The world, as far as the human eye can see, has always been prey to violent upheavals. Wars, injustices, natural disasters, famines and other catastrophes, natural or provoked, weave the sad history of mankind. However, the world continues to turn: people marry, raise their children, plow their ground, build their homes, all involved in the beautiful occupation of being men, in spite of their weaknesses and the obstacles in life.
Childhood is a time of sowing. Raised within a family that takes care of him, the child receives from his parents an intellectual, psychological and moral structure that forges the man he will be tomorrow. A man is no more than the ripe fruit of all the seeds sown in his heart during his youth. Sheltered from the changing winds of the world, his intelligence learns to judge, his heart to love and his senses to discern beauty. Those uniquely important years leave an indelible mark upon his soul.
Saint Theresa of Avila used to compare the devil with a hidden file that silently, imperceptibly blunts the soul. Living habitually in a world of impressions and images, we indeed have great difficulty in paying attention to this pernicious action of our most frightening enemy — an enemy who attacks us, with all impunity, without risking failure, because we are not ready to avoid his fearsome assault. The best weapon of the devil still is his silence and it pleases him to remain in the shadows, cunningly working there, as there is no greater trap for man than Satan's apparent absence. Isn't our greatest danger today that we hardly ever hear news of the devil? Everyone, or almost everyone, declares himself a believer! But the simple mention of the existence of the devil and of his action on men brings a smile of condescension and pity to the lips of our interlocutors - that is, if we have dared to confront human respect and timidly talk about the possibility of a habitual intervention of the supernatural order in our world.
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.