I receive a letter from Father Migliorini inside one from Father Pennoni673 and see that my anxiety was not without grounds. I am consoled and afflicted. When will this agony end?
I am told, “Do you see it was good for you not to be in Camaiore? If you had been there....” But I reply, “To die drop by drop with the sufferings I have here on account of climate, water, food, and so on, and from desolation over the absence of the one who, with his words, is my peace, after Jesus - isn’t that worse than to die once and for all?”
How clear it is that my real tragedy is not understood! Longing for an environment and the closeness of someone that are extremely necessary in my special case consumes me more than fever, but I am told, “It was good not to be there.” For me it is bad. I am subject to a threefold strain, ten times what I would have had there, because of the distance from home and the exertion of my mission. But my case is still, and always, not understood fully.
I believe I understand what the fourth vow of Father Pennoni is. It is the one there is greatest need of in the world, which will not be brought back to serenity - I am not even speaking about joy; I say only serenity - by hatred and intransigence, but by the sacrifice of many, so that numberless others learn to look at love. To look would indeed be something.... And now they are unable to do even this.
I remember a far-off vision in the winter of Our Lady, dressed in mourning, putting aside sullied flowers and picking broken ones, and She said to me, “They are priestly souls that were martyrs or guilty of political and human heresies.”674 The two letters received speak of persecutions of good priests and of blameworthy indifference among priests whose flame has gone out, the first stage of priestly heresy. And all of Jesus’ words for priests resound within me....
Then, during the night, I hear the bells tolling again.675 It is 1:30 a.m. I am sitting in bed and saying the sequence of the seven joys of Mary. Wide awake and with a temperature of 37.5 degrees, which cannot, then, make me delirious, since it is the lowest I have. But the bells are there. I hear them on my left, quite clear and distinct in their funereal knell, repeated three times.
What do they seek to tell me? My death? There is nothing but this that causes me repugnance: to die here, without my spiritual Father.
673 A religious in the Servants of Mary, Father Migliorini’s order. In reference to Camaiore, see note 312.
674 On December 17, 1943. See The Notebooks. 1943.
675 As on August 25.