The Young Marello and his Vocation

This is the beginning of a new calendar year, 2026, although a continuation of our Congregation’s Year of Marello. We have finished the Christmas and New Year’s holidays and are traveling forward with the activities of this newly begun turn of the calendar. As St. Joseph Marello himself said: “let us begin again again, truly begin again”, for the journey of a Christian, a child of God, and even more a consecrated person, is always one of rekindling our dedication to strive for holiness, the fullest personal union with God and the most generous expression of it among the people whom God places in our lives. If we are still on this earth, it is an opportunity for us to renew our efforts, making them more fruitful and enduring, and thereby grow all the more towards that ultimate heavenly goal to which God has invited us.

This is particularly true with regards to realizing the vocation to which God has called us. As we travel with Marello in this year dedicated to him, we can begin to learn from him how to continue to respond to that most fundamental of paths, the personal vocation – in our cases to consecrate ourselves to Christ and serve Him as St.Joseph did. The call from God for many of us began to be heard perhaps early in life, and our response led us to be more and more open to it, take steps to embrace it, and eventually, entering into the reality of it, seek to live it as completely and whole heartedly as possible, in response to the infinite love of Christ who has Himself reached out to us, invited us and walks with us.

Joseph Marello began to perceive the call of God at a young age and after making a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Mercy, the gift of a happy father to a son who had done well in school that year, he had the courage and conviction to ask his father’s permission to enter the seminary, for he had felt God calling him to the priesthood. To perceive an invitation from God and respond to it is the fruit of a process: preparation, listening, discerning, confirming, responding and growing. It is without doubt that the devout family life in which Marello was brought up helped him prepare to receive such a call, but it is also without doubt that his own willingness to grow spiritually as a child and young man also prepared him to be open, knowing God as a loving God who invites His children to paths of goodness and happiness as well as service. That openness is a sign of an active inner spiritual life, one which seeks to listen for the voice of a God who speaks to His children as much as it seeks to share with Him the thoughts and concerns of one’s own life. He who learns to listen, in a spiritual sense, is one who best is able to identify the signs my which God signals His will and His call to us. Itis a discerning listening. This too is a fruit of spiritual life – prayer and reflection on the great stories of Saints and the examples of the Scriptures help nourish a sense by which we distinguish what is of God and what is merely a fruit of our own active imaginations, or the suggestions of others.

Discernment allows us to filter out competing voices and recognize the true voice of God and understand that to which He calls. Our human spiritual skills, at any age, are always in need of confirmation – something God Himself understands and readily accommodates. How many times, how regularly, in what specific ways to God confirm to the young Marello what His will was, the call to the priesthood? We do not know. Yet it was enough for him to be sure and confident, confident enough to first embrace within himself and then propose it with clarity and firmness to his father, whom he probably well knew, had other plans for him. He definitely put his calling to the test when, respecting his father’s desires and contemplating the sad conditions of the church and the seminary, he decided to leave the seminary and study in Turin. It was a time of genuine discernment – to consider alternative ways of serving God, gain perspective on the state of the world, put to the test his understanding of God’s call. It was a measure of his openness to God and willingness to accept the confirmation, that after nearly dying of typhoid fever, and vividly experiencing the attraction of his call and the role of Our Lady, that he decisively returned to the seminary, and never looked back. From that point on it was a whole hearted pursuit of the life was calling him to, to be a priest, to be a holy priest. His writings as a seminarian are filled with his own motivation to generously make progress in the way God was laying out before him. His priestly Ordination in 1869 was both a point of arrival, but also simply the next step of his following of the Lord and His will in his life.

If we spend some time reflecting, Marello’s youthful journey and embracing of his vocation is a renewed call to us. It is a call to appreciate the gift of God’s personal invitation to follow Him and to embrace a life of consecration. It is a call to continue to be attentive listeners, for God continues to speak to us. It is a call to practice ongoing discernment about the choices and paths of our lives and to seek confirmation that we may walk faithfully in God’s ways, and not become distracted by the world or absorbed in our own self-focus. It is ultimately a call to dedicated ourselves all the more to responding to God’s love and growing constantly in union with Him and in His service.