Life seems to mirror theatre. The theatre is filled with pathologies: divorces, adultery, obsessions. Life is war, disasters, havoc and its protagonists, demagogues, thieves, fools… It’s like living in a theatre where inspiration has been substituted by folly. Sensitivity is needed and spiritual visibility in order to notice beyond the problems, the virtues that blossom in the darkness, the heroism that is consummated within four walls, the peaceful resistance of workers and others, scholars and teachers. Inner silence needs to be rediscovered in order to feel the flow of goodness, that current in which the grace of God flows through the goodness of men. And many have lost the notion of this and are ignorant of the experience.

When we draw from this fountain we notice how the image of the people of importance becomes blurred as they make the newscasters talk about them and fill our days with noise. The alternative would be to risk becoming impoverished and alone, helplessly facing the tragedy of this world on our own. This loneliness is lurking within each one of us, while our soul longs for solidarity with other souls; it needs its social life. The souls who love and offer support are the saints, not only the conspicuous ones on the altars and in the annals of the martyrs, but the humble, the countless humble people who suffer like us through these troubling times because of the harmful actions of others in every corner of the world. An illusion? No more than the illusion for which our thinking with a single leap passes beyond the terms this world has to offer.

We know the forces of the cosmos by their effects; we know the communion of saints by the fruits.

First of all by the energy it brings to our interior life, then by the assistance put forward in our exterior life. If so many individuals give what they do not need, to help the populations in need; if thousands of missionaries, nurses, volunteer servants of humankind run to assist peoples who have never been seen and do their utmost for them, even to the point of sacrificing their own lives; if many individuals suffer because of the sufferings of their neighbours, and spend their lives in producing advantage for the children of others, they do it because they are listening to the voice of love, which is the voice of God.

Through the spiritual gifts that flow from these gestures, a life among souls is created which is higher than political, territorial, linguistic and cast division: a communion that is at work within this fabric formed by the very substance of our souls, which came forth from the hands of God, a divine substance. We think of these lowly men and women, visiting hovels, medicating wounds, bringing bread to the hungry and hope to the troubled.

And at their backs are all those great and shining brothers and sisters who have preceded them in that giving and fatigue: the saints of the altars and those not written in the martyrologies, but who have been written in the Book of Life. And untiringly they continue to share in our experience, to support us in our patience and nourish us with strength.

Igino Giordani in: Le Feste, International Press Society, 1954.