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Address to Beekeepers
Pius XII, November 27, 1948
Your presence in such large numbers, your desire to assemble before Us, beloved
sons, is a real comfort: and so We express our heartfelt gratitude for your
homage and your gifts, both particularly pleasing to Us. Beyond its material
and technical importance, the work which you represent, by its nature and
significance has a psychological, moral, social, and even religious interest
of no small value. Have not bees been sung almost universally in the poetry,
sacred no less than profane, of all times?
Impelled and guided by instinct, a visible trace and testimony of the unseen
wisdom of the Creator, what lessons do not bees give to men, who are, or
should be, guided by reason, the living reflection of the divine intellect!
Bees are models of social life and activity, in which each class has its
duty to perform and performs it exactly—one is almost tempted to say
conscientiously—without envy, without rivalry, in the order and position
assigned to each, with care and love. Even the most inexperienced observer
of bee culture admires the delicacy and perfection of this work. Unlike the
butterfly which flits from flower to flower out of pure caprice; unlike the
wasp and the hornet, brutal aggressors, who seem intent on doing only harm
with no benefit for anyone, the bee pierces to the very depths of the flower's
calix diligently, adroitly, and so delicately, that once its precious treasure
has been gathered, it gently leaves the flowers without having injured in
the least the light texture of their garments or caused a single one of their
petals the loss of its immaculate freshness.
Then, loaded down with sweet-scented nectar, pollen, and propolis, without
capricious gyrations, without lazy delays, swift as an arrow, with precise,
unerring, certain flight, it returns to the hive, where valorous work goes
on intensely to process the riches so carefully garnered, to produce the
wax and the honey. (Virgil, 4, 169.)
Ah, if men could and would listen to the lesson of the bees: if each one
knew how to do his daily duty with order and love at the post assigned to
him by Providence; if everyone knew how to enjoy, love, and use in the intimate
harmony of the domestic hearth the little treasures accumulated away from
home during his working day: if men, with delicacy, and to speak humanly,
with elegance, and also, to speak as a Christian, with charity in their dealings
with their fellow men, would only profit from the truth and the beauty conceived
in their minds, from the nobility and goodness carried about in the intimate
depths of their hearts, without offending by indiscretion and stupidity,
without soiling the purity of their thought and their love, if they only
knew how to assimilate without jealousy and pride the riches acquired by
contact with their brothers and to develop them in their turn by reflection
and the work of their own minds and hearts; if, in a word, they learned to
do by intelligence and wisdom what bees do by instinct—how much better
the world would be!
Working like bees with order and peace, men would learn to enjoy and have
others enjoy the fruit of their labors, the honey and the wax, the sweetness
and the light in this life here below.
Instead, how often, alas, they spoil the better and more beautiful things
by their harshness, violence, and malice: how often they seek and find in
every thing only imperfection and evil, and misinterpreting even the most
honest intentions, turn goodness into bitterness!
Let them learn therefore to enter with respect, trust, and charity into the
minds and hearts of their fellow men discreetly but deeply; then they like
the bees will know how to discover in the humblest souls the perfume of nobility
and of eminent virtue, sometimes unknown even to those who possess it. They
will learn to discern in the depths of the most obtuse intelligence, of the
most uneducated persons, in the depths even of the minds of their enemies,
at least some trace of healthy judgment, some glimmer of truth and goodness.
As for you, beloved sons, who while bending over your beehives perform with
all care the most varied and delicate work for your bees, let your spirits
rise in mystic flight to experience the kindness of God, to taste the sweetness
of His word and His law (Ps. 18:11; 118: 103), to contemplate the divine
light symbolized by the burning flame of the candle, product of the mother
bee, as the Church sings in her admirable liturgy of
Holy Saturday: (For it is nourished by the
melting wax, which the mother bee produced for the substance of this precious
light.) |
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