My path of faith and study at APRA (by G. Valsecchi)
“I believe that the main purpose of my life is to express God in every word and every feeling I have.”
My university journey began at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross with a Bachelor’s degree in Religious Sciences, which culminated in the publication of a book entitled ‘Knowledge and Mystical Experience of St. Thomas Aquinas. The Hagiographic Narration of William of Tocco’. This book was intended to be a tribute to the Angelic Doctor, whose jubilees of birth (Roccasecca 1225), death (Fossanova 1274) and canonization (1323) are being commemorated in these years 2023-2025. While there are numerous texts that praise the intellectual dimension of the friar of Aquino, my contribution aimed to recognize the solid foundations of his Christian life and his fidelity to the specific vocation of priest and religious of the Order of Preachers, which have channeled his mystical life. In a panorama rich in visions, alienations of the senses and other extraordinary phenomena, Thomas’ love for the expression ‘Mysterium Trinitatis’ is placed, which underlies how the culmination of the knowledge of God lies in knowing his unknowability: the more He communicates his intimate life, the more we grasp Him as a mystery. This triggers a desire for re-velation, founded on that act of love with which man was created capax Dei, in the image and likeness of his Creator.
The consideration of the imago Dei is also moving my interest in the Licentiate degree program at our Athenaeum, with a thesis that proposes to treat the intimacy of the couple as an art that the spouses exercise starting from the image and likeness of God, which finding its culmination in the sacrament of marriage flourishes according to physical, spiritual and social fecundity. The echo of the Genesis principle resonates in man the truth about human sexuality, a reflection of the eternal communion of the Trinity. From what has been written, there follows a total rejection of a deterministic and distorted vision of the concept of matrimonial vocation, according to which from eternity one person is destined for another as the half of the apple to be met to be complete or chosen by Cupid with the simple shooting of an arrow. This conception does not do justice to the human person, who is instead called in his individual completeness, with the faculties that are proper to him, to choose another person as a companion on the journey. It is then moving to recognize the singularity of the sacrament of marriage: if the other sacraments delineate salvific events that are grafted onto human history, this is an event of human history that becomes a salvific event. Hence the intention to convey the beauty of marriage also by using the Theology of the Body, which in his pontificate St. John Paul II intended to make known, loved and lived with awareness by the people of God. He writes in the letter Gratissimam Sane:
“It is not possible to understand the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ, as a sign of the covenant of man with God in Christ, as a universal sacrament of salvation, without referring to the ‘great mystery’, linked to the creation of man male and female and to the vocation of both to conjugal love, to fatherhood and to motherhood. There is no ‘great mystery’, which is the Church and humanity in Christ, without the ‘great mystery’ expressed in being ‘one flesh’ (cf. Gen 2:24; Eph 5:31-32), that is, in the reality of marriage and family.”
My university experience is confronted with the teaching of Catholic Religion at the Archiepiscopal College of Lecco, where I am entrusted with the primary school and the lower and upper secondary school. In the work environment I am faced with a challenge that conceals a wealth of teaching: striving to adapt academic language allows me to reformulate and make accessible fundamental contents for personal existence, continually returning to make the heart strings vibrate. Referring in particular to the students of the Scientific High School, I recognize that in order to start a reflection that challenges them, it is essential to narrate my own experience. Sharing with them the interest in the theme of intimacy of the couple, which is reached through the pedagogy that one’s own body teaches, I find it precious to transmit the taste of having offered one’s life. Far from limiting myself to transmitting mere notions of anatomy or physiology or even moral principles that seem far from their daily lives, every morning I hope to transmit the possibility of a joyful journey, where one discovers that giving oneself for someone carries within it the taste of life.
[1] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, 1,2.
[2] John Paul II, Letter to Families Gratissimam Sane, n. 19, 2/2/1994, in AAS 86 (1994), 911