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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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