Love Has Shown Himself!
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith on Thursday, December 16, 2010 4:00 PM
At yesterday’s Audience, the pope highlighted a relatively modern saint.
Veronica Giuliani was a Capuchin Poor Clare whose 350th anniversary the Church celebrates December 27th.
She was a mystic with a mysterious connection to Christ’s passion, experiencing in some fashion the crowning with thorns, a wound in her heart, and the stigmata.
We know her life from some 22,000 handwritten pages of her diary, which her spiritual director asked her to keep.
The Pope highlights how her increasing union with Christ brings her to deeper and deeper intercession for the whole Church:
In every page of her writings Veronica entrusts someone to the Lord, strengthening her prayers of intercession with the offering of herself in every suffering. Her heart dilated to all “the needs of the Holy Church,” living with longing the desire of the salvation of “the whole world.”
Here’s a little more:
Veronica cried out: “O sinners ... come to Jesus’ heart; come to the cleansing of his most precious blood ... he awaits you with open arms to embrace you” (Ibid., II, 16-17). Animated by an ardent charity, she gave care, understanding and forgiveness to the sisters of the monastery. She offered her prayers and sacrifices for the Pope, her bishop, priests and for all needy persons, including the souls in Purgatory. She summarized her contemplative mission in these words: “We cannot go preaching around the world to convert souls, but we are obliged to pray continually for all those souls who are offending God ... particularly with our sufferings, that is with a principle of crucified life”
What’s also interesting is that in spite of extraordinary mystical phenomena—even for a mystic!—St. Veronica’s experiences were not new, but simply intensifications of the basic truths of scripture and liturgy. She was in the heart of the Church, not outside of it:
In Veronica’s writings we find many biblical quotations, at times indirectly, but always precise: She shows familiarity with the sacred text, from which her spiritual experience is nourished. Revealed, moreover, is that the intense moments of Veronica’s mystical experience are never separated from the salvific events celebrated in the liturgy, where the proclamation and hearing of the Word of God has a particular place. Hence, sacred Scripture illumines, purifies and confirms Veronica’s experience, rendering it ecclesial. On the other hand, however, precisely her experience, anchored in sacred Scripture with an uncommon intensity, guides one to a more profound and “spiritual” reading of the text itself, to enter into the hidden profundity of the text. She not only expresses herself with the words of sacred Scripture, but she also really lives from these words, they become life in her.
The Pope concludes with some observations about what we can learn from this extraordinary woman:
she invites us to participate in the suffering love of Jesus Crucified for the salvation of all sinners; she invites us to fix our gaze on Paradise, the goal of our earthly journey, where we will live together with so many brothers and sisters the joy of full communion with God; she invites us to nourish ourselves daily from the Word of God to warm our hearts and give direction to our life.
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