Invoke the peace and become “peace builders.” This is the invitation of the Pope, “looking at the current scenario”, in his letter for the 1500 years of the cult of the venerated image of Santa Maria in Portico – Romanae Portus Securitatis, protector of the Eternal City, the luminous beacon that has led to their children to safe harbor. The Holy Virgin “revealed herself at a particularly difficult time for the Church, extending her mantle over Pope John I, who suffered and died for peace without renouncing the faith, made hostage to political plots and fratricidal wars,” wrote the Pontiff in his letter to Father Antonio Piccolo, General Rector of the Order of the Regular Clerics of the Mother of God, to whom the custody of the cult has been entrusted since 1601.
Peace builders
The reference to history offers the Pope the opportunity to reflect on this era marked by violence and to relaunch his call: «Given the current scenario, how can we not grasp the urgency of promoting peace, of praying for peace? Invoke peace and be peacemakers above all in your reconciled and reconciling communities. May their example of fraternal life be evangelically attractive to the faithful to whom they provide pastoral service, he wrote to the Regular Clerics of the Mother of God.
The foundation of the Order
Francis said he was close to the Religious Family on this significant anniversary for the entire Church of Rome, also underlining the “providential coincidence” of the commemoration in 2024, the year of preparation for the Jubilee of Hope, of the founding of the Order for the pharmacist Saint John Leonardi, devoted to the Virgin, chosen as faithful custodian of the leonardo charism.
Welcome to the poor
In the letter, Pope Francis then recalls the genesis of the cult of Santa Maria in Portico in Campitelli, born as a result of a “prodigious manifestation of the Mother of God” on July 17, 524 in the house of San Galla, a Roman patrician, in the presence of the aforementioned Pontiff Saint John I. «Since then, the Portico where the noble Galla welcomed the poor and pilgrims, became a Marian sanctuary and hospice of charity. This – he writes – is for you, spiritual heirs of Saint Leonardi, an invitation to care for and promote the value of welcoming the poor and the last, so that the places we inhabit and the churches themselves are a porch open to the world, in “to offer comfort and succor to the multiple forms of destitution that characterize our lives.”
Missionary zeal
With this spirit, Leonardi founded the “Congregation of the Reformed Priests of the Blessed Virgin Mary”, precisely to restore to the Church “the apostolic luster of its origins.” «Christ, above all, Christ at the center of everything, Christ the measure of everything! “Christ, the only medicine capable of curing the ills of the Church and of men,” the Pontiff points out in the letter. And he exhorts the Marian Congregation “to an ever greater missionary zeal and to continuous progress in the spiritual life, accepting the exhortation of the Holy Founder, who strongly recalled before the eyes of the mind and heart only the honor and glory of Christ and Him crucified.
