Castelfiorentino is preparing to welcome H.E. Bishop Gherardo Gambelli in a festive atmosphere. On Sunday 7 July (6:00 p.m., Church of Santa Verdiana), the Bishop will preside over the Eucharistic celebration, concelebrated by the priests of the community and the area, and at the end he will meet the children inside the Sanctuary and all the citizens in the church square, the latter of whom will be more than happy to exchange a word with him to renew their feelings of affection and esteem for the new Bishop, who grew up in Castelfiorentino and was a missionary in Africa for many years.
At the end of the celebration, the pastoral community will donate to Bishop Gherardo a pectoral cross, a faithful reproduction of the one that Saint Verdiana brought from Santiago de Compostela as a souvenir of her pilgrimage, so that the Bishop “may remember”, reads the parish community’s newsletter, the bond with the community of Castelfiorentino that brought him up in the faith, and also entrust him to our patron saint, sister and companion on the pilgrimage of faith and life”.
The initiative will be attended by the Mayor, Francesca Giannì, and the Councillor for Culture, Franco Spina.
“As we did some ten days ago,” Mayor Giannì remarked, “when we went as a delegation to the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, next Sunday we will renew our embrace to Bishop Gherardo, our fellow citizen, a witness to the good, the humble and the hard-working, of whom we are doubly proud for his spiritual teaching and his concrete love for his neighbour. An authentic solidarity at the service of the poorest, the weakest, the marginalised, which he was able to spread by example from his decades of experience as a missionary in Africa”.
“As Bishop Gherardo reminded those present on the occasion of his episcopal ordination rite,” observed the proposer of Santa Verdiana, Don Alessandro Lombardi, “everyone carries his universe in his heart, and people are what we find in them. An invitation, therefore, to question ourselves on the gaze we have and carry on the reality that surrounds us and the people who live alongside us’.
“Besides the desire to see him and greet him here,” concluded the proposer, “where his experience of faith together with his vocation grew and matured, the occasion is given to us by the memory of Cardinal Silvano Piovanelli on the eighth anniversary of his death”.
In the evening, at 9:15 p.m., there will be a screening of the documentary on Cardinal Piovanelli “Silvano Piovanelli, bishop of dialogue”, with talks by Andrea Fagioli and Marcello Mancini.
From 2011 to 2022, Fr Gherardo Gambelli was a missionary as a “fidei donum” priest in N’Djamena, Chad, and between 2018 and 2022 he followed the birth of the new local church in the new apostolic vicariate of Mongo, where he also became prison chaplain. Returning to Florence in March 2023, he took up the post of Parish Priest of Our Lady of the Cough and Deputy Spiritual Director of the Florentine Archbishop’s Major Seminary, and was also chaplain of the Sollicciano prison.
