«That Olbia is increasingly a Simplician city, not only in the name of some important structure, but in the human and cultural fabric of its people».
It is with this wish and with the invocation to San Simplicio "so that he may support the aspirations and projects of an ever more supportive, peaceful, willing and lover of beauty" city that the bishop of the Diocese of Tempio Ampurias, Monsignor Sebastiano Sanguinetti , closed the homily of the solemn pontifical mass in honor of the patron saint of Olbia and Gallura , celebrated this morning, together with all the priests of the Diocese, which crowded the churchyard of the Basilica, attended by the highest institutional authorities.
Opening with the alleluia sung by the Lorenzo Perosi Choir of Olbia, which enlivened the entire function with liturgical songs, the mass, in Sanguinetti's sermon, was a hymn to love and memory . Borrowing the words of Primo Levi, the bishop recalls the importance of memory as an indispensable foundation for building the future.
"Forgetting, watering down or betraying the values that our patron saint has left us would mean irreparably compromising the social, cultural and human quality of our future," says Sanguinetti. And he puts the responsibility of «preserving, cultivating and updating the cultural and moral heritage of this history on the entire city context and its institutions». He says: «There is an urgent need for identity and unifying values that is as urgent as ever in a city like ours which, in the last seventy years, has had the well-known demographic and economic development, becoming a multicultural, multiethnic and multireligious reality , but there can be no economic, scientific, social and cultural progress without solid roots in the founding values of the human person and his intangible dignity".
Despite the many and varied criticisms that are underlined, continues the bishop, "Olbia does not lack extraordinary patrimonies of moral and intellectual resources capable of imprinting positive changes on its present and its future". And he applauds the commitment of many voluntary associations, the municipal administration and many businesses and private citizens in giving the city an ever more dignified face.
Among the initiatives, Sanguinetti recognizes "deserving an educational project entitled "For peace with care", promoted by the municipal administration and some high schools, which combines the theme of peace with the daily care of others, in which I cannot not see a breath of hope and a good future for our city".
The commemoration in San Simplicio continues, starting at 4.30 pm, in the square of the Basilica, with the gathering of folk groups who, at 6 pm, (live on Videolina, which also broadcast the mass) accompany the procession through the streets of the city they marked the martyrdom of the Saint .