Nagai Takashi was born in 1908 in the town of Matsue, in Shimane Prefecture, in the province of Izumo, the very place where the myths of Japan have their roots. It is also home to one of the most important Shinto shrines, Izumo Taisha, and so Nagai was raised in Shinto, but as a young man became an atheist and a convinced materialist. At the age of twenty, Takashi came to Nagasaki to study medicine; he found a rented room in the house of the Moriyama family and there met Midori (1918-1945). As a Christian girl, she gradually led him towards the Catholic faith, telling him about Father Paul Miki and his companions and their martyrdom. When Takashi Nagai was baptised on 9 June 1934, he had to decide on his new Christian name. He chose to be called Paul. He had been captivated by the story of the life of Paul Miki, one of the first Japanese Jesuit martyrs, who refused to trample on images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, even though doing so would have saved his life. Out of love for Christ he was crucified on a hill near Nagasaki, together with twenty-five other companions. That was in the year 1597. The first missionary to reappear in the country did not arrive until three centuries later, in 1865, and he could hardly believe his eyes: more than three thousand Christians had survived every persecution.
Midori's parents were direct descendants of Sonzaemon, one of the leaders of the hidden Christians (kakure Kirishitan) who, from the seventeenth century onward, kept the Catholic faith alive through seven generations, cut off from the rest of the world and from the universal Church, after all the missionaries had been killed or had fled the persecution. Midori's parents were what was called chōgata (keepers of the calendar), whose task was to remind the faithful of the dates of the feast days. The faithful would gather and pray in secret, in the forest. Since there were no longer any priests, the laity organised themselves so that some would baptise and others would teach the catechism.
When he moved into the Moriyama family's house, Takashi did not yet know this story. He studied hard, played basketball, wrote poetry, and believed he had done with religion for good. In March 1930 Nagai received a telegram from his father that read simply, "Come home." His mother was dying: "In her eyes I saw myself as one who denies the existence of the soul, but in that instant I instinctively felt that my mother's soul truly exists: it was parting from her body, but it would never cease to exist." After that he began to read Pascal's Pensées, which helped him enormously in his spiritual growth: "the heart has its reasons which reason does not know. Faith is a gift of God ... you must pray to receive it."
While serving on the Chinese front he received a gift from Midori of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and through it came to know the Catholic faith better. He always carried a Bible with him. He was especially moved by the Letter to the Romans: "For thy sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered." Rom 8:36
On Christmas Eve 1932Midori invited him to Midnight Mass at the cathedral in Nagasaki, the largest church in East Asia, with its twin towers sixty-four metres high. Built with the donations of fishermen and farmers, it was a symbol of the rebirth of the Catholic community after many trials. Takashi was deeply moved by the hymns and prayers of the faithful in the cathedral. "I felt the presence of Someone I did not yet know," he would recall later. The following night Midori fell ill and very nearly died. Takashi immediately diagnosed the illness, acute appendicitis, carried her in his arms to the hospital while snow fell outside, and she was quickly operated on and recovered. He had saved her life.
In August 1934,shortly after his baptism, still deeply in love, they married, both of them twenty-six years old. She understood their life together as a "privilege they would have the chance to share on a common path, wherever it led, and as a gift for everything that would happen along that path".
She was the president of a women's society, and he too became involved in the Society of St Vincent and committed himself to caring for the poor. He came into contact with the Polish Franciscan Maximilian Kolbe, who had opened a friary in Nagasaki. He diagnosed Kolbe with tuberculosis and treated him until his return to Europe, neither of them yet aware of the sacrifice each would make, of the death and the path to sainthood that awaited them both.
When war broke out, he went to the hospital to help the wounded who were arriving from the whole region. Paul Takashi specialised in radiology, and his exposure to X-rays resulted in leukaemia, which was diagnosed in June 1945. The prognosis was grim, he had little time left to live.
On 8 August he embraced his wife for the last time, before leaving for the night shift at the hospital to care for the sick. The next day, 9 August 1945, at 11:02 in the morning, an atomic bomb exploded at an altitude of 500 metres, directly above the cathedral, which would be utterly destroyed. Around 70,000 people died.
Severely injured, Paul Takashi found the strength to respond, helping as a doctor the victims of that hell on earth. Then came the hardest discovery of all. His beloved wife Midori was dead.Of her body, beneath the ruins of their house, he found only a few remains and her rosary. In his book Nagasaki no Kane (The Bells of Nagasaki), Nagai describes the scene after the bomb exploded in these words: "Hell, sheer hell. As in the world of the dead, there was no one left who could even hear a groan or a cry. There she was (Midori, dead), just as I had expected. A blackened shape amid the ashes! Oh, Midori! Nothing remained but a few bones on the spot where the kitchen had burned, a fragment of a rice bowl ... I came closer and touched those bones. They were still warm. I gathered them up. They were very light, and crumbled apart. Wrapped around them was nothing but her rosary."
He promised her that he would devote to others the little time he had left of his life on earth: "In memory of you, because of my love for you ... who led me to the love of Christ". He cried out: "Lord, you know how weak I am. I do not know whether I can accept all of this. My God, why so soon? My wife, my children! And all the work still left to finish! Ashes, nothing but ashes everywhere! A life reduced to ashes! I cannot bear such a worthless life. I must gain something immortal, hold fast to something that does not pass away. Even as time passes, as space vanishes and living things perish, I must live a life in which I can leave behind something immortal, something that does not pass away. Now I have understood that what transcends time and space is eternal, and that the words of Jesus Christ are eternal, the words of God."
According to figures gathered by Takashi himself, of the 10,000 Christians of Urakami, the Christian quarter of Nagasaki, as many as 8,000 died instantly. In his memoirs, published in 2007, Cardinal Giacomo Biffi suggested that the city of Nagasaki may not have been chosen at random for the second bombing, wondering aloud whether the fact that it was, besides having a storied history, the most thoroughly Catholic city in Japan, was entirely beside the point.
Takashi preferred instead to ask why he had survived while his wife had not, and found this answer: "They did not yet want the two of us together in Heaven: we failed the entrance examination." He believed that "Urakami had been chosen by God as a sacrificial lamb to bring the war to an end, a kind of deeper plan of divine providence", as he put it in his address, as representative of the Urakami parish, at the funeral of the victims: "All eight thousand of you, because you had confessed and received absolution for the feast of the Assumption of Our Lady (Fukure Manjû), have been lifted up on the clouds into heaven, before the feet of the Lord".
They had four children. The eldest daughter Maria Ikuko died after one year. The third child, Sasano, also died young. Their mother was buried between the two little girls. Two of his children, Makoto and Kayano, escaped the atomic bombing because they were staying with relatives in the countryside. His profound grief over the fact that they had lost their mother, and might soon lose their father too, became the driving force behind his prolific writing. "I must put off, as long as I possibly can, the moment my children become orphans, even if only by a day, or an hour. Even if it is only a minute, or a second, I want to make their time of loneliness as short as I can." He wanted to stay with his children for as long as possible: "I pretended to be asleep, and Kayano relaxed and pressed her cheek against mine. I felt my cheek slowly growing warm. Then, as though savouring some small treasure she did not want anyone else to know about, she whispered, "Papa." She was not really calling me. It was some barely audible thought that simply echoed up from the depths of her heart. The love I give my daughter Kayano as a father is unique, very particular, and exists only between Kayano and me. This singular and absolute love is not general or universal. You cannot exchange it for any other love. No one is permitted to act as father or mother before my children! When I am dead, the memory of their parents will remain in their hearts. Makoto and Kayano! Do not be cowards! Become strong, upright and joyful, as orphans should be!"
He spent his last few years in bed, praying, writing and receiving visitors, of whom there were a great many. But, one of the most unexpected visits was that of Helen Keller, the famous deaf-blind writer who had devoted her life to working for the poor and for world peace. Although the meeting lasted only some fifteen minutes, that visit, on 8 October 1948, moved him deeply: "She took hold of my hands! For a moment I felt a powerful sense of love, as though an electric current were passing through my whole body."
Emperor Hirohito and the envoy of Pope Pius XII, Cardinal Norman Thomas Gilroy, came to see him. Thanks to a donation, he planted a thousand cherry trees, turning that devastated land into a "hill in blossom".
"Consolation, courage. The Bells of Nagasaki." is a song with lyrics by Sōtō Hachirō and music by Koseki Yūji, performed by Fujiyama Aiichirō, which became a bestseller in Japan in 1949, not long after the Second World War. It was inspired by Takashi Nagai's book Nagasaki no kane (The Bells of Nagasaki), a first-hand testimony to the terrible tragedy caused by the atomic bomb, and at the same time an expression of the love and longing for peace, values that he lived and professed as a Christian. It was the first book written by a survivor of the atomic bomb.
The English lyrics of "The Bells of Nagasaki" are not reproduced here, as the song remains in copyright; it mourns Midori beneath the cathedral bells and finds consolation in the rosary left among the ashes and in the image of Our Lady shining white through the night.
The melody and words of The Bells of Nagasaki are engraved on the wall of the slope leading up to the house of Nyoko-dō. On the slope beside the Statue of Peace, the symbol of Nagasaki, stands a small wooden house of just ten square metres. Nagai lived there, suffering from leukaemia, and there he wrote 17 books in four and a half years. Nagai named the house Nyoko-dō ("Love your neighbour as yourself"), inspired by Christian love.
His granddaughter Nagai Tokusaburō is still living today, and runs the Nagai Takashi Memorial Museum, which is visited by around 150,000 people every year.
Paul Takashi died on 1 May 1951, leaving behind a son, Makoto (16), and a daughter, Kayano (9), asking that his body be used for scientific research into the effects of radiation. Twenty thousand people attended his funeral. The whole city of Nagasaki honoured him with a minute of silence while every church bell rang. A couple of years earlier, before many who already regarded him as a saint, he had said: "I would like you to understand my desire for peace, for a lasting peace that flows from love of neighbour, and to put it into practice in your own lives. Never before have we been so determined not to provoke further wars. And that is entirely because of the explosion of those two atomic bombs. Now that we have renounced war through our Constitution, we must root war out completely from the depths of the human heart. The moon that lights up the night sky is nothing but a cold mass of matter reflecting the sun's light. Christ is the sun, and I reflect only a little of his light. Without God I would be nothing but a useless servant."
A film about him, All That Remains, has recently been released, and we bring you a short clip from it.
WATCH A SHORT CLIP FROM THE FILM "ALL THAT REMAINS"
"Our chief duty is to watch and to labour, so that in our nation too, family life may be preserved and maintained in all its purity, innocence and vigour."
Josip Juraj Strossmayer
According to Strossmayer, the family and the family home are a place of warmth and love, and as such are irreplaceable for society and the Church. In His wisdom, God grants to individual nations particular families from which the great figures of history then emerge, all for the purpose of fulfilling God’s designs. Strossmayer interprets the expression "the home" as that place which the Catholic Church has always sought to transform into a "domestic church": "The faithful will contribute to the wellbeing of the nation if they carry out their sacred duty by turning their homes into living images of the house of Nazareth, and if ‘parents and elders become, in some manner, domestic priests to their young.’" Such families have the task of preserving and maintaining, in their own homes, faith, prayer and devotion: "Those, gentlemen, who bore and raised us, who gave us our body and bodily life and nourished it, are worthy of our eternal recognition, our eternal gratitude; but those who provide us with the means to a higher formation of the soul give us a higher life, one that is worth as much more than the first as heaven is worth more than earth, the spirit more than the body, the goods of the soul more than the goods of the body. These are our spiritual parents, to whom we can never show recognition enough, nor gratitude enough."
Ancient Rome, with all its splendour, its legacy in numerous surviving works of art, and everything else on account of which it would come to be called the cradle of civilisation, is described in numerous works by writers who lived both in the age of its flourishing and for centuries after the fall of the Empire. Rome experienced its greatest flourishing under the emperor Augustus, in the 1st century BC, when, after the victory over Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, peace came to the state within the Empire, since that victory marked the end of the long wars the Romans had until then been waging. Soon after consolidating his political position, the emperor Augustus began reforms within the Empire. Numerous laws were passed with the intention of strengthening the family and the economy, both of which had suffered heavy losses on account of the wars.
is to take charge of his happiness for as long as he is
beneath your roof (at your table)"
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
"Those who sit down at table are people who share the same life, or whom life closely binds together in some way. The table becomes a place for manifesting and sharing that communion. To invite someone to the table cannot, therefore, be reduced to 'giving them food'. To receive someone at table means giving them a place in one's life, sharing life with them, communicating in that which shapes life. To deny someone a place at the table means depriving them of communion."
"Eating reveals us as we truly are. It reveals us to ourselves as we truly are, and directs us towards others. The way we eat manifests our habits, our desires, the maturity of our relationships with others, our responsibility for them, our skill in recognising gifts, and a humility that is always grateful for all that we receive.".
Christmas is the most favourable moment of the year to express and share the strength of goodness, of love given and received, above all within the family, among people who love one another.
In the magic of the Christmas spirit, we can all find in our hearts that precious ingenuity we had as children: that inclination towards goodness and sincerity that we need to nurture at every stage of life.
Andrea Bocelli
The operatic tenor Andrea Bocelli has released a new Christmas album, on which he sings every song together with his son Matteo and daughter Virginia, entitled "A Family Christmas". Although Matteo (24) has not yet fully matured as a musician the way his father has, he strongly resembles him. Virginia, Andrea's 10-year-old daughter, on the other hand, brings a wonderful childlike innocence to the whole album. Though still a little girl, she shows a capacity for musical performance that her father should be proud of.
We are especially moved by the song "Il Giorno più Speciale". This song feels much more personal than the other songs on the album. A family singing together - it almost looks like an impromptu family sing-along on Christmas Eve.
The Slovenian artist Fr Marko Ivan Rupnik, SJ, is the author of the official image of the World Meeting of Families in Rome, presented at the Vatican. The World Meeting of Families, to be held in Rome from 22 to 26 June 2022 under the theme "Family Love: Vocation and Path to Holiness", will also conclude the Amoris Laetitia Family Year. The meeting was originally due to take place this year, but because of the coronavirus pandemic it has been postponed to 2022. The image "This Mystery Is a Profound One", measuring 80×80 cm, in bright and warm colours – yellow, orange and red – depicts the biblical scene of the wedding at Cana, and, in the artist's own words, seeks to convey that the family is an expression of the sacrament of marriage. He teaches at the Gregorian University in Rome. Until last year, he directed the "Aletti" Centre for spirituality and culture, and his mosaics and sacred works adorn more than 220 places around the world. He gives spiritual retreats and is also a consultant to several Roman congregations.
We bring you the catechesis of the artist himself on the mystery of marriage and family from a Christian perspective, through the "Wedding at Cana", and also on how the artist himself sees it.
My heart says to me: "Seek his face!" Yes, your face, O Yahweh, I do seek. (Ps 27:8)
We live in a time of the lost face. Man cannot live without the presence of another's face. He cannot see his own face; it is not possible to have a relationship exclusively with one's own face. We have a need for a face that is different from our own. A mirror does not help. In this loss of face - because we have lost the face of God - we have also lost the time we need, the time given to us to find a face. That is why we are constantly in a hurry. Time is needed to gaze upon the face of another. It is extremely important.
The house is a place of memory; our life is imprinted upon it, together with its joys, sorrows, contradictions and hopes.Here we raise our children, here our friends die, here love is born and illness is lived through.The place where we live has something to do with memory, feelings, concrete desires and relationships with one another. The primary meaning of the house is therefore a place of gathering and union. Freud wrote that the house is a substitute for the mother's womb, the first dwelling of the human person, for which, in all likelihood, man never stops yearning, because in it he felt safe and at ease.
Cardinal Farrell: A Concrete Proposal for Being a "Domestic Church"
Yesterday my friend Géza from Budapest called me. We talked mostly about how we are living through this time at home with our households. At one point, Géza told me that they feel fortunate because, in the isolation in which we have suddenly found ourselves, they have their own house, they can go out into the garden, take a walk, and so on.
Then he added: "We didn't even know how rich we were until now. There are five of us in the house. We have turned the house into a home, a church, an office, a workshop, a playground… The house suddenly took on dimensions we had never known before. We truly feel enriched, especially as regards our relationships with one another."
Géza put into words what Cardinal Farrell, Prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, had written three days earlier in his letter published in L'Osservatore Romano. The Cardinal underlines what a hidden treasure we have, and what a hidden treasure we ourselves are as a family. We bring you excerpts from the letter.
God's blessing on the house — text found on a medallion, recited at the requiem Mass for A. G. Matoš.
The text on the medallion reads: God's blessing on the house/Where there is faith — there is love/Where there is love — there is also peace/And where there is peace — there God reigns, the father of your home.
"The ancients felt that our body is a house. For only he is truly a man who is a living house of God: templum Dei absconditi (temple of the hidden God), a living church, where the spirit is the priest, the heart the altar. The eyes — two wondrous windows."
A. G. Matoš
"Our authors, already familiar to readers of these pages, Raffaella and Ciro, in their book 'We Need Nazareth' (C'è bisogno di Nazaret), have set about the task of seeking answers to what the Gospels do not tell us about the life of the Holy Family. Their work helps readers enter the house of the Holy Family in Nazareth in order to picture the days, the feelings, the difficult decisions, the indescribable joys. But not in order to tell fairy tales, but rather to help each of us illuminate our own history through the appearing of the Lord's glory."
The greater part of Jesus' life unfolds in Nazareth, in the house of Joseph and Mary. Those roughly thirty years are described as the "hidden" years, since Scripture is silent about them, a silence broken only by two events: the Holy Family's flight into Egypt and the finding of Jesus in the Temple at the age of twelve. These three decades were probably spent in the ordinary duties of everyday life in Nazareth.
These days everything around us is filled, on the one hand, with birth, and on the other with death. On one side the joy of Christmas, on the other fear and suffering, caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the powerful earthquake that destroyed many homes in Petrinja, Sisak, Glina and the surrounding areas. Many families have been left without their homes. We bring you an article dedicated to the Holy Family, who are in exile on the road to Egypt, and thereby to every family in difficulty. They are fleeing before Herod, who wants to take the life of the newborn child Jesus. This mystery of the Family's flight and of God's closeness will be illuminated for us by the painting "Rest on the Flight into Egypt", painted in 1597 by Caravaggio. It is found in the Church of St Agnes, on the beautiful Piazza Navona, and was intended as a wedding gift for Olimpia Aldobrandini, who married Prince Camillo Pamphili.
He must go on, the father tells his son. He cannot go with him — but the boy must carry on without him, doing everything just as they had done together.
The son says he wants to stay with him.
He must carry the fire — life itself, the father goes on.
These days we are witnesses to images of mothers and fathers from Afghanistan handing their children to soldiers and "passing" them over the wall, abandoning them and, in doing so, amid unbearable pain, saving them. In the photograph we see a father raising his arm, holding in his hand the son he is handing over — like a basket of food, like a gift, like a testimony — to a complete stranger, a soldier in full combat gear, with threatening, lethal weapons.
Jochebed, Moses' mother, did something similar, pushing her son into the waters of the Nile in despair, trying in this way to save him. She abandons him so that he may be saved.
What could drive parents to do something so drastic, so painful?
A few days ago, the world marked sixty years since the first human flight into space. That man was Yuri Gagarin.
We bring you the letter Yuri Gagarin wrote to his wife and daughters two days before his first flight into space on 12 April 1961, together with some very interesting glimpses into their family life.
The letter was to be given to his wife Valentina only if something went wrong. In fact the mission was a success, and after one hour and 48 minutes of flight, Gagarin returned to earth, landing in the Saratov region, about 850 kilometres south-east of Moscow. However, what amounted to his spiritual last testament was delivered to his wife seven years later, on 27 March 1968, when he lost his life in a plane crash. This moving farewell letter contains very powerful words about a man's devotion to his calling and to life, and it brings to mind man's first journey into space.
On the day the Church keeps the memorial of Sts Joachim and Anne, Jesus's "grandfather and grandmother", Pope Francis called on young people to make a gesture of tenderness towards the elderly, especially those who are alone, in their own homes or in care homes, those who have not seen their loved ones for months. "Dear young people, every one of these old people is your grandfather or grandmother! Don't leave them alone! Use the imagination of love - telephone them, contact them by video call, send them messages, listen to them and, if possible and in keeping with health guidelines, go and visit them. Offer them an embrace. They are your roots. A tree cut off from its roots does not grow, and gives neither flower nor fruit. That is why it is important to be united and connected to our own roots. "What has blossomed on the tree comes from what lies beneath the ground" - as the Argentine poet Luis Bernárdez says. That is why I invite you to give a great round of applause to all our grandmothers and grandfathers!", concludes Pope Francis.
Infidelity is one of the most painful experiences in life. We remain in that pain for far too long, drowning in anger, rage and hurt. The anxiety we feel cuts with its edge into other areas of our lives too. We become powerless, because we begin to doubt everything that matters to us, everything that, until that moment, was good and worthwhile in our lives. Life turns into mere existing. Anything, just to avoid the image of the person to whom we gave ourselves and promised faithfulness, now in the embrace of another man or woman. In any case, this is a blow that changes life at its very foundations, both for the one who has been unfaithful and for the one who has discovered the infidelity.
What next, and how, after infidelity?
I would like to tell you the story of a marriage marked by the anguish of her husband’s infidelity, the story of Elisabetta Canori Mora, whom Pope St John Paul II beatified in 1994. She lived at the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century in Rome, Italy. From the story of the infidelity of her husband Cristoforo, people today, in a world where statistics show that one in every three couples divorces, can learn how the anguish of conflict-ridden marriages does not necessarily end in divorce or long-term therapy, but can instead be completely transformed into the beauty of God’s presence on earth.
"The good Lord gave me a father and a mother more worthy of heaven than of earth."
St Thérèse
"There was perfect understanding between our parents,
although they were known to differ on certain points of view."
Their daughter Celina
The married couple St Louis Martin (1823 – 1894) and St Marie-Zélie Guérin (1831 – 1877) are the first married couple in the history of the Catholic Church to be canonised together as saints. They are also the first parents of a canonised saint to be beatified. They were not declared saints because they had a saint for a daughter, St Thérèse, but because they themselves lived holy lives.
We are publishing the story of the married couple Ciro Piccolo and Raffaella Esposito Corcione, who are the joint authors of a handbook for young couples on the subject of courtship (Il Manuale del corteggiamento). They give us their testimony about the beauty and depth of their relationship with one another, and how the use of natural methods can be a great help in marriage. This is knowledge that every woman and every man should possess!Janet Smith says: "The fact that couples who use natural family planning almost never divorce reveals a great deal. Natural family planning is much more than abstinence. It is a method that requires a great deal of communication and shared values."
A Story of Marriage and Love in Pictures: Marc Chagall and Bella Rosenfeld
And you became my wife
For the years to come. Dearest.
You gave me our daughter, a rare gift
on the most solemn day...
Thank you, O God on high
For the day and for the month.
Marc Chagall
He portrays his wife as an imaginative, intellectual, assertive woman: "With whom can I compare her? She was like no other. She was Bashenka-Belochka on the hill, reflected in the river Dvina with its clouds, trees and houses. I wanted to wake up inside my own daydream." Her voice was, as he put it, "like the song of a bird from another world."
Two revolutions, two wars, poverty, frequent travels — Bella Rosenfeld, Marc Chagall's faithful muse and wife, was with him for almost 30 years. His angel, the symbol of love in all his paintings, gentle, clever, beautiful, Bella understood Chagall as no one else did and accepted him just as he was. Not a single painting was finished without her approval; the artist adored her, loved her as he loved no one else, to the end of his long life.
The composer Ennio Morricone, who during his lifetime created famous and wonderful melodies, died on 6 July 2020. He was born on 10 November 1928 in Rome, where he spent his entire life.
His wife Maria Travia was born in 1932 in San Giorgio di Gioiosa Marea (Messina-Sicily), on the last night of the year, 31 December. However, as early as 1933 her family moved to Rome, where Maria grew up. She was a friend of Adriana, Ennio's sister.
Shortly before his death, he named her in writing as the one to whom he had entrusted everything: "Last, but not least, Maria. With this I renew the extraordinary love that has held us together, and I am not glad that I must leave her. The most painful thing is to say goodbye to her."
It is somewhat surprising that Christian Zadar has no home-grown saints of its own, and that the saints venerated in our city — Anastasia, Chrysogonus and the elder Simeon — were all brought here from elsewhere. The only one recognised by the Church as a blessed is James of Zadar, and even he won his renown and died in Italy, at Bitetto near Bari. So we must admit that we are, in a sense, poor in officially canonised saints. Yet when we come to eternity, we shall see that throughout the long Christian history of Zadar there lived a great many holy people who can be models and intercessors for us. One of them is Anđelika Salghetti-Drioli, née Isola, a holy woman and mother, together with her husband Frane.
"Friendship between husband and wife seems to exist by nature; for man is by nature more inclined to pair with a mate than to associate with a fellow citizen, inasmuch as the household is an earlier and more necessary thing than the state.".
"He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god."
Aristotle
Martin Buber asserts: "In the beginning is relation." Relation (Beziehnung) leads us to encounter (Begegnung).
"God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore, let us not fear though the earth should shake, though the mountains fall into the heart of the sea. Though the waters of the sea roar and rage, though the mountains tremble at their fury: Yahweh of Hosts is with us, our refuge is the God of Jacob!" (Ps 46:2-4)
"He was always my comfort (counsellor) and support."
The last words Zélie wrote to her husband were: "I am entirely yours."
St Zélie
"I feel that our family, modest though it is,
is honoured in that our wonderful Creator has numbered it among his favoured ones."
St Louis
The Martin family lived their lives following the liturgical feasts. On working days the parents began with Holy Mass at half past five in the morning. Mr Martin's influence extended to a whole circle of friends. Many of them, without Louis, would probably have given themselves over only to worldly amusements. He drew them to frequent Catholic circles, kindled their enthusiasm for the feast-day customs of the parish and for visiting the sick. They were not turned in upon themselves, but were, instead, attentive to what was happening around them.
The Bible begins with a garden, a garden that God planted in Eden (cf. Gen 2:8), and it ends with the mention of a garden-city, the heavenly Jerusalem: "through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations" (Rev 22:2). At the very centre of the Bible, too, there is a garden, the one in the Song of Songs, of which Rabbi Akiva said that it was the "Holy of Holies" of Scripture; a garden with flowing waters and trees in bloom.
We would like to reflect on this twofold perspective, which links the "mystery" of the garden with that of the human couple. Why does the couple arrange to meet in a garden? How does the anthropological and cosmic figure of the couple in the garden bear a theological truth? The Song of Songs will provide the "setting" for this reflection; it is on its pages that the lovers' invitation to go to the garden is expressed most explicitly: "Let my beloved come to his garden [...]. I come to my garden, my sister, my bride" (Song 4:16-5:1). We will speak of the web of shared roots, of care for a shared home, of love within the family. The couple, considered in this context, opens itself to the divine plan, to life in its fullness, with fruit of many kinds.
Our marriage was ideal. If that could be turned into an advertisement, I would say: "Live your marriage the way Cvijeta and I did!" She was the happiness of my life. Please do not take that as a banal thing to say.
Boredom has always been a foreign and unknown word in our life.
Besides sightseeing in cities, we were drawn to places of silence.
Two days ago, at the age of 94, academician Viktor Žmegač died – a special man: gentle, calm, reliable, precise. Like a Renaissance man, he knew a great deal, and too much, about facts, events, people, countries, art, life. He is kind. Strict, even with himself. A Germanist and Croatist, professor emeritus at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, a writer, historian, musicologist, theorist of literature and art, and travel writer.
In the last fifteen years or so, Professor Žmegač wrote about a dozen phenomenal books on the civilisation, culture and art of Europe. Above all, he loves the culture and art of Europe, which he considers the centre of our planet. He is erudite. Top-class. That is him: someone who has a deep knowledge of whatever he engages with or studies.
He was married to Cvijeta, the author of German-language textbooks and an outstanding teacher in language schools: "I loved her immeasurably, from the very first day until her death. We lived for half a century in a happy marriage. The years that followed, right to the end, were the only tragedy of my life. She had to live in a care home, in an ever-worsening state. She was struck by an incurable, slow-progressing illness. There is no treatment. Even today, not a single day goes by without my remembering episodes from our marriage. She was not only beautiful, dear, and devoted to the family; she was also tremendously witty, full of jokes and quips. Our marriage was ideal. If that could be turned into an advertisement, I would say: "Live your marriage the way Cvijeta and I did!" She was the happiness of my life. Please do not take that as a banal thing to say.
My husband! My husband! My husband! Dry, you see, are my eyes, yet I do not wish to hide my love.
Begging you, forgive me: never again, moved with feeling, on your return from battle shall I be able to embrace you.
I am ready for death/ nor do I fear it when the executioner swings his sword, I shall hold myself with pride, as a nobleman and a Croat.
Grieve not at all/ Let me be a woman, let me wail, let me moan, let me tear my own heart apart.
Mate Marčinko
The wedding of Ana Katarina Frankopan and Petar Zrinski took place in Karlovac, with the celebration held in Ozalj on 27 October 1641. It united the most powerful Croatian noble families, the Zrinski and the Frankopan. They had four children: Jelena, Judita Petronila, Ivan Antun Baltazar and Aurora Veronika.
Katarina married Petar at the age of 16, and from then on lived with her husband in Ozalj, occasionally also visiting Čakovec, to which she would move with her husband after the tragic death of his brother, the Croatian ban Nikola Zrinski. She also stayed from time to time at other Zrinski and Frankopan estates – in Vrbovec, on Grobnik, in Kraljevica and in Novi Bribir. All these estates were not merely working farms but also centres of public and cultural life, where Croatian was spoken, in the Kajkavian, Čakavian and Štokavian dialects alike, where people wrote and debated world and national affairs, and where literature, art and culture were cultivated.
We present the marital, family and patriotic story of Petar and Katarina Zrinski, and his farewell letter to his beloved wife before his execution.
"But their eyes were kept from recognising him" (Lk 24:16)
Recently, in a care home in England, the carers brought an unusual birthday gift for a 94-year-old widower. A small pillow. The pillow the carers had given him bore a picture of his late wife. Herecognised her.
And the LORD God said: "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him."(Gen 2:18)
This sentence of God introduces us to the biblical world of couples. Why does God say that solitude is not good? Because in solitude we cannot love or be loved. From the very beginning, from the creation of the world, we observe God's wonderful design. God wants man to exist in this world as male and female. This mysterious difference between man and woman is immeasurably dear to him.
"For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom 8:38-39)
In 1842, the 33-year-old colonel of the Dutch cavalry Jacobus Warnerus Constantinus van Gorkum (1809-1880) married a 22-year-old woman of noble rank, Jonkvrouwe Josephina Carolina Petronella Hubertina van Aefferden (1820-1888). The marriage was highly controversial, not primarily because of their difference in rank, but chiefly because of the difference in their religion - van Gorkum was a Protestant, and van Aefferden was a Catholic. The two communities lived in great mutual hostility. The two of them fell in love, but their wish to marry met with great resistance because of differences in faith, status, wealth, political allegiance and origin. Despite these objections, they married in 1842 and enjoyed a happy marriage for almost thirty-eight years. The marriage was blessed with three children: two sons and a daughter. Josephina remained a Catholic, Jacobus remained a Protestant, and the couple somehow managed to defy the intense hostility from both sides, until death parted them - for a time.
it sank into the great flower, adorned with leaves so many,
and thence reascended to where its love abideth evermore.
Their faces had they all of living flame...
because the light divine so penetrates
the universe, according to its merit,
that naught can be an obstacle against it.
This realm secure and full of gladsomeness,
crowded with ancient people and with modern,
unto one mark had all its look and love.
O Trinal Light,
that in a single star, sparkling upon their sight, so satisfies them,
look down upon our tempest here below!
Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXXI
How is marriage possible, if this will — my own, wilful, stubborn, proud will (I don't mean just Filip or Karla, but all of us) — if this will of ours, this idolatry of ours, does not submit to the heavenly will, to God's will… That is why we say that Christian marriage is a marriage of three: husband, wife, and Jesus Christ. He is listened to. He is the head. It submits to the Father's will.
Homily by Don Antun Nižetić, Cathedral of St Anastasia, Zadar, 13 May 2023.
