LETTER OF FR. VIGAN̉ ON MARY, 1978

Rome - Feast of the Annunciation, 1978

My dear confreres,

I greet you with joy and hope, and I would like to share with you some thoughts that I have at heart.

Each one of us is accustomed to meditate on the facts of his own existence and of the Salesian family in humble imitation of the Virgin Mary who knew how to store up in her heart the most meaningful events of her vocation and ponder them within her.¹

A few months ago Providence upset my whole existence with my election as your Rector Major. The awareness of the heavy responsibility inherent in this ‘family service’ which demands real spiritual fatherliness in full harmony with Don Bosco is already becoming second nature to me. It is a good thing that it is our practice to give each other mutual support.

But the good Lord is helping me also to perceive the beauty and the abundance of grace that comes with such a service, and the joy of being able to enter into communion with you, with each one individually and with every community, so that we can reflect and grow together in a spirit of gratitude and fidelity.

Would that I had the calm and penetrating style of Don Bosco and the facility of communication shown by his successors.

I hope to be able to make up for the lack of this charm and simplicity at least by sincerity and solidity.

I am writing this letter during the Easter Octave with the deep and joy-filled atmosphere of the Resurrection in my heart; this is the wonderful day the Lord has made! It is the day that brought us the greatest, the most disturbing and radical innovation that explodes every secularist world-vision and forces us to reread all earthly values from a point of view that is humanly speaking unthinkable, but which absorbs them all and shows their relativity.

How much it must have cost our Lord to make his apostles understand what his Resurrection was and what it implied in reality. It marked the beginning of a ‘new humanity’: man reaches the fullness of God the Father’s plan for him, he touches his true destiny and captures the real dimension of his history.

We are at the heart of the gospel, whence with penetrating clarity the baptismal mystery and the meaning of religious profession, the Church’s true mission in the world and our role among youth as Salesians; we can view the entire horizon both of the saving dynamism of the faithful and the technical, economic, cultural and political undertakings of man with their real objectives.

Easter is truly the vertex from which we can see and evaluate everything in the light of faith, and it is from this paschal summit and in the hope of the Resurrection that I invite you to reflect a little on our relationship with the Virgin Mary, Mother of God.

Let us make a place for Our Lady in our home!

The GC21 invites us to renew the Marian dimension of our vocation.

The time seems ripe for us to review together our convictions about the Blessed Mother and make an accurate verification of our devotion to Mary Help of Christians. What is the relationship between the living person of Mary and ourselves? To what extent is devotion to our Lady experienced and felt in our hearts and in our pastoral activities at the present day? Is it an exaggeration to say that the Marian dimension of our life is on the decline? Is there not perhaps an urgent need to create a new space for Mary in our family?

On the afternoon of Good Friday while I was listening to the reading of St. John’s account of the Passion, I was particularly struck by the importance he gives to the words the dying Jesus addresses to his Mother: "Woman, this is your son!", then he said to the disciple: "This is your mother", and by what he immediately adds: "and from that moment the disciple made a place for her in his home".²

This is both a testament and a program.

I thought instinctively of our Congregation and the whole Salesian family that today needs to re-examine closely the reality of Mary’s spiritual motherhood and live again the attitude and resolve of that disciple. And I thought to myself: "We must make the evangelist’s affirmation our own program of renewal— ‘make a place for our Lady in our home!’

In this way we too will be ‘beloved disciples’ because we will give better attention to our baptismal adoption as sons, and will experience in a tangible way the beneficial effects of Mary’s motherhood.

And I remembered the affection and the reality of Don Bosco’s filial concern for our Lady’s presence in the house, planning and carrying out his multiple activities in dialogue with her.

Then on Easter Sunday there flashed into my mind with great clarity the deeply realistic aspect of Mary’s role as mother in the life of the Church.

Meditating on the objective meaning of the Resurrection of Christ, not on the miraculous aspect as in that of Lazarus who came back for a time to mortal life but as a final transfiguration of human existence, an effective fullness of new life conquering evil and death and sharing in God’s glory. I once again saw emerging the singular figure of the Mother of Christ. In fact the paschal transfiguration of the Resurrection has so far found its concrete realization in only Jesus and Mary!

As two of us they live the paschal Resurrection as the first fruits and the beginning of a renewed human race. They are the "new man" and the "new woman": the second Adam and the second Eve. And they are so only as a model to be imitated or an objective to be attained, but more precisely as the only efficacious source of regeneration and new life for all.