A ROAR AT THE ANGELUS

Angelo Scelzo

At 12 o'clock sharp, the Pope began the Angelus prayer from the altar at Longchamp. At the first words of an announcement - "On Mission Sunday, 19 October 1997, in St Peter's Basilica in Rome, I will proclaim..." - a murmur and immediately afterwards a joyful roar ripped through the immense crowd of the nation of young people. The announcement concerned a saint, Theresa of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face who will be proclaimed Doctor of the Church.

Can one explode with enthusiasm for a saint? A strange people those of Paris who jump for joy as they would in a stadium and pray as they would in a church. Strange, however, only to the eyes and - even more so - to the inured (or musty?) thoughts of those who cast inattentive and dreary looks at the world of young people, and are incapable of going any deeper and perceiving at least the path where truth passes.

And so it happens that amazement makes us open wide our eyes: suddenly they open to a reality which our short-sightedness has hidden from us. Is it not perhaps a fact that in the civilization of images everything that appears is taken to be true?

Amazement: this is a feeling for which to some extent all of us, and not only the young, are in debt to John Paul II. No emotion is more intense than when something is revealed. It is like opening our eyes to the world again and seeing everything in a new light which warms and lights up the soul. They may be sudden bright patches, or last even only for an instant, but they become as bright as a life.

Here then, from personal experience, another overwhelming reality appears: yes, one can explode with enthusiasm for a saint. Saint Theresa seemed to be one of them, for the way in which she was received, for that feature of familiarity which led to the discovery of an uninterrupted and deep relationship: from soul to soul. And again another reality became visible, the most important of all: the world of young people is peopled with saints, with champions of the faith, who quite literally look down from above.

Young people know how and where to look for their models, they have circuits and antennas all of their own, sheltered from interferences and superimpositions that come from entirely different directions. So it happened that in Paris and precisely among the young people the limelight fell on a young woman, who belonged totally to God, and on the father of a family, Frédéric Ozanam, a lay saint in lay Paris. It is in this mingling of terms that the essence of the sequela Christi may be contained. And may be formed the model for a holiness that knows how to choose unusual roads in the world. Or, even, unpredictable ones.