The parishes of the V and VI Vicariate on pilgrimage to the Cathedral on the fourth centenary of the discovery of the body of Saint Rosalia

The parishes of the Archdiocese of Palermo continue to live the experience of the pilgrimage to the Cathedral to honor Saint Rosalia, 400 years after the discovery of her mortal remains. The “Rosalian Jubilee”, announced by the Archbishop of Palermo Monsignor Corrado Lorefice for the fourth centenary of the event that saved the city from the plague, continues through the program defined by the Diocesan Committee and which involves the six Vicariates: the faithful of the parishes of the and the VI Vicariate will go to the Cathedral on May 29th for the veneration of the relics of Santa Rosalia and for the Eucharistic Concelebration presided over by the Archbishop. At 6.00 pm from Porta Nuova a procession will move to the Cathedral. Here, at the end of the Celebration, the Archbishop will entrust the reliquaries of St. Rosalia to the Episcopal Vicars which will be housed in the various parishes in the coming weeks.

LIVE STREAMING ON THE ARCHDIOCESE CHANNELS (YouTube, Facebook Archdiocese of Palermo, Facebook Radio Spazio Noi), starting at 5.55pm

The theme of God’s “crazy love” for men and, in this sense, the still current example offered by Saint Rosalia, at the center of the homily pronounced by Archbishop Corrado Lorefice:

“I greet with great affection and joy in my heart the priests, deacons, lay groups, religious groups and all the parish communities of the third and fourth Vicariate of our church; joy is offered by the possibility of finding ourselves in the presence of the risen Crucifix, as testimony to our being the people of God. Saint Rosalia herself spent her life understanding more deeply the mystery that Jesus wants to reveal to us too, that Jesus is the son of God made flesh for us men and that we are loved by him. This is the high price of God’s crazy love for men, the high price is represented by the life itself given by the son of God, the demonstration that the greatest love that exists is that of giving one’s life so that others may have life. Love – continued the Archbishop – transfigures while life without love is a life condemned to sterility, to the betrayal of relationships, which instills suffering and causes dryness in hearts. We want to live this jubilee year looking at Rosalia: she, in the known iconography, is represented in contemplation, attracted, by the Crucifix; Pope Francis states that the Crucifix is the revelation of God’s love (“God loves us, he loved the world so much that he gave his only begotten son; the Crucifix is the great book of God’s love”. The love of God for us men it helps us to experience the grace of a presence in the world, loving the world as Jesus loves it. Rosalia asks us today more than ever to have the courage of God’s crazy love while a sad and devastating epidemic that we all breathe is causing love to cool, unconsciously, in hearts. Ultimately, shouldn’t every Christian be a little crazy in the eyes of the world?

The Archbishop dedicates a passage of the homily to the relationship with the Saints: “They are ordinary Christians, let’s not put them in a niche: sometimes we are fascinated by the miracles attributed to them and consider them distant, unattainable. But the saints are like all of us, baptized, who got serious with the Lord, with the crazy love of God. The life they lived was not able to extinguish the love of God and this is a challenge for each of us. Rosalia has given up being closed in on herself, living without the love of God; Rosalia was a contemplative of God’s crazy love but she was – and is – also our sister precisely because she was understood by the love of God-her-father and precisely because she did not close herself in a sort of fairy world: she remained a sister and companion, even centuries after her death, sister who loves us with the same crazy love of God who lives in her and asks us to live filled with the life that her son offers us in abundance, free from every plague of violence and dominance of man on man; she asks us to always look at the love of the Crucifix. Today Santuzza asks our Vicariates, our pastoral areas, our parish and religious communities, to return a little more to and with passion to contemplate crucified love, to live according to the commandment of love, to be the leaven of pacified and solidified human relations”.