ULYSSES AND THE FASCINATION  OF THE SIRENS

I would like to answer this question starting with a parable. All of us know the narration of Homer about Ulysses, who to avoid the risk of giving in to the song of the sirens, made himself to be tied up strongly to the tree of the boat, and ordered the sailors to plug up their ears with wax.

The Fathers of the Church made a courageous comment about this myth of Ulysses. Clement Alexandrine, for instance, with an allegoric reading destined to have a good following, considers the sirens, with their sweet and fatal charming, as signs of worldly wisdom. The sailors are those who, without any understanding of good culture, having plugged their ears, refuse any kind of confrontation, because they know that they would not be able to find their way home, if they gave in to listen to the wisdom of this world. Ulysses, instead, is the wise Christian who knows that it is a must to pass amidst the deceits of the culture,  not with plugged ears, but listening to and evaluating every reality with a right discernment, to find what favours faith out of the cultural things. However, to do this, he has to be tied up strongly to his tree, namely to the tree of the cross. Tied up to his wood, he will remain immune from every deceit. The wisdom of God will guide his boat and the Holy Spirit will lead it to the harbour of heaven

Even today, tied up tenaciously to the cross and without feeling ashamed of his scandal, consecrated life can face courageously all the difficulties and the deceits of our time, thus overcoming the splendid but fatal danger of this world, secure of himself, yet still very frail, discerning between muses and sirens, to the end of carrying into the heart of our cultures the announcement that a harbour of peace exists that gives meaning to the human sailing.  We need to help one another to be aware that the knotty problem – the one that we hardly accept up to its depth- is that we truly find ourselves in front of deep epochal transformations; this means that we live in situations, which has never been met up-to-date. Consecrated life also, and its transformation, must accept to confront itself with a different way, because it subsists today in really very different contexts and must answer needs that perhaps are deeply common to every generation, but that today cannot be confronted, thus they differ in languages, emotive roots with orientations to new horizons. These data tell us that every proposal and every formation -which nurture illusions on the consecrated life- besides being  bad education, produces the dramatic infantilism that all of us have known or that, perhaps later on, changes into refusal and defection.

Freedom and happiness in the future of Religious Life

Sure, we have many problematic elements but, luckily, we have equal positive realities as great resources for the future. The drama is that some positive and valid  cultural principles run the risk of getting deteriorated  for the simple fact of having been affirmed, especially in these latest decenniums, in a unilateral manner. Thus, any positive value, which contributes to build up a highly civil life style, risks to become, just because of its being made absolute, an element of desegregation of civilisation itself.

Let us think of the principle of freedom, that follows the importance we give to subjectivity: made absolute and unhooked from references to other principles (for instance that of solidarity) it risks to lead to the atomisation of our system of life. A freedom vindicated  as an absolute value, in fact, risks to destroy the very society, which it had contributed to build up. The same thing can happen also in the consecrated life: Some Gospel values introduced these years in a unilateral form, without any adequate reference to other equally evangelical values, may contribute to prime the earthquake which is destabilising the life of religious Institutes.   Thus, from the right and holy, but unilateral relevance of the value of persons and the respect for their conscience, we have insensibly passed on to many forms of individualism. From the new vision of authority as a service to the community, also in contraposition to various forms of authority in the civil society, we have passed on to the weakening of authority itself and to a scarce esteem of obedience. From the missionary necessity of reading the signs of the times, almost unknowingly we have passed on to a diminished awareness of the need to answer with the anxiety of the Kingdom of God, limiting ourselves above all to problems of efficiency. Our opening to the demands of society, to the end of knowing and serving it better, has led us sometimes to be attracted by the fascination of too little  evangelical forms present in society, translating them into a bourgeois life-styles of consumerist kind. The necessity and urgency of understanding the macro-phenomena  of our society has insensibly taken us away from the more modest, but not less essential attention to interiority and personal problems of our spiritual journey; in a word, from the interior man, from the classical habitare secum.

Consequently, the acquired sensitivity of a changing society has put in the second level the sensitivity of changing ourselves. Again: the importance given to creativity has unavoidably shifted regularity to the shadow, reference to the rule, seen as repetitive  or judged insufficient to face the new situations.

The happy and fecund re-discovery of the Bible, as the primary source of spirituality in the consecrated life, has received the reaction of practically abandoning the typical spiritual literature on religious life and on one’s own charism, a literature that in the past mediated the Word of God for our peculiar kind of life.

We could go on showing how the consecrated life, above all in Europe, does not escape from the process of complexity, typical of our society, but begins to feel the need of tending with increased awareness and energetically to a synthesis that may answer the reality of things in a better way. Also because the European society is becoming paradoxically  ever more complex and atomised around the aggregations of many sectors and various interests, often in difficult communication an compatibility among them. 

Which suggestions could we offer in situations of this kind? Now we perceive that we can no longer postpone the necessity, emerging everywhere, of making a synthesis within the consecrated life, a synthesis that may re-balance the various values, so that on one side the novum of these years may not disperse the wisdom of tradition, and on the other, the excuse of tradition may not be used as a pretext to kill the new and to remain blocked in the old ways. After all, it is the matter of proceeding with a wise sense of all the realities, which interact in the vast and variegated field of consecrated life. This is an evangelical action of the wise scribe who knows how to fetch new and old things from his treasure. This acting requires plenty of human and spiritual maturity, which proceeds from a vast and complex vision of the many elements in act and which is to be conducted together with the people of God of the whole Church.

In this perspective, the time has come for the consecrated life to pass from doing to being, namely the time to free us from too much work, so that we may concentrate on the life of the Spirit and leave the space for the Lord, that He may act in us.

Contrast between models and dynamics

Going deeper and widening the talk, we can observe that until Vatican II, and even after it, the strongest model of consecrated life was the so called classical model, which underlined above all the disciplinary aspects, the regular observance, uniformity, ascesis…This is a model that has produced abundant fruit of holiness and apostolic zeal but that, at the same time, has run the danger of formalism. Then, in an opposite alternative, the liberal model has prevailed, which relativises  the fundamental elements of the previous model, above all discipline and ascesis, to the end of concentrating on the person, on its realisation, on its desires and numerous commitments of apostolic efficiency. The risk, more than theoretical, has been the abandonment of contemplative aspects and, consequently, the loss of religious identity, as well as of the sense of consecration, reduced more or less to its more functional aspects.

These are the two models that, though carrying with them undeniable useful contribution, have left us at the doors of a deep crisis, in which we are still immersed  and in which we debate among us. Luckily, however, we are seeing also a change of model, above all thanks to and under the push of the consecrated youths. To tell the truth, this model is at its starting stage, but it could be called a radical model or the radical sequela of the Lord Jesus; it is a model connected to the known category of re-foundation. A radical life of sequela, which asks to start afresh from Christ and from His centrality in the existence of the consecrated; it re-launches the eschatological specificity of the consecrated life itself.

In fact, a radical consecrated life radiates the waiting for the coming of the Kingdom in the midst of a world forgetful of God’s merciful love: death does not have the last word and the Father is waiting for everybody so that, risen in the Lord, all men and women may live for ever with Him and in Him. The greatest service which the Lord expects from us,  and the best service we can offer to the men and women of our time is that of being witnesses of eschatology, the Easter of the Lord. To live without children, without seeking a carrier and without possessing money; sharing a communion of fraternity without any bond except the charismatic one, all this is not there to conduct a dark existence or to condemn the common way of living, on the contrary it is there to illumine the sense and to fulfil our human life with a strong tension towards the Kingdom, which alone can fill human love and is the unique great unending richness.

Moreover, we must say that, after the enthusiasms of the council renewal, owing to the ever growing difficulties faced by the consecrated life -(aging, scarcity of vocations, marginalisation on behalf of society, a little also by the Church, abandonment and vocational frailty, secularisation of life, ever more difficult management of works…)- the three dynamics, dreamt and planned by the documents of the Church and the Institutes as a perfect syntony of involvement and renewal of the consecrated life, in reality, after 40 years we observe that they move around at contrasted speed and contrasting one another reciprocally.

The institution has gone on centralising itself, over-burdened with the commitments to face the ever growing difficulties and often has changed into institutionalism to the detriment of the person. On the other hand, after the fall of great systems (between ‘80/’90) all the institutions have experienced a crisis. Structures very often become a problem for the realisation of the mission.  

The person, to contrast the totalitarian ideologies , as well as to be set free from homogenisation, from being anonymous in the society of consumes and to be saved from the pressure of institutionalism  (present also in the Church and in the religious life), revenges powerfully a strong subjectivism, up to a private management of vocations and charisma. In particular, the relation between institution and person is overheated or, if we want, cooled down. For instance,  let us take the relation between the exigencies of the role and the personal life/growth inn maturity (human, of faith, charismatic, apostolic….); the relation between personality and the professionalism implied by the role. In the past there was something like a natural fitness (natural harmony) of the priestly state in the parish or of the friar, the religious in general.

Today we have a crisis of relation. We have a kind of broken bridge between the demands of the person and his life and the demands, the answers of the institution. Let us think of the over-work, of the problems, of bigger requests than those we are able to face (you are clever if you adapt yourself; if you contests and give up, if you are inadequate….); let us think of the excessive and persisting expectations, which gradually massacre us physically and psychologically; let us think of the fact that very often we cannot and are not apt to conciliate the ideal (=vocational enthusiasm, motivation and dedication…) with the real situation.

Consequently, a mistrust of the institutions is created (the denunciation that does not know how to get renewed; which pretends impossible things; which considers the person only as energy or work…) and we take refuge in privacy with various syndrome of burnout: depression, ambiguity of identity due to anguish and a sense of failure; all things that normally cause different escapes: alcohol, sex, research of success and extra personal interests. Thus from contemplatives in action we become burnt in action, with our energy spent uniquely in doing. All this is aggravated by the community situation, in which the relation among generations lives a discreetly difficult moment. Summing up, we could enclose everything in the word mentality.

The charism, after the council of the ’60; the enthusiastic going back to the sources of the Gospel and of the founder in the 70s; the harvest of fruit with the new Constitutions in the 80s; in the 90s the RL has found itself to face the unfulfilled and suspended renewal  (still going on) thus remaining as a masterpiece suspended in the air, without becoming renewed life. The difficulty of translating the great lines of the Council into concrete action, thus keeping the status quo, is shearing the living roots of the charism reduced, more or less to a standard, not to say that it is getting fossilised.

THE UNEASINESS AS AN OPPORTUNITY

Therefore, we are living in the uneasiness of this post-modern reality, in which, thanking God, we are called to exist. The following symptoms, besides what has already been said, can tell us what uneasiness means in our communities:

a. normally there are difficulties in finding persons available for the roles of authority;

b. there is a diffused communitarian individualism, not only as phenomenon, but even as a demanded attitude;

c. many consecrated  men and women take refuge in their role, making their apostolic and professional role absolute, thus they start accumulating specialisations;

d. there is a diffused research of spirituality outside one’s own charism;

e. as general climate, there is the predominance of a negative vision of the contemporary world; (diversity between negative vision as documentation of facts and as general sensation);

f. the internal lacerations among generations, among different roles and cultures keep on increasing;

Before these symptoms, which we fully inhale, a series of deviating journeys has been created:

1. denial or removal of problems: complaints or launching oneself to work/compensations, in order to avoid looking at reality vis-à-vis:

2. tentative of solving the problems by removing the symptoms ( ex. Lack of vocations; let us go to get them from the third world; an apostolic work does no longer function: let us turn it into a hotel…);

3. seeking the guilty: the superiors, the aged, the youths, the middle aged; the diocese or the parish, the state, the families, the different cultures….

All this form a kind of short circuit, having at its basis the sensation that others represent a danger; follows the will of going out of uneasiness hurriedly, while the right strategy is on another side. Moments of crisis contain plenty of opportunities, and history proves it. Psalm 48 says, “Man in prosperity does not understand, he is like animals which perish…”. We need the courage of a change after evaluating the present properly. The phenomena that I have listed above could be seen also in a wrong way: either just as the arrival post of a glorious past, rich in charismatic and pastoral satisfactions, which, wanting or not wanting, is going to bankruptcy; or as a future, which presumes to start from zero, just as if we did not have in us the chromosomes of a charism with its history. Instead, there is a present that must go to what is essential and to the genuine of the past, from where we may start for the future, even if it remains full of unknown things and uncertainties.

This is possible only if the Institute puts itself in the state of formation (enough with formation reserved only for the youths) and with a general re- restructuring  of the community or of the so called works. However, we need to pay attention: formation and re-structuring must move side by side. Formation without a contemporary re-structuring deludes and is soon abandoned, because it is seen useless and academic, without any practical application. A re-structuring without contemporary formation causes the growth of uneasiness and discontent: works are closed, we resist and struggle among opposite parties within the Institute itself…

The provocations and the change anchor substantially two areas which must be the first to move.

Personal identity and charismatic group

From the eight hundred up to date the consecrated life is defined more or less after the type of work it carries on (in the field of education, of health care, of charity and first welcoming….). Today this system of things is collapsing because of reduction, change of destination and of use, a new lay out of presence, closing of institutions….Then the new risk is that of verifying whether  we must identify ourselves with these different type of apostolate or whether there is something deeper on which we can anchor our life. After all, one of the main reasons of contrast and misunderstanding in community life is here. Must we try first of all to face today’s challenges  with an ever stronger and demanding commitment at efficiency level, as far as it is possible to step forwards with  the overwhelming race of our epoch, or should we manage to take our position at wisdom level?

If we look at the history of the Church  and of the consecrated life itself, we see that that we have been able to overcome the most difficult moments, of being reborn and renewed. This happened because, instead of running madly to fill the holes of the historical and cultural moment, we tried to seek firm points, stable positions, to overcome the logic of the time and to go ever deeper. This is what we intend to do with these meetings. Everything can be summed up in the dilemma: to be religious in order to do this, that, or exclusively for the sake of Jesus Christ?

Today we need the strong emergency of knowing that one enters religious life and remains in it in order to be a living memory of the life of Jesus before the Father and the brothers (VC 22), not so much and/or only to do things, important apostolic works. We must think essentially about te consecrated persons and the quality of their life, before thinking of carrying on any other work. According to the document Starting afresh from Christ no. 20, this requires giving the primacy to the spiritual life, strengthening the roots of the charismatic spirituality, so that we may express true wisdom, namely, we may be adult in faith, through this evangelical way with today’s historical discernment..

A community of authentic relations

We must say straightaway that it is important to dismount the system with which we have more or less motivated and built our community life. At spirituality level, we adult and aged consecrated persons have been formed to a very individualistic spirituality that, above all,  from the modern devoted person up to date has been the winning line, with a jealous tendency to keep for ourselves the experiences and spiritual journeys of our life. Today the Church requires the capacity of a spiritual, fraternal communion, which –we must admit it- is almost unedited. Up-to-date, very often the community has been felt either as a place of apostolate (where the work is identified with te community), or only as an instrument of apostolate.

Naturally, all this has been used to create the weakest point of every consecrated community, from which the major part of the crisis derives, that is, the existing type of interpersonal relationships, often too much formal -not to say inexistent- with a marked parallelism among the generations. We are asked to create true human relations in the communities, so that the commandment of reciprocal love may circulate in them. This is asked so that the consecrated community may not be or remain shut up, but may rather be open within history, and our house may be opened to all our brothers and sisters, open to the four winds. A Diakonia of service born and founded on the koinonia, without which there cannot be a true diaconia. For this, the community must go back to be, as St. Benedict would say in his time, <<a school of divine services>>.

We ask ourselves how it is possible to translate all this into a communitarian style. I herewith indicate two ways:

1. the concrete community life, time tables, meetings…must be laid out in such a way as he who chooses it may know that it is not because of a better apostolic efficiency or to ensure the logistic services for the person (such as a rest-house of restaurant), but because of an authentic vocational testimony; 

2. we need to renew the agreements among the brothers/sisters of the community, by giving ourselves a rule shared by all, in order to assimilate what has gone on maturing during these forty years. On which basis? On the basis of the love for Christ and his Gospel; to have caught the essence of the charism; the capacity of discerning the signs of the times. To sum up: a community of persons who feel of having received a clear mandate  -they believe in it and want to carry it ahead all together.

From the fruit of the two previous points derive that: the most important mission of the consecrated life is that of leading self and the other members of God’s people to the maturity of faith. We must place once again Christ at the centre, because at present the consecrated life is dispersed through too many things, forgetting or neglecting the essential part.

THE NEW REALITIES OF THE CONSECRATED LIFE

Though dramatic and discussable the reflection that José Maria Vigil, a Claretianum, has written on Adista (14^th May, 2005), is quite interesting. He admits that the European consecrated life undergoes the collapse of an irreversible crisis and a re-foundation is not sufficient to solve and avoid the situation. Besides the question of very scarce vocations, the consecrated life has practically disappeared from its role as vigorous and relevant protagonist in the society and in the Church. He denounces its state of institutional captivity, which deprives itself of prophetic freedom. It follows that, what we are living is no longer the hour of prophecy, but that of culture and simple professionalism; no longer the hour of the exodus, but that of the exile; not the hour of revolution, but that of tiny reforms. This happens just because we are reduced to a collective margin structured by a gigantic indifference externally and by a strong apathy inwardly. He concludes that there is nothing else to do but to save whatever can be saved and to set aside what is left over. 

To me, it is the matter of an air-view, which does not catch the subsoil  and the particular aspects of a life that, anyhow, moves in micro- dimension. Of course, the situation iworries us, but…if we walk with our feet on the ground, leaving behind the air-view, we see that the consecrated life exists and that another reality is also moving.

In fact, during these 40 years, from the Council up-to-date, new plants of consecrated life have been born. They are, above all, a renewed form of monastic, desirous of conjugating together the traditional values and the perspective of Vatican II with the cultural stimuli of the post 68 and of the cultural change in full development. We herewith mention the most famous ones: Bose; Piccola Famiglia dell’Annunziata di Dossetti in Emilia Romagna; Comunità dei Figli di Dio di Barsotti in Tuscany.  

The main characteristics of these <<plants>> are:

a a strong spiritual dynamics around the centrality of God’s Word;

a a strong fraternal component (mixed communities –sharing with the laity, above all with families), without any clerical underlining, centred on the evaluation of the common Baptismal consecration and with a remarkable local ecclesial sensitivity on the territory;

a a typical mission at the service of faith maturation towards all the components of the people of God (shelter, lectio ,sharing of life…).  

In Italy, these forms are of a similar typology  for a total of at least thirty persons. We do not speak of the other continents, above all of Latin America, where this new sprouting is now overflowing  (ex. In Brazil more than 180 new forms of consecrated life in charismatic movements….)

However, we do not have only new plants. We have also a number of blooms sprouted  on the trunk of old foundations and charisma. I think that most Institutes could give the testimony of some little bloom of the kind, also in the major part of tolerated cases, not to say contested cases. Of course, they are not integrated, they are rather marginalised, if compared with the classical institutes of reference: a kind of small fires spread here and there, but beyond tolerance/acceptance; the interesting thing is that most these new blooms have the same  characteristics as the new communities we have mentioned above, namely:

a preponderant centrality of the Word of God;

a a particularly relevant fraternity. When they are not mixed communities, they are communities really shared with the laity and families, to participate all together in very close charismatic experiences;

a meaningful presence in the territory and in the local ecclesial reality, not seen as productions of the classical service of charity, but as attention paid to the new poverties;

a recuperation of sources and of charismatic freshness at the service of faith maturation among the people of God (hospitality, Lectio Divina, sharing of life and journey of faith….).

It would be interesting to mention all of them. Without sinning of ingenuity, we are supposed to look with attention and an open heart at the new plants as well as at the new blooming. It is interesting to see that their elements and characteristics are present almost everywhere, though there are also many problems among them. Some of them may simply reach an exploit and then they will die. Others, as I believe, will have a future.

Three challenges

Today we have a crisis of identity in the consecrated life and, consequently, of visibility, still consequently of credibility.

The re-launching of holiness, as the end and fundamental preoccupation of the consecrated life, becomes urgent and fundamental. In the past, the consecrated life thought of holiness as of its own privilege. Let us remember the famous secular distinction of the way of commandments open to all and that of counsels open only to a few privileged people from the elite consecrated life. Today, thanks to the theological and ecclesiological layout of Vatican II, this visual has beautifully been made to fall. Holiness is no longer the monopoly of a particular group of believers, but a universal call. However, there is a  risk for the consecrated life: it is the risk of reducing the primary and fundamental commitment to holiness, in order to concentrate on other immediately more producing dynamics, such as secularised activism, meritorious, but essentially functional services.

Or, some express themselves in a disincarnated spiritualism, since today it is of fashion and refuge the re-launching of very emotional experiences of mystical type, such as cures, healings from the interior travails of contemporary man, in competition with the fleeing to the East or with the spreading of sects and of the New Age, without seriously compromising the persons along journeys of faith and conversion of life.    They still look for an identity in pursuing a professional role appreciated and considered at society level, thus one’s own visiting card is presented: first professor, parish priest, syndicalism, nurse, psychologist, journalist, social promoter; then consecrated, sister, priest. All this strongly affects the identity of consecrated life at personal as well as at charismatic level, or at Institute level. Nobody understands any longer who he is, since we live wholly in our personal project of life or according to the communitarian or congregational proposals.  Thus, God becomes a pretext and not the cause of our choices and the consecrated life is no longer an existence centred in God, but a using his ways for other finalities, similar or parallel to those of the society.  

In the Medieval and in the modern age there was the  terrifying phenomenon of the consecrated life secularised by induced constrictions (=persons compelled to religious life to safeguard the solidity and compactness of the family patrimony, to the advantage of the first begotten son). Today we have worrying phenomena of consecrated life secularised due to services useful in society and to obtain the image of being accepted, appreciated and valued by a schizophrenia of life: that is, we affirm a fully consecrated life, with rhythms, mentality and daily choices practically in line with the ways and life-style of society. Thus here is the other grave crisis for us as well as for those who live at our side: we are no longer credible by ourselves and even less by others (believers or non); they consider us as false money, useless people, or they appreciate simply the service we offer, but then, they go elsewhere to seek and to find the sense of their life. The unique alternative, therefore, is that of going back to the fundamental knot and to take the consecrated life seriously, going to what is essential, because it is only here that identity, visibility and credibility are played, only here we become such salt and yeast as God and the Church expect from the consecrated life.

In line with all this there is the talk on the re-discovery of the charism. This is the question: Shall we go back to the origin, or shall we open new frontiers? What does it mean going back to the origin? A simple going back or a reform that implies updating and enculturation, the spirit and intuitions of the origin, thus giving to the charism a renewed form?

Every foundation experience is an inflamed  word of God, that descends and is born on earth through 4 elements (4 pro):

a contextual  provocation, which challenges the holy founder, makes him react and be converted to the project of the Lord on him;

a evangelical project, The reaction provoked by the Spirit pushes us to live the Gospel here and now with a particular faceting: we are at the specific birth of the charism;

a actuation project: they are the different concrete and official steps, which we give to the project and which sometimes imply more than   true Herculean fatigues;

a definitive product: it is the concrete image of the charism in the unfolding of time, through the institution, various persons, adaptations…

To renew the charisma. Is it possible and how? Every charism, gift of the Spirit, contains an ensemble of fundamental elements, which are unchangeable along the passing of time and the changing cultures. These fundamental unchangeable elements are put in a changeable container connected to time and cultures. The first important  dimension is the capacity of discernment, to succeed in catching the essential and everlasting elements of the charism compared to the passing ones. Thus the fundamental content is the changing content of  culture of time. The second dimension is to see the different containers, which succeed one another along the epochs, always checking if the essential elements are safeguarded, The third dimension is to let us be provoked by the social, cultural and ecclesial today, to form the new container of everlasting values: to rebuild today’s container according to  these elements, above all in the direction of spirituality, of fraternal relations and of the mission.

AWARENESS, HOPES, INTERROGATIVES

We have not reached the point of the youths and we start from the first consideration; in these 50 years, new proposals of living the Gospel in the contemporary life have been aroused, in spite of the many extinguished communities we see around us. In the consecrated life, rich in principles of a millinery history at the level of saints, there has been at theory level, an extra-ordinary commitment to look for the charismatic roots and for the updating of the Constitutions  but, together, a noteworthy poverty of perspectives about the future, due to the chimerical dream of a speedy return of yesterday’s prosperity - a thing that will never come back; - for the slow down of inertia taken back to system and the burden of cumbersome  structures which hinder us from living evangelically our spirituality, fraternity and mission. Let us think just for a while about what happened from the day of the French revolution up to date: the consecrated life was reduced to a deem light; it was reborn in the eight hundred with an unequalled historical prosperity and thrown away, above all into the works of charity; suffocated today by the same works of charity through the State (the compelling norms); the Church that has shifted the monopoly of the works of charity from the consecrated persons to all the people of God; and the youths themselves (their demands= to be consecrated aiming at the management of works or at being prophets?).      

Faced by all these things, do the consecrated youths feel life as the presence of a minority in society and in the Church  or just a residual?  We can speak of minority when there is a proportioned relation: for instance: 3/10;  but if the relation is 3/100 we must rather speak of “ residuity”. Today many consecrated youths feel to be rather a “residuity” of something that in their eyes seems to have no future. They feel the actuality of the value inherent to the consecrated life, in particular the value of the Gospel counsels, but they notice the incapacity of expressing them according to categories and a convincing actual modality.

Of course, one can come out of the crisis only by looking ahead, however, it is equally fundamental to be faithful to the fondant and characteristic values of the consecrated life, though with new modalities. For instance:

a an evangelical community with relations of real family type, which announces a new type of fraternal, equalitarian society, which accentuates  communion before and above the juridical community;

a a community that gives the preference to journeys of faith rather than to the “routine” of regular observance. Today there are no more strong contestations and frontal rigidity  as in the ’68, perhaps because there are no more clear reasons confronting one another; very often only nebulous feelings and resentments, while we do not take into sufficient consideration the demands of a happy life, a life that is realised from the human point of view, to be fully man/woman also in the consecrated life.

The apostolic life itself, more than minding exclusively to keep the religiosity, must invest at the level of announcing the Gospel. Many activities of ours were beneficial when people lacked the primary goods and livelihood (basic condition of subsistence, health, education); today people, in particular the youths lack the sense and the purpose of living. Today we are asked to be ferment in the spaces of ecclesial dynamism, in experiences including apostolic activities of close entwining between ecclesiology and consecrated life. This demands apostolic activities carried on together in a complementary way among the institutes, in strict synergy  with the diocesan pastoral activities. What was missing and what is missing today to translate the actual challenge into a mandate? We have missed the courage and the trust  of trying some new experience, as a tentative of re-translating the grace of the charism into the renewal of new demands. Many times we clearly see that we should do it, but we keep on postponing the realisation of these experiences, waiting for mature times, a thing which effectively makes us to lose many favourable occasions.

WITNESSES OF HOPE: UNDER WHICH CONDITIONS?

The Church is asking us to allow the  perfecta caritas of Christ to hurry up with the fantasy of charity; thus nothing will be left to do but to make space for the quivering of the Spirit that already breathes and blows in us and wants to translate himself into concrete life. This quivering must become joy and exultance of liberation and new life. How to do it? At which  conditions? Thus, it seems important to individuate the way to walk along, above all towards three directions.

From the exterior to the interior renewal

During the past forty years we have gone through many psychological, pedagogical and sociological readings with various theological and philosophical links of the journey fulfilled by the consecrated life. In truth, we must admit it, we have not made enough wisdom reading, namely seeking the word that God wants to tell us this moment through these events. We have worked a lot on the aggiornamento, leaving behind many positions; we have launched ourselves in re-structuring  the works, re-qualifying the personnel, using an enormous amount of energies, but we notice that the true answer is to be found at a different level: we need to go deeper.  

Today we lack a sufficient experience of God, to support the various projects which are filled in by our organisations and by our desire of efficiency, with which at times we attempt to give a programme to God: from the personal to the communitarian, from the formative to the pastoral and to that of the Institute..

From the vocational <<monopoly>> to communion among the states of life

The exigency of the communion prophecy is particularly felt during these years, when the European Union wants to re-launch the process of the Constitution and the Italians want to concentrate their mind on the value of the republican Constitution, without useless polemics, starting from fondant elements, to the end of giving a new order to the interacting of traditions and ideas and to create a harmony of differences.

A communion that, on one side may express clearly the identity of each member, of each state of life, of each church; on the other side may bring to evidence that we need to let ourselves be created by the Spirit in the harmony of differences. Each one will feel to be an instrument in the hands of the Lord and will free oneself from the presumption of having to realise all alone the necessary improvement of the world. When things will reach this stage, the  perfecta caritas of the Lord will prevail and will become the protagonist and motor of everything: <<The love of Christ urges us>> (2 Cor 5,14).

A perfecta caritas that: with its being a protagonist, will not flatten and make the charisma of each state of life uniform, but will exalt their diversity in the rainbow of communion. It will make the lay faithful to be interpreters of the risen Lord in every secular reality, with a particular accentuation of the richness and fecundity of matrimonial love and of the family. It will offer the ordained ministers the same apostolic anxiety and the same fire of pastoral charity as those of the heart of Jesus, who follows untiringly the lost lamb, namely the lost and suffering humanity, to say to everyone that God, with a heart pierced on the cross, is love and wants the salvation of the whole world. Finally, he will call the consecrated persons to express in their existence the spousal character of the Church, attracted by and tending to the Lord Jesus, so as to be signs and memory of his  style of living and of existing. (GS 22).

From information/instruction to on going formation

The authentic face of a person in the structure of its concrete existence finds the ultimate factor in the initiative of the spirit: knowledge, freedom and action. It is a creating expression, because the transcendent spirit enters the being of nature and gives a form to it, a form which can be nothing else but the living form of Christ, since we are created to his image and similitude. The authentic form gets integrated with this fundamental dynamics. These brief reflections of R. Guardini introduce us to the considerations of this last point.

Since the energies of the original human love (eros) can never get separated from the love descending from above (agape), it is urgent to educate us and others to make both kinds of love to meet, dialogue and mature reciprocally, so that the person may become a source from where rivers of living water may flow (See John 7,37s.).  Therefore we need such a formation as it may be translated  into harmonious sources of knowledge, an appeal to freedom, a progressive itinerary of maturation and growth in action, because this welding between the limited and frail richness of the person with his affective energies and the grace of perfecta caritas, moved by the Holy Spirit may produce truly the living form of each man, within his vocation, and in his specific charism. However, we need an urgent passage: during these years, static projects of formation have prevailed  and some types of methodology that too often, beyond theoretical declarations on personalisation , have rather favoured an exterior moulding, more than provoking the dynamism of the person from within towards this living form of life.  

Formation, in fact, many times has given an excessive space to planned  and theoretical intellectual knowledge,  more than to interior dynamics of growth. Consequently, we have enough manual formation and too little at the school of the great masters of life. Therefore, we need a true revolution in the field of formation, a revolution that does not get satisfied with courses indicated by the Ratio, but that may enable us to discern truly in ourselves the perfecta caritas which we have spoken of above and which may enable us to welcome it in freedom and availability, as well as to work for the welding of one’s own personal richness  and one’s own history, so that we may get translated into praxis all that is indicated in the document Perfectae caritatis: <<The renewal of the institutes depends mostly on the formation of its members (…). The members will have to go on diligently making perfect this spiritual, doctrinal and technical culture” (no. 18).

When a religious is called by his brother to preside, to coordinate, to help the life of the charismatic group, he finds himself in the duty of representing and mediating the research of faithfulness to the Holy Spirit, author of the charism. His authority is an obedient authority. The superior is a servant of the common good, of the good of each person. After all the things which we have seen, we should say in synthesis that the superior gives: -the service of the light: reminding everybody the finality and the values of the common evangelical project, through a “constant school actualised by the Rule”, to recuperate the common patrimony of charismatic  spirituality; -the service of encounter: managing the structures in such a way as to favour the unity of the group with opportune animation and decisions, putting the community in a state of on going conversion; -the service of the mission: helping the community to give the missionary value of testimony to the Gospel, opportunely subdividing the services; keeping the relations, harmonising the diversities, interrogating himself about what God truly wants today.  

CONCLUSION

Our identity is hidden and contained in the service of Christ who washes the feet, therefore our reflection has been limited to the most meaningful nuclei of this service, that is, its  perfecta caritas. This is a nucleus to be re-discovered and re-launched with renewed commitment, despite the 40 years which separate us from the Council.

The event of the entire Council has been a true moment of grace, an experience of Pentecost, a visit of the Holy Spirit to the Church. Our research and commitments must make us walk towards open winning posts and towards the great horizons that seem to be still incomplete in the fatigue of our renewal.

Biography

H. U. VON BALTHASAR, <<Il grande respiro della “Lumen Gentium”>>, in AA.VV., La Chiesa del Concilio, Istra, Milano 1985. BENEDETTO XVI, <<Discorso alla Curia Romana>>, in L’Osservatore Romano, 23 dicembre 2005. BENEDETTO XVI, Deus caritas est, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Città del Vaticano 2006. BENEDETTO XVI, <<Discorso ai Superiori e alle Superiore Generali>>, in L’Osservatore Romano, 22-23 maggio 2006.

R. GUARDINI, <<Fondazione della teoria pedagogica>>, in C. FEDELI (a cura di), Persona e Libertà - Saggi di fondazione della teoria pedagogica, La Scuola, Brescia 1987.

K. RAHNER, Discepoli di Cristo, Paoline, Roma 1968. S. XERES, La Chiesa, corpo inquieto - Duemila anni di storia sotto il segno della riforma, Àncora, Milano 2006.