Reconciliation

It is thanks to him that Gaudium et spes was called this way, instead of Luctus et angor: joy and hope instead of mourning and anguish. Father Anastasio Alberto Ballestrero participates in the Council as superior general of the Discalced Carmelites. He doesn't like that title, for the conciliar constitution on the Church in the contemporary world. How can we approach the men of today starting from mourning and anxieties? And Gaudium et spes will be.

he will become bishop of Bari, archbishop of Turin (1977-1989), cardinal and president of the CEI. He died in 1998, today he is a Servant of God, on the path towards holiness. He takes the helm of the Turin diocese, succeeding Cardinal Pellegrino, who lived through the convulsions of 1968 and the post-Council period. Ecclesially rich and fruitful years, but harbingers of divisions, lacerations, flights forward, impulses and slowdowns. The new archbishop arrives with the mandate of Paul VI, summed up in the word "reconciliation". He will make it, handing over to his successor Giovanni Saldarini - twelve years later - a pacified and reassured diocese.

On the fiftieth anniversary of priesthood (1986), inviting young people to soon accept the call to the priesthood, he says: «This evening I would like to be able to tell you my story, the story of a priestly and religious vocation that did not wait to ferment when maturity would arrive for me (which never arrived...!). The Lord looked for me, quickly: I understood little, but I understood that I had to say yes to him. The rest then came day after day and, to tell you the truth, I still don't know how it will end. I have had many surprises in life, but they taught me not to make plans, not to close God's desires and plans to the illuminated horizon of my exuberant and daring youth, of my mature wisdom full of presumptions and certainties, and my old man's malice full of doubts and perplexities."

He asks the Christian people for forgiveness «for not having been sufficiently capable of announcing Christ to you, of announcing the Gospel to you, of placing myself at the service of the great and infinite desires of your hearts and of your life and of not having been able to do encounter the events of this world with the Gospel. I realize. There may be many of you who accuse me of a lack of assiduity, of presence, of generosity. But I ask you for forgiveness and I ask you to pray...". Today we know "how it will end". One day Anastasio Alberto Ballestrero will be a saint.


Renzo Agasso
NP December 2023