Question Renato Cursi wants to ask the Rector Major.
Dear Fr Pascual:
What I’d like to share with you is a reflection on my Christian life as a young Salesian Cooperator, a leader in the Salesian Youth Movement at the oratory at Borgo Ragazzi Don Bosco in Rome and in the national coordination of the Movement in Italy.
Jesus and Don Bosco have been, respectively and in due proportion, two beacons in my life since I was a child, for their own merits but also because of the wonderful family I was born into and grew up in. I still recall the enthusiasm with which I read the illustrated stories of John Bosco and Dominic Savio when I was young.
In these 25 years of “already and not yet” I have felt accompanied along a journey which has been full of joy and also difficult, constant ascesis, heading for the high mountain of God but also towards brothers and sisters and the depths of the human heart. For 10 years Salesian spirituality has been the paradigm I have referred to on this graced road.
I recognise three gifts in particular I have received from this spirituality: the central role of the Sacraments, the importance of the everyday for the life of the soul, and the proposal of youthful holiness.
I feel that all these things have given me a new heart and new eyes.
Today, listening to and observing young people I meet in the oratory and the Salesian Youth Movement, this new heart and these new eyes seem to be telling me that there is a renewed need for us to be offered strong, radical choices for our Christian and Salesian lives, ones that can make daily life a place where there is no mediocre routine, but a place of sanctification.
The greater glory of God and the salvation of souls. These alone should be the aims of our Christian and Salesian lives. But what I want to ask you, Fr Pascual is this: what are the strong and radical choices that can be offered and that first of all we can witness to so we can convince for lukewarm or indifferent youth of the central place of these aims?
Is it the radical nature of poverty? Is it thinking about being missionaries without reserve? What other radical views of the Gospel are there?