I am sending you an email from Pablo de Haro
containing Fr LEPORI’s response to the news of Marcos’s death…
Dearest Fr Pablo, your message fills me with sorrow and with a sense of mystery. During the days of the Spiritual Exercises I felt Marcos particularly close. We had already travelled together from Madrid to Guadarrama, and during that journey his questions, his desire to know and to follow, were the ever-wonderful spectacle of a heart chosen and called by Christ. Then, during the Exercises, I looked at him as at a young Saint John, attentive and passionate, who let no word fall without answering «Yes», without desiring and asking for fullness. We parted with the promise of keeping in touch and seeing each other again when I came to the abbey of Poblet.
The very next day, 12 February, he wrote me this email:
Hello Fr Mauro!
Thank you so much for these days of Exercises. They have been a gift. You are an example for me, a man who lives life as I would like to live it, and I need nothing more in life than great «shepherds» and teachers.
Your teachings are already accompanying me through the first struggles in the seminary. Suddenly I face them with a more positive outlook; I must ask that it stay that way. Like this morning when I got out of the shower — there’s only hot water for 2 minutes, and my room is the North Pole. So I got out of the shower at 6:45 in the morning, and my first reaction was annoyance, but straight away I remembered the «patiences» and this phrase came into my mind, as if Christ himself were saying it to me: «But didn’t you want to give me your life? And isn’t this part of the way you have of giving it to me?» and I lived it gladly.
I’m writing to ask you to let me know whenever you come to Catalonia. If it’s during the week perhaps I can see you with permission, but in any case I will always try to see you and take you wherever you need to go.
I’m sending you a news item that illustrates once again what you were telling us about martyrdom, and the possibility of living among the flames with a certain peace:
http://www.paginasdigital.es/v_portal/informacion/informacionver.asp?cod=6281&te=15&idage=11626&vap=0
It reminded me of you. I commend you in my prayers; may the adventure you are living never end, and may you go on discovering more about the love of our life, Jesus.
With a warm embrace
Marcos
Now I read these words about the gift of his life to Christ, about life as an adventure that discovers ever more the love of our life, Jesus, as the testament and the legacy of a beloved disciple who has gone ahead of us all, and whom we are now called to follow, with humility, gratitude and compunction for not yet having corresponded in this way to the predilection of our vocation. I feel as though in Marcos God had given me a son who after only 10 days is already a father, authoritative in the right position towards life, vocation, the love of Christ…
I would like to embrace his parents (Marcos spoke to me of their bond with our abbey of Poblet), his family, and his uncle Fr Yago. Please forward this message of mine to them, above all for what Marcos wrote to me, and I hope to be able to meet them the next time I go to Barcelona. In the meantime I pray for them, as I already prayed every day for their son. But now it will be he who intercedes for us. Who knows what an embrace Fr Giussani gave him, precisely on this 10th anniversary, as a fruit already ripe for the fulfilment he taught us to desire.
This sorrow makes your friendship even more precious to me. Thank you, and let us help one another with prayer to Our Lady, so as to consent, as you say, to the conversion of our heart to Christ, which this event makes all the more urgent.
A warm embrace, yours Fr. Mauro-Giuseppe
Machine translation. If you spot a mistake, do write to us.