The “chair” of the poor person

To make of his heart and of his house a “house of mercy”, each member of the Fraternity looks at Jesus who lived in the family of Nazareth where he wanted to merge with what was fully human (Art. 2 of the Statute).

The poor are not only the receivers of our exuberances of charity, but the holders of that chair of humanity before whom we all should become some students.

From the inter-ecclesial communion, charity opens by nature to the universal service, projecting us in the commitment of an industrious and concrete love towards every human being (NMI, n° 49).

The attention to the least owns an exemplary character of the heart of the Gospel.

The charity of the Christian is a charity that “colours”, that clothes, that “leavens” his whole existence: the sentiments, the thoughts, the words, the gestures, the actions, the styles, the choices, the relations, the presence, the links, the proximity, the listening, the welcome, the accompanying, … every expression of life is “evidence of love, of charity”.

“… clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone…” (Col 3, 12-13).

Charity as the “whole of everyday life” is a necessary rule of life.

Charity that founds/finds its roots in God, as God is LOVE.

God is love in Christ, not by words but by deeds. The deed, the event accomplished by God-love, is the gift, the gift of the person of Christ, is the gratuity expressed in Christ.

It’s the announcement of God’s merciful and infinite love for the person and, in reply, of the person’s love for his brothers, according to the word of Jesus.

“Love each other as I have loved you” (Jn 15, 12).

“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Mt 25, 40).

“By the least and the social outcasts, we all will be able to recover a different kind of life. We will demolish, before all, the idols we have built: money, power, consumption, waste, tendency to live beyond our means.

Then we will rediscover the values of common good: of social tolerance, solidarity and justice, of joint responsibility” (The Italian Church and the perspectives of the Country, n° 6).

“The charity expressed in the Gospel is not a vague sentiment, or a passing emotion, but it is distinguished by the concreteness and by everyday life. Love, if it is true, becomes gesture and history, as it was in the life and death of Jesus…By his love of preference for the sinners and the far ones, for the poor and the outcasts, that spreads to all, the enemies included, Jesus has shown that gratuity and excess of love that distinguish the whole action of God … We must learn to incarnate in concrete gestures, in the relations from person to person, and in the social, political and economic planning skill and in the effort to make the structures more appropriate and more human, that charity which the Spirit of Christ has lavished into our heart” (ETC, n° 22 and 37).

To live the dimension of charity then means not to hesitate to assume all one’s responsibilities, to make choices without invocating backings, openly to pit ones strength and at one’s own risk, with responsibilities marked out even by some disagreement.

It is important to bear in mind the strong call of the Council where it is foretold that a form of the charity that is necessary for our time is the promotion of Christianculture.

Culture is the wealth of a person, it is her habit of mind able to value historical events, relational behaviours, displays of social life, political proposals.

Culture is personal anchorage to benchmarks and standards of judgement that have consistent foundations and coherently guide some private, civil and political behaviours.

Considering the culture like this, it is related to the professed concept of the person.

Then, the lay believer who has a Christian concept of the person, cannot disregard or give it up. The activities of formation towards a Christian anthropology should be included in the plans and in the worries of the one who progresses into the paths of charity.

“The apostolate of ideas is very important, since the action comes out of the thought.

Many evils take place because, being satisfied with kneeling in the Church, out of it we cannot do anything for God; it is because we don’t study, we are not interested in the great modern problems…. It is because our Christian life contents with the Sunday Mass and with few consolatory practices…” (Helena da Persico).

The role of Christian culture in the construction of the town of humanity, in a society just characterized by a plurality of concepts of the person and of consequent cultures, is also the one to begin an open dialogue with the other cultures, in a context of fidelity to itself.

For Palazzolo, the choice and the request to “serve the poor like poor people” is the fruit of sharp and deep intuitions, coming from his incessant reference to the Gospel and from his experience of life.

The lives of Father Louis Palazzolo and of Theresa Gabrieli are only the discover, the agreement, the progressive answer to the announcement of the Gospel of charity, following the track of Jesus, like Jesus, for the sake of Jesus and in the generous agreement with His Will of good for the whole humanity.

Palazzolo’s faith is a personal and unconditional faith in God the “Amiable Infinite”; a faith that is translated in a consistent and complete adherence to Jesus, face of his Father, who loves and serves humanity till the washing of feet, till his stripping of all possessions and his “death, naked on the cross” for love.

A faith that makes us see-love-serve Jesus Christ in each person, above all if poor, weak, wounded by life, abandoned.

To realize in our time this “serving the poor like poor people”, means to feel equal with everybody, in the will to create friendships, starting from the life and the expectations of the other. To realize such a meeting, it is indispensable to start listening to the other, to welcome him, to support him, to become his “neighbour”.

To respect the other really, even the impossibility to understand fully the other, to answer every one of his needs, must be taken into account. Before that in the “solution” of problems, the quality of the aid realizes itself in the “sharing” of discomfort, of suffering, of difficulty.

In the choice of serving, like poor people, the poor, we choose to compete more closely even with “our” limit, our being poor, our trouble to accept ourselves as we are, our ability to hope always for the good and to face our difficulties with faith and optimism.

The choice of the poor tells, in the last resort, an option for the God of the Kingdom announced by Jesus Christ, who has become poor among the poor. In humble Christ the poverty and the need are not a place of despair or pride, but the place of faith and communion, since they allow the faith and the obedience to the Father to become incarnate in history. Then the reason of the commitment to the poor relies fundamentally, as Christians, on the God of our faith, meaning that such a commitment witnesses and realizes the filial relation with God the Father revealed in Christ, his First-born Child.

The first step to do is the one to become aware of the reason why to privilege the poor. The poor and the least are privileged because they force to look into everyday life, understanding that the reality of a poverty, spread all over the world, is often fruit of injustices, of historical mistakes, of violences and privations, but also inviting to read again the sense of the attitudes we use to look for our realization.

The privilege granted to the poor means at least two things:

The first one is that this attention of charity cannot and must not concern only someone in the Church, but everybody.

The second attention concerns the fact that Christian life does not come down to the attention to the poor. The care for the least does not achieve at all the evidence of charity, necessary for Christian fidelity. However the attention and the service to the poor and to the least enjoy a position of privilege in the evidence of charity, since they relate directly and strongly to the action of faith that saves. In other words, the care for the poor allows a stronger and more direct exercise of faith, it is really a representation of the benevolence of God, the God revealed by Jesus, who wanted to identify with each poor person, with the least.

The poor, while they move us, suggest the precise gestures we should do and make us understand very well the gestures themselves of Jesus, who has always been close to those who were suffering.

For the Gospel, the poor are a precious legacy, are the “appeal” that Jesus leaves us for us to be able to discover our call.

A certain current of theology and of pastoral felt justified even in talking of the poor as a “theological place”, that is to say as book of faith to read and to put near the great book of the Bible and of Tradition.

Being with the poor, sharing their existence, their troubles and their fights, even the Gospel itself would attain authenticity and significance. The poor are the book where I read that even my life, so full of things and goods, lacks the only necessary thing that is the capacity of relation, of sharing, of love, of affection, of devotion, of vocation.

The poor ask to accept the Gospel in its wholeness, to be led in the fraternal freedom, in the house of communion.

In the end, the poor don’t ask only some goods or things, but they are waiting for our fraternity.

Palazzolo and Gabrieli were people in love with humanity, unable to live thinking only about themselves, unable to enjoy by themselves the goods that Providence was giving them.

In the logic of the Gospel and following the example of Jesus Christ, Palazzolo opens his heart and offers his help to everybody, but with a very clear preferential attention: the poor among the poor, those who, because of different reasons, cannot profit from other suitable answers.

We could remember many and impressive expressions that claim this decision, never revoked, but more and more underlined and carried out.

“Let’s take in the most abandoned… those nobody provides for,

those who are unreached, those refused by everybody… the most needful ones....”.

The poor are our teachers and evangelisers, Jesus keeps on repeating us: “if you don’t become like a little one, if you don’t become poor in spirit...” and, as this was not enough, Jesus himself says he is poor, and in fact he is so.

The true disciples of Christ, the saints of charity, and among them Palazzolo and Gabrieli, have understood this truth and have witnessed it really in their life of “servants of the poor”, that is they were firmly convinced that the poor “teach us how to live the Gospel, how to enter the logic of Jesus Christ, tell us what believing, hoping and following the Son of God, who from rich became poor, implies …”.

Palazzolo is touched and amazed by the generosity of a poor orphan, who generously dived into a ditch at the risk of his life to save a woman who was drowning:

“How much we have to thank the Lord! We can see clearly that Jesus just wanted to save that poor woman through a poor boy of ours… what a privilege!” (L.P., n° 152).

Father Louis is surprised before the material aid that comes from the poor; he appreciates it, like Jesus who underlined before his disciples the gesture of the poor widow who gave all that she had: few coins… but with all her heart!

“What a lot of care the very Amiable Jesus takes of us… and everything through the poor!… it is a wonderful thing” (L.P., n° 86).

Mother Theresa expresses all her confidence in the Father who listens to the cry of the poor and has the poor, “his dearest sheep”, at heart:

“Be not disheartened as in Brescia they had no sugar, and little in Vicenza, do not lose heart, we are all trying to save everything we can, and we do not want to have all the conveniences, let’s live like the poor and let’s not feel ashamed to look poor, and this must be warmly recommended to those of Vicenza, they seem to me a little eager to make an impression, let’s stay in our spirit, besides have confidence in the Lord who knows your needs and in fact what has he let you be lacking of with so many expenses you have done?

Then don’t do them an injustice by mistrusting, they are all souls of the Lord who has many to provide for, do you think that a so great and omnipotent Lord allows the necessary to be lacking to his dearest sheep?

Let’s love him with all our heart, and then let’s hope everything from Him” (T.G., n° 199).

Mother Theresa lets her be questioned before the deeply evangelic and virtuous spirit of a poor aged and very sick woman. So she announces it to Father Louis:

“The sick woman that I am nursing tells me to greet you respectfully; she has hoped for the whole day to see you and asks me for your blessing; as soon as she is in Heaven she will remember You, me, all our houses, and says she waits for us all, all in Heaven. I tell you she really makes everybody envious among so much evil, that she sings: what a beautiful way of suffering, it is suffering for God etc. etc. and some prayers to the Holy Virgin, I tell you we can find so great heroic virtues that make us feel shame” (T.G., n° 199).

Palazzolo and Gabrieli could learn from the poor, as they themselves were poor in the heart and in their whole being.

FOR OUR REFLECTION

What are the situations and the modalities in which I have experienced the meeting with the “poor person”?

What kind of conversion, what change is the meeting with “the least”, that Providence and my choice of Fraternity make me meet, leading into my life?

What is my connection with things, with “possessions”?

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