| RMG – Holiness: An expression of a life lived in faith and apostolic fruitfulness |
| Italy – Running to free a child soldier |
| Italy – Free a child soldier |
Present at the celebration were over 800 of the faithful including young people and adults from some Salesian houses in Italy, ready to take part in the second in the series of the “Saints’ Race.”
The Rector Major recalled how holiness, “high standard of ordinary Christian living” is a vocation for everyone. God’s holiness becomes the goal with which we compare our own lives and towards which we are headed. Holiness is reached, Fr Chavez observed by putting aside the criteria of self-sufficiency and giving priority to self-giving. “A person achieves genuine self-fufilment only through love, to the extent that he gives himself in love even to giving his life for others, God and his neighbour as did Christ the perfect man.”
“Salesian holiness,” the Rector Major said, “is expressed in the search for God as the Absolute in our lives, in the ongoing identification with Christ until we make his thoughts ours, his feelings, his words, his life, his attitudes, his death all our own.” Salesian holiness should be lived in a spirit of brotherhood and finds it true expression is the educating and evangelising mission on behalf of the poor.
In the broad panorama of Salesian holiness, there are different models of its human and evangelical fulfilment: religious and lay people, adults and young people. “The word ‘holiness’ shouldn’t frighten us. It isn’t what we do ourselves but the free gift of participating in the holiness of God, and so it is a grace which draws our whole being into sharing God’s mysterious presence.”
At the end of the celebration the young Salesian athletes went to Pius XII Square where the second “Saints’ Race” began.
Published 01/11/2009
