Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, proprephic of Dicastery for Evangelization, ordered two new bishops in the Basilica of San Pedro in the Vatican, on Wednesday, March 19, San José Day, and encouraged them to realize “God’s dreams with obedience and zeal.”
God’s dreams
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“When your vision and your plans seem not to advance, they sleep, like San José. Because when we sleep, we are vulnerable, less controlling and, therefore, more receptive and open. They sleep and dream the dreams of God. They wake up to realize them with obedience and zeal,” he encouraged the purple in his homily of the episcopal ordination mass.
The new bishops are Mons. Samuele Sangalli, deputy secretary in charge of the administration of the Dicastery for Evangelization, in the section for the first evangelization and the new particular churches; and Mons. Diego Ramón Sarrió Cucella, of the Missionaries of Africa and former president of the Pontifical Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies (Pisai), who was appointed on January 25 as the new Bishop of Laghouat, Algeria.
The Purpsed Filipino, informs the VATICAN AGENCY FIDESHe also stressed that the Holy Custodian of Nazareth’s family accepted God’s call with faith, which “is the source of the courage and creativity of Joseph, who always subordinates his own project to that of God, even when he seems incomprehensible or inconvenient.”
The faith of San José
In the same way, he said, the Ministry Priests and Bishops “must be rooted in a response of faith to God and exercise as such.”
Saint Joseph, continued the proprephic, is a “silent holy”, and in fact there is no word in the gospels, but “rescue, take care and retain the word of God made flesh in the bosom of Mary, the most important word.”
Every thought and action of Joseph, highlighted the purple, “speaks of a single word: Jesus. It is the only thing that matters. His own words pale before the supreme word. Therefore, he can be silent.”
The bishop is a doctrine teacher and minister of the Government of the Church
At another time in his homily, Cardinal Tagle recalled that the Second Vatican Council explains that the bishops are called to take care of “instead of God, to the flock of which they are pastors as teachers of doctrine, priests of the sacred cult and ministers of the Government of the Church”; and to be “shepherds of the Church of God, which he bought with the blood of his own son.”
This, said the proprephic, are “beautiful teachings that make even the bishops themselves. How can a bishop do justice to such a great responsibility? Certainly, only by the grace of God.”
Custodians of Jesus
As Saint Joseph, the cardinal continued, “deacons, presbyters and bishops must also keep ‘silence’ while proclaiming the Word of God” because “it is not our word that counts and the one that must be recorded for posterity, but the Word of God”, and if “our thoughts, plans, decisions and actions do not speak of Jesus, we could be like ‘bronze that resonates or cymbal it.”
In addition, the Holy Custodian is “a faithful custodian of Jesus”, and in that task “he knows that Jesus belongs to his father’s house. Joseph’s house in Nazareth only has value if it remains a shadow of the Father’s house, from which he must take light.”
Therefore, “deacons, priests and bishops are also called to be custodians of God’s active presence in his church” because “bishops are not substitutes for the eternally alive God or competitors of the Savior”, since they are called to be “authentic signs of the presence of God in the Church”, with a “discreet visibility of shadow that depends on the light.”
At the end of the celebration, the new bishops thanked the Holy Father, who attended their consecration and all those with whom they have worked at the service of the Church.
Cardinal Tagle had Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio and Archbishop Fortunatus Nwachukwu, secretary of the Dicastery for evangelization as co-consagrants.
The purple also recalled that yesterday 12 years of the beginning of Pope Francis’s papacy, “for whose full restoration we pray.”
Walter Sánchez Silva
I am husband since 2008. With my wife we have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before birth. Since I joined ACI Press in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Colonia, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the family’s synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Sinodality, in 2023. I follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers the persecution of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as the ecclesial news in the region.