Transformed in Christ, the Master of Uncommon Sense
“I am the way and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.” As a sixteen-year-old seminarian in Piedmont, Italy, James Alberione was seized by those words of Christ. He had read Leo XIII’s encyclical for the dawn of the twentieth century, Tametsi futura prospicientibus, On Jesus Christ the Redeemer. He had absorbed the thinking of now-Blessed Giuseppe Toniolo, economist and leader of Christian social thought. Together, they launched Alberione on a unique, lifelong quest into the Person of Christ the Master, both rooted in Christian Tradition and responsive to society. Exactly one hundred years ago, that response took the form of what gradually became the ten branches of the Pauline Family. Each branch, in its own way, bears witness to Christ the Master, Way, Truth, and Life. The theological-spiritual synthesis that undergirds this witness is the principal reason that at Alberione’s beatification, John Paul II would call him “the first apostle of the new evangelization.” What secret does this synthesis hold for us here as we attempt to renew the West?