On Saturday, Jan. 28, the centennial day of her birth (Rome, Jan. 23, 1923), Bishop Emeritus of Savona-Noli, Msgr. Vittorio Lupi presided over Mass in the Church of Mary Help of Christians, so dear to Vera Grita. He later blessed the foundation's headquarters. In his homily, Msgr. Lupi, drawing inspiration from the Word of God of the day, spoke of Vera Grita as a woman of faith who also lived through the hours of trial, illness and the same mystical experience of which she was a spokeswoman, trusting in God's faithful love to His promises.
In the afternoon, Fr. Pierluigi Cameroni, Postulator General for the Causes of Saints for the Salesian Family, delivered the lecture on "The Saints in the Life of the Church," recalling the spiritual richness of the mystery of the communion of saints, the universal call to holiness so dear to Salesian spirituality, the value of Baptism as the font sacrament of every path of life in the Spirit and the beauty of the saints who are lived Gospel, words of God incarnate.
This was followed by the presentation of some figures of sanctity related to the Ligurian land. Maria Rita Scrimieri presented the testimony of Blesseds Itala Mela (1904-1957), author of a series of theological writings on the theme of the Trinitarian Presence and Inhabitation in man, and Chiara Luce Badano (1971-1990), a young woman belonging to the Focolare Movement; she died before she turned 19 due to osteosarcoma and lived a spousal relationship with Jesus forsaken. Then Carmelite Father Giovanni Maria Tomasi spoke about Friar Joachim of Regina Pacis (1890-1985), a carpenter, in love with the Virgin Mary from a young age, very active in the Catholic associations of his village, and who only at the age of 60 entered the Desert of Varazze as a Carmelite.
This day of grace was well summarized by these words of Maria Rita Scrimieri: "Vera of Jesus, a small drop of water in infinite Love, with two specific traits of her spirituality: her littleness and poverty. The first concerns her physical frailty, marked from a young age by illness and suffering due to which Vera had to alternate long periods in the hospital with others that saw her engaged as a teacher in elementary schools in the Ligurian hinterland. The second aspect concerns the centrality, in Vera's daily and spiritual life, of the Mass, in which Vera is the little drop of water that joins the wine to be inseparably united with Infinite Love, from which her poverty receives Everything in order to be, in Him and with Him, a new drop of Infinite Love that continually gives itself, saves and sustains the world. 'I am alive in the Holy Mass,' Vera wrote from the Hospital, to her spiritual father Fr. Gabriello Zucconi, a few months before her death. Vera Grita belongs to the ranks of the 'poor of Yahweh' of all times who, in trusting abandonment to God and total and conscious dependence on Him, have found the secret of their lives in God and joy on this earth, as well as the promise of the Kingdom of Heaven in eternity."
