With these short notes I want to share the ecclesial communion experience, which I lived in the IV National Congress of the Italian Church from October 16 to 20, paying particular attention to the first area, affective life, because of its singular reflex in consecrated virginity.

The reflection was introduced by Prof. Raffaella Iafrate and involves the whole Christian community in the exercise of discernment to witness to hope, namely our Risen Jesus, giving him full citizenship in the world. We speak of exercise to underline that discernment is a way of being, a quality of our being there in history, the concrete way that brings the Gospel to our daily life.

How can men and women bear witness to hope in history? We find the answer in narrating with our life the wonders of God according to the spirit of the Magnificat. Mary, who understands herself, her mission, the entire history, is our guide and teacher in our following of Christ. She is the perfect image of the Church, the reference point of every vocation. In this narration, out of the prophetic experiences of the future, the Italian Church puts the Consecrated Life on the candlestick. This is an appeal to the consecrated persons to let the disruptive strength of Christian hope be transparent in their life, by offering their contribution to the building of God’s people and the evangelisation of the world.

The consecrated Life enters the five areas as prophecy of the future, not in an abstract or theoretical way, but through the consecrated persons. Sure, they have such an anthropological valence as to question every Christian and every ecclesial community (…), to bring to emergence a feeling and a thinking enlightened by the light of the Gospel".

The area of affective life has a particular incidence since it concerns the most elementary and permanent dimension of any person in its interiority and way of relating with the Other, with others and the universe. However, today, it undergoes a powerful conditioning in the direction of a superficial emotionalism, which often has disastrous effects on the truth of relations. Identity and sexual complementarities, the education of sentiments, maternity/paternity, the family and, generally, the affective dimension of social relations (…), the various forms of public representation of affections have a strong need of opening to hope and, therefore, to the richness of relation, of generation building and of bonds among generations.

The area must relate with the other four ones, by giving value to three directives: mission, culture and holiness, according to the approach of an integrated pastoral activity, often spoken of in the congress. It is easy to sense how they question us consecrated women, personally and as community, because, thanks to the gift of virginity, we dedicate our strength and love totally to the Lord and his Kingdom. Some questions of the outline help us to question ourselves, so that our affective way may always be more radically evangelised.

How can we integrate authentically the affections in the unity of rational and moral experience? This first question pushes us to conjugate the affective life, rationality and morality, before a mentality that often emphasises the emotion and hedonism, while marginalising reason, ethical responsibility and the vocational choice. Virginity supposes and deepens this integration, because it changes into loving God with an undivided heart and in shouldering the neighbours in his love. It becomes a fertile soil, in which we can put together reason and sentiment, affection and ethical issue, self-realisation and oblation.

How does the Christian community consider the education of the affective life according to the Spirit? This second question concerns education, because affective life is not automatically good, but needs education and evangelisation. The question provokes our concrete evangelical journey, because we do not miss occasions of formation and self-formation. It calls us to conversion in our daily life, going beyond routine and habit, becoming ever more revelation of the love of Christ

How can we help to formulate a cultural and moral judgement on the current mentality concerning sexual and sentimental life? This third question orients us towards the capacity of discernment for a cultural and moral judgement on the current mentality. It provokes the verification of our being "in" and not "of" the world; to incarnate the Gospel in history and to witness that the love of Christ cuts down nothing of what is genuinely human, but purifies and qualifies it, bringing it to fullness. Consecrated virginity is like a signal system, indicating the theological dimension of our affective life, its fulfilment in charity.

Which helps does the family need in order to keep alive the faithfulness to its vocation. This fourth question challenges us about the helps we must offer to the family so that it may be faithful to its vocation. Today, in a socio-cultural context in which its values risk to disappear, as community and communion, the Church has the task of accompanying the couples and the families. She has to do it not only with her educative action for the celebration of the sacrament of matrimony, but by becoming more and more a space of listening, affection, friendship and solicitude. The consecrated woman collaborates in the fulfilment of this task, reminding with her life that God is the source of love.

The Christian vision of the human person constantly emerged from these questions discussed during the Congress in Verona. The Pope underlined it in his talk, "The Creator of heaven and earth, the unique God who is the source of every being, this unique Logos, this creative reason, knows how to love man personally , indeed he loves him passionately and wants to be loved In return. Therefore, he creates a love story with Israel, his people, and in this event, before the betrayals of the people, his love reveals an inexhaustible faithfulness and mercy. It is a love that forgives boundlessly. This attitude reaches its extreme, unheard and dramatic form in Christ, our Lord".

The Risen Jesus, hope of the world, is the source of our testimony. Image of God according to which we were created. He reveals us the mystery of God and our own mystery, two mysteries that recall each other at the same time. He reveals us the extent of his Love, a mystery of communion of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. He reveals us also to what an extent the human creature is made to receive and to give love, to live the unique commandment of love for God and neighbours. In his person, before his mission, he inaugurates a deep and indelible relation between humanity and the Trinity, not just abstractly, but in the concrete human existence.

In his earthly life, he lived a fully human affective existence. The Trinity effused in him his infinite love through the human heart, which became able of loving "till the end", in limitless mercy. With his choice of consecrated life, he created a new parenthood in faith; he built up the new family of God’s children founded, not on flesh and blood, but on grace, in the fulfilment of the will of the Father. Thus, we can understand every vocation of love within his mystery, within his virginal love, which reaches a total self-offering.

The theological life, the participation in the divine love, does not walk parallel to the human experience, but roots in it and leads it to fulfilment, in virtue of the Incarnation. In fact, Jesus recalls and fulfils the principle of creation, taking back to the origin the human love deviated by the hard heart degenerated because of sin (Gen. 1-3). The controversies of Jesus are an eloquent example: on the indissolubility of matrimony (Mark 10, 1-12), on the celibacy for the Kingdom (Matthew 19, 10-12), on the tribute to Caesar (Mark 12, 13-17), on the resurrection (Mark 12, 18-27). He wants his disciples to nurture an undivided love. This is not just a moral imperative, but the inestimable gift of grace. It teaches us that the fullness of humanity is in the integrity of the heart and life, made possible by his love.

Some follow him along his way of love by sharing his choice of celibate life. Women also share it (Luke 8, 1-2). Thus, the Church has her virgins from its very start. These virgins will have a very rich genealogy along the centuries, a genealogy rich in charism and fruitfulness of evangelical works. The Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus and of the Church, shines among them all as a reference point for every vocation. She is an icon of the church with her virginity, espousal reality and maternity. It is important to proclaim this anthropological message that flows from Jesus, the Risen Crucified, mainly today, in our secularised context, impoverished of transcendent values.

Benedict XVI, as a theologian, has underlined that the turning point of today’s civilisation can give consistency to a pacific conviviality, overcoming our living morally, as if God did not exist, with a life that keeps in view the existence of God. He has invited the atheists to live before God and experience the deriving richness for their own existence in the world. Some of them have welcomed this challenge.

In the mystery of Incarnation, of his earthly events and of his Easter, the Son of God opens horizons whose sense the human existence cannot imagine in all its expressions and in all phases of its development. The mystery of Mary who conceives by the action of the Holy Spirit, the thirty years of Jesus’ hidden life, his pilgrimages for the sake of the Kingdom, the fulfilment of his earthly life with his Easter, constitute the vital context, the fertile humus where our life acquires sense, redemption and salvation.

Through his concrete humanity, glorified by the Resurrection, he clears up our darkness and gives us the new life, thus transforming our earth in new heavens and new earth

When suffering weighs on us like a grit stone and we feel everything absurd, insistent questions arise: What is the value of suffering? Why must the innocent die? Why do they persecute and kill the righteous? Does God really exist? Where is He? The answer is Christ who welcomes and lives suffering, even the unjust and humiliating one. His death on the cross is a place of mercy in which his offered life generates life. Looking at the Crucifix with the eyes renewed by his grace, we can exclaim, Ave Crux spes unica! It is not the cross that saves us, but the cross of Christ. He is mysteriously at the side of him who suffers because of the truth, justice and freedom. His resurrection is the source of this fruitfulness: he rose from death as primary fruit of the new creation, as the first born of brothers called to form the Family of God.

This states the immortality of the soul, but it also proclaims the gift of a new life in which our body is transfigured and glorified. The mystery of the Eucharist as communion of his body and blood is indeed an immense dignity! The creation of man to the image of God in Christ is an ineffable dignity! The Son of God assumed our body to bring salvation to the world!

During the Congress, a delegate stated, "We must not be ashamed to live and proclaim the Christian anthropology; we must give it full citizenship in our contemporary world". This is an invitation to value the richness of the Gospel humanism with its prophetic valences, its newness, its sensational strength, making it explicit at awareness level and translating it into praxis". Another delegate said, "We must announce and witness to the Risen Jesus within the anthropology of the limit; we must introduce the eschatological dimension of hope in our affective life, by proclaiming the hope of heaven in the limits of the earth and by putting the seeds of eternity in this limit".

Before a mentality that exalts the complex of pride and omnipotence and hides ideologically, in the spirit of lying, the sense of being creatures, precarious and humanly frail, the Christians bear witness to hope in the reality of being frail creatures saved by the Lord. In this direction, we have the role of witnessing the eschatological dimension of the affectivity of our oblation love, overcoming the multiple and reductive forms of narcissism, which seduce our daily life, in such a love faithfulness as it arouses from the Cross of Christ.

What is our prophecy to recall the future good into our daily life? To proclaim it is not sufficient. We need to live it, bearing witness to it. As women, we welcome the call to witness it with our femininity. The current mentality often reduces human sexuality to the physic-biological dimension, removing and marginalising the spiritual one, which indicates the vocation to love, the overcoming of individualism and egocentrism. It is to remember that it is not good for man to live alone (Gen. 2, 18), that man must quit isolation as a contradiction to the principle of creation. The human person is created to the image of God, "you", addressed to another "you" in "we". God created him to the image of the Trinity.

John Paul II in his Mulieri dignitatem offers contents and perspectives, which we should re-think and share to promote a new awareness about the male and female anthropology before a mono-sexist culture. Benedict XVI in his encyclical mentions these contents in considering the affective life and its tension towards charity, "God is love; he who is in love dwells in God and God dwells in him" (1 John 4, 16). These words from the first Letter of John expresses the centre of Christian faith with singular clarity: the Christian image of God and the consequent image of man and his journey. Moreover, in this same verse, John offers us, so to say, a synthetic form of Christian existence, "We have known the love of God for us and we have believed it", We have believed in the love of God, this is how the Christian can express the fundamental choices of his life. We do not find an ethical decision at the beginning of our being Christian, nor a great idea, but the encounter with an event, with a Person, who gives a new horizon to life and with it the decisive direction. John expressed this event in his Gospel with the following words, "For this is how God loved the world: He gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life" (3, 16). (Deus caritas est 1),

Affectivity is not a datus fixed once for ever. It is a divine gift offered to the human creature, so that he may manage and bring it to fullness, through good choices, finalised to the growth in love. Affection is not a simple emotive reaction. It is an interior feeling, a spiritual perception asking to be set free and to be led to love or definitive self offering. Being finalised to the fullness of life, it relates with beauty, generates well-being and gives happiness. At the same time it calls back to suffering: there can’t be any human growth without suffering, without acknowledging one’s own being creature and that of others; without accepting one’s own weakness and that of others, without delimiting the omnipotence of our desires, without being aware of conflicts and contradictions.

The affectivity has a peculiar process, which demands a patient waiting, attention, respect, discretion and modesty. It avoids being spectacular and the ostentation of feelings; it does not give to any form of retaliation or manipulation. It implies personal responsibility and promotes it in others. It does not get spontaneously mature by automatisms. It questions freedom, invokes an educative presence made up of loveliness, of love translated into educative dimensions, capable of mediating and transmitting values with a particular sensitivity for times and life situations. It needs interpersonal relation, confrontation with meaningful persons who propose and never impose or give in to morality, persons who change the "you must" into "you can". The affectivity is open to the future, to a history of faithfulness, to the discovery and welcome of life as vocation. This translates into specific forms that, if genuine, take to communion and syntony.

Today we can see also the negative repercussion of our affective dimension: its banal significance in eroticism provokes a growing fear in and of lasting affective relations. Not rarely, those who display security in their individualism hide a considerable relational frailty, a difficulty in weaving meaningful and faithful relations. There are people who take refuge in work and stop narcissistically at the affective maternal bond, or give in to a sense of anguish, which shuts them up into a fatalistic passivity. Fear is an obstacle against the recognition of the other in his being different and in his singular and unique value. The youths are particularly vulnerable in the affective field. They need somebody to accompany them along their journey towards the affective growth to a love of oblation. The church, with the family is the favourable place for the youth to mature in affection, love and charity. However, this does not happen automatically, but according to how much a man allows the Lord to convert him and to create a welcoming space in him. If a young man allows Jesus to evangelise him, he will be able to evangelise others, above all wherever the feelings are wounded because of betrayals, abandonment, bureaucracy of relations, weariness and routine, building up good, constructive and seducing relations

In the Church, mainly the adults should bear witness to a mature way of managing the affections, without trusting one’s own strength, just as if they had already reached the end, but assuming one’s own affective life, managing and orienting it to faithful love according to the Gospel logic, with the help of grace. Along this journey, they build up themselves as balanced and serene personalities, capable of discernment, of listening, of fraternal and loving relations. If they live of love, they become reference points for the new generations. The consecrated persons join this ecclesial journey for a particular reference In the area of affections. In fact, by dedicating themselves with the full strength of their love they prove that every vocation is a welcoming of God’s charity and a response to him in the service to others. They remind the theological source of love, mainly through virginity, that speaks of the virginity of the heart and affections, born from the intimate and fruitful communion with the Lord.

It is a symbol of the symbolic spiritual triad: virginity-spousal state- maternity/paternity, which qualifies the life-choice. Love-charity is always at the basis, the love-charity that the Lord effuses in our hearts so that we may radiate it in the world and favour hope in all. The Eucharist is the centre and source of this love. Don Bosco educated the boys and the youths just during the life-phase in which affections explode and need a re-organisation, indicating it with the example the Communion as source of life, then Confession and a tender devotion to the Mother of God. This indication is valid for not only the boys and the youths, but for every Christian also.

Marcella Farina
Pontifical Faculty Auxilium
Via Cremolino, 141 - 00166 Roma