By Archbishop Thomas Wenski - The Archdiocese of Miami
As Catholics we often make pilgrimages, and often times those pilgrimages take us to places where saints are buried where we honor their memories, seek their prayers, and where we recommit ourselves to the imitation of Christ following the example these saints have left us.Today, this has been reversed � we haven�t gone on pilgrimage, but Saint John Bosco has! Today, the only Saint who has been given the title �the father and teacher of youth� visits us. We honor his relics � the hand which in life he used to bless countless numbers of people, especially the poor and abandoned children he befriended; in doing so, we ask that God bless us, that he give us some of that same spirit which inspired John Bosco to love those whom others considered unlovable. His mission was the poor, marginalized and abandoned youth � to the throwaway kids of his time. This mission continues all through the world through the work of the Salesians � priests, brothers, sisters and lay collaborators. And, even if we are not Salesians, we also pray that Don Bosco inspired us with the Salesian spirit to be more committed to the young people of our time, especially those who because of poverty, the breakup of their families or the lack of immigration status risk becoming �throwaway kids� of today.
The gospel today � the parable of Lazarus and the nameless rich man � is particularly instructive. Lazarus dies ignored by the rich man. You might say that even though Lazarus slept on his doorstep, the rich man didn�t even see him. And often times, we suffer from the same spiritual myopia � the poor kid, the troubled youth, the homeless or runaway teen often live next door to us, if they don�t live at our doorstep, yet we don�t see them. Here in South Florida, we have young people being trafficked for sexual exploitation � and we don�t see them. Here in Florida and the throughout the United States, we have thousands of young people who have grown up in this country without immigration papers and we can�t get our representatives and senators in Congress to pass the Dream Act. How often do we let the poverty that surrounds us become invisible?
Don Bosco saw them � and he reached out to them and befriended them. They say that he often had dreams that helped him to discern where God was calling him. As a child, he dreamt that someone who seemed like an angel told him: �You will have to win these friends of your not with blows but with gentleness and kindness. So begin to show them that sin is ugly and virtue beautiful.�
This was the beginning of what he called his �preventive system� of education � which emphasized reason, religion, and kindness, a system based not on punishment but on love.
As Pope Benedict told young people a few years ago in the run-up to a celebration of World Youth Day, �Love is the only force capable of changing the heart of the human person and of all humanity by making fruitful the relations between men and women, between rich and poor, between cultures and civilizations�.
Don Bosco knew this and he lived this. Not only did he love those kids, those kids knew that he loved them.
The lives of the saints � like the life of Don Bosco � should be for each of us not merely some pious stories that we recall just to make us feel good; the lives of the Saints should be a daily challenge for each of us, a challenge to our complacency, a challenge to the easy compromises we make to the demands of Christian living, a challenge to the spiritual myopia that prevents us from seeing the Lazarus at our doorstep.
Let me end by quoting from a message given by Pope John Paul II a few years before he died.
��How can we exclude anyone from our care? Rather we must recognize Christ in the poorest and the most marginalized, those whom the Eucharist � which is communion is the Body and Blood of Christ given up for us � commits us to serve. As the parable of the rich man, who will remain forever without a name, and the poor man called Lazarus clearly shows, �in the stark contrast between the insensitive rich man and the poor in need of everything, God is on the latter�s side�. We too must be on this same side.�
May the prayerful intercession of St. John Bosco put us also on Lazarus� side, on God�s side.
