Hajja Salesjana July September 2018

“It is she who has done everything!” Don Bosco used to say. Our holy Mother continues to radiate her motherly tenderness, just as she did today in Beirut.I’ve seen it! 32 Greetings to all our readers! Today I’m writing to you from Beirut, Lebanon, on the day after April 1, when we celebrated the Pasch of the Lord, Easter Sunday – a very significant day for the Salesian Family in more than one way. I don’t want to miss this opportunity to make reference, before all else, to Don Bosco and his relationship with Easter. It was precisely on the day of the Lord’s Resurrection in 1846 that Don Bosco obtained the little Pinardi shed (today our Pinardi Chapel in Valdocco), due to the intervention of Divine Providence, after he had suffered a veritable Gethsemane – not knowing where he would be able to gather his 200+ boys on the following Sunday. From that Easter Sunday until today, we have experienced innumerable interventions of Divine Providence and of the Virgin Mary. It was also an Easter Sunday, a very rainy one, when Don Bosco was proclaimed a saint on April 1, 1934. This year also, April 1 is the day on which our Lord gave us the gift of celebrating Easter around theworld and in all our presences, no matter how different the situations among them. Sometimes we celebrate in a beautiful church, and other times under a tree, as in the refugee camps of Palabek in Uganda or Juba in South Sudan, where Salesian communities share life with the least and the rejected. Let us thank the Lord for these signs of life and of the Resurrection because in their poverty and pain they still feel that they are special to the Lord. It is we humans who are responsible for creating the unjust situations which exist – not God. And Mary is always present also – whether on the Friday of the Lord’s Passion or on the morning of the Resurrection. This is the point I wish to refer to: the attraction that OUR MOTHER awakens in the entire Christian world. THE MESSAGE OF THE RECTOR MAJOR DON ÁNGEL FERNÁNDEZ ARTIME STABAT MATER. OUR MOTHER IS THERE. ALWAYS. From Beirut to Valdocco, our Blessed Lady is always present!