FROM Pope Pius XII’s address to newlyweds on May 7, 1941:
Springtime of nature’s beauty, springtime of Easter joy, springtime of weddings. You are now enjoying this threefold spring; you are reveling in it almost as if the world around you is drawing together everything in your life for you. However, if you interrupt for a moment the sweet converse of your honeymoon and happen to read a paper, you will find in its columns another life and another world: operations of war, immense battles on land, at sea and in the air, but also magnificent examples of generosity towards those who suffer, of dedication, heroism and sacrifice.
In the midst of these dreadful upheavals, dear sons and daughters, you yourselves in a great and beautiful act of Christian faith have not been afraid to establish your new families, well knowing and believing that the unperturbed renewal of spring in the tumult of human events is neither mockery nor jest, nor the cold indifference of blind nature nor an empty fancy of foolish dreamers, but witness and proof to our senses of the reality of life and beauty reborn of that supreme and paternal “love which moves the sun and the stars,” whose abiding care never for an instant deserts the governance of the universe, and whose mercy controls and moderates the turmoil of humankind. Is not your faith really a reliance on the sovereign Hand of God, gentle and strong, watchful, alert, perpetually guiding the events of this world, great and small, sad and joyful? Learn the beautiful and lofty lesson God gives you in the threefold spring which you are living in these days and which confirms your trust.
It is not a childishly simple trust, fancying that spring will last forever, that its incomparable beauty will not fade, that its flowers will never wither, that torrid heat or cold or snow will never return. It is not a simplicity enamored of the present without a thought for the future, with no attempt to strengthen the soul, to prepare it and fortify it against the hardships and trials of the future.
It is not a listlessly indifferent trust, living from day to day and deluding itself with the dream that there will always be time to reawaken at the sound of the trumpet and protect oneself against the storm, that for now it is better to enjoy calm and carefree today’s life and the rays of today’s sun, however fleeting they may be.
It is not the trust of grim surrender to fatalism, uncaring in the conviction that against the blind onslaught of events nothing helps but to hunch one’s shoulders and fend off the blow as well as possible, seeking if anything to soften its shock by giving way like a ball which can be rolled and bumped on all sides without resistance and useless reaction.
What, then, is this trust? It is faith in God’s love, “and we have come to know, and have believed, the love that God has in our behalf” (I Jn. 4:16). Lift your spirit above the winds and tempests of earth. With all your soul you believe that the worldstream which sweeps us along in its storm, and bruises and stuns us, is not an unthinking flood and collision of blind forces unleashed by chance, but that however dark and baffling the raging torrent may be, the omnipotence of Infinite Love and Wisdom leads all, watches over all, and directs all to one goal where mercy pleads louder than justice.
You know that God has never forgotten the purposes of His work, the wisdom of which will be made manifest in heaven when in His vision we can retrace life’s path, marked by our bloody footprints and strewn with the flowers of His grace.
