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Posted August 1, 2011

A Great Nuncio to our Country Returns Home to God

Thank you Archbishop Pietro Sambi for the joy you were to us!

Taken from Whispers in the Loggia


The son and brother of schoolteachers, Pietro Sambi's episcopal ministry was especially devoted to the work of teaching -- in Catholic education, in the media, in every member of this church by our witness and example... but above all, it's the role he eagerly, unmistakably wanted his bishops to evidence most in their ministries.

Along those lines, it was beyond fitting that, in his final American road-trip, aware of the "delicate" surgery that'd befall him, B16's Man among us received an honorary doctorate from Denver's Jesuit-run Regis University, in the presence of the prelate to whom, just a few weeks later, Sambi would make his tenure's final -- and, on several angles, most consequential -- phone-call bearing news of the Pope's decision.

As the Big Boss rides off into the sunset, though, one talk he especially enjoyed giving is worth recalling: the late Nuncio's 2007 keynote to the nation's Catholic educators at the National Catholic Education Association's Easter Week convention in Baltimore, its key grafs -- especially poignant in this hour -- reprinted here below (emphases original):

[A] young man, 22 years old, once took a piece of marble and sculpted in it two of the most deep human sentiments: suffering accepted from the hand of God does not diminish the beauty of the human person but increases it, and -- second sentiment -- even in death, a son continues to have full confidence in his mother.

This is the Pietá of Michelangelo, that you can see everytime you enter in the Basilica of St Peter in Rome.

Michelangelo, the author of the Pietá, is considered one of the greatest artists in the world. I don't believe it! The greatest artists are the educators -- are you -- because you try to sculpt the best of yourselves, of who you are and what you know, not in a piece of marble, but in living, breathing human beings, who are the glory of God.

And for all the things he's given the church on these shores -- both individually and by the thousands -- whatever our place in the mix, God give us all the grace to teach ever better in word and witness today, tomorrow and forever.