n. 7-8
luglio-agosto 2006

 

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LAY AND RELIGIOUS PERSONS
IN THE JOURNEY OF EVANGELISATION
TODAY

Teresa Simionato

 

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Premise

The theme of this Assembly invites us to read afresh and to consider an ever more visible reality spreading in our ecclesial context.  Lay persons and religious work together in the pastoral field, particularly in different education, socio-sanitary and human promotion fields, with the common commitment of edifying the Church all together and of co-operating with her mission.

Starting from this experience, our reflection will lead us to re-visit the common baptismal identity of the lay and religious persons, as well as their specific vocation in the Church. It will lead us to consider the collaboration and co-operation movement of the religious with the laity in various fields of work. It will help us to highlight the soul, the style, the testimony as well as the need of discernment in our Congregations. This experience, imbued with fear and prophecy, may become an occasion for today's religious life to return to the heart of its charism and consecration, allowing us to start again from Christ and to treasure up the faith journey of the Church.

This course demands some passages:

a)      to remember the Ecclesiology of communion, originating from the mystery of the Trinity;

b)      to highlight the common baptismal consecration in the specificity of different vocations;

c)       to privilege the common charism of consecrated life, re-expressing its spiritual and theological foundation;

d)      to favour a renewed deepening of the identity of the apostolic religious life, so that the testimony of charity and the transmission of faith may be transparent in the works;

e)      to discern modalities of lay-religious collaboration, so that they may be the expression of a mature ecclesial conscience.

This is like a picture which is being re-painted.

The urgency of evangelisation, the seriousness of this moment in which to guarantee the continuity of the transmission of faith becomes more and more difficult, spur us to listen to the action of the Spirit, to get rid of worries about ourselves, to be available for His work.

Looking at the actual situation of religious life in Italy, we observe two tendencies:

- the birth of new charismas and new forms of consecrated life, even within the lay movements themselves;

- an increment of inter-congregational reality among the religious, an overcoming of distances

between laity and religious, between Institutes and Local Church2.

- These two tendencies introduce us into a journey of a major ecclesial community.

1.      Ecclesiology of communion, starting from the Trinity

As a fundamental category of Ecclesiology, communion is a fruit of post-Council deepening

In the mind of the Council Fathers, communion was a theme transversal to everything. In fact, we realise that they have not treated this aspect specifically. The Council has explicitly privileged some categories like:

a)                  The sacramental reality of the Church: The Church, in union with Christ, as sacrament of the encounter with God: "sign and instrument of the intimate union with God and the union of mankind"3.

b)                  The category of the people of God, which expresses a bond with the whole history of salvation and opens to an ampler and more universal vision of the Church, to her eschatological vision: the people in pilgrimage towards the heavenly Jerusalem. "The Church is the people of God gathered in the unity of the Father of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (St. Cyprian)4.

Gathered in the unity of the Trinity, the Trinitarian communion generates the people. God is love, St. John says in his First Letter. This means that God is communion within Himself, love being dialogical by its very nature. In God, there is the Loving Love, namely the Father, the Loved Love, that is the Son, and the Love of love, namely the Holy Spirit, the breath of the Father and the Son in the everlasting dynamic of Love.

Jesus has revealed to us the mystery of the Father and has offered us the Spirit so that we may partake in this communion (Ro 5,5). He has entrusted to us the continuity of his own work: He has constituted the Ecclesia, the community of the disciples, gathered in koinonia by the Spirit, to announce and to witness the salvation and the call of all men to this communion.

It follows that communion is not only an ethical commitment, but also a gift, a participation in the essence of God himself. Therefore, it is a constitutive character of the Church, a reflex of the Trinitarian communion.

The Father gathers His children with his two arms: the Son and the Spirit (see Ireneo from Lyon, Ad Her.).

C) The category of the Body of Christ is very much present in the Pauline Epistles. "We have all been baptised in one Spirit, to constitute one body" (1 Co 12-13). Lumen Gentium also expresses this, "In communicating His Spirit, Christ constitutes mystically his brothers, gathered from all peoples, as his own body".

"The category of the body highlights the unity and the variety of the gifts of the Spirit, of the various vocations and of the single persons. Every member has its function in the body, just because it is not equal to the other. In that body, the life of Christ spreads among the believers, who join Him, suffering and glorious,  in a mysterious and real way through the sacraments".

By saying that the Church is the Body of Christ, we state that all men and women have a place in Him and that each one's particular vocation contributes to the edification of all. "This harmonious unity of different persons derives from the fact that they are one with Christ. The more we try to be one with Christ and the more we are one with others"5.

The different vocations in the Church flow from Baptism and express the richness and the variety of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Our Religious Families have lived the great season of Vatican II and feel a living exigency of participating in this mystery of communion of the Church, always keeping their openness to the mission of announcement and evangelisation, living mature ecclesial relations and witnessing to the "good news" of charity.

2.      Consecrated life, an icon of the baptismal vocation

The Decree Perfectae Caritatis defines the religious as people who live exclusively for God through a particular consecration rooted in Baptism6.

The post-Council theology of religious life has discussed the sense of this formula. On one side criticising expressions, which now seem to be contested ("consecrated life", "life of perfection") and which conceal the danger of minimising the baptismal consecration; on the other side seeking a specificity of religious life, which looks more and more difficult to be caught. In fact we feel that we cannot admit as specific or exclusive of religious life what characterises the life of all the baptised.

Relation between religious life and baptismal consecration

The question is just here, in the relation between religious vocation and baptismal consecration.

Looking at the journey of the Church in the first centuries, we observe that some Christians have felt the need of expressing the baptismal vocation in a radical way.

The Church Tradition, the history of Christian life, reminds us of a new form of life rooted in Baptism: the monastic form of life. What do we mean by monasticism? Who is the monk?

The monk is a new man, born from Baptism, one who contemplates God, who is familiar with God, one who thus witnesses to the other world.

As a man inwardly unified, the monos is a visible paradigm of the baptismal vocation. It reminds us of what we have become with Baptism and what we tend towards while waiting for the Lord who comes.

Within such  a horizon of meaning we can recognise the intimate aspiration of the Church to live in familiarity with God, to find the measure of her relation with God in the absolute essential reality  of the monastic identity (=of the monk). Understood like this, the monk is a "figure" of the Christian.

The monk is a visible paradigm of the baptismal vocation

It is very important to allow this ecclesial experience to inspire us, not as history, but as exemplifying, as an icon of Christian life.

According to a common tradition in the eastern and western countries during the first millennium, monasticism is not one form of religious life, but such an essential and radical form as to be considered an indispensable reference from which any other form of consecration inspired itself.

Pope Benedict XVI says, "Monasticism is a fundamental phenomenon of the church, which will never disappear. Rather, I think that some experiences lived within the movements will bloom in the monasticism and will create new monastic vocations.7.

Monasticism and other forms of religious life

The different forms of monastic life, which have gone on appearing along the centuries, have assumed different denominations. These have highlighted the most external aspects on which they have tried to build particular identities, thus weakening the strength of the common foundation.

At the beginning of Christianity, there were the ascetics and the virgins. They started speaking of the monks in the IV century.  Pacomium and Basyl avoided the use of these terms, preferring those of brothers and sisters.

In the second millennium, the West introduced the term religion to indicate a state of life and religious for the one who practised this life.

Today, this front has widened and we speak of consecrated life to include all those who profess the Gospel counsels, but do not consider themselves as religious, since they live a secular life.

Evidently, I do not intend now to deepen these aspects. However, we can highlight that the apostolic religious life lives a delicate travail. It needs to clarify self to itself, to manifest its radical being for God and of God.

This travail touches different aspects:

-  it is a travail because the foundation is not evident enough and, at the same time, the specific character of the charismas does not seem to be always at the service of this foundation, or its clear expression;

-                     this travail is born, first of all, from a theology of religious life, which finds it difficult to clarify the relation between identity and specificity  within the baptismal vocation itself.

-                     a travail derived from a historical development of religious life during the latest centuries, in which the ecclesial recognition did not always succeed in leading to the pneumatic dimension. It was often motivated by the exigency of defining the new religious family in a juridical picture;

-          a travail caused by the excessive fragmentation  of charismas and spirituality , for which to

define one's own exclusive identity becomes more and more artificial, with the result of definitions which obscure and neglect the common charism of religious life as well as the charismatic dimension of the Church. In her, the gifts granted by the Spirit are not competitive, but are one within the others, for the common edification.

It is surely enlightening, for us religious of apostolic life today, to return to Baptism to recuperate the heart of our consecrated life, namely a vocation, which would express the exigency of living Baptism in as radical as possible way.

True, the laity and the religious are equal in virtue of Baptism, yet in the journey of faith and spiritual life, the religious receive the gift of signifying in a visible way their radical belonging to God, assuming a form of life different from that of the laity.

3.      To reflect once again on the spiritual and theological foundation of religious life

The service, which the religious can render to the laity, does not consist in the offering of

various services, but in the witness to the radical character of Christian life assumed with the profession of the Gospel Counsels in community life, to be a visible sign of a life-style, of a mentality, which holds Love (agape principle) above everything else.

The exclusive love of God as motive of everything

The religious who recuperates the interior monasticism is a Theo fore of the Spirit: one with passion for the mystery, which Baptism has fulfilled in him. It is the mystery of regeneration, as Paul says, the mystery of a journey towards the spousal union with the Lord, towards the full likeness with Him who has loved us first. It is a journey towards the heavenly Jerusalem, our mother, to which we gradually get accustomed, as Ireneus from Lyon would say, through the participation in the holy liturgy and the new eye, which is born from it. It is an eye capable of discovering the invisible presence of the angels and saints and of spending time with them. This would take away the world far from its "mundane" ways making us taste the capacity of being a revelation of God, a place of his presence, like Eden, the garden where God and His creature stroll along together in the evening sweet breeze.

In the life of the disciple, every pastoral service, every charitable and social expression is a consequence of the union with Christ. It is not simply the realisation of self and of the sense of life. It is, we must remember it, what derives from the union with Christ; whatever comes from Him is manifested through "grace". There is no scope, no practical end, no mission or charism, no concrete field of action of any religious, whatever the religious family he belongs to, that is not the fruit of his deifying union with God, which is always the first and unique end of his own life.

We do not become religious for the apostolate. We become religious for Christ, for his sake, to seek the fullness of life. Only "for Christ, with Christ and in Christ" the same divine grace can arouse in us , individuals and groups, the possibility of acting in the human community with a special task, according to the charismas, thus contributing to render humanity more similar to the original creative project, fruit of the Father's love.

There is no religious life without love for the Lord. We may have philanthropy, sociological utopia, fear of the world , secret refugees from self-aspects which we are unable to accept, we may have only the desire and need of security in an institution, the desire of peace in a regular, usual and repeated ways of life not to be exposed to the newness. If there is no love for the Lord, there is only the poverty of our human nature, clothed in a habit which is not our own.

The conversion, the accompaniment of faith, the action of charity

In the Church, the lay faithful remember that there is a religious justification of the world in itself, as a creature of God, thus they work for the transformation and sanctification of the world. The religious, instead, with their eschatological vision, remember that whatever is temporal risks to become mundane, purely carnal, when the means obscure the end. I say "carnal" to mean the flesh, which opposes the Spirit, as Paul defines it.

In fact, after the sin, we cannot find God in the world ipso facto, but we need to exercise "asceticism as an exercise of distance", through which the seductive power of things comes to be exorcised , so that they may be restored to their true nature.

This means also to witness the acceptance of the cross of our own life, to purify the use we make of things, to understand once again the meaning of trials and re-establish in our life the relation between the immediate and the ultimate end; to re-establish the role of sacrifice, which is the sign and the journey of our freedom. The cross is the condition of our full communion with Jesus the Saviour.

Moreover, it means to recuperate the importance of being masters of spiritual life, spiritual mothers and fathers who know how to help others in the big fight against the malign, in view of the eschatological fulfilment of history.

The monks and, therefore, the religious have always been masters of prayer, of spiritual fight, of discernment of thoughts, clearness of the end , witnesses of the risen life. They have always been masters of an action, which transmitted first of all God's love for man. It is enough to bring out the example of our Founders..

4.      Laity and religious in the evangelisation: a mature experience of Christian life

The living together of lay and religious faithful in the Church, in communion with the Pastors,

at the service of the Gospel of Christ, becomes a sign of mature Christian life before the world.

"The new evangelisation is above all a spiritual commitment. Therefore, it is fundamental to allow the Gospel to question us in an ever-newer way. It is fundamental for us to live more decidedly and joyfully according to the spirit of the Gospel. If we are sincere, we acknowledge that we ourselves are often an obstacle to the diffusion of the Gospel. Without our personal conversion, all the reforms, even the most necessary ones, fall down.  Without our personal renewal, the reforms finish into an empty activism. Without our listening to the Word and the will of God, without a spirit of adoration and continual prayer, there will be no renewal in the Church, nor any evangelisation in Europe"8.

The challenge of evangelisation, a new way of communion

The urgency of evangelisation leads us to join our efforts in the proclamation and testimony of faith, namely it cautions us against the dispersion of personal projects. It spurs us to grow more and more in our openness, so that we may collaborate in various services and works, thus answering the recurring challenge of communion. We are under the impression that the multiplicity of pastoral strategies bound to local contexts and groups, has often led us to overvalue the diversity of the proposals and forms of pastoral animation, at the disadvantage of the unique and inexorable announcement proposal, "God loves man!” This is the simplest and most upsetting announcement, which the Church owes to man. The word and the life of each Christian can and must make this announcement to resound: God loves you, Christ has come for you, for you Christ is "Way, Truth and Life" (Jo 14, 6)"9.

The life testimony of the Christian people flows from here through the various charismas. The evaluation of the authenticity of each charism leads us back to this announcement, which becomes an experience of salvation for all men.

In our evangelisation, along with the charity of works, the charity of faith transmission is urgent. This imposes itself today as a challenge to the pastoral work. It is not the matter of undervaluing the works of mercy in themselves, since they are a testimony of Love, but of correcting a tendency, due to an existing mutation, which risks emptying the prophetic life of many Institutes.  Though giving up everything, many sisters are breathless and compelled to a daily rhythm of life, which deprives them of a serious and continual spiritual formation, of a vital contact, which would allow them to nurture themselves at the font of Life. Thus, what should be a testimony of "perfect charity" becomes the presentation of a life-style, which is very little different from the work and life of the world.

Why do we not use the spiritual energies we bear in the Church and our society, to transmit our faith to the new generations and to strengthen it in those who should animate it within the different situations? To strengthen the faith in parents, teachers, youths, patients, sanitary workers and in those who hold cultural and political tasks could be an area of presence and capillary pastoral action for many of our sisters, remaining always faithful to the charismatic inspiration of one's own Institute in a creative way.

There is a deep bond between evangelisation and charity, as our Bishops say in the pastoral Orientations for the year '90, " To underline this deep bond between evangelisation and charity we have chosen the expression  "Gospel of charity" as the leading thread of our reflection. Gospel reminds us of the word that proclaims, narrates, explains and teaches. (…). Charity reminds us that the centre of the Gospel, the "good news", is God's love for man and, in answer, the love of man for his brothers and sisters   …   "10.

A great light to understand the dynamic of this testimony shines forth from the Encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, dated 25th December 2005.

From the pastoral point of view, we reach a turning point: it is no longer possible to exchange the pastoral action with organisation and multiplication of initiatives, without evaluating and strengthening the faith foundation in us, in every person and in each Christian community.

The experience of the immensity of the need can, on one side, push us into the ideology of having to solve the many problems of the world, and on the other side it may become a temptation that spurs us to inertia, thinking that we can realize nothing or almost nothing.  "In this situation the living contact with Christ is the decisive help to remain on the right way".

Our mission as consecrated beings is characterised also by the external work, which we accomplish, yet we fundamentally fulfil it by making Christ present in the world, through a personal testimony. This is the primary task of consecrated life.

"In our world, where every trace of God seems to have disappeared, a strong prophetic testimony on behalf of the consecrated beings becomes urgent.  It will revolve on the affirmation of God's primacy and on the primacy of the future goods, as it is visible through the following and imitation of Christ. We follow a chaste, poor, obedient Christ, totally devoted to the glory of the Father as well as to the love of our brothers and sisters.

Fraternal life itself is a prophecy in action, in the context of a society that, sometimes without being aware of it, has a deep yearning for a fraternity without frontiers"11.

However, it is indispensable to favour in today's church the encounter and collaboration among the religious and the lay believers. This is an experience aiming at the ecclesial communion, which empowers the apostolic energies for the evangelisation of the world 12.

The ecclesial Movements and consecrated life

The phenomenon of the ecclesial aggregations and Movements characterises the post-council season, which the Church is living. It is a flourishing phenomenon following that of the Congregations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

One characteristic of the Movements seems to be that of highlighting the witness of faith, of a revival of the baptismal commitment to renew the world in Christ.

In fact, "they favour the universal call to holiness. They express the centrality of the lay vocation in the relation between the Church they belong to and the world, in which they live and operate. They contribute to the incarnation of the Gospel in the society and to the overcoming of a lay apostolate too much depending on the hierarchy".

It is interesting to see the not rare phenomenon of new forms of "special consecration" also within the lay movements.

It would be important to start a reflection among us , Congregations of apostolic life, on such a reality and seeking its motive. We shall undoubtedly get a reply from the Movements invited to this Assembly, but among the motivations, we could already highlight one of a spiritual and ecclesial nature. It seems that the lay Movements are aware that the radical witness symbolised by consecrated life is necessary within the Christian testimony. The Church cannot miss the visible example of baptismal life, which the consecrated life offers.

In recuperating the heart of religious life in its baptismal exemplarity,  and in considering the events we are living and which are transforming the actual image of religious apostolic life, we feel challenged to operate a discernment. Shall we undergo this transformation or shall we assume it as an invitation of the Spirit, who prepares a new face of consecrated life for the third millennium?

We are all workers in the vineyard of the Lord

In the journey of the Church, which we have just touched, we want to recognise one another, coming out of every separation, of negative confrontations or competitive relations, in order to assume the style of the ecclesial koinonia and to work together for the Gospel.

An appropriate contact among the typical values of the lay vocation, (as the most concrete perception of the life, the culture, the politics and economy of the world), along with the typical values of religious life, (such as the radical way of the following, the contemplative and eschatological dimension of the Christian existence), can become a fruitful exchange of gifts between the lay believers and  the religious13.

We can enter any time the field of God, namely the world, where we can share the grace and the received gifts, thus contributing to the building of a kingdom of love.

5.      Ways of collaboration among the lay faithful and the religious in the various ecclesial works and initiatives

A shared spirituality

Following the journey of the religious congregations, in these latest years, we highlight a constant tendency: openness to the laity and a return to the specific spirituality of our religious family.

The lay believers around our Institutes become more and more numerous. This happens either to assume the functions and tasks left behind by our sisters, or by a certain aspiration to live some aspects of the spirituality and the specific mission of the Congregation.

The animation and involvement of the laity, in the fulfilment of the evangelising mission, matures the reciprocity journey of a communion Ecclesiology. It solicits the "handing over" and the sharing of a gift, which does not belong exclusively to us. It favours a new expression of the "charism" with the characteristics proper to culture. (See Instrumentum Laboris, 52nd USMI Assembly 2005).

A closer collaboration between the laity and the religious is a push that comes from the Institutes themselves. It is solicited by the Church and often requested by individual lay persons.

It is important to welcome these experiences and to consider their spiritual efficacy, at personal and ecclesial level. It helps us to operate a discernment, which may favour a new awareness of our identity, so that the testimony of charity and the transmission of faith may become transparent through our works.

Spirituality and charism are not disjointed. The sharing of a specific spirituality demands also the sharing of the charism. However, we cannot transmit the charism as a task or by entrusting some functions to others, since it is a call.

From the very beginning, in their charismatic project, many Institutes have the presence of lay believers, with whom we can certainly share the charism thought by the Founder for the religious as well as for the laity.  

In reality, it is the matter of a baptismal spirituality, in the realisation of a pastoral project, the spirituality of the disciples of the Lord, specific of every Christian.

Collaboration and sharing experiences of pastoral projects

The CIVCSVA Instruction  "Starting afresh from Christ", no. 19, poses some interrogatives  on the huge works and structures, whose management, at least in Italy, must be submitted to an accurate discernment:

"(The members of the Plenary Assembly) Similarly, they are sensitive to the interrogatives of the religious concerning the great works which they have been serving up-to-date in their respective charisms: Hospitals, hostels, schools, sheltering houses, retreat houses. In some parts of the world they are urgently requested, in other parts they become difficult to manage. To find the ways of solution we need creativity, caution, dialogue among the members of the Institutes, among Institutes with analogous activity, with the persons responsible of the particular Church"

The Congregations have already started a process of discernment. Some transformation is in action in several Institutes, but we feel that the most consistent part of the "works" weigh upon the life of many general governments. It is difficult to find practical ways, feasible for the continuity of the service and the efficacy of the pastoral work.

Many of us, responsible persons of Congregations, are venturing the way of entrusting the management of some schools, hospitals, homes for the aged and other works, to Associations, or to lay Co-operatives,. The expected result of this collaboration is the continuity of the service, but we would like also to ensure the continuity of the charism. This continuity is surely more difficult, because the transmission of a charism is not an automatic datus of fact.

To me, these experiences, keep they positive value in the sense that the ecclesiastic goods managed by the associative realities, catholic in their majority, continue to be a social resource for the good of the territory according to a Christian spirituality. They safeguard the ecclesial destination of the goods and the patrimony.

The collaboration with the laity in the direct apostolate offer more perspectives or problems. We work together to fulfil tasks, which do not belong to us in an exclusive way. We mean tasks bound to the fact of our being religious, but in a shared form, being all of us partakers in the mission of the Church because of Baptism.

At this level, the Religious Life can bring to the ministry the experience of a radical life-style due to its surrender to God, to its exclusive encounter with God, so that the provocation of the baptismal exemplarity and the "grace of God" may pass through its service.

In the past year's Assembly, we faced the theme, "Courses of discernment and reconciliation to make hope visible". During our group work, several experiences of collaboration and sharing with the laity in various pastoral projects were exposed. You will find these experiences in the Supplement of the 52nd Assembly, which we have handed over to you in this hall.

For an efficacious presence

The collaboration and the exchange of gifts grow in intensity when groups of laymen and women, through vocation in their own ways and in the same spiritual family, participate in the charism and mission of the Institute. They establish fruitful relations based on mature co-responsibility and supported by opportune itineraries of formation in the spirituality of the Institute14.

These are criteria to discern modalities of lay-religious collaboration as expression of an ample ecclesial experience, of a return to the foundation of our religious life, in the perspective of what we have already touched, in the reciprocity of gifts and charismas.

In our interaction with the laity, in the Church, we feel to be an active part of the journey, which She is making also in our Country.

The Coming Ecclesial Congress in Verona (16-20 October 2006) moves on the background of three perspectives, which we have referred to in this course:

that of the mission reality, the need of awaking a missionary conscience, the need of finding again, on behalf of the whole ecclesial community, a new desire of announcing the Gospel;

that of culture, understood as a capacity of the Church to offer a horizon to all today's men and women, to be a credible reference point with her own existence for those who seek an answer to the complex and multiform demands of life;

that of spirituality, a modern and paschal spirituality, especially a lay spirituality, characterised by the commitment in the world and by sympathy for the world as a way of sanctification15.

To conclude this course of reflection, we insist on the urgency of a renewed awareness of our identity among the people of God, considering these difficult tens of years as a time of grace, in which we religious are called to re-discover the essence and the heart of our vocation. living and acting accordingly.

There are too many signals creating confusion and ambiguity. The signal of religious life must be unequivocal and easily legible in the Church and in the world.

Our action, our work in history will start again from here. Our relation with the laity will be even more transparent and fruitful, because the charity of Christ urges all of us to live and to offer our life so that the world may know that God loves it.

"The microfores"

The microfores are like evangelical icons of consecrated life.

They are women with hands full of perfumes, who go to the tomb, find it empty and receive the announcement that Christ is alive, that He is Risen Lord.

With hands full of the perfume of their love and their prayer, they run to announce to the Apostles that Christ is the Living God.

This is the race of the Church along the centuries to announce the "Good News" of the Resurrection.

It is the journey of evangelisation. "Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee. They will see me over there" (Mt 28, 10).

In the Galilee of history, the faith of these women, fills the Church and the world with perfume and attracts all peoples to recognise the Risen Lord.  

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