BENEDICT XVI
GENERAL AUDIENCE
Paul VI Hall
Wednesday, 15 December 2010
Wednesday, 15 December 2010
Saint Veronica Giuliani
Today I would like to present a mystic who did not
live in the Middle Ages. She is St Veronica Giuliani, a Poor Clare Capuchin
nun. The reason is that 27 December will be the 350th anniversary of her birth.
Città di Castello, the place where she lived the longest and where she died, as
well as Mercatello — her birthplace — and the Diocese of Urbino are celebrating
this event with joy.
Indeed, Veronica was born on 27 December 1660 in
Mercatello, in the Metauro Valley to Francesco Giuliani and Benedetta Mancini.
She was the last of seven sisters, three of whom were to embrace the monastic
life.
She was given the name “Orsola” [Ursula]. She was
seven years old when her mother died and her father moved to Piacenza as
customs superintendent of the Duchy of Parma. It was in this city that Ursula
felt a growing desire to dedicate her life to Christ. The call to her became
ever more pressing so that, when she was 17, she entered the strict cloister of
the monastery of Capuchin Poor Clares in Città di Castello. She was to remain
here for the rest of her life. Here she received the name of “Veronica”, which
means “true image” and she was in fact to become a true image of the Crucified
Christ.
A year later she made her solemn religious
profession and the process of configuration to Christ began for her, through
much penance, great suffering, and several mystic experiences linked to the
Passion of Jesus: being crowned with thorns, the mystical espousal, the wound
in her heart and the stigmata.
In 1716, when she was 56, she became Abbess of the
monastery. She was reconfirmed in this office until her death in 1727, after a
very painful prolonged agony that lasted 33 days and culminated in a joy so
profound that her last words were: “I have found Love, Love has let himself be
seen! This is the cause of my suffering. Tell everyone about it, tell
everyone!” (Summarium Beatificationis, 115-120).
On 9 July she left her earthly dwelling place for
the encounter with God. She was 67 years old; 50 of those years she spent in
the monastery of Città di Castello. She was canonized on May 26, 1893, by Pope
Gregory XVI.
Veronica Giuliani wrote prolifically: letters,
autobiographical reports, poems. However, the main source for reconstructing
her thought is her Diary, which she began in 1693: about 22,000
handwritten pages that cover a span of 34 years of cloistered life.
Her writing flows spontaneously and continuously.
There are no crossings-out, corrections or punctuation marks in it, nor was the
material divided into chapters or parts according to a plan.
Veronica did not intend to compose a literary work;
on the contrary, Fr Girolamo Bastianelli, a Filippini religious, in agreement
with the diocesan Bishop Antonio Eustachi, obliged her to set down her
experiences in writing.
St Veronica has a markedly Christological and
spousal spirituality: She experienced being loved by Christ, her faithful and
sincere Bridegroom, to whom she wished to respond with an ever more involved
and passionate love. She interpreted everything in the key of love and this
imbued her with deep serenity. She lived everything in union with Christ, for
love of him, and with the joy of being able to demonstrate to him all the love
of which a creature is capable.
The Christ to whom Veronica was profoundly united
was the suffering Christ of the Passion, death and Resurrection; it was Jesus
in the act of offering himself to the Father in order to save us.
Her intense and suffering love for the Church
likewise stemmed from this experience, in its dual form of prayer and offering.
The Saint lived in this perspective: she prayed, suffered and sought “holy
poverty”, as one “dispossessed” and the loss of self (cf. ibid., III,
523), precisely in order to be like Christ who gave the whole of himself.
In every page of her writings Veronica commends
someone to the Lord, reinforcing her prayers of intercession with the offering
of herself in every form of suffering. Her heart dilated to embrace all “the
needs of the Holy Church”, living anxiously the desire for the salvation of “the
whole world” (ibid., III-IV, passim).
Veronica cried: “O sinners... all men and all
women, come to Jesus’ heart; come to be cleansed by his most precious blood....
He awaits you with open arms to embrace you” (ibid., II, 16-17).
Motivated by ardent love, she gave her sisters in
the monastery attention, understanding and forgiveness. She offered her prayers
and sacrifices for the Pope, for her Bishop, for priests and for all those in
need, including the souls in Purgatory.
She summed up her contemplative mission in these
words: “We cannot go about the world preaching to convert souls but are bound
to pray ceaselessly for all those souls who are offending God... particularly
with our sufferings, that is, with a principle of crucified life” (ibid., IV,
877). Our Saint conceived this mission as “being in the midst” of men and God,
of sinners and the Crucified Christ.
Veronica lived profound participation in the
suffering love of Jesus, certain that “to suffer with joy” is the “key to love”
(cf. ibid., I, 299.417; III, 330.303.871; IV, 192).
She emphasizes that Jesus suffers for humanity’s sins, but also for the
suffering that his faithful servants would have to endure down the centuries,
in the time of the Church, precisely because of their solid and consistent
faith.
She wrote: “His Eternal Father made them see and
feel the extent of all the suffering that his chosen ones would have to endure,
the souls dearest to him, that is, those who would benefit from his Blood and
from all his sufferings" (ibid., II, 170).
As the Apostle Paul says of himself: “Now I rejoice
in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in
Christ's afflictions for the sake of his Body, that is, the Church” (Col 1:24).
Veronica reached the point of asking Jesus to be
crucified with him. “In an instant”, she wrote, “I saw five radiant rays issue
from his most holy wounds; and they all shone on my face. And I saw these rays
become, as it were, little tongues of fire. In four of them were the nails; and
in one was the spear, as of gold, red hot and white hot: and it went straight
through my heart, from one side to the other ... and the nails pierced my hands
and feet. I felt great pain but in this same pain I saw myself, I felt myself
totally transformed into God” (Diary, I, 897).
The Saint was convinced that she was already
participating in the Kingdom of God, but at the same time she invoked all the
Saints of the Blessed Homeland to come to her aid on the earthly journey of her
self-giving while she waited for eternal beatitude; this was her undying
aspiration throughout her life (cf. ibid., II, 909; V, 246).
With regard to the preaching of that time which
often focused on “saving one’s soul” in individual terms, Veronica shows a strong
“sense of solidarity”, a sense of communion with all her brothers and sisters
on their way towards Heaven and she lives, prays and suffers for all. The
penultimate, earthly things, although appreciated in the Franciscan sense as
gifts of the Creator, were always relative, altogether subordinate to “God’s
taste” and under the sign of radical poverty.
In the communio sanctorum, she explains the
gift of herself to the Church, as the relationship between the pilgrim Church
and the heavenly Church. “All the Saints”, she wrote, “are up there thanks to
the merit and the Passion of Jesus; but they cooperated with all that the Lord
did, so that their life was totally ordered ... regulated by these same works
(his)” (ibid., III, 203).
We find many biblical citations in Veronica's
writings, at times indirectly, but always precise. She shows familiarity with
the Sacred Text, by which her spiritual experience was nourished. Furthermore,
it should be pointed out that the intense moments of Veronica's mystical experience
are never separate from the salvific events celebrated in the Liturgy, where
the proclamation of the Word of God and listening to it has a special place.
Hence Sacred Scripture illumines, purifies and confirms Veronica’s experience,
rendering it ecclesial. On the other hand, however, her experience itself,
anchored in Sacred Scripture with uncommon intensity, guides one to a more
profound and “spiritual” reading of the text itself, to enter into its hidden
depths. Not only does she express herself with the words of Sacred Scripture
but she also really lives by them, they take on life in her.
For example, our Saint often quotes the words of
the Apostle Paul: “If God is for us, who is against us?” (Rom 8:31; cf.
Diary, I, 714; II 116.1021; III, 48).
The assimilation of this Pauline text, her great
trust and profound joy, becomes a fait accompli within her. “My soul”,
she wrote, “was bound to the divine will and I was truly established and fixed
for ever in the will of God. It seemed to me that I should never again have to
be separated from this will of God and I came to myself with these precise
words: nothing will be able to separate me from the will of God, neither
anxieties, nor sorrows nor toil nor contempt nor temptation nor creatures nor
demons nor darkness, not even death itself, because, in life and in death, I
want all, and in all things, the will of God” (Diary, IV, 272). Thus we
have the certainty that death is not the last word, we are fixed in
God’s will, hence, truly, in eternal life.
In particular, Veronica proved a courageous witness
of the beauty and power of Divine Love which attracted her, pervaded her and
inflamed her. Crucified Love was impressed within her flesh as it was in that
of St Francis of Assisi, with Jesus’ stigmata. “‘My Bride’, the Crucified
Christ whispers to me, ‘the penance you do for those who suffer my disgrace is
dear to me’.... Then detaching one of his arms from the Cross he made a sign to
me to draw near to his side... and I found myself in the arms of the Crucified
One. What I felt at that point I cannot describe: I should have liked to remain
for ever in his most holy side” (ibid., I, 37). This is also an image of
her spiritual journey, of her interior life: to be in the embrace of the
Crucified One and thus to remain in Christ's love for others.
Veronica also experienced a relationship of
profound intimacy with the Virgin Mary, attested by the words she heard Our
Lady say one day, which she reports in her Diary: “I made you rest on my
breast, you were united with my soul, and from it you were taken as in flight
to God” (IV, 901).
St Veronica Giuliani invites us to develop, in our
Christian life, our union with the Lord in living for others, abandoning
ourselves to his will with complete and total trust, and the union with the
Church, the Bride of Christ.
She invites us to
participate in the suffering love of Jesus Crucified for the salvation of all
sinners; she invites us to fix our gaze on Heaven, the destination of our
earthly journey, where we shall live together with so many brothers and sisters
the joy of full communion with God; she invites us to nourish ourselves daily
with the Word of God, to warm our hearts and give our life direction. The
Saint’s last words can be considered the synthesis of her passionate mystical
experience: “I have found Love, Love has let himself be seen!”. Thank you.
