The miracle of St Joseph

Luigi Giussani, in the center of the photo, with his classmates in the seminary of Venegono [© CL Archive]

“When at my first year of high school, after the summer holidays, I returned to the seminary in Venegono, I spent the first month, the month of October, in a very melancholic state. Basically it was because I had left home, but when one is so full of melancholy, one always tries, and finds, an excuse, an alibi not to acknowledge one’s own weakness; and the alibi was that I had not received the Gemoll Greek dictionary. My mother had sent it to me in early October, but the days went by and the Gemoll didn’t arrive; and it was difficult because, in class assignments, I always had to ask my classmate for the dictionary, to his great annoyance and my own too.
On the last Wednesday of that month of October, at the end of his brief morning meditation, Father Motta, our spiritual father, told us that the Wednesday of the week was, by Christian tradition, dedicated to the memory to St Joseph, who had a great task in the Church: that therefore we should turn confidently to him, first of all because he was the protector of a good death and secondly because he performed miracles. In that instant, at seven in the morning, I said, “The Gemoll arrives today”. And I remember at breakfast and at recreation afterwards all my friends asked me: “What’s happened to you?” because my face had changed, I was different from how they had seen me that month, I had regained my good spirits, and every time they asked, I answered: “Today I get the Gemoll”.
That was in 1938, and then the mail came just once a day. Mail delivery in the seminary was at noon: the vice-rector came into the large refectory (where three hundred of us sat to eat) with a “huge bag” and handed out the mail to everyone; it was one of the day’s most awaited moments, as it was among soldiers. I was perfectly calm: “Today I get the Gemoll”, but my Gemoll wasn’t there. Yet I was sure it would arrive. On some rare occasions, in that period, there was also an afternoon delivery, and in this case the vice-rector repeated the round at supper. That evening there was mail. But my Gemoll wasn’t there. It was eight o’clock in the evening. After supper there was an hour of play, of recreation, and then, from nine-thirty to ten-thirty an hour of study; at ten-thirty the last bell rang, evening prayers were said and we went to bed. We studied in a large hall, about eighty of us, each with his own desk. At half past ten the bell sounded to end the day and at that moment someone came in at the far end of the hall, and went to the prefect with a package. I said very loudly to my companions: “It’s my Gemoll”. It was my Gemoll!
Obviously this fact may have said nothing to others, though it said a lot to me.
I mentioned this episode to stress the second meaning of the word “miracle”: a slant to happenings that draws a person to God, and drawing him, also draws his neighbor, who is close to him.
The greatness of God knows how to reveal itself in the familiarity with which it lives with man, lives in the life of man”.

(Taken from: Luigi Giussani, Perché la Chiesa [Why the Church], Rizzoli, Milan 2003, pp. 288-290)