Riccardi

Castel Gandolfo, February 16, 1987 (...) Mary was a gate that leads to God. A gate is not a gate unless it opens and allows free passage. A door that is always closed is really a wall. Those who stop at the gate do not reach God. The gate is for Jesus. “Hail, O Gate of the Sublime Mystery,” sounds the Akathistos hymn. The Virgin is the one who is empty of self, utterly self-forgetful. She is the created being who knows that she is created, even when filled with God. She was using the same method for our Movement that she had used for the Church: keeping herself in the shadows in order to highlight her Son, who is God. Text Video in italian

(...) During the pontificate of Paul VI, too, I had the adventure of becoming acquainted with and loving a very special countenance of Jesus forsaken, which brought not pain to be embraced but solely the most intense love: that which shone in the great Athenagoras I, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. By the will of Providence I found myself an unofficial intermediary between the Patriarch and the Holy Father. I came to know Athenagoras’ thought, his all-consuming longing for the unity of the Orthodox Church with ours. For years I became the ambassador of his tender, delicate love for the pope and the bearer of the pope’s replies to him. Athenagoras was a deeply charismatic person, more endowed with the gifts of the Spirit than anyone I have known outside of the Catholic Church. As such, he was also a prophet, who saw the future and suffered the present as a time of waiting. He used to say to me: “The day shall come... the sun shall rise high, the angels will