November - 2024
MANIFEST CHARITY IN CONCRETE GESTURES OF LOVE FOR NEIGHBOURS
Dear Members of the Pallottine Family, in this month of November we are invited to a life of holiness, that is, to a life of communion with God marked by love, self-giving and charitable service to others.
When St. Vincent Pallotti uses the thought of St. Paul as a progressive lifestyle: “CARITAS CHRIST URGET NOS!” – “Christ's charity impels us!” (cf. 2 Cor 5:14) – he presents charity as a lifestyle for our Pallottine action inside and outside the Church, as a way of living love towards our neighbour in the most concrete manner. These attitudes give meaning to the existence of those who benefit from charity and those who practice it by serving others with love.
Charity is the harmony between the Creator and his creature, where through acts of charity the Church nourishes her children with the medicine necessary for the sick, the hungry, the imprisoned, the excluded... As our Founder St. Vincent said: “I want to be medicine, food, drink... to be everything for everyone” (cf. OOCCX,115).
Without the bond of charity, there will be no novelty since we will not entire the "land of the underprivileged". The Christian heart without charity is cold, mean and joyless; it does not produce fruit. Christ reminds us that we are to bear much fruit (John 15:16).
In practice and in his writings, St. Vincent Pallotti shows us that the centrality of the Catholic apostolate derives from the heart inflamed by the love of Christ for human beings, the charity par excellence of God for us, where the Son of God gave himself to redeem and save us. Because of these attributes of Christ, the Pallottine Family is also charismatically called to unite the universality of charitable love to all men and women and in all places where we have been sent for a mission, which is rooted in baptism and our specific consecration in the Church.
A member of the Pallottine Family, without the concrete practice of charity for others is like a dove with only one wing; it becomes limited in its mission; it does not fly, it does not let itself be guided by the wind of the Holy Spirit, but clings to the petty voices of the human spirit, which does not reveal the eternal and does not allow itself to be recognized as light in the world (cf. Mt 5:14).
When Pallotti reminds us that God is charity and whoever is in charity is in God and God in him (1 John 4.16), he affirms and confirms the purpose of our existence and of our being in the Church and in the world.
Charity, however, without ties to the Spirit, can only become a place of statistics to justify expenses and the search for results, in the face of a conscience numbed by material goods or even by the obligation to be accountable to government institutions, and so it must be. But the transparency of numbers does not always reveal the transparency of justice with our charism, thus damaging another pillar of Pallottine spirituality, that of the communion of goods in the material and spiritual sphere.
The gift of charity is for us the heart, feet and hands of the Pallottine charism; without it, we do not realize and are not fulfilled in the mission entrusted to us by Christ and the Church. The exercise of
charity should never be a burden to us when we exercise it towards others.
charity should never be a burden to us when we exercise it towards others.
Charity without the bond of the divine Spirit risks being only social assistance, which becomes a limited act that does not touch the soul of others, because it was not an act of love. Love touches the entire existence of our biological being: soul and spirit; it is charity par excellence.
Being Pallottine at its origins does not live on crumbs. Saint Vincent Pallotti and his first collaborators were rich in many goods, both corporal and spiritual, distributed freely to others; it is the sign of charity guided by the Spirit in the Cenacle of the heart. For examples: the first public action of San Vincent Pallotti, the Pia Casa di Carità in favour of abandoned girls; visiting the sick and prisoners; soup for the hungry... these facts must not be erased from our memory.
Charity is a language understandable to everyone, because it derives from the One who created us in his image and likeness, it resides in the essence of every man and every woman, even if there are cases in which in the existence of being charity it has been atrophied by the lack of experience of this gift in the environment in which the person is formed and moulded. Hence our mission to verbalize it in concrete acts at all times, to those who need it, to reawaken in the human soul this precious gift for our existence in time and eternity, where not even death can cancel it (1 Cor 13 ,13).
In concrete Pallottine life, we have two places in which we can manifest charity: one is through the institutions that we have created or that have been entrusted to us by the Church; the other is through the voluntariness of our heart, where we can exercise it in every moment of our life. However, it is that of the heart that gives life to the first.
We are generous in living the charismatic dimension that the Holy Spirit gave to our Founder and he to us, where everyone is called and sent to others, where life is associated with being and existing as the image and likeness of God.
Life in charity awakens in man the awareness of not simply being assisted, but of becoming protagonists of their own freedom. Nourished and refined in Pallottine anthropology, the truths of God manifest themselves in the life of man. For Saint Vincent Pallotti, nothing went unnoticed by his charitable gaze, whether he walked the streets of Rome or thought beyond Rome. Today many people do not recognize themselves as loved because they are not seen, especially the victims of sin, excluded from concrete love, where they progressively lose the sense of being and existing; they are ashamed of being a person in the eyes of their peers. Voluntary or institutional charity can help people rediscover themselves as part of a reality in which being is superior to having. Finally, the practice of charity aimed at those in need restores the person in their entirety: spirit, soul and body (1 Thess 5.23), puts each being back in their place, not in isolation, but in relationship.
To reflect and share:
- How have we used resources as an institution to concretely demonstrate charity towards others? Or from far away?
- When there is an institution of charity near me, what was my real and emotional relationship with it?
- Has the Pallottine charitable charism that I experienced influenced the identity of the institutions close to me?
- What is the objective of charity in the life of the Pallottine Family? In the charity of Christ,
Fr. José Orlando de Carvalho da Cruz, SAC - Brazil
Piazza San Vincenzo Pallotti, 204 00186 Roma, ITALIA
Tel: (+39) 06.6876827 E-mail: uacgensec@gmail.com
