Arise from earth's bonds

 All that depresses you, all that you fear, is really powerless to
harm you. These things are but phantoms. So arise from earth's bonds,
from depression, distrust, fear, and all that hinders your new life.
Arise to beauty, joy, peace, and work inspired by love. Rise from
death to life. You do not even need to fear death. When all past sins
are forgiven you live and love and work with God. Let nothing hinder
your new life. Seek to know more and more of that new way of living.

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12 March – St Luigi Orione FDP

 “The Advocate of the Poor and of Orphans” Priest, Preacher,
Confessor, Writer, Apostle of Charity, Apostle of Eucharistic
Adoration, Marian Devotee and Founder of Sons of Divine Providence Congregation, the Congregation of the Little Missionary Sisters of
Charity, Blind Sisters, Adorers of the Blessed Sacrament,
Contemplative Sisters of Jesus Crucified.

Born as Aloysius Giovanni Orione on 23 June 1872 at Pontecurone,
Allessandria, Italy and died on 12 March 1940 at San Remo,
Imperia, Italy from heart disease.
Patronages – the Sons of Divine Providence, the Congregation of the
Little Missionary Sisters of Charity, Blind Sisters, Adorers of the
Blessed Sacrament,  Contemplative Sisters of Jesus Crucified, the
various related Lay apostolates, Tortona and Pontecurone. His body is Incorrupt.

Luigi Orione was born in Pontecurone, diocese of Tortona, on 23 June
1872. At 13 years of age he entered the Franciscan Friary of Voghera
(Pavia) but he left after one year owing to poor health. From 1886 to
1889 he was a pupil of Saint John Bosco at the Valdocco Oratory (Youth
Centre) in Turin.

On 16 October 1889, he joined the diocesan seminary of Tortona. As a
young seminarian he devoted himself to the care of others by becoming
a member of both the San Marziano Society for Mutual Help and the
Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. On 3 July 1892 he opened the first
Oratory in Tortona to provide for the Christian training of boys. The
following year, on 15 October 1893, Luigi Orione, then a seminarian of
21, started a boarding school for poor boys, in the Saint Bernardine
estate.

On 13 April 1895, Luigi Orione was ordained priest and, on that
occasion, the Bishop gave the clerical habit to six pupils of the
boarding school. Within a brief span of time, Don Orione opened new
houses at Mornico Losana (Pavia), Noto – in Sicily, Sanremo and Rome.

Around the young Founder, there grew up seminarians and priests who
made up the first core group of the Little Work of Divine Providence.
In 1899, he founded the branch of the Hermits of Divine Providence.
The Bishop of Tortona, Mgr Igino Bandi, by a Decree of 21 March 1903,
issued the canonical approval of the Sons of Divine Providence
(priests, lay brothers and hermits) – the male congregation of the
Little Work of Divine Providence. It aims to “co-operate to bring the
little ones, the poor and the people to the Church and to the Pope, by
means of the works of charity” and professes a fourth vow of special “faithfulness to the Pope”. In the first Constitutions of 1904, among
the aims of the new Congregation, there appears that of working to
“achieve the union of the separated Churches”.

Inspired by a profound love for the Church and for the salvation of
Souls, he was actively interested in the new problems of his time,
such as the freedom and unity of the Church, the Roman question,
modernism, socialism and the Christian evangelisation of industrial
workers.

He rushed to assist the victims of the earthquakes of Reggio and
Messina (1908) and the Marsica region (1915). By appointment of Saint
Pius X, he was made Vicar General of the diocese of Messina for three
years.

On 29 June 1915, 20 years after the foundation of the Sons of Divine Providence, he added to the “single tree of many branches” the
Congregation of the Little Missionary Sisters of Charity who are
inspired by the same founding charism. Alongside them, he placed the
Blind Sisters, Adorers of the Blessed Sacrament. Later, the
Contemplative Sisters of Jesus Crucified were also founded.

For lay people he set up the associations of the “Ladies of Divine Providence”, the “Former Pupils”, and the “Friends”. More recently, the Don Orione Secular Institute and the Don Orione Lay People’s
Movement have come into being.

Following the First World War (1914-1918), the number of schools,
boarding houses, agricultural schools, charitable and welfare works
increased. Among his most enterprising and original works, he set up
the “Little Cottolengos”, for the care of the suffering and abandoned, which were usually built in the outskirts of large cities to act as
“new pulpits” from which to speak of Christ and of the Church – “true beacons of faith and of civilisation”.

Don Orione’s missionary zeal, which had already manifested itself in
1913 when he sent his first religious to Brazil, expanded subsequently
to Argentina and Uruguay (1921), Palestine (1921), Poland (1923),
Rhodes (1925), the USA (1934), England (1935), Albania (1936). From
1921-1922 and from 1934-1937, he himself made two missionary journeys
to Latin America – to Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, going as far as
Chile.

He enjoyed the personal respect of the Popes and the Holy See’s
Authorities, who entrusted him with confidential tasks of sorting out
problems and healing wounds both inside the Church as well as in the
relations with society. He was a preacher, a confessor and a tireless
organiser of pilgrimages, missions, processions, live cribs and other
popular manifestations and celebrations of the faith. He loved Our
Lady deeply and fostered devotion to her by every means possible and,
through the manual labour of his seminarians, built the shrines of Our
Lady of Safe Keeping in Tortona and Our Lady of Caravaggio at Fumo. In
the winter of 1940, with the intention of easing the heart and lung
complaints that were troubling him, he went to the Sanremo house, even
though, as he said, “it is not among the palm trees that I would like
to die,but among the poor who are Jesus Christ”. Only three days
later, on 12 March 1940, surrounded by the love of his confreres, Don
Orione died, while sighing “Jesus, Jesus! I am going”.

His body was found to be intact at its first exhumation in 1965. It
has been exposed to the veneration of the faithful in the shrine of
Our Lady of Safe Keeping in Tortona ever since 26 October 1980 – the
day in which St Pope John Paul II inscribed Don Luigi Orione in the
Book of the Blessed…. Vatican.va
St Luigi was Canonised on 16 May 2004 by St Pope John Paul II.

see
https://anastpaul.com/2018/03/12/


“Speaking of Prayer”

“Without Prayer nothing good is done.
God’s works are done with our hands joined
and on our knees.
Even when we run,
we must remain spiritually
kneeling before Him.”
--Saint Luigi Orione (1872-1940)


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Thought of St Luigi Orione FDP

“Men who have risked their lives for the sake of Our Lord Jesus
Christ” (Acts 15: 26). These words taken from the Acts of the Apostles
can be well-applied to St Luigi Orione, a man who gave himself
entirely for the cause of Christ and His Kingdom. Physical and moral sufferings, fatigue, difficulty, misunderstandings and all kinds of
obstacles characterised his apostolic ministry. “Christ, the Church, souls”, he would say, “are loved and served on the cross and through crucifixion or they are not loved and served at all” (Writings, 68,
81).

The heart of this strategy of charity was “without limits because it
was opened wide by the charity of Christ” (ibid., 102, 32). Passion
for Christ was the soul of his bold life, the interior thrust of an
altruism without reservations, the always fresh source of an
indestructible hope.
This humble son of a man who repaired roads proclaimed that “only
charity will save the world” and to everyone he would often say, that “perfect joy can only be found in perfect dedication of oneself to God
and man and to all mankind.”

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