open ourselves to the message that Blessed Clelia Merloni transmits to us in a very clear way through her life and her works. Moral suffering made her a strong and courageous woman who knew how to witness the love of Jesus in every circumstance. Joining the pierced Heart of Jesus and wanting to live the passion of Christ implies an awareness that the embrace of the Cross is an essential condition for making life flow around us and not allowing death to prevail over us, hatred vs love, division vs communion. The Blessed never surrendered in the face of outrages and slanders of all kinds. She reacted by expanding love everywhere especially to the weak, the most disadvantaged and working for the assistance and religious education of younger generations. Not only that, but she was able to share her ardent desire for love of God with her brothers and sisters and with other companions with whom she began an original experience of religious life dedicated to the Sacred Heart, where prayer and suffering were to emerge as essential elements of their charism. These were dimensions that never failed in the existence of the Blessed and with which she grew and governed the institute, leaving as her inheritance to the Church a very current interpretation of the sense of authority as authoritative in gift and in love.
Dear Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, today we rejoice with you to see Mother Clelia as a member of the Blesseds. We ask you to keep her charism alive and above all her oblative spirituality, whose fulcrum is the love that bears and forgives everything. The mission, for which your religious family was founded, is still current. The motto of your Institute, Caritas Christi urget nos - the Love of Christ urges us -, commits you to make these words of Saint Paul your own, radiating love without rest and without limits.
Let us ask the Lord to make the path of holiness, which Mother Clelia Merloni has shown us with her life sustained by love of the Cross, become every day the luminous and sure path of our journey of love for God and for our brothers and sisters.
Let us repeat together: Blessed Clelia Merloni, pray for us!
Homily of His Eminence, Cardinal Angelo Becciu
for the Beatification Mass of
Clelia Berloni
Dear brothers and sisters,
The word of God that has been proclaimed helps us to appreciate the essential components of the human and Christian experience of Blessed Clelia Merloni, highlighting the essential elements of her spiritual face. Hers is the face of a woman whose existence has been impressively marked by sufferings and tribulations: the cross has been the seal of all her life! But her gaze, especially at the time of trial, was always turned to God.
In the second reading, the apostle Paul addresses the Christians of Corinth pointing to charity as the most sublime way to attain the greatest charisms (cf 1 Cor 12:31), and he affirms: Charity is magnanimous, benevolent, it is not envious, ... it does not get angry, it does not take into account the evil it has received ... It excuses all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things (1 Cor 13:4-6). For his part, the evangelist Luke puts these words on the lips of Jesus: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you (Lk 6:27).
These exhortations seem to find a new relevance in the life of Mother Clelia, who radically made them her own, especially when she was hit by slanders that determined her dismissal from the government and then even her removal from the Institute she founded. It was the period of her ordeal. A hard and exhausting personal ordeal, made of loneliness and isolation, of weakening health and hardship, at the limit of despair. It was the moment of the meeting with her Spouse, the crucified Jesus. How can we fail to see her unified with the One who suffered abandonment, contempt, ignominy, failure, stripping of all human dignity on the cross? Blessed Clelia, following the example of Mary who remained firm and unshakeable at the foot of the Cross, did not doubt her faith in God, in the One who never abandons her children in every season of existence, especially in the painful hours, many times difficult to understand and hard to accept.
She shared the wounds of the Heart of Jesus, responding to hostility and contempt with charity. She placed every opposition at the foot of the Tabernacle: there she found her point of support. Before the Heart of Jesus she recognized her desire for reconciliation with everyone, finding the strength to forgive those who persecuted her. Despite having a strong character, she showed extraordinary tenderness in forgetting the injuries that she suffered, thus bearing witness to the overwhelming power of charity, which does not get angry, does not take into account the evil that has been received, excuses all and bears all. She never spoke to the detriment of anyone, even those who, especially within her Congregation, were hostile to her; she embraced sufferings, offering them to the Lord and seeing in them the various facets of God's love for her.
Thus, with her life given in total oblation, she was the founder of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, witnessing the charism of the Institute in her flesh - a current and fascinating charism: to offer oneself totally and joyfully to the Heart of Jesus in order to be a living and credible sign of God's love for humanity.
The centre of her faith always remained focused on Christ, encountered above all in the Eucharistic mystery, in long hours spent in the chapel, even at night and while she was sick. An eyewitness says: After serious events, she took refuge in the chapel and many elderly nuns who saw her reported that they had to shake her with their hands in order to make her answer because she sank into the contemplation of God and in Him, she often stopped as in deep ecstasy (Information, 67).
This Eucharistic centrality flowed in her attention to the decoration of the altar, the liturgical functions, the churches, the solemnity of feast days, and especially to priests, ministers of the altar, for whom she prayed especially, especially for those in crisis.
She was a religious who always looked only to God; her motto was God alone. God above all and above all things. It was worthwhile choosing Him as her only Ideal of life and trusting only in Him, above all in the light of the experience - experienced in her own flesh - of the collapse of so many human certainties. She could rightly recommend to her sisters: Impress in your heart that God alone is your only good and your only refuge.
Entirely and only of God, she savoured His continuous presence, living plunged into the supernatural, to the point of being transformed into a flame of love.
In fact, in Blessed Clelia, the life of contemplative prayer was intense and constant. The testimonies agree in asserting that she prayed continuously, keeping her gaze fixed on God, scrutinizing His Word and interweaving her prayer with all her actions: her life had become prayer. She was so attached to prayer that the inner union with God led her to skip meals. When asked: 'Mother, how do you live without eating?', she replied that her meal was prayer (Information, 35).
But here is another line of the spiritual face of Blessed Clelia Merloni: precisely because she was a woman entirely of God, she was a woman entirely of brothers and sisters, especially the little ones, the poor, the simple, the defenceless. Her love for God was necessarily reflected but incarnated in love for man, the living and palpitating image of God. His heart was open to all people, especially to the sick and the suffering; she knew how to respond to the needs of others, even to the point of often depriving herself of what was necessary; she always showed a special tenderness, an innate compassion for all sorts of suffering, for subjection to which she submitted to any discomfort and effort, extinguishing that thirst for charity and zeal that burned in her. In works of charity she did not know limits and she fully identified himself with the problems of others; those who lived alongside her assert: If she saw a needy man and could not help him, she felt that she was faint. In the face of charity she understood nothing (Information, 53).
Dear Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, today we rejoice with you to see Mother Clelia as a member of the Blesseds. We ask you to keep her charism alive and above all her oblative spirituality, whose fulcrum is the love that bears and forgives everything. The mission, for which your religious family was founded, is still current. The motto of your Institute, Caritas Christi urget nos - the Love of Christ urges us -, commits you to make these words of Saint Paul your own, radiating love without rest and without limits.
Let us ask the Lord to make the path of holiness, which Mother Clelia Merloni has shown us with her life sustained by love of the Cross, become every day the luminous and sure path of our journey of love for God and for our brothers and sisters.
Let us repeat together: Blessed Clelia Merloni, pray for us!
No comments:
Post a Comment