Capuchins hope Pope's trip
will be a teaching moment:
The faithful should look more
to emulating Padre Pio
than to hoping for miracles
SAN GIOVANNI ROTONDO, Italy, June 12 (Translated from ASCA) - "The principal expectation we have from the Magisterium of this theologian Pope is certainly that he will give the faithful guidance on authentic devotion, less dependent on expecting supernatural events and more oriented to emulating this man (Padre Pio o Pietrelcina) who succeeded in leading a life of holiness in the past century even while relativism and the culture of nonsense had taken hold".
This according to Stefano Campanella, deputy spokesman for the Capuchin Fathers of San Giovanni Rotondo, who are in charge of the churches and sites associated with the saint.
"The fact that Benedict XVI - first as cardinal, then as Pope - has cited padre Pio a number of times, gives us to understand that for this Pope, the Capuchin saint could represent a 'lived' catechism for man in the Third Millennium, at the start of which Padre Pio was presented to the universal Church as a saint [he was canonized in 2002] and a model to follow," he said.
Benedict XVI will arrive in San Giovanni Rotondo around 9:15 on Sunday, June 21, and will first proceed to the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie to venerate the remains of the saint, exhumed in April last year, and which will remain for public exposition till September this year.
He will the celebrate a Mass in the piazza in front of the modern church of San Pio. In the afternoon, he will visit the Casa Sollievo di Sofferenza [House of Relief from Suffering], established by Padre Pio, which has since become one of Europe's best tertiary-care health facilities.
The Italian service of
has once again produced a dossier - which is really a briefing book - about the Holy Father's coming visit to San Giovanni Rotondo.
It did the same thing previously with the Pope's visits to Cagliari, Cameroon and Angola, and to the Holy Land, but not for Montecassino.
It's the sort of briefing book that I used to prepare for announcers doing any important news coverage for radio and TV back in the days when I was a journalist. It provides background information, both historical as well as current, on all aspects of the visit, including the place and the people, previous visits by other Popes and by Benedict himself before he became Pope, the specific places and events to be attended by the Pope, and in this case, excellent background material and pictures of Padre Pio.
It's a shame that the other language services of Vatican Radio, particularly the English one, do not make the effort to translate these dossiers. The San Giovanni Rotondo dossier only comes to 80 printed pages (the one for the Holy Land came about 180 pages in two volumes).
If they assigned a team of 3 or 4 to translate a dossier for each language, they could easily do it on a weekend. I am only too sorry I do not have the time to do it myself, although in the past visits where a dossier was available, I did try to translate and use their material where appropriate (though the last time, I could not keep it up after the first two days in Jordan).
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/06/2009 03:02]