The need of re-evangelising the culture

The year 2005 celebrates the 40^th anniversary of the closing of the Vatican Council II (1965) and the 30^th anniversary of the Evangelii Nuntiandi (8^th December 1975) by Paul VI. Many initiatives have already been planned to commemorate and to actualise both the celebrations.

In this frame, the present contribution wants to commemorate the importance of bringing together afresh faith to life, the Gospel to culture, the kerigma to history.

            Founded by Jesus, the first and greatest evangeliser (E.N. no. 7), the Church is sent into the world to the end of evangelisation. She is, indeed, "born from the evangelising action of Jesus and the twelve. She is its normal, wanted, most immediate and visible fruit" (E.N. no.15). The entire Church is missionary and the evangelising activity is the fundamental task of the people of God (E.N. no. 59).

            "For the Church, to evangelise means to bring the Good News to all the strata of humanity,  to transform and renew humanity inwardly.

            We can say that the today's defined  "pastoral missionary turning point" was already pre-figured in the Council. Faith is to be announced, offered, communicated. This is today's journey of  the Church in Italy: to communicate the Gospel in our changing world.

            It is a matter not only of announcing, but also of "communicating", in the awareness that the Gospel could be announced without shouldering the duty of understanding the message and of responding to it, on behalf of those who receive it. To communicate it, instead, requires a responsible attention to the so-called "feedback" on behalf of the receiver. On the centrality thus assumed by the verb "to communicate", we can record a happy confluence between pastoral and cultural project, thus strengthening the unitary character of the journey, which the Church in Italy is making in the attempt of re-centring the importance of culture, thought and language. In a word: the understanding of faith.  However, we cannot take for granted that the Christian community is fully aware of  the historical reasons, which have compelled our Bishops to choose such a committed pastoral journey. In fact, in the majority, we are still prisoners of the so-called "trap of illuminism", a dualistic vision which keeps on subordinating the intelligence of the believers to the elaboration of the lay thought, in the false conviction that man thinks "with the mind" and believes "with faith". No, the Christian must not subject himself to this deceit, because with faith he "believes and thinks". Thus, every Christian must commit himself to let his faith think, instead of limiting himself to believe (the mysteries and dogmas). When faith thinks - it is essential to underline this - it thinks of what reason alone does not dare think of, in the perspective of self-transcendence and hope. We need to start afresh from here, "the breaking off between Gospel and culture is, undoubtedly, the drama of our epoch" (E.N. no. 20).

We have always been convinced that, with the proposal of the Cultural project, the Bishops have offered us a sound opportunity for the renascence of faith in our Country. Surely, for some years the Cultural Project has not been understood by the Catholic world itself, but for the past few years, it has been proving a providential, courageous, global, prophetic choice: a true kairos to be caught and valued.

            On 3^rd December 2004,  in the area of the VI forum of the Cultural Project, ten years after Cardinal Ruini spoke of it for the first time, the co-ordinators of the national Service for the cultural project, have spread informative material in which it is said that the "net", which these days has grown around the project, today counts 263 diocesan referents, 373 cultural centres, 250 experts and more than 1200 diocesan initiatives organised in the picture of the Cultural Project. A net which, at present, has about 1500 knots, and it is expected to increase a "motor" and a meaningful "terminal" in the site www.progettoculturale.it

How to prevent the cultural sterility of faith

            With the words of Monsignor Giuseppe Betori, General Secretary of CEI, we can say that the moment has arrived for making a "more elite, but popular process" of the Cultural Project", to pass from a question of workers on to a pastoral commitment of all".

            It is, therefore, urgent for the Christians to commit themselves "to re-evangelise the culture", starting from the presupposition that we are to discuss our own categories of interpretation, moved by the conviction that the process of evangelisation of culture may not exclude, but may rather imply self-communication. In fact, the newness of Christian faith, too often, remains implicit and passive, without translating itself explicitly into the form of a renewed "thought" and of a "believing intelligence".

            As Catholics, we are called to feel and exercise strongly our responsibility of re-generating the signs and symbols of Christian faith within a society, which in various ways seems to be iconoclastic. The cultural and "civil" dimension of the Catholic world is also here, starting from the vital worlds, from the local communities, from the religious traditions, the territorial and social tissues, in a word from whatever is "civil", namely from the interpersonal relations and the communitarian, associative bonds.

It is indispensable to assume a cultural mediation for the diffusion of the Compendio della dottrina sociale della Chiesa¹ , in order to make its thought popular, against every élitism and temptation of aristocratic culture. Today, the commitment "to restore the habit of thinking" means, for the Catholics, to assume the historical task of giving life to a prophetic thought enclosing the strength of resistance, the courage of divergence and the fantasy of imagination.

In our complex society, we often have the impression that the Catholics have neither "positive journeys" nor "dragging examples" to go ahead, but only the expression of contrary positions, as it often happens in the bioethic field. If we don't want to condemn faith to aphasia, or to a sort of cultural sterility, we must commit ourselves to build up a new ecology of mind consenting us to discern and to decode the social reality.

Michele De Ben ², in Nuova umanità (new humanity) observes that we are supposed to be aware that our culture is neglecting the education of the thought , privileging technical and efficient forms, which cannot guarantee the development of the capacity to reflect.  Thus, in our programmes of study we miss the questions of meaning (on friendship, altruism, good, evil, sorrow or happiness … )  These surely require the answers, though not definitive, through the plurality of sense indication, which, just because they are sought, contribute to give a meaning to the human existence ³. This is what Gregory Bateson underlines when he notes down that, unfortunately, all the fundamental questions are neglected in schools, with the risk of making the students stupid. ^4.

"To educate  to thinking", therefore, is the leading thread of a systematic, pervasive itinerary of education, open to all knowledge and areas of life.

Howard Gardener, an American psychologist and educationalist, admits that in the schools, all over the world, there is no adequate stimulation for a deep comprehension of reality ⁵. There is rather the tendency of being satisfied with mechanical, ritualistic, conventional services.  According to Gardner the "involuntary fraud", which is daily committed to the damage of the students, consists in focussing the attention more on learning than on understanding, just as if it were possible to learn without understanding.

To make the contemporary culture fruitful, the Christian must go back "to drink from his own well", re-conquering an old spirituality already forgotten in its major part. He has to commit himself "to de-colonise the collective imagination", to detoxicate himself from the seducing urge of today's dominant narration. There is no intelligence of faith without the capacity of fetching from one's own story.  The Christian must try to recuperate the freedom of thinking of the future prophetically, as a reaction to a soporific present and to a psychological subjection to the laity and the lay thought.

It is our conviction that today the Christian has the duty to educate himself and to educate others to a diverging, non homologated. non conformist thought which can be as proposed an "eschatological reserve" a "contra-power place". In this sense, the culture of gift  is against the ideology of the market, the culture of non-violence opposes the ideology of war (more or less preventive): the subsidiarity opposes the ideology of an assistential State: the culture of brotherhood opposes the ideology of racism:  the culture of sobriety opposes the ideology of immoderate consumerism, the "use and throw away", as life-style and social virtue, etc. We shall limit ourselves to mention only four out of all these visions opposing each other: the anthropologic question, a positive vision of laity, the culture of gift opposing the ideology of market, the choice of inter-cultural values in the actual cultural pluralism.

The anthropologic question

Man and the human dignity, are foremost "under siege" in our time dominated by science and technology.

An anthropologic question, tending not so much to interpret man, as to transform him in the economic-social side, as well as in the biologic and psychic one, goes on imposing itself and seems to become more and more acute and pervasive.

We can no longer subtract ourselves from this radical challenge. In fact, the human person is the frontier in which we face the challenge of the future. The new watershed passes between the human and the post-human ^6.Till the recent past, what mostly has been worrying the Church is that man might be reduced, by the totalitarian ideologies, to a cell of the social organism, risking to lose his personal dignity and autonomy;  today we can say that the attention of the Church is focussed on the danger that, under the spur of technology, man may be reduced to a simple particle of nature, in a non-acceptable vision of biocentrism and of post-humanism.

What seems to be subjected to a deep mutation is of common interest: the concepts of "life" and of "death", of "natural" and "artificial", of "individual" and society", of "human" and "non-human", of "freedom" and "limit", of "right" and "ethics" …. Whatever way we examine the problem, we reach the conclusion that at the heart of the multiple questions raised by technology there is, anyhow, an "anthropological question".

A positive vision of the laity

            From the "give to Caesar what is of Caesar" to the Letter to Diogneto, from the Abbot Rosmini to Vatican II, the Catholics are aware that the principle of the State laity is the expression of a grammar of civilisation which we must absolutely never give up.

            The discussion of the Christian roots,  in the preamble of the European Constitution, the law on the laity in France, the Buttiglione case, the polemics around some proposals of law advanced by Zapatero in Spain  …  not to mention many others related to the Crucifix and the crib, are all there to prove how urgent it is to have a balanced culture of laity, far from today's high-flying secularism.  A culture that may allow us to establish rules of civil conviviality, avoiding the clash of symbols  - which is characterising our society as an "iconoclastic society" - as well as the two inaccessible drifts: the relativism of values and the new forms of fundamentalism.

            We have a positive vision of laity: we do not accept a laity defined only as absence, neutrality and emptying of the religious matter.

            In the Compendio itself, the laity is presented as "an acquired value recognised by the Church and belongs to the reached patrimony of civilisation"⁷. It is also stated that  "it implies the respects of every religious confession on behalf of the State … In a pluralistic society, the lay state is a place of communication among the different spiritual traditions"^8. and the lay state represents a non acceptable counterfeiting.

            Therefore, the lay state, before anything else, is a public space of free confrontation, where all have the right to express themselves, believers and non-believers, agnostics and devout atheist, Hebrews, Christians and Muslims, followers of every religion, ideological position and vision of reality.

            This open concept of laity is fundamental because it allows us not to marginalise religion, by making it invisible and leaving it in the private dimension.

            Founded on plurality, the culture of the lay state refuses the logic of concealing and cancelling the religious identities.

            Our vision of laity as a plural public space, does not accept, on the other hand, the instrumental reduction of Christianity to the range of "civil religion". Cardinal Ruini himself has expressed this view,  contrary to the "denaturing" of faith, when in his prolusion to the VI Forum of the Cultural Project  (Rome, 3^rd December 2004) he stated that it is "essential to be aware that the Christian faith can fulfil efficaciously a similar public role only if it is not reduced to a cultural heritage of the past, and it is actually believed and lived in its truth and authenticity by concrete persons. It is under these profiles that we must take into serious consideration the worries of instrumentation and denaturalisation of faith".

            We actually prefer the jealous protection of our faith to the instrumental use of the Christian religion, in the conviction that the values of the Kingdom are not negotiable.

The culture of gift against the ideology of market

            Speaking of cognitive antibodies in the economic field, we can take the example of MAUSS ⁹, the anti-utilitarian movement of social sciences, to which scholars like Alain, Caillé, Jacques Godbout, Serge Latouche belong, and which promotes the culture of "gift" against the culture of "market". The gift is a unilateral, asymmetric gesture, which expresses gratuity, thus contradicting the law of the market as an equivalent exchange. The gift generates a new sociality, which did not exist before. In this context it is, above all, important to find the strength and the reasons for unmasking  the market which has become culture. The late John Paul II, in his talk to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciencs, on 27^th April 2001, expressed very clearly his worry about people who think and act according to the logic of the market.

            In fact, the market has become a logic, a culture, a cluster of ideas and categories in the head of people and, therefore, the market is much more than economy, finance, multinationals or any other material reality. The market seems to be dematerialised : it has become a spiritual reality which imbues the mentality of people. The terms liberism amd new-liberism do no longer indicate only an economy doctrine, but a real and proper anthropological doctrine! Man has become a homo oeconomicus and the world is nothing but market. This is why the logic of competition dominates the people's mentality. For instance, we are getting into the habit of hearing people name the  hospital as a "sanitary firm". But how can we ever link the logic of a firm with sanitation? Of course, we do need an organisation to avoid wastage and to control the expenditures, but a hospital must always have essentially a human dimension, because it is concerned with illness, suffering, sorrow … not with the world of profit and accounts.

            The school, too, is undergoing a phase of transformation into a firm. The so far called Progetto Educativo d'Istituto (Pei) has changed into Piano dell'Offerta Formativa (Pof);  the students have become clients (request) of the school proposal of education (offer); the Principal is thought of as a manager, the institute Council has become the Council of Administration; the evaluation has become a question of debts and credits; the portfolio of competence is going to be introduced … I would not make of it a question of political alignment, neither a question of this or that minister of Instruction, because the problem is the general vision, the tendency of bringing the logic of the market into the world of instruction, which should, instead, answer other types of logic.

            In short, we need to denounce the primacy of economy, which has replaced ethics and politics. In fact, the reality is codified starting from a mercantile type of mentality. Economy becomes the matrix, the reservoir where we can fetch from  to re-baptise the realities, which are not economic, like the hospital, the school and, perhaps tomorrow (or is it today already?) the Parish itself.

In his message for the World day of the migrant and the refugee (24 November 2004), the Pope reasserts the choice of the intercultural integration. The Christians are solicited not to be satisfied with a simple tolerance but to reach the "sympathy". He says explicitly, "We should, rather, promote a reciprocal fecundation of cultures. This presupposes the reciprocal knowledge and openness of the cultures"  For this reason, he adds, "we need to conjugate the principle of respect for the cultural difference with that of protection of the indefeasible common values, which are founded on the universal human rights. The climate of a "civic reasonableness" which consents a friendly and serene conviviality, flows from here. Since the Christians are called to be, in history, the morning sentinels, it is their task  "to perceive the presence of God in history, even when everything seems to be still wrapped in darkness.

Panikkar¹⁰, a master in intercultural philosophy, courageously states that "the opening to the intercultural reality is truly subversive. It destabilises us, contesting deeply radical convictions, which we take for granted, because they are badly put under discussion. It tells us that our vision of the world, thus our own world itself, is not the only one" ( … ). "One task of the intercultural philosophy consists in overcoming this mental monistic scheme, by offering a philosophical basis  for a true, more authentic and lasting human conviviality. This does not mean at all that the fact of being intercultural is a universal panacea; it is an activity and a journey towards the right direction"¹¹.

A "new principle of education", for an intercultural society, cannot limit itself to state the traditional values of tolerance and conviviality or, also, the new values which recognise the identity and the respect of differences. We need to do more than this.

For some years, the Catholic University of Milano also has started a project of research on the foundations and the perspectives of the intercultural conviviality. A research of inter-disciplinary character, according to Vincenzo Cesareo¹², which gives value to the competence of theology, of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, sciences of communication and pedagogy, through a constant confrontation and a common work. A fruit of this project is the publication of an anthology of sources entitled Magisterium of the Church on the multicultural philosophy¹³.

It would be necessary to indicate many more initiatives on this direction.

We limit ourselves to mention an important congress on the intercultural philosophy  organised by the Salesian University in January 2004, to prove the academic commitment of the Catholic world to this perspective.

Some more important directives can be found in the document  Le persone consacrate e la loro missione nella scuola (The consecrated persons and their mission in the school) (November 2002) of the Congregation for the Catholic education, nos. 65-67, where it is stated that by now the Institutes of Consecrated Life "are the expression of multicultural  and international communities called to witness to the sense of communion among the peoples, the races and the cultures" ( … ) where they experience reciprocal knowledge, respect, appreciation and enrichment  (…). The itinerary to be made in the community of education imposes the passage from tolerance of the multicultural reality  to its acceptance and the search of confrontation for the reciprocal understanding up to the intercultural dialogue which leads to recognise the values and limits of each and every culture" (no.65).

In the document, moreover, we read that "in the Christian life, the intercultural education is based essentially on the relational model which opens to responsibility" (no.66). Moreover: "The intercultural perspective implies a true change of  paradigm  at pedagogic level. We pass from integration to the search of conviviality of differences. It is the matter of not a simple and easy realisation" (no.67).

This is, however, the impervious, but obligatory way of the testimony of faith, today, in our changing world.

The Christian must feel committed in this journey. It does not suffice to learn how to think, to do, to live, to be. We need to learn also the way of changing, of re-generating ourselves. A simple change of mentality is not enough: we need, well differently, a true mentality of change.