|
 |
|
|
|
"I clean the tomb of Monsignor because he was my
father. Because he loved people who, like me, did not disturb him. He
spoke to us, touched us, asked us, indeed he even had confidence in us.
If you knew how much he loved us! This is why I clean his tomb; he has
given up his life for me”.
On a winter morning, a poor man, dressed in rags,
with hair full of dust in the city of El Salvador, pronounced these
words while cleaning carefully, with a dirty piece of cloth, the tomb of
Monsignor Romero, the Archbishop who was murdered on March 24, 1980,
while he was celebrating Mass.
The words of this poor man are a constant testimony,
which persons in misery pronounce about saints. These are persons who
know how to welcome the other, but also how to love him. To love means
touching, asking, sharing, coming at par. 1
The saints love, become neighbour, take care always,
unconditionally, because they know that nobody can live without love.
To take care of others is the heart of the feminine
genius, it is the typical feminine way of loving, of being close. We
read in Mulieris dignitatem that "the woman can find herself by
offering love to others", and again, "God entrusts man to her in
a very special way", the human person: man or woman, young or old, poor
or rich, white or black … without any distinction and exclusion.
During the homily for the feast of Christ the King
(31st October 1943), Card Stepinac, today blessed, said,
"The Catholic Church does not know races of masters and races of slaves.
The Catholic Church knows races creatures of God. If she appreciates
somebody more than others, this somebody is one who has a noble heart,
not one with a strong fist. For her, the black from central
Africa and the European are both men. For her the
king in his royal palace and the poor fellow of the gypsy in his tend
are equally men. The other is my brother,
my sister, my relative.
In his testament, dedicated to the new generations,
the Turkish Poet Nazim Hilkmet has written, "Do not live on earth
like a stranger or a tourist in nature. Live in this world as in the
house of a father: believe in wheat, in the soil, in the sea, but
believe in man before anything else.
Love the clouds, the cars, the books, but love man
before anything else.
Do feel the sadness of the branch that withers, of
the star that extinguishes, of the wounded animal that cries, but feel
the sadness and the pain of man before anything else" 2
The person in love feels and experiences the sadness
in the heart of his brother and sister, which becomes his own sadness,
his own weight.
I have just quoted two passages from Mulieris
Dignitatem, "The woman finds herself in her love for others" and "God
entrusts man to her in a special way". They say the specific
attitude of the woman of elevating love starting from life to accept the
bond of inter-dependence and find in it the roots of true solidarity.
Therefore, it is the feminine universe to remind us, with its richness,
that "man cannot live without love". He remains in himself an
incomprehensible being, his life is deprived of sense, if love is not
revealed to him, if he does not experience and makes it his own, if he
does not participate in it vividly" (Redemptor hominis, no.10).
Remembering, in this perspective, that God has created man to his image
and similitude means to remember that God "by calling man to
existence because of love, he calls him to love at the same time
(Familiaris consortio, no.11).
In his splendid encyclical, "Deus caritas est",
Pope Benedict XVI says, "My sight towards the pierced side of Christ
is the starting point of this my Encyclical Letter" and again, "Whoever
needs me and I can help him, is my neighbour" (no.15). With this first
encyclical, he enters the heart of our Christian faith. The Christian
can express the fundamental choice of his life only with these words.
"We have believed in the love of God".
To love, to take care, to be neighbour
is the peculiar vocation of every woman. She is the
human creature wanted by God to generate, to safeguard, to educate life,
particularly today, in a society that suffers a deep anthropological
crisis, which challenges just women -a fortiori consecrated women- to
ensure a globalisation centred on the person, consequently on
solidarity, particularly with those who suffer physically and
spiritually. In fact, the centrality of the person, in our multicultural
world, leads us to give value to the communion among individuals and
peoples above every system, idea and ideology. It leads us to discover
the true meaning of relation and what the other -no longer an enemy or
competitor- can offer; to develop the paradigm of a planetary and,
simultaneously, plural civilisation. It leads us to safeguard the
universalistic issues of every culture in a spirit open to differences
and multiplicity, without any will of homologation.
The human person is not something I can use as an
instrument, something I can manipulate or dominate. We cannot sacrifice
man to history, to the fame of great people, to earning, vice, economic
or political interests. We must respect and protect the human person
always, from its conception to the threshold of death.
It is within this global anthropological crisis that
the problem of poverty explodes in its multiple forms, old and new. It
touches the conscience of the believers, of many men and women of good
will. He who loves life passionately, he who wants the happiness of
every human being feels the cry of the poor, even when nature rebels. He
feels the cry of the poor whom nobody listens to. “I was hungry and
am still hungry. I was thirsty and am still thirsty. I was a foreigner
and I have not yet found a friendly land. I was in prison and nobody
ever freed me. I was naked and covered myself with cold. I was sick,
and died alone. I had doubts and nobody helped me to understand. I was
in anguish and nobody gave me hope. I was a street boy and only the
street accepted me with its violence. I was raped and they insulted me..
The cry of the poor, of the children, the aged, the
women reaches us. We are consecrated women and want to feel the cry of
the women explicated in the Conference of Pecking (unluckily already
forgotten). More than once I have asked myself about the concrete follow
up pf the two key-words of Pecking also in the catholic area. The
keywords were: empowerment (energy, power, capacity and will to
put the person at the centre) and mainstreaming (feminine
viewpoint): I limit myself to give some datus which brings to evidence
how only a little things have changed during the past en years. I
remember the words of Hillary Clinton in the Conference: they do not
feed female children, they have them drowned or they cut their spinal
cord simply because they are female. In China, India and South Chorea,
the prenatal ichographies have become functional for the selective
abortion: female foeticide. In Tibet, extended to sterilisation,
these methods have led to a specific genocide. In Bosnia and
Herzegovina, they have given an estimate of 300.000 rapes. Out of
114.000.000 women who undergo sexual mutilation, more than 2.000.000 are
female children every year. In Thailand and Philippines, they train
hundreds of thousand girls for prostitution or sell them as slaves in
the Arabian countries. In civilised countries like Canada and United
States, one third of women denounce sexual abuse during infancy and
adolescence. In India every day 13 women die for reasons linked to dowry
and often they are burned alive.
More than two thirds of illiterate persons in the
world are women. This percentage keeps on growing in Africa (80% to 97%)
and in China (70%). In the countryside of Kenya, women work an average
of three hours daily more than men do. In Africa, women represent more
than 60% of the agricultural work, but receive only 15% of the
agricultural credit. Almost everywhere, women are paid 30 to 40% less
than men, though they work and average of 13% more than men. Even
migration penalises the woman”, who leaves as colf and becomes slave”.
In the year 2000, they uprooted almost 8.000.000 Philippines from their
land and took them abroad. Quite often, in Islamic countries, Christian
women suffer persecution twice: as Christian and as women. However,
destiny is not any better for those Muslim women who fight for the
emancipation of women and for peace. In Pakistan one risks life only for
writing a book that narrates the Islamic persecution of a Hindu family.
Notwithstanding the continuation of this context
–perhaps even its worsening- we cannot help highlighting the tendencies
against current through the examples of well known women. Rigoberta
Menchù, that defends the rights of the indigenous people. Vandana Shiva,
that fights against the privatisation of water in her country and the
defence of the rights of local people. Wangari Maathai, that fights for
the re-forestation of Kenya, for the indigence and marginalisation of
women in her country. We could go on multiplying these examples.
A luminous example comes from a lay missionary,
Annalena Tonelli. During a congress organised in the Vatican by the
Pontifical Council for the sanitation pastoral, on 1st
December 2001, Annalena described her experience of life among the
least ones and the most suffering people in the world. Hardly after two
years, on October 5, 2003, she was killed at Borama, a town in
Somaliland, ex British Somalia, presently North-West of Somalia. She was
a victim of a terrorist group that killed her in the hospital where she
was working. Here are her words:
“Nothing has any sense outside love. My life has
known many dangers. I have often risked my life. I have been in the
midst of war for many years. I have experienced in my flesh the
suffering of those whom I love, the wickedness of man, his perversity,
cruelty and iniquity. I have come out of all this with an unshakable
conviction. What matter is only love. Love has sense even if God did not
exist. Love frees man from all that enslaves him. Only love makes us to
breathe, to grow and to flourish. Only love removes fear from our life,
allows us to show our not yet wounded chick to the mockery of those who
hurt us. They do not know what they do, and we risk our life for our
friends, because we believe, bear and hope everything. Thus we must see
that our life may be lived with dignity, may become beauty, grace and
blessing. Only then our life becomes happiness even in suffering,
because we live in our flesh the beauty of living and of dying. I live
immersed deeply in the midst of the poor, the sick, those whom nobody
loves”.
How many more women like her have spent and go on
spending their life to be neighbour and to take care of others! I have
in mind the rainbow of different charismas and the holy women that have
aroused and developed them: Theresa of Avila, Catherine, Luisa, Maria
Domenic, Brigid, Theresa of Calcutta … Humble, great women who “take
care”, living fully and joyfully their mission in the Church.
Unluckily, near these women we must mention others,
whom are getting into the habit of seeing, though with anguish, during
these years: they sow death instead of sowing life.
I thing of the women kamikaze, particularly of the
terrorists who at Beslan, in Ossezia, on 3rd September 2004,
paradoxically during the celebration of a feast of peace, killed
hundreds of persons, mostly children. “Belsan impresses and frightens us
for knocking the bottom of our love for life, on behalf of one who
weaves life in her womb and receives the call to safeguard it with the
whole of her being. The race of those naked and desperate children,
violated in their innocence by women, who should instead teach and
safeguard decency, is the sign –the wound- that we have crossed the
limit. We have crossed the interior boundary of our heart: the securest
banner of life and human dignity” 6.
Let us ask us: what to do before all this? Etty
Hillesum wrote, “We should oppose a tiny piece of our conquered love
against every new crime and horror”. This is our first challenge: we are
the first frontier of love and bounty. We cannot sow love if we are not
good. Bounty is not an obsolete virtue: let us think of Pope John XXIII.
Having set this premise, let us now enter some
details of the theme, bringing to focus some realities and wounds that
concern specifically the feminine world and wait for the balm of our
love.
The “ferial” poverties: the
cry covered by silence.
The cry covered by silence. Let
us think of the problem of the unmarried and separated women, the
problem of health due to our growing old (man lives longer than in the
past). Let us think of the economic condition of elderly women, which
does not consent a real “quality of life” (the house, treatment and
assistance, free time, access to information). We know that the frequent
solitude of the aged women is one reason of serious depressions, o
alcoholism growth and abuse of psycho-medicines.
Let us think of the unemployed
women or of the women with poorly remunerated work. In this case, the
economic and psychological dependence of the male partner has a
boomerang effect on the life of women: the more we depend, the
less economic means we have, less social life, more difficulties in find
an occupation. The scarce personal autonomy generates poverty and
further dependence, triggering off a descending spiral mechanism in a
condition of deprivation.
Let us think of the women
housekeepers, in families with a unique preceptor of income,
particularly if numerous and in trouble! Let us think of families with
great problems (for instance with the presence of a disabled or not
self-sufficient aged persons). The work of taking care amplifies
further. This makes more difficult the synthesis between professional
and family commitment, increasing the feminine dependence on the family,
parental nucleus of assistance.
Among te extreme poverties,
there is an increase of persons lacking a fixed abode, 23,3% of which
are women. Among the above 40% of immigrates in Italy, poverty is an
endemic condition –though not general- linked with countless factors.
The poverty of women, however,
does not regard only material goods, but widens –as we know- to enclose
physical violence, prostitution, black work, illiteracy, sexual abuses.
These phenomena do not afflict only foreign women.
Moreover, the humiliation of
women in the media is a worrying phenomenon. The presence of the
woman in the world of mass media is on the increase. The assuming
of women into in programmes grows. Girls form the majority of precarious
workers in the sector. The world of information, therefore, is becoming
feminine, but every policy of mainstreaming and of empowerment
appears lengthy and hard. The image of woman that the media presents is
stereotyped. They commercialise the feminine body in the publicity and
less attention, on behalf of the women themselves, with regard to use
women as sexual instruments of the publicity images of fashion. Saving
a few exceptions, the only image attributed to immigrated women is that
of the “black chronicle”.
Moreover, the genetic
manipulation tends to turn the uterus into a kind of experimental
laboratory. They manipulate substantially the same image of the feminine
body. They build it according to functional criteria for the technical
possibilities of the plastic surgery and aesthetic medicine.
Let us ask us: where has the
reservation gone, the feminine virtue so very dear to our grand-mothers
and mothers? Do we, consecrated women, still believe to the fruitfulness
of this virtue, immortalised by our great artists in the face of many
splendid images of Madonna? Do we create space for this virtue in the
education of the youth and in the formation to religious life?
Let us think also of the sexual
violence, of the physical and psychological ill-treatments, which take
place in the family environment. A recent survey of ISTAT attests that
80% of cases of violence happen in contexts of trustful relations and
90% of women, who turn to anti-violence centres, have undergone a
physical or sexual damage in the family area. The traffic of women to
the end of sexual exploitation invests many countries. Data prove that,
despite the strong commitment-even organised- the culture of violence
and conspiracy of silence of women keeps on spreading very much. There
is also a certain underground complicity, which tries to hide the
phenomenon, when it happens within the domestic walls. Thus, the
illusion remains that the violent and the rapist is always the
“stranger” or a “foreigner”.
All these situations deserve a
transversal reflection, which is of interest for us as women, as
consecrated women. We should not forget that the poverty, which afflicts
women, is often invisible, and it is up to us to individuate it,
particularly when they clothe it with dignity and discretion. When the
woman has to depend always and totally on the income of her
husband, she risks to lose self-esteem and to undervalue her resources.
The work that the women lend to the family (to bring up the children, to
cure the sick, the aged, the handicapped … ) is undervalued before the
professional work. The poverty of women, above all the extreme one, is
a violation of the human dignity.
Because of these motives and of
our being women who have chosen to follow Christ, we cannot help
shouldering the poverty that many women suffer in their flesh and
spirit, though we know that a journey within the world of poverty is, at
times, more binding and exacting than reaching a mission ad gentes …
Our vocational choice requires a
getting down “into the dramas of poverty”, of placing the person of the
poor, of the poor woman, before the Sabbath, becoming experts in a
welcoming listening to the forms of solitude and anonymous situations of
our brothers and sisters. Let us not be all mouth and no ears; let us
not raise the parabolic aerial, a sign that our heart and our interests
are rooted elsewhere, in the world of securities of every kind, and that
poverty is not the “land of the heart for us”. Every charism possesses a
particular grace, which turns it into a balm for the many different
kinds of poverty: charismas of mercy, of compassion, education,
prevention, rehabilitation …
To this end, thinking that many
of the mentioned problems have an incidence on the family, or derive
from a deep crisis, I wish to say something on the fraternal and
evangelising force of the vows. For the families, for the wives and the
mothers in particular, who live a difficult moment of economic,
affective and spiritual precariousness, we can be a sign of faithfulness
to vocation. Our poverty, lived in its radical essence, can teach that
in the family what matters is to give a priority to affection and human
relations, rather than to money and things. Our chastity says that our
sexuality deserves to be a joyful moment of communication and gift. Our
obedience can be emblematic for the relations between husband and wife
and between the parents and their children (let us think of the family
influence on education).
Finally, let us not forget that,
if misery afflicts particularly women, these are also the first to
protect their dear ones from poverty, from social exclusion, often in
silence. Let us not forget that the poorest of women must be the first
to get involved when it is time to conceive, realise, evaluate
strategies of action against poverty; that it is not possible to
eliminate women’s poverty, without the role played by men and without
collaboration with them.
I have mentioned the
fruitfulness of the charismas and the witnessing strength of the vows as
a privileged way to be a balm for the wounds afflicting the family. Now
I desire to widen the optic of my reflection and turn our sight towards
Mary, the all beautiful, the poor, the obedient. Every charism expresses
a peculiar aspect of Mary. Thinking of my own Institute dedicated
particularly to the education of women, I make soon a reference to “Mary
at Cana”, “Do what He will tell you!”. To me, this is the image of Mary
connoting every educative charism: to learn from the Lord, to be
available for God, to follow his footsteps, guided by Mary. Or, “Mary at
the feet of the cross”. Mary, the woman who “stays” near the dying Son,
recalls the charism of compassion characterising many Congregations In
their dedication to the sick, the aged, the marginalised. Let us think
of the Congregations that draw their inspiration from “Mary who visits
Elisabeth”, or commit themselves to the evangelisation of the parishes.
Let us think of those who treasure up the example of “Mary in the
cenacle” in their daily meditations; or those who imitate Mary who
carries the baby persecuted by Herod, and flees to Egypt; of Mary who
keeps in her heart the prophecy of old Simeon “A sword will pierce your
soul”.
In the following of Mary, every
consecrated woman enjoys the call of witnessing that the chastity of the
heart, the body and the life is the full and strong expression of a
total love for God, who sets the person free, full of deep joy and
available for the mission. It is the matter of a very important
testimony before a culture that tends to make human love more and more
banal and to shut up itself from life.
(continues)
 |
