"The new evangelization demands that consecrated persons have a thorough awareness of the theological significance of the challenges of our time. These challenges must be weighed with careful joint discernment, with a view to renewing the mission."(VC 81). The words of John Paul II may still be, for the consecrated life, a reference’s point, today we talk earnestly of "new evangelization". The resulting tasks are two: the theological significance’s discernment of the new facing scenarios and the renewal of the mission, from which this awareness must arise.

Theological Perspective

The clarification, on the first aspect, that the perspective on game is theological, and not merely sociological or cultural, immediately put on guard by the illusion that the problem, as regards the second point, is just an "adjustment" of the religious’ evangelizing mission to the behavior’s languages ​​and styles of in the world today. It is also for consecrated the warning that  "It is a not cultivable illusion to think that the new evangelization can be realized with a mere renewal of past forms”.[i]

Discerning in the new scenarios

We begin, therefore, by discernment. Its first product is finding that in our time the evangelization must "confront with the phenomenon of detachment by the faith, which progressively manifested in companies and cultures for centuries appeared impregnated by the Gospel".[ii]
Some speaks of a neo-paganism. Maybe it was! Why "the pagans" looked at the new religion with great hesitation, often with hostility, but in
ultimately were affected and interested parties.
Today it is not. The Sociologists speak of a post-Christian society:

of a society, that the Christianity did not before –both well as a threat - but at the shoulders, already known, already digested and passed.

The typical reaction that removes men and women of our post-Christian society is not is the scandal, but the indifference.

An indifference that subtly pervades even the unbelievers, those
that we go to church, but they are bored.

The God of Jesus Christ, who times in the past had fought, now seems to become superfluous, or optional least, in the logic subjective preferences that characterize the consumer society. Not that the world has reached perfect autonomy that  had been prophesied by the great ideologists of progress or revolution:

never as today the dreams of ones and others are illusory; never as today humans they find in their constitutive fragility an insuperable limit. Their temptation is not to make an absolute themselves, as in other times, but to do in less than a any Absolute that gives meaning to life.

The more hidden face of God

Yet, precisely in this apparent absence - determined by the "loss of the sacred" in companies that had the fabric of their daily lives - it is possible that the God of Jesus Christ reveals His most hidden face. In his triumphant power of a time, now he is present in his weakness.

This perspective has a feedback in post-modern thought.
Recovering an old Jewish concept, that is present in this tradition of Kabbalah, a contemporary thinker jew, Hans Jonas, argued that, "so that the world was and was not for himself, God must have waived to his being; must have been stripped of divinity, to get it back again in the odyssey of the time, burdened than he claimed and collected at random, in the experience not predictable of the future: transfigured or even disfigured”.[iii]

But beyond the philosophical readings that can be given, the kenosis of the Son of God - of which the letter to the  Philippians speaks explicitly, but that is widely expressed in subsequent Gospel narratives – it is certainly at the heart of Christian message. There is no resurrection that can regardless of this emptying, from this manifestation of impotence. It in his passion and death that Christ saves us. "There, in the mystery of the three days, we must look for [...].

Look for it where he is not: in the sinner, in far from God, in solidarity
with enemies, with the lost, where he makes himself known to the third
days." Thus, "the more a "Finding" is a Christian, the more is a stripping  [...]. Before God there isn’t will to possess, because he does not want to own.

Instead He gives his Son to all, irrevocably. Only then He can have Him. You can not be rich in God if you do not want to participate in divine Poverty”.[iv]4
The result is a new perspective for the life and evangelization’s mission of the Christian. You do not draw certainly by it "to live in the world as if there were no God" according to the radical formula of Bonhoeffer. But we must overcome  dualism between the sacred and profane and learn to detect the presence of Christ in His seeming absence, "there where He is not" in the heart of a crucified humanity that he wanted assume without reservations.

Anthropology of the evangelical counsels

We try to translate these considerations in relation to the mission of religious life, knowing what John Paul II said, stressing "the profound anthropological significance" of the evangelical counsels: "The decision to follow the counsels, far from involving an impoverishment of truly human values, leads instead to their transformation." (VC 87). In the footsteps of their Master, the consecrated person is taking the human in all its thickness, but to redeem him from his injuries and return to its original relationship of similarity with God, "Thus, while those who follow the evangelical counsels seek holiness for themselves, they propose, so to speak, a spiritual "therapy" for humanity" (VC 87).

 
Consecrated poverty

So, as regards the poverty, the reference to '"depletion" of the God of Jesus Christ should perhaps make us think more deeply about what it entails, compared to the past centuries. In them, to be membership in a religious order guaranteed in reality an economic safety immensely greater to that of the real poor and where prosperity -sometimes even power and prestige– of the same Order was counterbalanced to the emptying by the individual.
Even more fundamentally, the fact that now God is silently next to the man and woman while experiencing their vulnerability, without the safety net consisted of an image of the same God who often made it a "Gaps" (Bonhoeffer), asks the religious person to take poverty in a deeper sense than purely economic, as an existential icon of human condition facing to the majesty of life. In this context, Heidegger wrote, "Man is not the owner of the entity. The man is the shepherd of the Being." What's competes is "the essential poverty of the shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called from the same Being in custody of its truth".[v] None most of the religious person, with his empty hands and hearts stretched to the gift, embodies this size at the same time divine and human. And that can make this God present in the post-Christian society, much of the immense and powerful abbeys of the past.

Consecrated virginity
How to consecrated virginity, voted to agape, to the love of giving,
it can appear dramatically outdated in a society that has made
of the eros, the love of desire, reduced to its sexual dimension, its flag. However, as Benedict XVI noted in a wonderful page:

“Were this antithesis to be taken to extremes, the essence of Christianity would be detached from the vital relations fundamental to human existence, and would become a world apart, admirable perhaps, but decisively cut off from the complex fabric of human life. Yet eros and agape—ascending love and descending love—can never be completely separated. The more the two, in their different aspects, find a proper unity in the one reality of love, the more the true nature of love in general is realized. Even if eros is at first mainly covetous and ascending, a fascination for the great promise of happiness, in drawing near to the other, it is less and less concerned with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the other, is concerned more and more with the beloved, bestows itself and wants to “be there for” the other. "(Deus caritas est 7).
This, on the one hand, involves a thorough review of our way of conception of eros, which enter, already in his sexual prowess, in the complex unity of the person -"Spirit, mind and body" (1 Thess 5.23)-, and it enhances in all its amplitude the dynamics, which goes far beyond the physical sphere. But it involves, on the other hand, a recovery, in religious life, of the emotional and passionate size, at the School of the Song of Songs. That the consecrated person is a true eros, well most ardent and personal than that "reduced to pure "sex" has become a commodity, a mere "thing" » (Deus caritas est 5).
An offering of oneself to God so fraught with passion may seem
less "spiritual", but in reality is more complete that in the forms of
religious life of the past, where sometimes it was believed to guard the best Virginity repressing its own affective sphere.

Consecrated Obedience

Finally, the consecrated obedience, in its dialogue with the authorities,
may recall that the latter does not be confused with the power, because it addresses to the other as a subject to be asked -rather than as
an object to have– both need to act supremely free of the recognition and  obedience on his part. To rely on the will of the superior it calls for strong personalities, capable to offer to God own autonomy (Freedom from)  and exercise every time the freedom to choose (freedom of), to achieve the highest form of freedom that is the full donation of themselves (freedom for). In this viewpoint St. Benedict exhorted his monks to hold "very strong and valiant arms of obedience”. "So" – writes the father of Western monasticism, turning to the person who undertakes the way of counsels - "you can go through the diligence of the obedience to Him from whom you stay away for the sloth of disobedience".[vi] In this reversal of the current dominant criteria obedience becomes a fundamental figure of that presence of God
that lies at the point of being absence, but their life Consecrated with the her silent witness can manifest, becoming as a way of "the new evangelization."
 

Giuseppe Savagnone
Direttore del Centro diocesano
per la pastorale della cultura