The Prayer of the Mothers of Lu

Mr. Peter Newman

O God, grant that one of my sons may become a priest! I myself want to live as a good Christian and want to guide my children always to do what is right, so that I may receive the grace, O God, to be allowed to give you a holy priest! Amen.

In 1881, under the direction of their parish priest, Mgr. Alessandro Canora, mothers of families in the little village of Lu, near Turin in Northern Italy, began praying this prayer together after Mass. In addition, they offered Holy Communion on the first Sunday of every month for the intention of fostering vocations to the priesthood and to the religious life among their children, and gathered every Tuesday for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament for the same intention. In a period of fifty years, five hundred priests and religious came from this village of just four thousand souls.

The well-known story of the mothers of Lu might conjure up the image of a miraculous transformation by which the village became a seedbed of vocations overnight. But the atmosphere of devotion and piety had been cultivated for years in the family homes of Lu, which then averaged between seven and ten children per household. A pre-existing culture of vocations is clear from the fact that, of the nine children in the Rinaldi family, five became Salesian priests and two became Salesian sisters. Philip, the second-youngest Rinaldi, was ordained in 1882, meaning that the vocations of the Rinaldi children were already either in seed or in full bloom when the mothers of Lu began their public devotions in 1881.

No doubt the Rinaldi children’s vocations to the Salesian order owes something to the presence of John Bosco just fifty miles away in Turin. The great Salesian saint-maker and thaumaturge visited Lu four times. Philip Rinaldi had known him from the age of five, and it was through Don Bosco’s counsels that he abandoned the idea of marriage at the age of twenty and eventually became Don Bosco’s third successor as vicar general of the Salesians.

However, this river of vocations did not only lead into the Salesian order but into forty other congregations, and continued to flow long after Don Bosco’s death in 1888, with 152 priests and religious brothers and 171 religious sisters (323 in total) after their mothers’ (or grandmothers’…) momentous decision. Among these later vocations from Lu was Evasio Colli, Archbishop of Parma, of whom John XXIII is reputed to have said, ‘He should have become pope, not me.’

The tradition of large Catholic families in Lu also endured, with 304 more births than deaths in the decade from 1919 to 1929,  and the village’s decennial “alumni” reunion continuing to swell for decades to come. During all this time, the parish church at Lu, dedication to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was the site of a litany of first Masses throughout the year, whilst the nearby villages seldom if ever celebrated one. So what’s the explanation for this particular grace?

The vocations of the children of Lu and that of St. John Bosco share a common source, at once more profound and more intimate than their common culture. In the words of St. Pius X, ‘A vocation comes from the heart of God, but goes through the heart of the mother.’ Don Bosco and St. Pius X were both raised in poverty by mothers who knew the first principle and foundation of Christian education, that ‘man is created to love, serve and reverence God and by this means to save his soul’, and took care to remove all obstacles which might stand in their children’s way. It is no wonder that, when Don Bosco fell ill due to the rigours of his apostolate, his mother, ‘Mamma Margherita’, came to nurse him, becoming as much a mother to her son’s ever-increasing horde of ‘little angels’. St. Pius X himself, as pope, kept a photograph of his mother on his desk and said, ‘Give me truly Christian mothers and I will save the sinking world.’

As far as it depended on them, these mothers obtained the grace of vocation for their children, firstly, by desiring it so generously as to impress this desire upon them, and secondly, by cultivating an atmosphere which gave the spirit of the world no hold over their home but allowed God to act unimpeded in the souls within.

Fr. Philip Rinaldi recalled of his home village of Lu, ‘a faith that made our fathers and mothers say, “The Lord gave us our children, and so if He calls them, we can’t say no.”’

Archbishop Lefebvre said that the measure of any religious foundation was not the number of faithful at Sunday Mass, nor the number of baptisms, nor even of conversions, but the number of vocations. The period of his missionary work in the Holy Ghost Fathers, and indeed the whole of the twentieth century before the Council, saw a long-cultivated flourishing of apostolic zeal, not only in Africa but in Asia and throughout the world. This resulted in multiple generations of pagans snatched all at once out of the snare of the hunters, followed immediately by a new generation of young people who desired to give their lives to God. At a French foundation in Papua New Guinea, for example, all the novice’s grandparents had been cannibals.

Archbishop Lefebvre also commented on the greatest transformation he saw in West Africa. Among the pagans and the Muslims, a woman was considered nothing, with wives and mothers generally held as little more (and sometimes even less) than property; but in those places where the inhabitants had embraced the faith, the mother became the heart of the family and the queen of the home.

What can account for this transformation, notwithstanding great missionary labour and sacrifice? It is only possible through the operation of the Catholic priesthood. In a sense, the story of the mothers of Lu is an echo of the Protoevangelium, of Mary’s fiat and of her contemplation of the open Heart of the Lamb on Calvary. It is a perpetuation of the Woman’s role in the work of Redemption, to be continued until our Lord’s return in glory, when the She will definitively triumph over the serpent through Her Son. Of the role of Christian mothers — and by analogy, that of female religious — Mgr. Gerbet wrote:

‘The mission of the woman is a private mission. She accomplishes it particularly in the sanctuary of domestic society … The predication of woman does not try and shake human nature but to cut to the quick of each individual. It is less resonant perhaps, but more penetrating. The great voice which announces the truth down the centuries is composed of two voices: to the man’s belongs the striking major tones; the Christian woman’s breathes forth the minor tones, veiled and unctuous, whose silence would leave only brute force to the other. The result of their union is suave and sweet harmony.’

‘Let women not complain about their part. If they are not charged with directing men, they are charged with forming them, as Joseph de Maistre, our Christian Plato, remarked, “The moral man, is perhaps formed at the age of ten; if he has not been formed on the knees of his mother, this will always be a great misfortune. Nothing can replace this education. If the mother makes it a duty above all to impress the divine seal profoundly on the forehead of her son, one can be nigh on sure that the hand of vice will never remove it.”’

If, in St. John Bosco’s estimation, one in three people have a priestly or religious vocation, then even the mothers of Lu did not have a hundred-percent success rate in fostering vocations among their children. But the Rinaldis, the Rolls-Vaughans and the Guérin-Martin families of this world are incidications that — in the words of that most unlikely vocation, St. Ignatius of Loyola — ‘God will not be outdone in generosity’.

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