Valentine’s Day: This venerable exchanged 1,600 love letters with his wife

On Valentine’s Day, many countries celebrate love. Today we remember the Venerable Argentine Enrique Shaw, a model of a husband, father of a family and Catholic businessman, who throughout his life exchanged 1,600 love letters with his wife, Cecilia Bunge.

From his youth, the venerable Enrique Shaw and Cecilia Bunge dreamed of accompanying and helping themselves in human and spiritual growth. After two years of boyfriends, they married on October 23, 1943. Fruit of that love, marriage had nine children.

His granddaughter, Sara Critto de Eiras, selected fragments of love letters between her grandparents and published them in a book entitled “Enrique and Cecilia: Love letters” There is reflected the desire that both had to live a single life, shared between them and God.

In dialogue with Orb Channel 21the granddaughter and author of the book recalled that “Enrique said that seeking God’s will, everything else adds itself, that what God wants is expressed in the usual duties, in those little things: in being a good husband, good Father, good son, good professional. ”

Writing that book, Sara admitted, “I was super edifying for me, for my marriage. The truth that (the letters) are very beautiful, because they set out to become happy mutually. ”

In her letters, said the granddaughter, “Enrique told her – which sometimes worried about things – that God wanted her to be happy, to live happy, without worries. And if she was happy, he was also going to be; And that they had to have that courage to be happy without mental complications, seeking to live with that faith, hope and charity that he considered the most important virtues of marriage. They are the theological virtues, but he said they were the cardinals of marriage, ”he explained.

This was mentioned in one of his letters: “Our marriage, thank God, has its very firm foundations in the love of God, as well as its structure. Reflecting on the subject, it has occurred to me that the three ‘cardinal virtues’ of a marriage, that is, of the relations between one spouse, always based, of course, in that firm foundation of God’s love, are faith, are faith, hope and charity between one and the other ”.

Being even boyfriends, Enrique wrote to Cecilia in one of his letters: “All the time that other people use and doubt the behavior of the spouse, like us, to God thank you, we do not have those problems, we must use in trying to make either to others or that others know the God to whom we owe so much. ”

Cecilia, on the other hand, in one of her letters she dedicated a poem about the love of Enrique:

Being in love, is feeling a bird in the heart.
It is living in a sky of two.
It is feeling the mantle of the Virgin.
It is to understand in the end the communion of souls.
It is to know the exact value of every minute.
It is wanting to catch the time it revokes.
It is having reached the fullness of life.
It is to find being perfect that has always been sought.
It is laughing for no reason, and crying for anything.
It is forgive.
It is to enjoy the usual things, and erase difficulties.
It is closing your eyes and seeing it, looking at the moon and wishing it.
It is to love you Enrique and that is all.

More than 80 years of their marriage, unwavering love between Enrique and Cecilia continues to bear fruit. This and other books on the life and testimony of the Holiness of the Venerable are available in This link.

The stamp with prayer to pray for the prompt beatification of Enrique Shaw, in This link.