My dear parishioners,
    Greetings and peace of our Lord be with you! 
    Happy Feast of the Birth of Our Blessed Mother! On this feast day, I’d like to write to you on birth and love.

    The Second Vatican Council used very strong words to delineate the task of two spouses faced with the choice of giving life to a child: “They should realize that they are thereby cooperating with the love of God the Creator and are, in a certain sense, its interpreters” (GS 50).

    Parents cooperate with God, the Creator. It is as if God, having created the heavens and the earth and, man and woman, had said to them: “Now you do it, I entrust you with the task of continuing creation, I will be by your side, I will be with you, I will not leave you alone.” Parents are said to “procreate,” recalling precisely what God did when creating man and woman.

    The spouses’ cooperation with the Creator does not end here because there is much more. They are “co-operators of God’s love” says the Council calling spouses to give that child the “spark of God’s love.” These are the words of Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia (172). The Pope links those natural gestures of love that two parents make to the very love of God.

    “This love is shown to them through the gift of their personal name, the sharing of language, looks of love and the brightness of a smile” (AL 172). The name tells an identity, it tells the uniqueness of that baby; the language inserts it into a history and a culture; the glances and smiles, accompanied by the warmth of contact, are and first cell words of the language of love and feeling loved.

    All this the Pope calls a ‘spark of God’s love’ because that is how God acts. The image of the spark is very beautiful. Christian initiation, the Pope seems to affirm, does not begin when two parents ask for baptism for that child, nor with the catechesis that introduces him or her to the Christian life, but it begins from the womb and then with that grammar of love that is natural in the gestures of every father and mother. Without knowing it, without being fully aware of it, father and mother cooperate in God’s love, they interpret - that is, they translate - his love with the gestures of their love. Without being fully aware of it, they light a spark that could become a fire that burns if, in the journey to come, someone will help that child to read in the love he has received the traces of a greater love, the love of the Father from whom all fatherhood in heaven and on earth comes, and the love of a mother God who speaks and works through that father and that mother, instruments of his love.

    Happy feast of our Blessed Mother.
    God bless you.
    In Mary Help of Christians,
    I remain,
    Fr. Franco Pinto sdb