The theme of the IV Ecclesial Congress of Verona¹, as we know, was, "Witnesses of the Risen Jesus, hope of the world"^. The choice has proved very good. In fact, they have centred the question of how to bear witness to the faith, which joins us and which is born from the resurrection of Jesus, in an extremely fast changing world and which somehow seems to introduce something stranger between the whirling development and faith.

In order "to communicate the Gospel in a changing world", as proposed by the pastoral orientations of the Italian Episcopal Conference for the first ten years of the 2000, we need credible and courageous witnesses. We need witnesses able of proposing solutions within a society, which seems to go on losing the Christian roots that generated it; witnesses capable of not giving in to the bewilderment caused by the rapid and whirling changes, which are being realised not only at scientific and technical level, but also at custom level. In fact, Such life-styles are emerging as they seem to reflect nothing Christian, not only among the so called "far away ones", but also among those who belong to our families. We religious also at times have the impression (and perhaps something more than a simple impression) of not being understood even by our own families, by our brothers, nieces and nephews. They do respect us, but they see us as some ultra-terrestrial beings, outside the world, overcome and retarded in things that they see no longer having sense, before today’s new things.

Therefore, this matter does not concern only the civil world, the world of social, political and economic structures, but also the world of common people, who might have saved some Christian tradition, but probably have lost its deepest soul, for which they can no longer look into the future, rather they are afraid of it. Now, when we are afraid of the future, we refuse definitive commitments, both in matrimony and religious life.

Before this situation, the Church in Italy has called all of us to reflect on the need of re-assuming once again the witnessing dimension of Christian life, both privately and publicly. "The world changes, but the Gospel is always the same". This is the answer, almost shouted with the sweet inflection of his voice, by Benedict XVI, in his homily at the Bentegodi stadium of Verona. The Christian identity is strictly bound to the mandate of Jesus, "Go all over the world … you are to bear witnesses to this".

The Biblical Text that accompanied the Congress was the First letter of Peter, which speaks of Christians as of strangers and pilgrims (1 Peter, 2, 11) who must narrate the wonders of the Lord in a world that does not know and does not accept him. Peter describes very well the situation of Christians also in our world. Generated by God to a new life in Christ, they receive the mandate of going like living stones to build the spiritual edifice in which both God and man can live at the same time. l

Being aware that this world keeps on changing very fast, and reflecting on how to react, the Church does not give in to discouragement. She goes back to the very centre of her faith and mission in the world, "to communicate the Gospel of the Risen Crucified, even when this demands a testimony passing through the martyrdom of refusal and indifference.

What is the modality required by such an enterprise, which John Paul II called new evangelisation? They have answered: As it has always recurred in the Church, we need witnesses able to narrate the hope, which the resurrection of Christ introduced in the World with his own life-style. Witnesses that become contagious because of their ability to attract men of our time. We need narrators of hope, persons who build up their own personal history derived from the Resurrection of Christ. Persons show with their life not only the reasonableness of the resurrection, but also the possibility of building on it a good and beautiful life already in this world. This can happen by living within (not outside) the different fields that life proposes to us to inhabit: affective life, work and rejoicing, human fragility, transmission of faith and culture, citizenship. These are the five fields in them and on which the common research developed of how to be in the world as narrators of the hope generated by the Risen Jesus, calling all the Christian vocations to a symbolic action.

In a changing world, we need to go back to what is essential

"The expression "To go back to the essential reality" resounded more than once in the Congress. The essential reality is the Christian newness we should never lose. The difficult times are those in which we need to root ourselves in the essential substance, by deepening our roots in it.

The truth on which hope is based is the Risen Jesus. It is a living hope because it is bound with the living person of the Risen Lord that is projected beyond the present until it embraces the eschatological tract of our life. "If our hope in Christ has been for this life only, we are of all people the most pitiable" (1 Co. 15, 17-19). In his homily during the Congress, the Pope reminded us of how "the change that took place in the resurrection of Christ (true and historical) does not concern him alone, but it concerns us all, the whole human family, history and the whole universe. Communicated to the believer, through faith and Baptism, it transforms him and through him it transforms the Church and the world. The resurrection has inaugurated a new dimension of life and reality, from which a new world emerges, which penetrates our world deeply, transforms and attracts it to itself" (Benedict XVI). With the immersion into the resurrection, operated by faith and Baptism, the essential identity of the Christian has changed. The Christian goes on living only in this transformation up to the point of saying with St. Paul, "It is no longer I, but Christ living in me" (Gal 2, 20). ""I, but no longer I": this is the formula of the Christian existence founded on Baptism, the formula of the resurrection within the time, the formula of the Christian "newness" called to transform the world".

Our communities must return to what is essential in our faith: the Easter love of Jesus that transforms them and from where the possibility of new relations flows. To act by oneself does not nurture hope, neither in us nor in those for whom we act. The communities we live in, today, need more than ever to recollect and to recognise themselves in the Easter love of Christ, from which they were born and in which they can evermore newly vivify themselves. "With our heart in him, we re-generate our will of loving this world, with our eyes fixed on him, to see life as he sees it. By living as he lives, we start our journey every day again, being made to stand up again by the mercy that loves without our merit, thus we spread the hope that is born from being loved and that in loving gives hope" (Fr. Bignardi).

The Church is aware that she cannot offer any technical answer to the multiple problems that afflict the world. She sides its fatigues, offers it a sense horizon of life, opens spaces on the mystery of God’s action in the world through Jesus Christ. She does not allow herself to be enticed by the many insoluble things, by the many apparently unanswered questions.

By pouring his light on the eschatological tract of our human life, the resurrection of Jesus does not estranger the Christian from the ordinary fatigue of building a righter humanity, of qualitatively different relations, but opens to the hope of a fulfilment that goes beyond the human present and the future realisations. Just because of this, she restores us to our freedom of action in the world, without becoming slaves of momentary fashions or of success at any cost.

The resurrection of Christ restores human freedom to its true space, that of committing our life definitively for long breath projects and high goals, even for those we cannot possibly contemplate in their full realisation, but need to be started so that the world and the coming generations may enjoy them. The religious consecration itself finds here the source and fruitfulness of its offering. What does all this mean for us consecrated beings? The Pope has authoritatively outlined the way for all of us. "Our vocation and our task as Christians consist in co-operating to bring to fulfilment what te Holy Spirit began in us with Baptism. We welcome the call to become new women and new men, to be true witnesses to the Risen Lord, and therefore bearers of joy and Christian hope to the world, concretely, to the Christian community we belong to" (Benedict XVI).

The activism of charity works, undoubtedly moved by good intentions and passion for man, which moves us as believers in one incarnated God, does not suffice to heal adequately the multiple wounds and the fragility of today’s men and women. It is even less enough to build up the good quality of our relations, the quality of our relation with the Risen Jesus and with the brothers, with whom we share our consecrated life. The poor quality of relations in our communities, when they are too human, does not make religious life attractive at all, rather it makes it unable of communicating the joy it bears. The exercise of charity works does not suffice, though very much appreciated in the world. If our communities do not express a good quality of communitarian relations, we cannot narrate any hope and the heart does not open to the joy of offering and consecration. If the Church is called to be "house and school of communion", even more should the communities of consecrated be it. A spirituality of communion should be cultivated in them in a very special way". The religious communities, moulded by the love of the risen Christ, should re-rediscover the prophetic value they bear.

The very much discussed anthropological question has surely worrying repercussions concerning the bio-medical and general technique-scientific progress, but it cannot be faced without overcoming individualism (even of the pastoral action), which leads to solitude and in which the value and dignity of the human person decrease.

We can say that a clearer evangelising conscience of the whole Church matured. The expression of "conversion, missionary pastoral/conversion was often repeated, as already expressed in the Orientations, "To communicate the Gospel in a changing world", which accompany this decennium.

Everybody knows the distance of the Christian conscience from the modern life. This demands an increased care for the formation of conscience, not only with an increase of abstract catecheses, but rather by promoting a formation that starts and inserts itself in the different areas of life that the Congress has included in the theme as areas where hope is exercised. This will facilitate the desired synthesis between faith and life.

If, as we believe, the Gospel has still an original message to give today, then three ways emerge, which we must necessarily journey along: 1) to restore evangelisation to its primacy, 2) to recuperate deeply the communitarian aspect of our being Christian, 3) to realise a pastoral conversion.

1) Primacy of evangelisation: We must regenerate the Christian identity constantly by remembering our origin through the Word and the Sacraments. We do not acquire this possession once for good. We must do it in and with the community of believers. The primacy of evangelisation implies an incarnation of the Gospel in the forms of today’s life. The past traditions, which have generated in faith our communities and us, risk of becoming obscure. They risk of not being any more capable of communicating the Gospel, unless they are read again in the light of the Word and re-moulded on it, so that the pure water flowing from it may go on flowing back on us and on our contemporary men and women.

2) The communitarian aspect of our being Christian: The Vatican Council has placed once again the ecclesiology of communion at the centre. We have still to recuperate two elements, if we want the Church to witness to Jesus in the world: we must not forget that the Gospel can be welcomed and lived only within a believing community: living the ecclesial belonging in such a way, as it may become already a narration of the Gospel. Under some aspects, the witness to the Risen Jesus comes before the community, followed by the individual who lives in that community, which witnesses to the fruitfulness of the Gospel. We cannot help being a community of the Gospel, in which there is already a non-eliminable missionary dimension. .

3) To realise a pastoral conversion: this demands simultaneously the three dimensions, spiritual, pastoral and cultural. It is the matter of taking the Gospel within the concrete daily life, where today’s men and women live. It means to inhabit evangelically the fields of life, going towards today’s men and women, just where they live, possibly going out of the small areas of our restricted parish communities, so that we may inhabit spiritually today’s social and cultural context. This pastoral conversion in its turn demands a "missionary conversion". "Mission and communion are two terms of the same encounter" with the Risen Christ (outline for the Congress, No. 4). There is an "intimate and indivisible bond between communion and mission, between mission and communion. They are absolutely inseparable: Simul stant vel cadunt" (Tettamanzi).

In the Congress, they often underlined that the Church can be truly missionary only trough the symphony of the many Christian vocations. It is not so much the matter of asking ourselves what the role of the laity in the church is, as to actuate modalities through which all the vocations and ministries can be living stones for the building of the spiritual edifice as living sign of Jesus in the world. It is useless to get dispersed in a feverish search of how to distribute the tasks, or in a sterile re-matching of the lay roles in the Church. We cannot face the theme of the role of the laity in the key of "less consecrated, therefore less space for the laity", but on the recuperation of the Church’s reality as a symphony of different vocations, all them rooted in Baptism, which together witness to the Risen Lord in different fields and modalities. All the vocations are necessary and all of them, though in different ways, bear witness to the Christian newness.

The symphony of vocations concerns the quality of our Christian testimony, capable of crossing the practical forms of today’s life of men, women, families, boys, adolescents, youths, adults and aged with their fragility and potentialities in order to live a life in Christ and fraternity, in him who makes us Church. Let us read again what the contributions of the dioceses have expressed in view of the Congress, asking for a new vocational conscience, "In the symphony of gifts and charismas, of which the Christian community is rich , we can recognise the plural and diversified vocational figures. Every state of life assumes a specific and singular vocational connotation: the consecrated life, the ministerial priesthood, the family, the laity and –in their proper way- the associations and movements of Christian inspiration. It is the matter of discovering the new dimensions of the same vocations, so that every situation of lived life may give a Christian witness and faith may incarnate itself in the places, times and conditions in which it is felt, but they want to silence it or to put it aside" (No. 22).

The specific and fundamental task of the consecrated persons flows from here. "The consecrated persons are strongly questioned: the specific task of the form of life according to the evangelical counsels is the affirmation of God’s primacy, as revealed in Christ Jesus. The consecrated religious bear witness to this, first with the choice of their life. Because of their specific vocation, the religious bear witness to the truth of a God, who offers Himself to the freedom of man, as a source of authentic and renewed life" (n. 22).

During the Congress, they received from several parts the solicitation of improving the network for a more efficacious witness to the Christian newness. This regards the ecclesial aggregations and movements, the parishes and the Christian communities, including the communities of consecrated life. The vocational crisis, which afflicts almost all the institutes of consecrated life, is, probably, a push to recuperate an intrinsic exigency of being all together, as Church, "communities of testimony"

The falling of strength and number, together with many sufferings and purifications, is an occasion not only for the exercise of hope founded on the Risen Christ, but also to live in hope, as Cardinal Tettamanzi reminded in his Prolusion for the Congress. The love that we offer on the life-style of Jesus is already our richness and we consecrated religious experience it. In the Crucified risen Lord, we know that the offered love is never useless, even when it seems that it leads nowhere. Like Jesus who in the Last Supper anticipated and accepted his death on the cross because of love, transforming it in his self-offering that gives us life, frees and saves us, we, too, receive the call to transform our life into our self-offering, accepting for love the conditions of life. God has chosen this way for us. Our constant living in hope the free gift of ourselves, will promote our well-being and that of humanity

As "pilgrims and strangers" (1 Peter: 2, 11), we must have a lucid mind and a free heart to give an original contribution to the building of the city and of today’s world. We treasure up the call to show to the world the transforming power of the "living hope" (1 Peter 1,3) that the Spirit of the Risen Lord offers us for our present life in the world. In a single word, we must prove that, looking at the earth from heaven and at heaven from the earth gives us the right dimension of our personal life. It gives the right dimension of the communities and nations and, at the same time, the freedom of giving up our life in love, so that the world may have life in abundance ( See: John 10, 10).