RMG – The icon of St. Artemis Zatti, SDB

11 October 2022

(ANS - Rome) - By reason of the canonization ceremony of Artemide Zatti, Pope Francis and the Rector Major were honored with an icon of the new saint, handcrafted by Lara Sacco, a professional iconographer. Pope Francis received it from the Rector Major on the sidelines of the audience granted on Saturday, Oct. 8, while it was given to Fr. Ángel Fernández Artime on Sunday, Oct. 9, as a tribute from the Salesian Congregation. Here, in detail, are the multiple meanings of the icon.

Zatti's face is depicted as a young man, yet holiness is a quality that spanned his entire life. He lived each developmental stage to the full: his boyhood and adolescence in Italy, his youth, maturity, and old age in Argentina. Maturity in Christ is reached in the terminal illness that makes him, as he says, "a squeezed lemon." In this final scene of his life, as total self-giving, is recapitulated every moment lived in Jesus, with Jesus and for Jesus, loved and encountered in every sick person. The golden halo manifests the fullness of life in Heaven, where he experiences the fullness of life and continues to intercede for everyone.

The white coat is the garment of his daily work of professionalism, competence, commitment, passion, and self-sacrifice toward the sick. Care is directed not only to the body but also to the soul and touches the whole man.

The Gospel of Jesus in his hand is the way, the truth, and the life that Artemide believed, promised to live, and fulfilled in his being a Good Samaritan to so many brothers and sisters he met on his path. The Good News became flesh through unlimited trust in God's Providence.

The Rosary was the simple, profound, and filial prayer to Mary as Mother Help of Christians that he experienced. It enabled him to trust in difficult times, to rejoice in the wonders worked by the Lord in people's lives, to contemplate the passion of Jesus and to welcome it in the sufferings of His children, to rejoice in the power of the Resurrection that runs through and guides history toward the day of Christ the Lord.

The bicycle is the means he used to travel from the community to the hospital, to visit the sick in their homes and help them. At the same time, it is the sign of his solicitude, of going in haste wherever there was a need to manifest his passion for souls. On the right side of the picture appears Don Bosco's chosen motto for the Salesian Society: a passion for souls through the renunciation of everything, beginning with oneself.

Above the motto, at a distance, appear a doctor and two nuns: collaborators in the health care field, a true educational community. Good is never accomplished alone; it is always ecclesial, synodal, communal, done together. Consecrated and lay people are the states of life of the Christian that, together with the ministerial priesthood, make up the beautiful mosaic of the Church.

The San Josè hospital in the background is the place where the Salesians embodied the welcoming face of the Church, a field hospital in the true sense of the word, even to the point of becoming mobile and moving to another place. It was truly the field in which Zatti sowed joy, cured illnesses of body and spirit, and expressed the service of charity to those most in need.

Finally, on the left is a boy with an obvious bandage: young people are the riverbed or banks of the Salesian mission, illness is the specific field in which Zatti expressed his being a Salesian coadjutor brother, a consecrated person for the young, especially the poorest.

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ANS - “Agenzia iNfo Salesiana” is a on-line almost daily publication, the communication agency of the Salesian Congregation enrolled in the Press Register of the Tibunal of Rome as n 153/2007.

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