II/ – TOWARDS A NEW VISION

We have to go deeper – I repeat this leitmotiv once again. Indeed, the following observation has to be made: even yesterday, at a time when RL gave the best of itself through ‘works’, with the extraordinary things that it achieved, the real task that it addressed – and performed through works as well – was to be a reference to something that is a great deal above many services and that was the mystery of God, the specifically religious dimension of life.

The ‘deeper’ that I continue to invoke refers here to the religious meaning of religious life. This seems to be a tautology and yet it is the point where everything is at stake.

1/ – Rediscovered roots

There stands out here the fundamental problem of the identity of religious life, its meaning in the life of the Church and in history.[1]

Here we can also refer to the image of Elijah or the Israelites after the collapse of Jerusalem and the deportation to Babylonia. It was through the painful experience of failure and trial that Elijah rediscovered himself and his vocation in his encounter with the God of his Fathers; and we may say the same about the deported people of Israel: everything seemed to be over and yet, specifically in the experience of exile, the people of Israel read anew their history and rediscovered their true face, their true vocation as the people of the Covenant.

And such is the case with us today and this is an invitation to read through faith – above I used the phrase ‘sapiential reading’ – what is taking place.

Many things in our history, although they are glorious have come to an end, but the experience of poverty that we are living, the fall in vocations, the great system of traditional works and apostolates that ‘no longer attract’ etc. – all of this must tell us something! It is certainly the case that we are directed towards a commitment to updating. But what above all else is here as the word of God for us is to take us back more decidedly to our true identity: Jesus Christ and the Gospel as the only reason for our lives and ‘apostolic service’.

We say this with a few words but inside there is everything that explains and gives meaning to a religious consecration.

Unfortunately, when this is said everything becomes wrecked in a reading that is merely devotional and which is worth what it is worth. There is much more! Inside there is a lesson that lies ‘in the facts’, that comes from history, from God who works in history, and this concerns our identity. I increasingly think that specifically in order to bring us back to Him more deeply, the Lord allows everything that is happening today: He wants to help us – we who have been in religious life for some time and those, whether few or many in number, who are joining it now – to see how much of our faith is in that life: the deep motivations that justify the choice that we have made.

I believe that we religious greatly needed this purification and it is a grace that this is taking place, but it is also a terrible challenge. Instinctively, certain elements are removed. But the real problem of CL today is the problem of everyone and it is a problem that is essentially spiritual in character, a problem of faith. One author a few years ago said that the only problem of religious communities is to see if they are Christian. He was completely right!

I like to say that apostolic religious life has to rediscover its monastic roots. This is the true meaning of refoundation – if we want to keep this term a little hazy and not well defined as regards its contents. A return to our roots, that is to say a spiritual requalification of our institutes – this, it seems to me, is the real challenge, if we want to keep this term which is perhaps rather misused.

2/ – The point where everything is at stake

I was pleased that this approach was shared by a paper that my religious brother, the editor of Il Regno, Lorenzo Prezzi, gave to the major superiors of the Dehonians last October on the subject of ‘Refoundation’. Pezzi attributes the crisis of CL to four domains and factors:

• That of identity and the (absent) theological definition of CL.
• That of ascesis, with the fall in moral and spiritual impetus that we are witnessing.
• That more specifically linked to the disappearance of the questions to which CL has always answered through works.
• And, lastly, a factor to be found on the theological horizon or the horizon of the meaning of God today.

It is the last point that explains all the rest.

A sufficient experience of God is absent which could support a life project and assure its positive outcomes. This is a crisis of roots and radicality. Without an experience of the sacred absolute, without immersion in the primary sources of being, of life and of truth, without the mystical dimension of reality, religious life becomes empty. In other terms, what is absent is the presence of the Spirit which has suffocated by habits, by ecclesiastical ‘respectability’, by little personal self-interests, and by an insufficiency of theology itself.

The confirmation of this is to be found in two emblematic facts. Firstly, the ‘systematic resort to sociological and psychological skills’, as though one could deduce from them what matters and to what religious life should respond. Secondly, the ‘lack of a historical judgement that has the depth of faith’.

‘Faced with the individualism of Western culture, the last four centuries of theology and religious life have not had those who have known how to condemn their insufficiency without having to fall into nineteenth-century anti-modernity’.

We here encounter again that ‘spiritual wisdom’ to which I referred above and which one could have the right to expect above all from religious. And indeed if it is true that the religion dimension of living is what in definitive terms decides the journey of consciences in history, and if it is true that this dimension ‘could not have a future without the presence of figures such as religious’, then one can understand from here at what level the challenge to religious life is posed today.

3/ – The congress on religious life – the most difficult challenge

Perhaps I could introduce here some observations on the congress of last November. Not in order to provide an overall assessment, which is not my task, but in order to draw some observations form it for the purposes of the analysis that I am seeking to engage in here in this paper.

The congress began well during the first two days with a strong reference to the theological and spiritual dimension of consecration. This was the right approach which could have, and should have, kept everyone together in unity. But then – and I here I refer to the overall analysis – the usual prejudice somewhat emerged: it was agreed to recognise that everything starts with Christ and depends on him but then, with this taken for granted, attention moved elsewhere, to what comes afterwards and constitutes – this is what people continue to think – the real ‘important point’: how to respond to the challenges to us that are posed by contemporary society.

It seems that I understood specifically this at this congress: the first two days become merely introductory because attention was then completely paid to the problems, to the gaps, to the challenges that are posed in various social and cultural contexts of today in order to identify how consecrated life can be an answer and what it is called to do to be an answer. This is an approach which perhaps is habitual for us but which in the end is much larger than we are and ‘impossible’. And indeed we find ourselves completely wrong footed and in the end without answers.

Perhaps yesterday, in a context of a Christian society, when what was expected of religious was taken for granted and vocations were superabundant, one could have also thought that the approach should have been specifically of that character: to recognise the situation and provide an answer to it. But today how could one think that this is the way forward?

I look at the Catherine wheel of problems, of gaps and of challenges that were listed by the continental groups on the third and fourth days of the congress and I ask myself – as indeed during the congress I asked myself – what is the use of that? What do we think we can achieve?

It is clear that there can but be an interaction with contemporary reality because it is a part of our history that we must live the gospel and that we address our mission to the man of today. But in order to offer what to that man? What is the answer that we – we the Church and we religious – must give to the society and reality of today?

It is here that one sees the awareness that we have of ourselves and of the mission that is entrusted to us.

It is truly frightening when the analysis takes place at the level of change or the things ‘to do’ in order to respond to change, perhaps deceiving ourselves that from here can come the possibility of being up-to-date as well. One would die of worry if such was the case. Fortunately, what is asked of us goes well beyond change and concerns the foundations, what remains and provides stability and then provides illumination so as to understand change itself and take it upon ourselves, without being overwhelmed by it.

What defines us ‘is beyond’ and is of a transcultural character. It is what Jesus has given us and has told us. specifically so that we may approach life and all its events in their correct meaning. This it seems to me is what the man of today expects from us. It is the problem of questions and ultimate meanings, once again the question of God and who God is for the life of man.

But it specifically here – in my view – that the congress displayed its weak point, which is also, emblematically, the weakness of RL today. We have gone alone, too much alone, against the challenges and the problems of today, leaving in the shadows, at the moment when this should have emerged with its true force, the only thing that we give and that we need: Jesus Christ and the gospel, the power of God that saves.

Perhaps I exaggerate here but it seems to me that the appointment failed just where it should have taken place, where the power of faith and penetration of a theological and cultural character that one as the right to expect of religious as well should have expressed itself: the theological and spiritual dimension.

There is an urgent need to bring back to a synthesis the many things that have been spoken about and the synthesis is here: overcoming the fracture between the discourse about Christ and the rest (addressing the problems and the challenges posed by contemporary society). This is a theological and cultural problem, a problem of mentality before being a problem of behaviour. It is not, therefore, even the usual problem of the unity of life but something that is deeper and more global – a problem of mentality and our approach to life.

Today’s religious life needs saints and prophets who are able make people see – without becoming shipwrecked in a spiritualism that is outside history – that Jesus Christ and the spiritual heritage of the Church are the answer. They certainly are this at their own specific level but perhaps precisely because of this one should finally know how to decide: leave to other people what is a matter for other people and accept – specifically today in secular and post-modern society – the most difficult challenge: that of ultimate meanings, the religious challenge.