One Month to the Canonization of Blessed Elena Guerra
On October 20, World Mission Day, Blessed Elena Guerra will be a saint
“Go and invite everyone to the banquet.” This is the theme Pope Francis has proposed for the upcoming World Mission Day 2024, which will be celebrated on Oct. 20. The slogan is taken from chapter 22 of Matthew’s Gospel, which describes the parable of the wedding banquet. In verse 9, the King, the initiator of the invitation, after receiving the refusal of many, says to the servants, “Go now to the crossroads of the roads and everyone you find, call them to the wedding.”
For Pope Francis, the Church’s mission is “a tireless going out to all humanity to invite them to encounter and commune with God.” The mission proposes to all starting with the poor, the offer of salvation, without excluding anyone. These are the ultimate sources and reasons for the Church’s missionary work.
By a happy coincidence on Mission Day October 20, Blessed Elena Guerra, foundress of the Oblates of the Holy Spirit, will be canonized.
The missionary spirit of Blessed Elena Guerra
The Saint from Lucca, without ever leaving the cloister of the City walls felt a strong urge to mission and to the mission she educated the sisters of her community. In her rulebook she would ask them to “Cultivate and spread devotion to the Holy Spirit […] and the propagation of the faith throughout the world.” She felt – as Pope Francis says in the missionary message – to “go beyond every boundary, to go out again and again without getting tired or losing heart in the face of difficulties and obstacles.”
Blessed Elena‘s goal was to invite everyone to enter the permanent and universal Cenacle, to invoke the gift of the Holy Spirit, so that the world may be renewed and love and peace may flourish in the earth. Elena Guerra, who on many occasions became a “beggar” to support the work of the missions, would also testify in her last testamentary will to her love for evangelization: “I pray to my good daughters, who are the Sisters of St. Zita, that when I am dead they will have a Mass celebrated for my soul, just one, and that they will send to the Most Holy Work of the Propagation of the Faith, that money which they would have had to spend on my funeral.”
Evangelizing to the Holy Spirit
Elena Guerra perceives evangelization as an emanation of the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit who suggests, prompts and sustains witnessing to the Gospel. Elena Guerra calls for sensitizing people to pay attention to and pray to the Holy Spirit. The missionary work she calls for has nothing outward, but to help souls make an inner journey, in the awareness that God in His Spirit, dwells in “interiore homine” and that it is necessary to listen to Him, cultivating silence: “Souls no longer know how to be silent in order to listen to God.”
In addition to calling for silence Elena teaches careful meditation “because meditation well done,” she writes, “is like a lace that binds the soul to God. In his Message for World Mission Day, Pope Francis stresses, “While the world proposes the various ‘banquets’ of consumerism, selfish well-being, accumulation, and individualism, the Gospel calls everyone to the divine banquet where joy, sharing, justice, and fraternity reign, in communion with God and with others.”
The Pope also asks everyone to intensify “above all participation in Mass and prayer for the Church’s evangelizing mission. […] And so daily prayer, and particularly the Eucharist, make us pilgrims-missionaries of hope, on our way toward endless life in God, toward the nuptial banquet prepared by God for all his children.” Values and aspects that Mother Elena also recalls in her many letters and writings.
Concern for the missions
In addition to prayer she herself became a questor on the streets of Lucca to support the works of missionaries. In addition to the Lucchese Monsignor Pagnucci and Father Menconi she sent financial subsidies to the Sodality of St. Peter Claver and the Foundress Maira Teresa Ledochowsk; to the missions of Benghazi and Derna; to the Institute of Foreign Missions in Milan; and to Propaganda Fide.
As she herself wrote, this attention and love for the missions, she had learned in her family, from her mother Faustina punctual and passionate reader of the Annals of the Propaganda of the Faith. Elena grew up in this atmosphere of prayer and solidarity for the missions of the Church in the various parts of the world.
Let us prepare for canonization
In preparation for her canonization, it will be good to deepen these mission-related themes in order to grasp the urgency of witnessing to the Gospel to every person, so that all may experience the joy of participating in the Lord’s feast, in his wedding banquet and, pray to the Holy Spirit, “the motor of all apostolic zeal,” as the Blessed defined him, to sustain our witness to Jesus.
The early Christians,” the Pope recalled, ”felt the urgency of proclaiming the Gospel. So today, too,” Francis stressed, ‘it is important to keep this perspective in mind, because it helps us evangelize with the joy of those who know that ’the Lord is near’ and with the hope of those who are stretched toward the goal, when we will all be with Christ at his wedding feast in the Kingdom of God.”
In less than a month, we will all be in St. Peter’s Square with Francis to celebrate World Mission Day and rejoice in the canonization of Sister Elena Guerra “Apostle of the Holy Spirit.”