A REFLECTION ON THE STRENNA
Don Bosco, Strenna 2021
a man moved by hope By Fr. Eli Cruz, SDB
T
he Rector Major’s Strenna “Moved by Hope” is moving enough for further commentary. And so this article simply strikes snippets of the Strenna and the experiences of Don Bosco as a man moved by hope... a man whose access to the future was the hope that – as assured to him in his dream at nine – “in due time you will understand.” It was on the second day of the celebrations for the consecration of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Rome in 1887, towards the end of his life, when Don Bosco duly understood everything after “62 years of hardships, sacrifices, and struggles have passed by.”
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DON BOSCO AS MYSTIC OF THE SPIRIT: “Amidst life’s toughest challenges, it takes
great faith in God to go through.” “This harsh reality of pain and sickness the world is going through today seems to drive people more to scandal and protest than to faith; to doubt rather than to trusting abandonment. But just the same, faced with this human cry or along with it there is always, for us believers, God.” (Strenna 2021, no. 3)
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St. John Bosco Today | January-March 2021
“Gone is the time for the belief that we can do everything with our own resources, on our own, like ‘giants of vanity’ for whom nothing is impossible... The others are ‘me’ declined as ‘we,’ much more dependent on the richness of humanity in its values of beauty and shared life.”(Strenna 2021, no. 5)
