This year we are celebrating the 175 years of the founding of our Congregation of Claretian Missionaries (July 16, 1849 – July 16, 2024). For this reason, various commemorative activities will take place, including a “Congress of Claretian Spirituality”, in Vic (Spain), the founding place, from July 7 to 15. Various documents and videos have also begun to be published. Hence the reason why this volume XXXVIII of “Studia Claretiana” offers some works, among other, that refer to this anniversary; specifically, the first two.
Indeed, in the “Studies” section, there are six contributions. In the first, our frequent collaborator, the Claretian Severiano Blanco, offers a historical synthesis of how Claret was developing, after several attempts, the idea of founding a group of missionaries that would dedicate themselves to popular preaching, in a historical period of its absence and even prohibition by the government of the nation. In 1849, Claret definitively founded the first community in Vic, which was later followed by others. In the second contribution, our young writer, the Claretian Sebin Mundackal, makes an interesting study on Psalm 22 (23), which was the subject of the first talk of the Spiritual Exercises with which Claret addressed the founding group that July 16. He frames it exegetically; but, above all, he focuses on Claret’s interpretation of it, following the sources that he had at hand at the time.
The third study, also the work of S. Blanco, deals with a little-known aspect, except for a few facts transmitted by tradition; a problem that Claret encountered practically throughout his entire apostolic life, that is, difficulties, slander and even prohibitions and persecutions of all kinds, by those responsible for public order: civil, military, judicial… There appears a very realistic, practical and even heroic Claret, in front of the socio-political complexity that he had to face in Catalonia, Cuba, Madrid, until his deathbed.
The long study that follows, the work of the Claretian J. M. Alday, is part of a detailed investigation into a very unknown topic, which is the role of women in Claret’s life. He had already published three chapters on this topic in “Studia Claretiana” XXXIV (2019) pp. 7-39. There he presented Claret’s relationship with his parents, especially with his mother; the presence of women in his life and work as well as in his Autobiography. Now we publish the following three chapters, from 4 to 6, on women in the active and passive epistolary of the saint; the testimonies of women in the Canonization Process; and finally, the presence of women in some biographies of Claret until his Canonization in 1950. Alday’s effort has a very special value due to the enormous amount of documentation collected and organized, which is certainly not within the reach of the vast majority of the Claretians. Here you can find a true mine, available to every reader. In a next volume we hope to be able to publish, after this mass of documentation, a synthesis of Claret’s thoughts on women.
The Claretian J. M. Hernández, a specialist in ecumenism, published in 2020, as no. 2 of the collection “Urget”, his doctoral thesis on “Claret and the Protestantism of his time.The utopia of an impossible encounter.” A reality that conditioned the apostolic concerns of the missionary. In the present work the author enriches and exemplifies this problem of Claret on Protestantism, as an emblematic example of his publicist activity.
The “Studies” part closes with a work by the Claretian Américo Paolo dos Santos Freitas Maia, on “Fr. Jaime Clotet, living in the presence of God.” In the previous volume of “Studia Claretiana”, on the occasion of the bicentenary of the birth of the said Fr. Clotet, we published six studies on this co-founder. The work contained in this volume completes what was said last year with a serious study of Clotet’s deepest and even mystical spiritual experience.
The “Notes” section follows next. In it the reader will find four brief investigations, three of them the work of the indefatigable V. Sanz, and the fourth by the young Honduran Claretian, Edgardo Guzmán. Sanz wants to remind us, with news that is often unknown, and sometimes even surprising, of events that happened a hundred years ago. Here specifically, about the life of the missionary Domingo Solá; then, about how the acceptance of the construction of the still incomplete Votive Temple of the Heart of Mary in Rome was reached, completing what he had already said in the previous volume (cf., pp.212-215); and on the typical Claretian initiative, the “Higher School of Sacred Music.” Guzmán, on the other hand, presents us with a series of unpublished documents on the cordial relationship of the martyr bishop from El Salvador, Saint Oscar Romero, with the Claretians, from his first experience as a seminarian until shortly before his death.
The volume closes with the “Claretian Bibliography”, published in 2023, and which has been provided to us, like the preceding years, by the General Secretariat of the Congregation.
J. ROVIRA, C.M.F.
(Director of “Studia Claretiana”)