“THE MADONNA IN DIFFICULT TIMES”
Dear friends of ADMA,
we all remember the moment when Don Bosco made that famous statement to Fr. Cagliero: “Our Lady wants us to honour her under the title of Auxilium Christianorum; the times are so bad that we need the Blessed Virgin to help us preserve and defend the Christian faith” (MB VII, 334).
Each of us experiences and lives dramatic situations, unprecedented in today’s world: viruses, wars, poverty, injustice. The faith of Believers, the very life of the Church and the ministry of its Pastors is put to the test in the search for new social and political reforms, for the integral education of young people and for the promotion of the working classes.
If the devotion of Mary Help of Christians is a specific Marian dimension for times of difficulty, if Don Bosco and his Family were raised up by the Spirit as specialised and effective instruments to propagate devotion in the Church, today we are invited to relaunch Marian devotion in the face of the present difficulties of the Church and Society.
It may help us in this challenge to better understand the spiritual journey that our Founding Father experienced in the growth of his love for Our Mother.
Don Bosco did not arrive at such devotion by chance, nor does it depend on a local apparition; it rather appears as the maturation of an entire spiritual and apostolic line that has been clarified and developed with the contributions of certain historical circumstances, read in the light of a profound personal dialogue with the Holy Spirit, so familiar in the daily unfolding of Don Bosco’s life.
Mary Help of Christians appears as the pinnacle of what Don Bosco felt about Mary: advocate, rescuer, mother of the young, protector of the Christian people, conqueror of the devil, triumphant over heresies, helper of the Church in difficulty, bulwark of the Pope and the Pastors undermined by the forces of evil.
Such devotion to the Mother of God is the practical concretisation of that holiness of action that characterised Don Bosco’s spirituality. It would be enough to think back of his dialogue with the painter Lorenzone, whom he asked to represent Our Lady at the centre of a whole gigantic ecclesial dynamism (MB VIII, 4) or to look at the current painting of the basilica of Valdocco to discover a connaturality between the Salesian spirit mixed with ecclesial apostolate and devotion to Mary Help of Christians.
We feel called today, with all the groups of the Salesian Family, to make Our Lady known and loved, especially by the new generations of young people, who hunger and thirst for God’s Love more than ever.
“...Mary: advocate, rescuer, mother of
the young, protector of the Christian
people...”
Renato Valera, ADMA Valdocco President.
Alejandro Guevara, Spiritual Animator ADMA Valdocco.
