It is not possible to begin this reflection without alluding to Don Bosco’s dream, known as the ‘Nine Years’ Dream’, which encompasses the general theme of this congress and which is an inspiring icon of the identity and mission of the entire Charismatic Family for him. founded. It is particularly a programmatic synthesis of the Salesian educational method: the ‘Preventive System’, which becomes a pedagogical method and, in turn, spirituality, as it is something more than a technique, it is a lifestyle. Therefore, Piera Cavaglià (FMA) will say that:
“The preventive system is life, an experience in which [the educator] finds himself immersed, a style of relationships, educational motherhood, in the logic of a commitment coated with affection and loving care […] Its objective is to guide people towards the quality of a committed Christian life and. as such, open to social solidarity, according to Don Bosco’s classic formula: ‘Good Christians and honest citizens’”. 109
Don Bosco ‘learns’ this method and preventive spirituality, that is, he makes it his own, by entering the school of Mary, the Mother and Teacher that the Lord Jesus gave him at the beginning of his journey. There are many charismatic sources that highlight the Marian inspiration of the ‘Preventive System’. 110 In several books, both on Mariology and on Marian spirituality, even non-Salesian ones, the figure of Don Bosco is indicated as a ‘mariaform life’, 111 in other words ‘a life guided by María’. 112 The dream itself, known as ‘the dream of nine years’, in reality is a set of successive dreams and visions that unified his entire life around the Master, who leads to the merciful and operative love of Christ. This is how Don Bosco himself perceived it at the end of 1887 during the celebration of the Eucharist on the occasion of the consecration of the Temple of the Sacred Heart in Rome 113. Dream that became very frequent at the beginning of his life, at the age of nine or ten; at sixteen, twenty-one and twenty-two 114; just as in the years prior to the founding of the Salesian Congregation, when it was twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-three and forty-one 115, becoming increasingly sporadic 116 but in turn acquiring a breadth of perspectives, as is the case of the missionary dream of April 10, 1887. 117 Fr. Aldo Giraldo states that Don Bosco found in Mary everything that his young spirit desired and needed to grow: a source of life, an insurmountable model and the victorious strength of Christ 118, which led him to gain the friendship of the neediest and neediest young people. and to put himself at their head to guide them to Christ, the source of all beauty, truth and goodness, through the pedagogy of the heart; the one that only a mother knows how to inspire. Therefore, the Salesian educational style cannot not be Marian, because it is the inspirer of the methodology and spirituality that supports it. The Salesian educator finds in it “the concrete synthesis of the different components and the vital source of its dynamism and its fruitfulness”. 119
Education is a process that aims to ‘bring out’, in Latin educere, which means ‘bringing out’ what is most genuine and unique to each person, what lives in the depths of their being, their identity. Based on faith in Jesus Christ, we believe that what is most genuine and unique in each human being is their creaturely identity and their being ‘children in the Son’ (cf Eph 1:5; Gal 3:26). What dwells in the most intimate part of yourself is your divine filiation, your being created to be in communion with God and with all of his creation. We believe that outside of God there is no life or happiness that lasts. That is why Christian Education is always a participation in the long gestation of God’s children. Therefore, Christian Education is nothing more than participation in Mary’s educational mission which, according to Saint John, is closely linked to her ‘spiritual motherhood’ towards all humanity. In the text of John 19, 26-27 the Lord Jesus from the top of the cross says to his Mother: “behold your son” and to the beloved disciple “behold your mother”. This is not the time to dwell on the exegesis of this very important biblical pericope, but it is opportune to remember that these words are ‘Words of Revelation, both of the identity of this woman, and of the identity of Christ’s followers. In other words, it is Christ’s will that disciples of all times participate in his divine sonship, also participating in Marian sonship. By virtue of the Spirit of Christ, Mary is, so to speak, the maternal womb of the ‘membership’ of the Family of God. Not simply in a Platonic sense, but that, at the time of Christ’s death, it was in some way a personal transit route of the actio personalis ipsius Christi, through which He gave the Church its pneuma: operating force and mediation that ‘brings forth’ the identity of the ‘son in the Son’. 120
Ultimately, Mary, by the will of Christ, becomes the mother of the new humanity that is born through the merits of his redemptive blood. Therefore, as a mother, she not only has a role in the ‘generation’ of children’ (cf. Eph 4:24) in making the image of Christ emerge (cf. Gal 4:19), but in the entire vital and existential process of configuration with the deepest identity that every human being has imprinted on their being: the eternal Son of the Father. Mary, as ‘spiritual Mother’, or ‘Mother in the Holy Spirit’ becomes ‘educator’, a Teacher who collaborates with the Spirit of the Lord so that, according to the natural laws created by the Father, the image of Christ grows in each human being.
Don Bosco in the so-called ‘Nine Year Dream’ received a private revelation from the Lord in which God allowed him to be fully aware of this Marian identity as Mother and Teacher, and was invited to enter his school. In other words, not only to let Mary continue to educate him, configuring him with Christ, but to participate in her ‘ministry’ in the Church, that of motherhood/fatherhood that she educates, especially those children that the ‘world’ considers as lost. No one knows more than María that the Spirit of her Son heals hearts and leads them to sources of abundant life (cf. Jn 10:10).
As sons and daughters of Don Bosco, I invite you to do a small exercise: enter Mary’s school, to learn from her, from her trajectory, how to be Salesian educators today; how to educate today’s young people in Mary’s way. To do this, we ask ourselves: who is this woman? How do the gospels present it to us, how does the Church present it to us from the origins of Christianity? Since, deep down, the Gospels are the memory of the nascent Church, which is written for believers of all times. We ask ourselves: how does the Church remind her of the first hour? The person who answers these questions very clearly is the evangelist St. Luke, in the first part of his Gospel, which is inappropriately called the theology of childhood, as in reality it is theology of the cross, and should be called so: theologia crucis. We all know that Luke wrote the texts about Jesus’ childhood after narrating the death and resurrection of Christ, since Jesus’ origins are only learned at the end of his journey. These evangelical data place Mary within the Christological faith, not as its center, but intimately linked to it.
In the text of Luke 1, 26-38, 121 Mary is presented in a conventional way, but at the same time, it draws attention to the fact that there is a lack of conventional data. It can be seen that the narrator intentionally reduces the data, leaving the character in good condition for a narrative creation, as there is less conventional data, giving the author more possibility to highlight the elements that express his essence. For example, the text does not mention Mary’s paternal home, nor her clan of belonging; the city is not an identification data, but a situational data, “the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a city in Galilee called Nazareth”. This is a very broad presentation, with few details. The narrator offers us a photo in the foreground, as he has cut out its entire context. We would like Lucas to offer us more data and information about the future mother of God, but the narrator offers us the minimum but essential data, seeking to help the reader understand the authentic and deep identity of this young woman. We can infer that, according to St. Luke, a person’s identity, although conditioned by biological, cultural and social parameters, is the spiritual and transcendent dimension that has a ‘determining’ role in the construction of who that being really is. In the specific case of Mary of Nazareth, according to the evangelist, it is the process of faith, that is, the dynamism of welcoming and responding to God, which was configuring and giving consistency to the identity of this young woman, since for the sacred author the Mary’s main and characterizing trait is her active and passive faith, manifested particularly in the beatitude she received from her cousin Elizabeth (cf. Luke 1:45), from which the first title that the Church attributed to Mary was constructed: the believing woman.
“In the sixth month, the ἄγγελος [God’s messenger-emissary] was sent to a city in Galilee called Nazareth and entered where a παρθένον [young woman] was married to a man named Joseph, who was a descendant of David; and the virgin’s name was Maria” (vv. 26-27).
Mary is presented in human history with very precise chronological and geographic coordinates. The sacred author places it in a concrete time, ‘in the sixth month’ 122 and in a specific space, ‘a city in Galilee called Nazareth’. These are not only informative but theological data: God entered human history, he became like us, being born of a woman (cf. Gal 4:4). According to biblical data, Mary is not a demigod, a female deity. It’s about a girl who is in history just like we are now. Your world is our world, it is the reader’s world. From ‘let’s go’, Maria learned from the same messenger of God that to educere the deepest identity of a human person it is necessary to enter into their concrete history with its struggles and vicissitudes. The announcement that God makes to Mary through his messenger occurs in an unusual way for the religious expectations of the time. To begin with, this revelation of God does not take place in the temple, in the sanctuary, as happened with Zechariah, not even in Jerusalem, the holy city (cf. Luke 1, 8-11), not even in the region of Judea, a region of people well regarded at a religious level. God happens in a peripheral, semi-pagan area, where people live who are not well regarded, who do not enjoy a good reputation because they are in permanent contact with people of different minds and who worship other gods (cf. John 7:41.52). God offers good news in Galilee of the Gentiles, in the midst of a people who walk in darkness (cf. Matthew 4:12-16). God’s messenger was not sent to a large city, to a metropolis of that time, he was sent to a small people of Nazareth, who, before this event, had not been mentioned even once in the biblical texts (cf. John 1:46).
These verses also offer us two more facts about this woman, she is a young virgin who was married, her name was Mary. Along with their name, the author gives an account of that person’s personal and existential situation. The biblical texts we use usually translate the Greek term παρθένον, as Virgo, to which we usually give a restrictive interpretation, restricting its meaning to the sexual sphere. On the contrary, the author, when telling us that she is a παρθένον, is telling us that she is a young woman, a person who is experiencing the transition from childhood to adulthood. She is no longer a girl, but she is not yet a woman, she is not married in the strict sense, as she does not know a man; is a young woman who awaits her wedding day, although already committed to someone with whom she has not had marital relations. 123 It is a female who is at the beginning of adulthood. According to biblical tradition, a person’s name condenses their identity, as it summarizes that person’s past in order to a present, and announces their future in terms of a certain mission. The narrator introduces her with her name, later this name will be filled with meaning when pronounced by God’s messenger (v. 30) who, by greeting her by her name, gives her her identity-mission. It is not a question of a social or religious identification, it is rather the identification of an opportune time that opens in and with her, because with her free adherence she becomes the key person and protagonist of the change of epoch and the messianic newness that is on the march. Some artists, making reference to Mary’s symbolic identity, which reflects and shows the new time, the messianic time, paint her as the new and authentic burning bush, which burns with zeal for the house of God (cf. Ps 69:9), burn without being consumed, as will the fruit of your womb, Jesus (cf. Jn 2, 17). 124
In verses 28-30, St. Luke states that God’s messenger enters into dialogue with the human creature Mary of Nazareth, greeting her with the expression that in the ears of the time resonates with the messianic prophecies made to the Daughter of Zion, 125 invited to joy and to joy, because the Lord was on his way to come and free her from her oppressors. With this dialogue between the messenger and Mary, the sacred author does not intend for the reader to be informed about the fact, about how this happened. You want the reader of the Gospel to enter into the mystery that is being revealed. A first theological truth that we discover through this text is that God conceives each human person, represented in the figure of Mary, as an interlocutor. Despite being God, omnipotent and omniscient, he decided to meet an inexperienced and insignificant young woman due to her feminine condition, her age and her geographical situation, to whom the author does not even attribute a paternal house or a clan to which she belongs. To paraphrase, we would say that Maria in her time was ‘a nobody Maria’. Many of us, if we had been there, would have asked ourselves, who is this? where did she come from? Does anyone know who she is? what merit does she have for being chosen to be the mother of the Messiah? to have been the favored one of God (κεχαριτωμένη). What beauty was there for God to be enchanted by her and attract his favor upon her? Let us let ourselves be carried away by these questions, we will answer them little by little.
Zacarias is the first to be questioned by God’s messenger, in turn, María is presented as the first young woman who is questioned and enters into dialogue with God. Both are for Saint Luke a theological counterfigure. Zechariah, as a man, adult and priest, according to the humanistic and religious culture of that time, was more prepared to understand and enter the mysteries of God and, however, he did not understand them, he was not able to enter the mystery, until the task was fulfilled. that had been announced to him in the temple. While the young girl from Nazareth who was less prepared, either due to her young age and/or her feminine condition, to access sacred things, she enters into dialogue with the God of Israel, and with her availability enters into dynamism of the salvific mystery. Mary represents what is fragile, what is weak in the humanist culture of that time, while Zacharias represents the strongest, the most secure, the least vulnerable. But he who had everything to recognize and understand God remains silent, while Mary dialogues, questions, welcomes and sings the wonders that God does. What makes one remain silent and the ‘other’ sing? The process of faith, which does not consist of the process of intellectual understanding of God’s message, but of the willingness to trust, to believe that nothing is impossible for God, (v. 37), is openness to newness and the unprecedented because it knows that He He can act when he wants and how he wants (cf. John 3:8). Zacharias, feeling so sure of how God acts, as happens with so many adults and professionals of faith, could have fallen into the temptation of domesticating God and his project, losing the ability to recognize God in the newness and unprecedented power of an elderly wife. conceive a child.
On the one hand, we have to say that the very fact of saying that Mary is humanly a “Jane Doe”, ratifies the unconditional and free love of God, which does not depend on human merit. He loves us and is with human beings, because he wants to, because he loves faithfully and mercifully, not because of what we give him, but because of who we are in his eyes: much-loved daughters and sons. Love that was synthesized in chapter 2 of the book of Hosea and taken to its maximum expression on the Cross of Christ.
On the other hand, we can ask ourselves why her? Why wasn’t it another young woman, perhaps the daughter of a priest or high priest or from another relevant paternal house or from another more important city? Why her and not someone else? Trying to answer these logical and human questions, we can ask others such as: what attracts God’s favor? What is pleasing to God? We find the answer in the book of the prophet Isaiah 58, 6b-12, which will later be condensed into the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. According to Isaiah, the way of proceeding that pleases God is that of the just, who frees prisoners and those imprisoned unjustly, who gives freedom to slaves and those who are mistreated. He who puts an end to injustice, shares bread with the hungry, gives shelter to the poor and clothes the naked. According to the prophet, whoever lives this way will shine like the light of dawn, his wounds will be healed, God’s justice and protection will not abandon him, his body will have vigor and his garden will flourish like a meadow, laughter and joy will accompany him. We know that Mary was recognized by the Church as the woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and a crown of twelve stars on her head (Rev 12:1), therefore she lived like the righteous man, who will hastily have with her cousin Elizabeth, who is on the side of the small and humble (cf. Lc 1, 46-55) and who moves with total availability to do good and meet the needs of others (cf. Jn 2, 1-11). For this reason and much more, Mary is an exemplary image that educates with her life, she is a finished image of what we are called to be and an example of what we can become. In her, as in a Master, we see the ‘goal’ of the educational process reflected and the Master who shows us the way: ‘Do whatever He tells you’ (John 2:5).
From v. 28 it is clear that God is the one who gives identity to Mary, in a scene in which the protagonist is She and the statements are from the messenger, therefore, from God himself. What the messenger says, God says, and if it is God who says it, he deserves the utmost trust. Therefore, everything that others say about Mary only has value if it is related to what God says about her. This explains the young woman’s confusion at the messenger’s greeting, as she becomes aware of who the speaker is and, therefore, of the originality and density of the greeting she is receiving. This verse offers us another reading key when it comes to learning to be educators in the way of Mary, since She learned from the same messenger, that in the educational process the protagonist is God, it is his Spirit. Other words like those of the Salesian educator only have value if they are in function of what God wants to do with that person, they only have meaning if they are in consonance and in function with what God said. No educator can claim to be the protagonist of the educational process, but only a simple mediation of the Spirit of the Resurrected. To do this, it will be necessary to ‘keep in your own heart’, as Mary did (cf. Luke 2:19), so many things that happen in your life and in the lives of your students until the Lord allows you to see the path you should follow. Meanwhile, you are called to remain in the Word and in the pursuit of the Lord, like the wife in the Song of Songs.
In vv. 31-35, God’s messenger announces to Mary the mission that was concentrated in her name: you will conceive, give birth and call the name Jesus. She talks to the messenger, asks how all this will happen, showing her incapacity, I don’t know man (v. 34). He doesn’t doubt that God can do it, he just asks what that will be like, since the human conditions are not there for what is announced to happen. Since Mary is recognized by the Church as a correlative figure to Abraham, since it was said of him: “He believed against all hope”, and of her it was said: “Happy are you because you believed”; Contemplating Her in the biblical testimonies, we discover Her as a determined young woman, who internally questions herself about the meaning of the greeting, and questions God through her mediations, about how what she announces and promises will be accomplished. In it, the Church contemplates the believing dynamism of a young woman who puts all her human energies into understanding and making her own what God is proposing to her in concrete history, in a continuous exercise of believing reading of events, whether small or large. In v. 35, St. Luke shows that the Holy Spirit, symbolized in the image of the shadow that accompanies her, and the presence of God that is in her, makes Mary his permanent home, inhabiting her being as in a temple. It was this presence that stimulated in her womb all the biological processes necessary to carry out her mission: conceiving, giving birth to and naming the Son of God. This action of the Holy Spirit in the young woman from Nazareth was possible through her consent, as a unique and personal act of her human freedom. Mary, without understanding it at all, as the biblical texts attest, collaborated with the activity of the Holy Spirit, placing her entire existence at the service of the divine Person. As an active young woman committed to the reality of her people and her God, Mary, in the exercise of responsible freedom, offered her body and her feminine sensitivity in the form of human cooperation with God’s project. We can say that she gave with her life what the disciples said with their voice after the Easter experience, “I have neither gold nor silver, but I give you everything I have: in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, walk! ” (Acts 3:6). Mary remains in the Church as the perfect model of the ‘wise’ person. After pronouncing her ‘fiat’ through faith and having welcomed first in her heart and then in her flesh the Son of God, she began an educational process that enabled her to accompany her son to the Cross and all those who on the cross of Christ will join the family of God. 126
In verses 36-37 the sacred author offers two facts, one historical: “also your cousin Elizabeth”, and the other theological: “nothing is impossible with God”, with which he highlights Mary’s immersion in the faith of Israel. The latter is a very relevant phrase in the saving history of Israel, since this phrase is what God’s messenger said to Sarah in Gn 18:14. With this statement, he is not only telling her that nothing is difficult for God , is showing you a path: put yourself in line with your people. Place yourself in the faith of Abraham, in the faith that your parents passed through. We are used to reading hastily and interpreting that as God is all powerful, he will give birth to a child of a young woman who has not had sexual relations with any man, but the text conveys a deeper truth that does not exclude the latter. It is an invitation to enter into the dynamism of their patriarchs, in the origin of their people who began with God nothing is impossible (cf. Gn 18, 14) who gave birth to a son who was named Isaac, which means: God made me smile.
The response that Mary gives to God’s emissary in v. 38, Here is the servant of the Lord, apparently contradictory to the way the angel treats her, since he addresses the young woman from Nazareth with an address worthy of a great Lady: Hail! Nowadays we would say that it was a treatment worthy of the queen mother, since for the Jewish world the greeting that the messenger addressed to her is the greeting addressed to Gebira 127 which, in turn, is correlative to the way her relative Isabel addresses herself to Mary: “Where is it given to me that the mother of my Lord comes to me?” (v. 43).
Mary’s relevance is given by her acceptance of the Word of God, which was received to such an extent that in her womb he became flesh, as her son and Son of God. Maria’s response is one of adherence to the identity that the messenger indicated to her as her mission. Her availability to God has nothing to do with slave submission, but with free and loving adherence to the will of the God of her people. It is a response given not from personal strength, but from trust in the one who gave her this vocational gift, this identity: as mother of the Lord. For the Spanish theologian M. Navarro, the yes of the young woman from Nazareth was possible because between God and Mary there is a common speech: they both say the same because they have the same deep desire. God, from his eternity; Maria, in time. For the author, the fact that God and Mary have the same desire means that they have the same Spirit, whose origin and identity is divine, but which inhabits Mary’s you and makes it possible for both to pronounce the same Word: the Son in history, as both generated, one in humanity and the other in divinity. 128
The theologian De Lubac states that the texts about the search for the Bridegroom contained in the Song of Songs are better adapted to Mary, precisely because in her the perfection of search and desire is realized. Mary is the model of the young Church that seeks and contemplates God in everything she does and says, just as a passionate young woman full of vitality seeks her beloved 129. Therefore, the Salesian educator is a person who is in constant search of God and his will, which is why, as a wise man and woman, he is able to tune in to the Spirit and perceive its signs in history. Like Mary who foresees; rather sees, intuits the presence and will of God; before knowing and understanding, it is capable of pre-feeling, feeling before the natural senses perceive it. In love, Mary ‘knows’ before understanding; her maternal gaze looks and sees what is invisible to the eyes of others. It is the experience of her feminine capacity enhanced by the Ruah of God, which makes her capable of intuiting, anticipating and predicting the Kingdom that God wants to establish through her ‘yes’. Without knowing in any way how this will be possible, he acts by giving his consent. This is how the evangelist St. John presents her in the account of the Wedding at Cana, as the woman who foresees the hour of her Son. 130 By welcoming the Holy Spirit, Mary realizes theological hope in herself, in the fullest and most dense form. It becomes the ground for the fulfillment of the divine promise, a place in which and through which the tomorrow of Grace comes to set up its tent, making it the Ark of the new covenant. Salesian pedagogy is a pedagogy of the heart, as it springs from a heart that is passionate about God and that is in tune with that which lives in the heart of the young person to whom it is addressed. Salesian pedagogy is similar to a mother’s insides, which moves and moves until all her children are safe and sound in the Father’s house. The educator, like a hasty mother, does not imprison her children close to her, she allows them to be free and helps them to exercise their will so that, in the healthy use of their freedom, they know and undertake the challenging and exciting path to the parental home.
Mary’s ‘yes’, made absolutely personal and creaturely, which began the biological process by which God made him man, occurred due to the presence of the Holy Spirit, which some authors point out as desire in the proper sense, desire with capital letter, who by dwelling in Mary achieved unity between the Creator Father and the young woman from Nazareth, to make her the Theotokos, the Mother of God. The Spirit, by the will of the Father, in Mary’s Immaculate Conception anticipated upon her the effects of Christ’s redeeming grace, imprinting on her a desire for transcendence, which makes her capax Dei, capable of recognizing God in the unprecedented and responding to his salvific will. and self-communicative, in the same way as all those who, after Christ’s Easter, opened themselves to his Spirit, are empowered. 131 This presence of the Holy Spirit in Mary, from the beginning of her existence, did not make her response a less ‘personal’ and free; as if he had been ‘manipulated’ by God; On the contrary, it is God who once again places the necessary premises, ontologically speaking, so that the freedom of human beings exists and can enter into the dialogical game of grace. 132
The God who reveals himself and enters into dialogue with Mary has nothing to do with a ‘divinity’ that seeks the passivity of the creature but is a God, One and Triune, who creates the possibilities for an authentic salvific dialogue between the Creator and creature, which allows the latter to go beyond the factual determinism of history enclosed in itself. It is the God who reveals himself in history, creating a spiritual and personal being endowed with the power oboedientialis, that is, with the ability to receive what God wants to communicate to us. 133 God opens history, condensed in the young Mary of Nazareth, to horizons unfathomable for human beings; accomplishes it by dwelling in it (cf. v. 35), in such a way that it is only feasible for the omnipotent and Creator. Inhabitation that allows Mary to be fully who she is, a young woman, and respond as such; in turn, it allows God to remain God, the all Holy One. The anthropological principle, Gegen-satz, ‘only a self can be a thou to another’ remains in constant tension with the other principle, Grundsatz, ‘the self thanks to the other’. 134 Only he who ‘knows’ who he is, is in conditions to recognize others and open up to welcome them; Furthermore, only those who possess themselves are capable of giving themselves, of placing themselves totally in the hands of others without ceasing to be what they are, without losing their identity and autonomy, and being capable of self-determination in function of the good of the other. God is the only one who possesses himself in fullness, and can determine himself in function of the salvation of human beings without ceasing to be God. 135 Therefore, I conclude that it is through participation in what belongs to God that Mary becomes the young woman who becomes defines herself, 136 because she recognizes, I would say ‘intuits’ her deepest identity, and from owning herself she recognizes the Other completely, present in her and in her history. She welcomes Him with her youthful and feminine freedom, making it possible for the Spirit of the Father and the Son to make the fruit of her womb ‘Holy’ (cf. Luke 1:35). 137 And it is precisely participation in that same gift of the Holy Spirit that the young woman from Nazareth is capable of self-possession and self-determination in function of God and his people, pronouncing the human yes that activated the biological and theandric process of the Incarnation of the Son of God.
Mary’s yes was a realization of the fundamental act of her being, a consecration carried out by the Holy Spirit that remained intrinsically linked to her free self-determination. Her failure to fully understand what was happening or about to happen did not exclude the possibility that her unreflected and transcendent experience of God and herself was entirely oriented towards her ‘very unique’ relationship with the Son of God, and the from Him with the entire Trinity. Just remember his wonder-filled question: What will this be like? And his believing response: Let it be done to me according to your word (cf. Luke 1:34.38).
In short: Mary is the model that every human being, and particularly young people, need to have before them, not to copy her, but to be inspired by her way of living, contemplating in her what a human being can achieve. when he decides to enter into the dynamism of God. Until one lives for a cause, one cannot understand what the living and active presence of Mary means in the lives of so many saints, especially Don Bosco and M. Mazzarello. Mary is not a painting on the bedroom wall or an image in the Church, but a living presence, who supports those who ‘suffer’ for the causes of justice, peace and the search for a better life for all. Mary has to be seen and presented as a young woman, free and responsible for her own actions: her ‘yes’ and her collaboration in the History of salvation is the great sign of freedom and responsibility that shines through time; an eloquent sign for all who dream of a more human world, more of God and his Kingdom. Mary is not only a concrete expression of God’s closeness in the struggle for life, but also a model and concreteness of some decisive values for all believers, particularly for young people of yesterday and today. The world needs young people and contemplative educators, in the style of Mary, capable of questioning themselves and meditating on the direction in which humanity is heading, where God is and what God is trying to tell us in the events of this time; young people and educators capable of committing all their potential in the search and construction of the common good and social friendship (cf. FT nº2), a sustainable world that includes and does not exclude the weakest in the system. Young people committed to the fight against evil and its manifestations; bold and generous people who are not afraid of the cross, because they know that God is bigger and stronger than death.
109 P. CAVAGLIÀ, The preventive system in women’s education. Pedagogical experience of the Hijas of María Auxiliadora, Madrid, CCS 1999, 28.
110 Cfr C. COLLI, Ispirazione mariana del Sistema Preventivo, Rome, LAS 1980.
111 Cf S. DE FIORES, Maria sintesi di valori. Storia culturale della mariologia, Milano, San Paolo 2005, 254-256.
112 Cfr COLLI, Ispirazione mariana del Sistema Preventivo, 5-8.
113 See MB XVIII, pp. 340-341.
114 See MB I, pp. 123-126; 244;305;382;424-426.
115 See MB II, pp. 243-245;298-300;342;406; MB III, pp. 32-36.
116 See MB XIII, pp. 536; MB XIV p. 608; MB XVIII pp.73-74.
117 See MB XVIII pp.73-74.
118 A. GIRAUDO, Gli appunti di predicazione mariana di don Bosco. Edizione critica, in «Ricerche storiche salesiane» 72/1 (2019) 120-121.
119 E. VIGANÒ, Maria rinnova la Famiglia Salesiana di Don Bosco, in «Atti del Consiglio Superiore» 59 (1978) 289, 30.
120 Cf A. SILVA CASTILLO, María y el Espíritu Santo, Montevideo, LEA 2021, 48.
121 Cf A. VALENTINI, Maria secondo le Scritture. Figlia di Sion e Madre del Signore, Bologna, EDB 2007, 89-105.
122 This event took place in the sixth month of John the Baptist’s conception, data offered by the synchronous reading of the same Gospel of Luke, which in v. 45 states that the relative Isabel is in the sixth month of her pregnancy, and in vv. 8-10 placed the Baptist’s conception in the times when Zacharias officiated as a priest in the temple of Jerusalem, more specifically when he took the shift to his group of priests, and specifically to him to offer incense in the sancta santorum of the temple, as it corresponded to a week for each group of priests, see 1st Cro 24,19¸2nd Cro 23,8.
123 This Greek expression used in the gospel of Luke and Matthew (Matthew 1,23) requires the Hebrew expression Almah (Is 7,14b) which designates a maiden, that is, a girl who, depending on the cultural and religious custom of the time, entered into a marriage commitment, although it has not yet been consummated. This is not in contradiction with the Catholic reflection on the perpetual Virginity of Mary, but adds an element more taken from Tradition and the Church’s Sensus fidei.
124 A. SILVA CASTILLO, The face of Mary in the Circulars of Mother Yvonne Reungoat Superior General of the FMA 2008-2020, Rome, Instituto FMA 2020, 10.
125 Symbolic figure that represents the people chosen by God, whom the prophets announced the coming of the Messiah and called joy in the Lord, see Sof 3:11. 14-15; Isa 12.6; Zac 9.9.
126 Cf A. SERRA, Maria nell’educazione. Le coordination biblico-theologiche, in M. Dosio – M. Gannon – M.P. Manello (Eds.),, «Io ti darò la maestra…» Il coraggio di Educare alla scuola di Maria. Atti del Convegno Mariano Internazionale promosso dalla Pontificia Facoltà di Scienze dell’Educazione «Auxilium», 27-30 December 2004, Rome, LAS 2005.
127 Chosen by God to govern the nation. “Villagers in Israel would not fight; they held back until I, Deborah, arose, until I arose, a mother in Israel”. (Judges 5,7), cfr VALENTINI, Maria secondo le Scritture, 79-87.
128 Cf M. NAVARRO PUERTO, Maria, the woman. Psychological-biblical essay, Madrid, Publicaciones Claretianas 1987, 77.
129 Cf H. DE LUBAC, La Iglesia y la Virgen María, en Meditación sobre la Iglesia, Bilbao, Desclée De Brouwer 4 1964, 328.
130 Cf B. FORTE, María, woman icon of mystery. Essay on narrative symbolic mariology, Salamanca, Sígueme 1993, 271-273.
131 “Divine self-communication means that God can communicate himself to the non-divine, without ceasing to be infinite reality and absolute mystery, and without man ceasing to be a finite being, distinct from God” (K. RAHNER, Fundamental Course about faith. Introduction to the concept of Christianity, Barcelona Herder 1979, 151).
132 Cfr H. RAHNER, L’homo ludens, = Biblioteca di cultura religious 9, Brescia, Paideia 1969, 31-46.
133 Cfr K. RAHNER, La Trinità, = Biblioteca di Teologia Contemporanea 102, Brescia, Queriniana3 1998, 88-89.
134 Cfr W. PANNENBERG, Antropologia in prospettiva teologica, = Biblioteca diologista contemporanea 51, Brescia, Queriniana 1987, 205-211.
135 “Through [divine] self-communication what was said before about the presence of God as an absolute and essentially incomprehensible mystery is not suppressed or denied […] God continues to be God […] He who we waLuke towards and who makes it possible and sustains said action by itself. God continues to be the saint […]” (RAHNER, Fundamental Course on faith, 151).
136 E. JOHNSON, Vera nostra sorella. Una theologia di Maria in the comunione dei santi, = Giornale di Teologia, 313), Brescia, Queriniana 2005, 77.
137 Cfr Y. CONGAR, Credo nello Spirito Santo, = Biblioteca di Teologia Contemporanea 98, Brescia, Queriniana 21998, 606.
