Elena Aiello

Elena Emilia Aiello was born on 10 April 1895 at Montalto Uffugo in the province of Cosenza, Calabria, into an exemplary Christian family, the third of eight children of the tailor Pasquale Aiello and Teresina Paglilla. Baptized soon after birth and raised in lively faith, she lost her mother in 1905 and grew early in prayer, penance, and desire for religious life. During a long illness she consecrated herself to the Lord by the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. After the First World War and the Spanish flu, she entered the Sisters of Charity of the Most Precious Blood at Nocera dei Pagani in August 1920.

A poorly treated shoulder condition, followed by further physical damage and the onset of grave illness including stomach cancer, forced her departure from the convent. Returning home, she invoked Saint Rita of Cascia and obtained healing; tradition holds that Saint Rita appeared to her in a dream. From November 1921 mystical phenomena accompanied her until death. Blood sweat and the stigmata appeared especially on the Fridays of Lent and on Good Friday. On one Good Friday the Lord appeared and placed the crown of thorns upon her head, and blood flowed for hours. She also received visions of the Blessed Virgin and of saints such as Francis of Paola and Thérèse of the Child Jesus.

Shaped by participation in Christ's Passion, on 17 January 1928 she began, with her first companion Luigina (Luigia) Mazza, a work of service to the most abandoned, especially orphaned and neglected little girls. Entrusting her first steps to Saint Francis of Paola, patron of Calabria, and to Saint Thérèse, she founded the Congregation of the Minim Sisters of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The institute gradually took shape and received pontifical approval (attested as 2 January 1948 / July 1949). Participation in the sufferings of Christ and love for the least, sustained by continual prayer and fervent devotion to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, became the twin pillars of foundress and congregation. The community spread from Calabria throughout Italy and into poor regions of Latin America among emigrants.

During the Jubilee of 1950 she met Pope Pius XII and asked whether her work was according to the heart of the Church; the Holy Father answered that her work would not end because it was founded on Providence. She loved the Pope and the Church deeply and often told her sisters that their duty was to "sentire cum Ecclesia"—to think and feel with the Church. In 1940, after an interior command of the Lord, she wrote to Benito Mussolini warning him not to ally with Hitler, lest defeat and divine punishment fall upon the Italian people; the letter went unanswered. An eminently Eucharistic soul, she lived the maxim she repeated almost as a litany: there is no love without suffering.

Sister Elena Aiello died in Rome at dawn on 19 June 1961, after receiving the last sacraments, having spent her life in holy service of the poor and the least. In life and in death the people called her the "holy nun." Her fame of holiness led to the opening of the cause; she was declared Venerable by Saint John Paul II on 22 January 1991. A scientifically inexplicable healing of a young woman from severe cranial trauma and related injuries was recognized as a miracle, and she was beatified at Cosenza on 14 September 2011, the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

May Blessed Elena Aiello obtain for us a heart that loves the Crucified and serves the abandoned, and help us practice today the virtue of uniting charity with patient suffering.

As the fame of sanctity grew, the Archbishop of Cosenza initiated the Cognitional Process on her life and virtues in 1972 and concluded it in 1987. Once the Positio was prepared, the customary examinations were carried out: the Theological Consultors, gathered in a specific Congress on December 5, 1989, expressed a positive opinion regarding the heroism of the virtues of the Venerable Servant of God.

Thus the Cardinal and Bishop Fathers judged in the Ordinary Session of May 8, 1990. Blessed John Paul II issued the Decree on the heroism of virtues on January 22, 1991. In view of her Beatification, the Postulation of the Cause submitted to the judgment of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints the alleged miraculous healing of the young Francesca Bozzarello from head trauma and diffuse brain injuries with severe coma, associated with chest trauma and an intra-articular tibial fracture, which occurred on April 23, 2002. Having fulfilled the requirements established by law, the Medical Board on February 1, 2007, judged this healing to be scientifically inexplicable.

In the Specific Congress of October 23, 2010, the theological Consultors considered it a miracle. The Cardinal and Bishop Fathers, gathered in an Ordinary Session on January 18, 2011, also judged this healing to be a true miracle. We therefore We Ourselves authorized the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to promulgate the Decree on the miracle on April 2, 2011, and established that the rite of beatification should take place in Cosenza on September 14, 2011, the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross.

BENEDICT XVI

GENERAL AUDIENCE

Paul VI Audience Hall Wednesday, 14 September 2011

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?", Psalm 22 (21)

Dear brothers and sisters,

In today's catechesis I would like to address a Psalm with strong Christological implications, which continually surfaces in the accounts of Jesus' passion, with its twofold dimension of humiliation and glory, of death and life. It is Psalm 22, according to the Hebrew tradition, 21 according to the Greco-Latin tradition, a heartfelt and touching prayer, of such human density and theological richness that it is among the most prayed and studied Psalms of the entire Psalter. It is a long poetic composition, and we will dwell in particular on its first part, focused on lament, to examine in depth some significant dimensions of the prayer of supplication to God.

This Psalm presents the figure of an innocent person persecuted and surrounded by adversaries who want his death; and he resorts to God in a painful lament which, in the certainty of faith, mysteriously opens up to praise. In his prayer, the distressing reality of the present and the consoling memory of the past alternate, in a suffering awareness of one's own desperate situation which nevertheless does not want to renounce hope. His initial cry is an appeal addressed to a God who appears far away, who does not answer and seems to have abandoned him:

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Far from my salvation are the words of my cry. O my God, I cry by day and you do not answer; and by night, and there is no respite for me" (vv. 2-3).

God is silent, and this silence tears at the soul of the one who prays, who incessantly calls out, but without finding an answer. The days and nights follow one another, in an untiring search for a word, for help that does not come; God seems so distant, so forgetful, so absent. The prayer asks for a hearing and a response, urges contact, seeks a relationship that can grant comfort and salvation. But if God does not answer, the cry for help is lost in the void and loneliness becomes unbearable. Yet, the petitioner of our Psalm three times, in his cry, calls the Lord "my" God, in an extreme act of trust and faith. Despite all appearances, the Psalmist cannot believe that the bond with the Lord has been totally severed; and while he asks the reason for a presumed incomprehensible abandonment, he affirms that "his" God cannot abandon him.

As is well known, the initial cry of the Psalm, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?", is reported by the Gospels of Matthew and Mark as the cry uttered by Jesus dying on the cross (cf. (Mt 27:46), Mk 15:34). It expresses all the desolation of the Messiah, Son of God, who is facing the drama of death, a reality totally opposed to the Lord of life. Abandoned by almost all his own, betrayed and denied by disciples, surrounded by those who insult him, Jesus is under the crushing weight of a mission that must pass through humiliation and annihilation. Therefore he cries out to the Father, and his suffering takes on the sorrowful words of the Psalm. But his is not a desperate cry, just as that of the Psalmist was not, who in his supplication traverses a tormented path culminating finally in a perspective of praise, in the trust of divine victory. And since in Jewish usage quoting the beginning of a Psalm implied a reference to the entire poem, Jesus' agonizing prayer, while maintaining its charge of unspeakable suffering, opens up to the certainty of glory. "Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these sufferings and enter into his glory?", the Risen One will say to the disciples of Emmaus (Lk 24:26). In his passion, in obedience to the Father, the Lord Jesus passes through abandonment and death to reach life and give it to all believers.

To this initial cry of supplication, in our Psalm 22, there follows, in painful contrast, the memory of the past:

"In you our fathers trusted; trusted, and you set them free; to you they cried out and were saved; in you they trusted and were not put to shame" (vv. 5-6).

That God who today appears so distant to the Psalmist is nevertheless the merciful Lord whom Israel has always experienced in its history. The people to whom the supplicant belongs have been the object of God's love and can bear witness to His fidelity. Beginning with the Patriarchs, and then in Egypt and during the long wandering in the desert, in the stay in the promised land in contact with aggressive and enemy populations, down to the darkness of the exile, the entire biblical history has been a history of cries for help on the part of the people and saving responses on the part of God. And the Psalmist refers to the unshakable faith of his fathers, who "trusted"—this word is repeated three times—without ever being disappointed. Now, however, it seems that this chain of trusting invocations and divine responses has been broken; the situation of the Psalmist seems to belie the entire history of salvation, making the present reality even more painful.

But God cannot contradict Himself, and so prayer returns to describe the painful situation of the supplicant, to induce the Lord to have mercy and intervene, as He had always done in the past. The Psalmist defines himself as "a worm and not a man, scorned by everyone, despised by the people" (v. 7), he is mocked, derided (cf. v. 8) and wounded precisely in his faith: "He relies on the Lord; let the Lord rescue him, let him deliver him, if he delights in him" (v. 9), they say. Under the mocking blows of irony and contempt, it almost seems that the persecuted man loses his human features, like the Suffering Servant portrayed in the Book of Isaiah (cf. Is 52:14; 53:2b-3). And like the oppressed just man of the Book of Wisdom (cf. 2:12-20), like Jesus on Calvary (cf. Mt 27:39-43), the Psalmist sees his relationship with his Lord called into question, in the cruel and sarcastic highlighting of what is making him suffer: the silence of God, His apparent absence. Yet God has been present in the supplicant's existence with indisputable closeness and tenderness. The Psalmist reminds the Lord of this: "Yet you brought me out of the womb, you made me trust in you, even at my mother's breast. From birth I was cast on you" (vv. 10-11a). The Lord is the God of life, who brings forth life and welcomes the newborn, taking care of him with a father's affection. And if earlier memory was made of God's fidelity in the history of the people, now the supplicant recalls his own personal history of relationship with the Lord, going back to the particularly significant moment of the beginning of his life. And there, despite the desolation of the present, the Psalmist recognizes such a radical divine closeness and love that he can now exclaim, in a confession full of faith and generative of hope: "from my mother's womb you have been my God" (v. 11b).

The lament now becomes a heartfelt plea: \"Do not stay far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help\" (v. 12). The only closeness that the Psalmist perceives and that frightens him is that of his enemies. It is therefore necessary that God draw near and help, because the enemies surround the one who prays, they encircle him, and they are like powerful bulls, like lions opening their jaws to roar and tear apart (cf. vv. 13-14). Anguish alters the perception of danger, magnifying it. The adversaries appear invincible, they have become fierce and extremely dangerous animals, while the Psalmist is like a small worm, helpless, without any defense. But these images used in the Psalm also serve to say that when man becomes brutal and attacks his brother, something animalistic takes over in him, he seems to lose every human semblance; violence always has something bestial in it and only the saving intervention of God can restore man to his humanity.

Now, for the Psalmist, the object of such fierce aggression, there seems to be no escape left, and death begins to take hold of him: \"I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint [...] my strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws [...] they divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots\" (vv. 15.16.19). With dramatic images, which we find in the accounts of Christ's passion, the dissolution of the condemned man's body is described, the unbearable thirst that torments the dying man and finds an echo in Jesus' request \"I thirst\" (cf. Jn 19:28), culminating in the final gesture of the tormentors who, like the soldiers beneath the cross, divide the garments of the victim, already considered dead (cf. (Mt 27:35), (Mk 15:24), (Lk 23:34), Jn 19:23-24).

Here then, urgent once again, is the plea for help: \"But you, O Lord, do not stay far off; O my strength, come quickly to my aid [...] Save me\" (vv. 20.22a). This is a cry that opens the heavens, because it proclaims a faith, a certainty that goes beyond every doubt, every darkness, and every desolation. And the lament is transformed, giving way to praise in the welcoming of salvation: \"You have answered me. I will proclaim your name to my brethren; in the midst of the assembly I will praise you\" (vv. 22c-23). Thus, the Psalm opens up to thanksgiving, to the great final hymn that involves the whole people, the faithful of the Lord, the liturgical assembly, future generations (cf. vv. 24-32). The Lord has rushed to the rescue, He has saved the poor man and has shown him His face of mercy. Death and life have crossed paths in an inseparable mystery, and life has triumphed; the God of salvation has shown Himself to be the undisputed Lord, whom all the ends of the earth will celebrate and before whom all the families of the nations will bow down. It is the victory of faith, which can transform death into a gift of life, the abyss of sorrow into a source of hope.

Dear brothers and sisters, this Psalm has brought us to Golgotha, to the foot of Jesus' cross, to relive His passion and share the fruitful joy of the resurrection. Let us therefore allow ourselves to be penetrated by the light of the Paschal mystery even in the apparent absence of God, even in the silence of God, and, like the disciples of Emmaus, let us learn to discern the true reality beyond appearances, recognizing the path of exaltation precisely in humiliation, and the full manifestation of life in death, on the cross. Thus, placing all our

I am pleased to welcome the English-speaking visitors and pilgrims present at today's Audience, including the groups from Great Britain, Scandinavia, Asia and North America. I extend a special greeting to the delegates of the International Catholic Charismatic Renewal Services and to the Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums. Upon all of you, and upon your families and loved ones, I invoke God's abundant blessings.

I cordially greet the German-speaking pilgrims and visitors. God does not abandon us. Therefore, it is important that we do not cease to knock at His door in prayer, indeed to cry out to Him, as the Lord did. He will also kindle the light of the Resurrection within us. May God accompany you all! Many thanks.

I greet the Spanish-speaking pilgrims, in particular the officers of the National Police of Colombia, the group from the Carabiner Academy of Chile, the students and teachers of the Modern Humanistic High School of Salta, Argentina, as well as the other faithful who have come from Spain, Mexico, Venezuela, and other Latin American countries. Let us allow ourselves to be permeated by the light of the Paschal mystery and, like the disciples of Emmaus, let us learn to discern reality beyond appearances, recognizing in the cross the full manifestation of life. Thank you very much.

I direct my friendly greeting to the members of the Franciscan Missionary Union, coming from Portugal, to the Brazilians of the Vocational Group, and to all the other Portuguese-speaking pilgrims present here. On this day of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, let us allow ourselves to be permeated by the light of the paschal mystery, in order to recognize the path of exaltation precisely in humiliation, placing all our hope in God, and thus our cry for help will be transformed into a hymn of praise. And may God's blessing descend upon you and your families!

Italian translation:

I cordially greet the Polish pilgrims. In these days, the "Education Week" is being celebrated in Poland. Education, whose goal is the integral development of man, is a task that requires the cooperation of parents, teachers, and pastors, as well as the respective state and local authorities. May this Week awaken in everyone a sense of responsibility for the good formation of the minds and hearts of young people. God bless you.

Italian translation:

I affectionately greet the Slovak pilgrims coming from Šurany, Záhorská Bystrica, Žilina, Prešov, and Stará Ľubovňa; in particular, I welcome the group coming from Svit with the "Laudamus" choir. Brothers and sisters, tomorrow Slovakia will celebrate the feast of its Patroness, the Sorrowful Virgin Mary. Jesus has given her as Mother to each one of us. May she help you to be faithful disciples of Christ. I willingly bless you. Praised be Jesus Christ

* * *

I address a cordial welcome to the Italian-speaking pilgrims. In particular, I greet the Sisters Servants of the Poor, who are participating in their General Chapter; the Salesian Religious, departing for the ad gentes mission; the representatives of the Shalom community from Palazzolo sull'Oglio. I wish everyone to be joyful instruments of divine love and mercy.

Finally, my thoughts go out to the young people, the sick, and the newlywed couples. Today, the liturgy invites us to meditate on the mystery of the Lord's Cross, and tomorrow on the sorrows of His Mother. May the Cross of Christ and the example of Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows, illuminate your lives, dear young people; may they sustain you in your daily trials, dear sick; and may they be an incentive for you, dear newlywed couples, to lead a courageous family life consistent with evangelical principles.

Today, in Cosenza, Sister Elena Aiello, founder of the Sisters of the Minims of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, is proclaimed Blessed. Immediately following the National Eucharistic Congress in Ancona, the Church in Italy rejoices at the elevation to the glory of the altars of an eminently Eucharistic soul. An illustrious daughter of the land of Calabria, Sister Elena Aiello used to say: \"The Eucharist is the essential nourishment of my life, the deep breath of my soul, the Sacrament that gives meaning to my life, to all the actions of the day\". May the example and intercession of the new Blessed increase in everyone the love for the admirable Sacrament of the altar.