Presence and prayer

Dear friends and guests,
As we have been saying to so many of you who have shown your concern for us through various means of communication, life in Bose for now continues without problems related to health, in the solitude that is part of our monastic vocation, but that feels deeply the forced absence of another dimension of our vocation: hospitality.

We wish to tell you that we feel close to you and pray daily for you, in an intercession that embraces first of all those who are more affected, physically or in their affections, by this epidemic. We think of all those — relatives and friends, but not only — who are on the front lines of caring for and assisting the sick: doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel, who, besides a taxing professional burden, have also to support emotionally and spiritually persons who are deprived of seeing those closest to them and who die in solitude. And this the medical workers do at the risk of their own health and even of their own life. We think of the sick who feel the life within them growing feebler, without the presence and comfort of their loved ones at the moment of their passing away. We think of the bishops, “fathers of the poor” (patres pauperum), who are faced with an absolutely new situation and who exercise their pastoral responsibility amidst great difficulties. We think of the many priests who are carrying out their ministry daily and fraternally by being close to the poor and the sick, we think of the religious, of our brothers and sisters in the faith, of the volunteers who pass day and night in alleviating the sufferings of the most fragile: the elderly, the poor, those who have lost their work, the homeless, prisoners, immigrants, and all those who do not even have a home where they can take refuge. These poor and sick are the body of Christ, and service rendered to them is an existential celebration pleasing to God. We think of all those men and women who are continuing and intensifying their work in essential services; their exertions makes it possible to limit the damage of this scourge and to prepare the way for a humane and brotherly rebirth, even before the economic.

In our liturgy of the hours, which we continue with some precautions, in obedience to the dispositions of the government and of the Italian Bishops’ Conference for protecting the health of all, and in our personal prayers we carry your faces and your sufferings, with trust that the Lord will give to all the strength to live through this trial.

In our common journey towards Easter and the Resurrection, we remain with fraternal affection,

Br Luciano, prior, with the brothers and sisters of Bose