9. The Virgin Mary for Saint Jerome
Whoever, like Girolamo Miani, had the mystical gift of experiencing Mary, who freed him from imprisonment after the defeat of Castelnuovo di Quero (September 27, 1511), whoever, like him, experienced the surprise of seeing her face immersed in light, of seeing his chains broken, of feeling taken and led by the hand, cannot but preserve in memory an intense spiritual joy and the feeling of a loving and continuous presence of Mary in his life. This apparition of the Virgin imprinted a profound acceleration on Girolamo’s path to holiness, who over the years passed from a varied and disoriented life to piety and Christian practice, to a profound conversion to Christ Crucified and to a severe asceticism, to works of charity until abandoning his social status to dress in the clothes of the poor and serve the little ones, the abandoned, the marginalized.
Jerome also developed and lived a convinced biblical-Marian spirituality, based on some evangelical expressions. The first is that of the Magnificat: “The Almighty has done great things in me” (Lk 1, 49). God works great things in those who live by faith and hope. Thus – he says – he acted with the people of Israel, so in Mary and in all the saints, so in me and he will do likewise in you, if you remain with Christ, militating with Him in the field, strong in faith, hoping in God, steadfast in tribulations, willing to suffer for his love.
The second Marian phrase, deeply internalized, is that of the wedding at Cana, spoken by Mary to the servants: “Do whatever he tells you” (Jn 2, 5). And Jerome tirelessly repeats to the Servants of the Poor, the company he founded, Mary’s phrase: “Do what the Lord shows you, what Christ inspires you; he gives you the grace to see and to do what is necessary for you to do at this moment.” It is an action filtered by the light of God’s will: the Lord shows, Christ inspires, only He knows and understands, He shows the remedy and the provision; it is an action always connected to prayer, to the fire of the Spirit, which gives us the capacity to understand the holy will of God in these tribulations and to carry it out. It is an action that acknowledges human weakness and commits to corrective actions: “to show with facts and with words, so that the Lord ‘may be glorified in you through me’.” It is an action that is grace, grace to act; a grace to be humbly asked of the Lord.
Finally, the third expression dear to the Saint is “Mary, full of grace” (Lk 1, 28), the mother of all graces to whom one must incessantly resort for the good of the Company and the Church and for personal holiness. Whoever prays with the Hail Mary also acquires the certain hope of realizing his Christian life on this earth and then meeting the Virgin in the glory of Paradise. This is a Marian spirituality that is always relevant, even if strongly marked by Jerome’s Renaissance sensibility, by his idea that one must fight on the battlefield, standing firm in faith and in the way of God, energetically committing oneself with “the grace of operating” to reform oneself, civil society with respect for the small and the marginalized, the Church itself so that it may return to the holiness of apostolic times, that is, to the Church of Pentecost, united around the Virgin Mary.
In summary, for Saint Jerome, the Virgin Mary is the one who frees you from chains and accompanies you by hand through the difficult passages of life (the story of liberation from prison). She is the mother of orphans, the liberator of the oppressed, the joy of the afflicted. We must imitate her faith and hope so that God can do great things in us, as in Her; we must obey her command: “Do what Jesus tells you.” Mary is finally full of grace and the mother of all graces, our advocate, the one who conforms us to Christ. We must invoke her every day with the Hail Mary, which is the most beautiful and joyful prayer we can address to her.
10. The Virgin Mary for Padre Pio
Like my holy founder, Padre Pio constantly had the rosary in his hand, immersed in prayer, sometimes in his cell in the silence of the night, sometimes in church absorbed before the icon of Mary, mother of graces. “To obtain this Holy grace, we will resort to Mary, mother of all graces” prayed Saint Jerome introducing the Hail Mary into the prayer of intercession. What consonance between the two saints in resorting to Mary, mother of Jesus and our mother! Furthermore, Padre Pio, usually in the concluding part of his letters, unites the name of Jesus and Mary, precisely because the Virgin is co-redemptrix, mother of every grace. “May Jesus and Mary always be in your heart and reign supreme there, take absolute possession of your spirit, assist you, comfort you, make you taste the sweetness of the cross, help you to sustain the good fight, make you grow in virtue, etc.”
Padre Pio had his own spiritual technique for reciting the rosary, which for him is an essentially contemplative prayer: “Attention must be placed on the ‘Hail,’ on the greeting addressed to the Virgin in the mystery being contemplated. In all mysteries she was present, she participated in all with love and with sorrow.” As if to say: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you in the mystery of the annunciation, of the visitation, in the mystery of Jesus’ death and his resurrection, etc. He therefore advised to preferably concentrate on the first part of the Hail Mary, to identify with her in the contemplated mystery.
Padre Pio also develops some original theological reflections that arise from his mystical experiences of participation in the passion of Jesus. He emphasizes the suffering of Mary sorrowful at the foot of the Cross and invokes her “to obtain for us from her most holy Son the grace to become intoxicated with her in the sufferings of Jesus.” She is our teacher in suffering with love for Jesus. I repeat that the nuptial chamber of Padre Pio’s spirituality is the heart of Jesus Crucified, who at the moment of greatest sorrow gives us his mother and wants us to keep her in our lives, in our inner home. This spiritual attitude is connected to the Franciscan spiritual tradition. Just think of Jacopone da Todi’s Stabat Mater or his poem “The Lament of the Madonna.” “Sancta mater, istud agas: Crucifixi fige plagas cordi meo valide. Fac me tecum pie flere: Crucifixo condolere: donec ego vixero. Fac ut portem Christi mortem: passionis fac consortem: et plagas recolere”. (Holy mother, do this: imprint the wounds of your crucified Son strongly in my heart. Make me weep intensely with you, sharing the pain of the Crucified, as long as I live. Make me bear the death of Christ, make me participate in his passion, and make me remember his wounds with love.)
In reflecting on the Assumption of Mary, Padre Pio reconstructs the state of mind of the Virgin in the period that goes from the Ascension to her reunion in soul and body with her Son. Mary in this earthly period is the mystic par excellence, who suffers and burns with love and desire to reunite with her Son. “After Jesus Christ’s ascension to heaven, Mary continually burned with the liveliest desire to reunite with Him. And oh! The inflamed sighs, the pitiful groans that she continuously addressed to Him, that He might call her to Himself. Without her divine Son, she felt herself to be in the harshest exile. Those years in which she had to be separated from Him were for her the slowest and most painful martyrdom, which slowly consumed her.” The moment of the Assumption is therefore considered as the moment of mystical marriage, as the definitive and intoxicating union of the bride with her beloved, in the fullness of paradisiacal joy. Suffering passes, but having suffered for love of Jesus at the foot of the cross and after His Ascension, this love shown by Mary in suffering is eternal, just as the glorious wounds of Christ, which merited our salvation, are eternal. For this reason, Mary is co-redemptrix: “You must think that Jesus, the fount of living water, cannot reach us without a channel: the channel is Mary. Jesus does not come to us except through the Virgin. It is she,” Padre Pio will say, without losing himself in many theological demonstrations, “the shortcut” to reach God.
11. The grace of operating – The Apostolate in Jerome Emiliani
Saint Jerome Emiliani is a saint of the Renaissance and has a vigorous sense of active virtue, of operating, of action that aims to modify reality with tenacity, with inflexible and conscious energy. It is an ideal of the time reinterpreted by a saint, who considers the apostolate as a militancy with Christ and who sees in all human action of faith an instrument of God’s work. He is, however, well aware of the primacy of grace and his conviction can be summarized in the Pauline expression: “We are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2, 9).
God works in us in his Trinitarian mystery: “God does not do his works except in those who have placed their faith and hope in Him alone,” “Christ works in those instruments who allow themselves to be guided by the Holy Spirit”; similarly, as Christian groups in moments of difficulty and uncertainty, we must “pray and pray so much that we see and, seeing, do what the Lord shows us,” every single Christian must ask the Lord for “the grace to operate,” to do good works that are the verification of our faith, so as not to run the risk of falling into a dangerous spiritual presumption. “Without good works, do not believe yourself to be that good Christian before God that you presume to be,” he wrote to a friend.
Jerome Miani, a layman, a man of contemplation and action, sought to involve as many people as possible, first of all numerous lay people and a small group of priests, in his ideal of charity and service to the last: to the sick in the hospitals of Venice and Lombardy, to the converted by gathering them with the help of noble Christian women in suitable structures, to the orphaned children of both parents, gathering them, caring for them, instructing them and educating them to Christian life. With the little ones and with the help of people who had shared his ideal of poverty and service, he founded communities inspired by the Gospel. To those who invited him to change his way of life he replied: “With these my poor I want to live and die, because they best represent Christ to me.”
12. The grace of operating and Padre Pio’s apostolate
The love of Christ urges us (2 Cor. 5, 14), that is, the love of Christ fills us with energy and stimulates us to serve our brothers. Alessandro Manzoni, who knew both the Somascans, his tutors until he was 14, and the Capuchins, friends of his father, whom he frequented with his son in the convents of Pescarenico and the castle of Lecco, gives as an example of energy and social charity in his Observations on Catholic Morals Saint Charles and Saint Jerome Miani: “Saint Charles, who stripped himself to clothe the poor, and who, living among the plague-stricken to give them every kind of help, did not forget his danger; that Jerome Miani, who went in search of orphaned beggars and strays, to feed and discipline them, with the care that an ambitious person would put into becoming the educator of a king’s son, did they not think but of their souls?”
In “The Betrothed” instead he concentrates all his ideal of active charity in Padre Cristoforo and the Capuchin Fathers. In the novel, four Capuchin convents are described: the convent where Ludovico takes refuge wounded before becoming Friar Cristoforo (the place is not mentioned), the convent of Pescarenico with a community of seven religious where Padre Cristoforo lives, capable not only of giving advice, like Friar Zaccaria, but of getting directly involved and compromising himself in the service of the poor and oppressed, the convent of Monza with its uninhibited guardian and the convent of Porta Orientale in Milan with Friar Bonaventura da Lodi. Other Capuchins also appear in the story. The Provincial Father (he has no name, he represents a function, the authority that commands the friars of Lombardy), and the Capuchins of the Lazzaretto of Milan under the guidance of Padre Felice Casati and Padre Michele Pozzobonelli, historical figures. Manzoni points out that an extraordinary historical merit of the Capuchins of Milan was to have taken over the direction of the Lazzaretto, previously ungovernable due to the indiscipline of the servants, the unrestrained behavior of many inmates, the confusion, and the incompetence of those in charge. The health tribunal and the decurions no longer knew what to do, so they decided to turn to the Capuchins, imploring the commissioner of the religious province, who held the place of the Provincial, who had died shortly before, to assume the government of that desolate kingdom. The Capuchins accepted by sending Padre Felice Casati, a mature and charitable man, active, strong and gentle at the same time, and they supported him with the young Padre Michele Pozzobonelli, serious and responsible. Padre Felice was given full and supreme authority. He too at the beginning was infected by the plague, healed and resumed his governing commitment, animating and regulating everything. In that place, mostly volunteers, other Capuchins flocked and became superintendents, confessors, administrators, nurses, wardrobe attendants, laundresses, everything that was needed. Among them Friar Cristoforo, who asks to give his life to the service of the sick and in the novel will be the one to untangle the intricate story of Renzo and Lucia’s love.
Manzoni entrusted Padre Cristoforo in particular and the friars of the lazaretto with the task of manifesting the highest aspect of his active Christianity, namely the holiness of life lived in faith, in forgiveness, in struggle and in the hope of a better justice among men, in the total gift of oneself to others, especially the sick, for the love of Christ. It is a literary digression to demonstrate that the service to the sick and the poor belongs to the tradition, to the charism of the Capuchin order, and Padre Pio did nothing but actualize it. He did not limit himself to confessing, praying, celebrating, giving advice, but he fully involved himself in the realization of a great social work, the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza (House for the Relief of Suffering), of which he was the tireless promoter. “If I know that a person is afflicted in soul or body, what would I not do before the Lord to see them freed from their evils…. I am vertiginously moved to live for my brothers…”
From his very first arrival in San Giovanni Rotondo, seeing so much poverty around him, so much lack of health services, he worked to open a small hospital dedicated to Saint Francis, which remained in operation from 1925 to 1938, but from 1940 onwards he worked for the construction of the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, a grandiose project “my great earthly work” Padre Pio said, but God does great things in those who place their faith and hope solely in Him, spiritually motivating and involving in its construction many lay professionals and many faithful from all parts of the world. There were moments of crisis and difficulty in building the hospital and in the first years of its management, as well as in questioning and judging Padre Pio’s intentions as distorted by the ecclesiastical authority itself. But something similar had happened to my holy founder, Saint Jerome Emiliani, accused on February 18, 1536 by Bishop Gian Pietro Carafa, the future Paul IV, his spiritual director, of ostentation, of blowing his own trumpet, in essence of little humility while he was trying to organize his works of charity, involving as many lay people as possible: “Do not sound the trumpet before you… I was astonished by so much commotion and tumult in Milan, in Como, in Bergamo, in Pavia, with so many legations and so many affairs.” He distanced himself from Jerome’s zeal. “So that I no longer know what to tell you, until I hear the din completely quieted… Cover the vase very well and seal it, so that the air does not resolve and disperse that little radical moisture of God’s grace.” The saint obeyed, restrained his activity, without founding new works, and concluded his life, a victim of charity, assisting the plague-stricken a year later, on February 8, 1537.
Another apostolic work of Padre Pio, certainly no less important than the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, to which it is inextricably linked, was the creation and initial organization of the prayer groups, conceived not only for the spiritual elevation of the individual participants, but so that they would be the humus on which the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza could grow and develop for the well-being of the assisted people, in the spirit of Franciscanism, as a place of prayer, of ecclesial identity, of science, of attention to both the physical dimension, but above all to the psychological and spiritual: “In the sick person there is Jesus and in the poor sick person there is Jesus twice.”
13. Conclusions
Saints are similar and different at the same time, each marked by their own charism, by their own activity, by their own character. However, their comparison helps us to understand them better, increases our ecclesial spirit, because as A. Manzoni says in the sacred hymn La Pentecoste – the Church is the Mother of Saints, the image of the celestial Jerusalem, the custodian of the Eucharist, she has suffered, fought and prayed for so many centuries, and is the field of struggle of those who hope, and plants her tents, that is, she carries out her activity, throughout the world, from one sea to the other, built and vivified by the Spirit of Jesus, who makes us children of the Father.
Let us carry ourselves with faith and heart into the celestial Jerusalem, into Paradise, which has no other place than the mind of God, intellectual light full of love, love of true good full of joy, joy that transcends all sorrow, and let us unite with the joy of all the Saints, of Francis, Jerome Emiliani, Padre Pio who sing Trinitarian love. Let us keep the first fruits of our spirit entwined up there! “To the Father, to the Son, to the Holy Spirit,’ it began, ‘glory!’, all of paradise, so that the sweet song intoxicated me. What I saw seemed a smile of the universe; wherefore my intoxication entered through hearing and through sight. Oh joy! oh ineffable happiness! oh life whole of love and of peace! oh without craving secure riches!”
P. Giuseppe Oddone