Acts 22, 3-16; Ps 116; Mk 16, 15-18.
The importance of the conversion of the “doctor of the Gentiles”, which the Church remembers today, can be seen from the three stories reported in the book of Acts of the Apostles where we learn what happened on the road to Damascus, where a man of undisputed monotheistic faith, observant of Jewish law as a good Pharisee, makes a radical turning point, transforming himself from a persecutor of Christians into a heroic, tireless announcer of the Gospel to the point of paying for his life choice with martyrdom. It must be said that the biblical story provides us not only with the chronicle of Paul’s personal experience, but also with an important transition phase in the history of the early Church, because Luke (the author of the Acts) frames the story in the vast design of the first Christian missionary expansion, which began with the persecution in which Stephen died stoned as a protomartyr. In fact, Saul was among those who approved the killing of Stephen; and again he is called to collect the inheritance, after the encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus; meeting which was not only a transforming and founding moment, but also the unifying point of reference for all his evangelizing action. From it arise the theology and spirituality of Paul, which also become for us the paradigm of our spiritual and apostolic life. The choice of this feast as the conclusion of the week of prayers for the unity of the Church is more appropriate and consonant with the universalistic dimension of this conversion. Still today, almost as an appendix to the event, the Church associates the memory of the Apostle with that of Saint Ananias, the Christian defined by Acts “a pious man according to the law to which all the Jews of Damascus bore witness”, who the Lord sends to Saul and who, laying his hands on him, makes him regain his sight and baptizes him. A late tradition states that he suffered martyrdom, flogged and stoned, on 10 October of the year 70.
