Daily Compass Annual Celebration Day: Persevering in the faith

‘Perseverance is not repetition, rather it is renewing the encounter with Christ every day.’ This statement, made last Saturday at the Daily Compass Annual Celebration Day by Mother Monica Della Volpe, a Cistercian of the Strict Observance, gives the reason not only to this year’s event but for every annual Daily Compass appointment.

This is, moreover, the reason for the great success of these Days, and once again for last Saturdays’ with the theme of ‘Persevere in the faith’: not the obstinate repetition of a discourse or a judgement, however right, changing only the interpreters, but the ever new encounter with people who witness with their lives what it means to proclaim Christ in the most diverse circumstances: whether one lives in a monastery, like Mother Monica in the Trappist monastery of Valserena, who pointed out to us the need to rediscover the soul; or whether one is on the front line in front of abortion clinics offering help to women who seem to have no alternative to suppressing their unborn child, like Isabel Vaughan Spruce.

We have repeatedly reported on Isabel in these columns about her vicissitudes in England: about her two arrests for praying silently, alone, in front of an abortion clinic, her court trials and the compensation she received for inappropriate police behaviour. But in Palazzolo sull'Oglio, on Saturday, we learnt above all about the origin and meaning of her pro-life militancy: her Catholic faith, received from her father, who opened his home to the mentally ill after the nearby psychiatric clinic where they lived was closed down. A faith that led her to recognise in abortion clinics the Golgotha of today, where Christ is still crucified, and which therefore demands of us the same attitude as Mary: a prayerful presence at the foot of the Cross.

We met Luca Di Tolve, who bears imprinted in his flesh the marks of an ideology that wants to destroy man by erasing his sexual identity; but who bears witness to how God's Grace, through His Mother Mary, can heal those wounds and make him an instrument for the salvation of other men and women who have stumbled into the same web of perdition.

Perseverance is also severely tested within the Church: Monsignor Nicola Bux explained how in his morning meditation, which the Daily Compass published in full yesterday, but which we also experienced through the words of Luis Badilla, an exceptional Vatican observer. He arrived in Italy in 1973, an exile from Chile after General Augusto Pinochet's coup d'état. He worked for 40 years at Vatican Radio and then created Il Sismografo, an online press review in four languages, which for 17 years until last December offered an unparalleled overview of everything that lives in the Church. Il Sismografo has been a fundamental tool for journalists of every field, but also for all those interested in the Church and the Holy See, reaching an incredible average of 400,000 visitors a day. And in the fervour of Badilla's words we saw all the passion and love for the Church, one and catholic, even within the travail, confusion and division that reign within it today.

And of course we could not miss the celebration of the first year of the Monthly Bussola apologetic magazine, a publication started precisely as an adventure is our humble response to the dry desert caused by years and years of failure to teach the contents of faith and the debasement of reason. With the Monthly Bussola, which runs alongside the Hour of Doctrine, the online catechism lessons we publish every Sunday, we have relaunched the apologetic training that, as Fr Marco Begato explained to us, is in the DNA of Christians. Not well-crafted propaganda to make the Church product more appealing, but the re-proposal of the reasons for our hope, a need that has been a constant throughout the two thousand years of the Church even if it has taken different forms in different periods of history.

And finally, we also saw perseverance in faith in Sister Rosalina Ravasio who, as hostess (‘What hostess, I am the scullery maid’ she replied), wished to bless our work as journalists, called to recognise the presence of Christ in the folds of the news and to make it recognisable to all those who follow us. Sister Rosalina, as you know, is in fact the founder of the Shalom Community, for recovery from addiction, which has been the home of the Daily Compass Day for seven years now.

There is one final point that is close to our hearts: it was a wonderful day and full of testimonies that moved us and made us reflect, but it cannot simply be a pleasant interlude. What we saw and experienced demands that we live each day of our lives in perseverance, that is, as we said at the beginning, with the desire to renew our encounter with Christ every day, entrusting ourselves to Mary, in fidelity to the Church. The work of the Daily Compass also serves this purpose, it has this as its ultimate horizon judging the daily news; otherwise it would be just another news website among others, perhaps with ideas that are a little different and against the tide, but essentially useless.