Namuncurá Ceferino Festival, an example of service to your people in Argentina

As every year, thousands of faithful arrived this weekend in Chimpay, in the Argentine province of Río Negro, to commemorate a new anniversary of the birth of the Blessed Ceferino Namuncurá, a young Salesian who died at age 18 leaving a trail of holiness in Patagonia.

Within that framework, the Mass on Sunday, August 31 in his hometown was chaired by the Archbishop of Mendoza and president of the Argentine Episcopal Conference, Mons. Marcelo Colombowho recognized his admiration to see “the work of the Lord in his saints.”

Reference to the Word of God, Mons. Colombo recalled that “we have been rescued by the blood of Christ,” blood that gave us dignity. “The blood of Christ conquered us the condition of children of God and brothers of all,” he said.

Then he focused on the message of the Gospel, where Jesus warns of “false human importance”, and said that “the place we occupy must be an expression of who we are: from the person we have come to build with God and with our own career.”

“We do not depend on the importance of a site or a look that recognizes human prestiges, or a camera that rewards with a foreground,” he said.

Another of the teachings taken from the Gospel was the idea of ​​living according to Jesus’ style, which “places us in the perspective of being able to entertain everyone and recognize in each person the value of their own being.”

The desire to serve

When evoking the figure of Blessed Ceferino, the prelate highlighted “his desire to serve his people.” This decision, he said, “led him to start to distant lands, first to Buenos Aires to train in the initial studies, then to Rome, to heal the ailments that affected and limited him in his health.”

The accent of Ceferino’s vocation, recalled Mons. Colombo, was: “Being useful to my people.” In that sense, he rescued the teaching of Pope Francis about “the spiritual taste of being a people.”

“To be soul evangelizers, it is also necessary to develop the spiritual taste of being close to people’s lives, to the point of discovering that this is a source of a higher joy,” he said.

“The mission is a passion for Jesus, but, at the same time, a passion for his people (…) He wants to take us as instruments to get closer to his beloved people. He takes us in the middle of the people and sends us to the people, so that our identity is not understood without this belonging,” he continued, citing the exhortation evangelii Gaudium of Francis.

He also called to feel animated by Ceferino’s conscience, “that little aboriginal who fell in love with Christ and wanted to live his own delivery to the service of the Lord and his people”, especially in the context of “individualistic projects, full of excessive aspirations and that little consider the value of others and the availability to help and sustain the most needy and fragile.”

Ceferino, help against addictions

Finally, the president of the Episcopper recalled that Ceferino Namuncurá is the patron of the addiction pastoral, and pointed out: “His identification with Jesus invites us to accompany all the efforts to take care of the threatened life of so many addicts who wish to get out of their situation.”

In that sense, he warned that “a purely police and judicial look of the problem of addictions leaves us without tools to face this scourge that leaves generations of young people in frustration and the nonsense of life, in addition to endangering their health and that of their family.”

Therefore, he requested the intercession of Ceferino “to stop those true signs of death that are the cut of contributions to the centers for the prevention and recovery of addicts, as well as the omission and delay of the quotas agreed for the maintenance of the centers that, in very precarious conditions, are still working.”