L'Angolo di Girolamo Savonarola: Catholic homiletics in lean times

THERE ARE MANY HOMES AND FATHERS: THE PRODIGAL SON RETURNS TO THE ONLY HOME OF THE ONLY AND TRUE FATHER WHO IS THE SOURCE OF GRACE AND THE CENTER OF THE MYSTERY OF SALVATION

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The prodigal son returns to his father's house where waiting for him there is no sociological fashion, above all, no political correctness. Because God is always beyond any fashion, but above all human political correctness, because God is all without beginning and without end, why not end it is his love, for this eternal is his mercy, for this one is his home, not many; and the only home of the one Father remains in the base centuries, source of grace and the center of the mystery of salvation, culmination and perfect center of unity.

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Author
Ariel S. Levi di Gualdo.

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Jesus Christ be praised !

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The Prodigal Son, work of the sculptor Arturo Martini, 1927 [Rest Home Jona Ottolenghi, Acqui Terme]

In this Sunday glad the fourth week of Lent, the liturgy gives us one of the pages of the Holy Gospels of the best known: the Parable of the Prodigal Son [see text of the liturgy, WHO]. To claim to have legitimate paternal inheritance while the father was still alive was a terrible outrage in the Jewish world, but not only in it. It would be like saying: "I have no time to wait for you to pull the bucket, what to give me right away what belongs to me ". Here then it is that the father gives an initial and a final response: Start the answer is the action that fulfills the son's request, confirming him master of his freedom and owner of the goods which he claimed; the final answer is an act of pure love, which in itself contains a lesson based on the maturity and true mercy; the mercy that comes from God, who has no fear to welcome sinners and eating with them, with all due respect to the scribes and Pharisees of yesterday and today.

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The prodigal son of a far country and he squanders all loose living, until it starts to feel the pinch. "He would gladly have fed on the pods that were fed the pigs, "But no one gave him anything". Honestly it is hard to think that the boy did not have a chance to take for themselves the husks; and this should call our attention to the phrase: "No one gave him anything", referring to this young man who had lost everything. That is to say that no one fed him with love. He devoured his substance with many prostitutes, but he had not been devoured by love sincere and passionate about a single woman. So it is the lack of love generates in him a strong crisis, because most of the physical needs he suffers for human needs. The love which until earlier had received, It generates in him a feeling of fear, resulting in tender nostalgia.

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We do not know if the young man begins to understand that you have lived a life devoid of love, or to understand that out of love had lost their freedom to enter into the spiral of fear, hidden anguish and guilt. The man, which itself remains a mystery, He can not live without love; his life is senseless, if he meets the love from which it can come true freedom: "In love there is no fear, but perfect love casts out fear " [GV 4, 18-19].

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At that point the young man begins to question: "How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and I perish with hunger! I will wake up, I go to my father ... ". In these words prevails not have a sense of pain for the father abandoned, or for its inability to give and receive love; It seems to prevail rather the situation of hardship and extreme need that push him to go home, Perhaps even more folded on itself. For a selfish need is for a party and selfish need decides to return. All this marks his first start and, albeit moved by discomfort and need, and he moves back to his father. "While still far away his father saw him, he took pity on him, He ran to meet, and he fell on his neck and kissed him ". These five words we open their doors on the essence of true love. Seeing someone still far means that in our hearts we were waiting for him. Try compassion means that you do not think more to injury received, on the contrary it is willing to open their hearts and to think of the suffering, no matter what happened. Christian The eternal challenge is in fact to humanely accommodate those who have hurt us, raising the evil from the ground when it falls, instead of raging at him with that spirit of revenge that has nothing to do with justice, even with the right and sometimes necessary punishment to compete for the best good of the person, but above all for its recovery.

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running meeting to the other equivalent to removing it from any uncomfortable taking the first step that breaks the deadlock, This prerogative typical of the great, certainly not of little men who live by grudges, spite and revenge. Throw to a person's neck, in the Jewish culture of the time was not a gesture of circumstance but of deep warm love and extreme confidence.

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Here is the big brother who "became angry and refused to go», beginning to list their merits and demerits of the brother to his father, complaining they have not received anything from his father. "Son, all that is mine is yours ", He reassures the father for his due. In this way the parable stresses that reasoning so also the elder son, in a different but similar moves away to his left and out of the house as the youngest brother, showing a clear rejection of the action of grace. Therefore the Father, that "emotional" meeting was going on at the prodigal son, Now comes a new meeting to the eldest son, explaining both his love for children is free. No One, it has the right to be loved; from any page of the Gospel you get this kind of law, if anything, it yields a duty: to love. From the various steps and articulate the Gospel we can also derive how often love is tragically one-sided, He donated one side with divine power, not accepted and welcomed other human aridity. God loves us not because we deserve it, but because he is the source of love. God can not help but to love, It is not capable; we are, able to help but be loved.

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Like the prodigal son has lost the love of the Father away from him, the eldest son does not have the Father's right to love because it has not strayed. In this same mistake we fall we children of the Church, we priests first, that much of the People that God has entrusted to us to serve, We acquired no right to salvation, only a duty to respond much more and much better than others for what Christ has given us, through the mystery of his participation in the ministerial priesthood.

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How many times do we suffer the Father who can not help but love, feeling like the eldest son of an injustice parable his love and mercy toward his brother offender? How much it is, especially in these times of serious crisis through the Church, We run integral with heat to embrace all that is not Catholic, But at the same time showing little love, sometimes even open rebellion against our Church, turning his back to the brothers and sons of the living members of Christ, which it is the Church, his mystical body? And on this earth, the Christ, He has established only one Church, worth remembering from time to time, considering that soon we will proclaim in the profession of faith, the unity of the Church, not the multiplicity of churches [the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed]; reminds without the possibility of erroneous theological interpretations one of the main documents of Vatican Council II, the The light.

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This is also a way to meditate on the parable of the prodigal son who returns to the house of his father, where waiting for him there is no sociological fashion, above all, no political correctness. Because God is always beyond any fashion, but above all human political correctness, because God is all without beginning and without end, why not end it is his love, for this eternal is his mercy, for this one is his home, not many; and the only home of the one Father remains in the base centuries, source of grace and the center of the mystery of salvation, culmination and perfect center of unity.

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In the unity the Father created us, and awaits you with open arms, the perfect unity of his body which is the Church, the beloved prodigal son hidden inside each of us, so that his children can be "completely one that the world may know that you sent me and have loved them even as you loved me" [GV 17, 23].

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From the island of Patmos, 30 March 2019

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