WITH HOPE TOWARDS THE EASTER

My dear friends,

This issue of ADMA online reaches you in the middle of the Lenten journey which, as Pope Francis has suggested and in the light of the Strenna, we are trying to live in the spirit of this Jubilee year: Lent is in fact the centre of our journey of hope.

The Church offers us time to prepare our hearts and to open ourselves to God's grace in order to celebrate the Easter triumph of Christ, the Lord, over sin and death.

Yet how difficult it is to believe and hope for all of us in a world so tried by sorrow; how can we not let ourselves be overcome by fear and discouragement? Precisely in this Jubilee year, dedicated to hope, there is increasingly worrying and painful news: wars continue or seem to end only in the illusion of a fake and unjust peace, which hides hatred deep in the hearts of broken men. Wealth and money feed the power of those who command, who prevaricate, who enslave. The value of life, our inheritance as God's creatures, seems to be lost in a vacuum that we fill only with useless things and pleasures, with appearance and narcissism. And for us, as children of Don Bosco, who have the young at heart above all, this pain and uncertainty become even stronger when it seems to us that it is precisely the young who are deprived of the possibility of dreaming.

The path of Lent that we are living in silence, listening to the word, in penance and in fraternity allows us to reread all these events and discern in them the presence of God and His mercy. It allows us to return to the essentials of our Christian life, to rediscover new horizons in the joy of Easter and to show these horizons to humanity and the young people we meet.

May the hope that does not disappoint (cf. Rom 5:5) - indeed, Pope Francis tells us - be for us the horizon of the Lenten journey towards Easter victory. As Pope Benedict XVI taught us in the Encyclical Spe salvi, “the human being needs unconditional love. He needs that certainty that makes him say: neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, neither the present nor the future, neither powers, neither heights nor depths, nor any other creature will ever be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom 8:38-39)”. Jesus, our love and our hope, is risen and lives and reigns glorious. Death has been transformed into victory and herein lies the faith and great hope of Christians: in the resurrection of Christ!

Pope Francis has invited us to rediscover, this Lent, the call to conversion that God's mercy addresses to all of us, as individuals and as a community. And the most important conversion is that of hope, of trust in God and in his great promise, eternal life. We must ask ourselves: do I have the conviction that God forgives my sins? Or do I act as if I can save myself? Do I aspire to salvation and call upon God's help to receive it? Do I concretely live the hope that helps me read the events of history and urges me to a commitment to justice, fraternity, care for the common home, ensuring that no one is left behind?

May the Virgin Mary, Mother of Hope, intercede for us, accompany us on this last stretch of the Lenten journey and prepare our hearts to rejoice in Christ's resurrection.

On behalf of the whole ADMA council, we wish everyone a peaceful Easter

Don Gabriel Cruz Trejo, SDB,

Spiritual Animator, ADMA, Valdocco

Renato Valera,

President, ADMA, Valdocco