The prelate’s message “With his life as a martyr he calls us to awaken a sense of responsibility at all levels”
IVREA
Born to respond to man’s desire to give space to spirituality and sociality, the patronal feasts see the parish communities manifest themselves in these two aspects in the bond with the territory. Our feast of San Savino is no exception, until today it has managed to avoid becoming an almost exclusively commercial or folkloristic event, as has happened in many other parts of Italy. «The patronal feast of Ivrea – recalls the bishop, Edoardo Aldo Cerrato – has great value for the whole city community, for believers who venerate a saint, and for those who are not believers. With his life as a bishop and martyr, as a man charged with responsibility and endowed with courage to exercise it faithfully, San Savino calls us to awaken at all levels and in any sphere, personal, ecclesial, political, civil and social, the sense of responsibility”. «Patronus refers to Pater, and” father “says” origin “, roots; it says identity, without which one falls into insignificance and the loss of true freedom; he says that life is a task and is worth living in all that it entails. Savino therefore calls us to be adult men and women, capable of proposing authentic life experiences supported by values that remain perennial ». «Even the epoch in which he lived, – he explains – between the third and fourth centuries, sends us a message that induces us to reflect. It is the era that historiography presents as the crisis of the third century: after years of prosperity and wealth, in the Roman Empire, very problematic situations arose simultaneously in different fields: changes in institutions, in society, in economic life and in the way of thinking, in the conception of life: changes so profound that in that epochal turning point historians see the watershed between the classical world and the age that was rising. It is worth dwelling on the term “crisis” which, in its original meaning, does not indicate something negative, but means judgment, evaluation ». And again: «How can we not feel called to evaluate the causes of our situation? To ask ourselves if it is the result of the failure to realize ideas, settings, programs, or is it the outcome of them? We cannot afford to fall into the danger of applying as therapies perhaps the causes that have determined – or contributed to determining – certain existences that afflict us. Hedonism, the commodification of everything, the frantic search to obtain more and more goods, the fall of ideals and many values, yielding to an insane relativism that rejects the categories of true-false, evil-good, and spreads a culture in which it seems forbidden to place Aren’t the big questions about God, about the meaning of life, about who the person is among the causes of the crisis in which we live? “. «Under our eyes – concludes Monsignor Cerrato – there is an old world; perhaps a new one is being born. We are called to be protagonists! ».