The cycle of modernity, which has pointed first at science and then at politics to the end of realising a rational and perfect society, reached its epilogue in the 60s. At that time work was the essential element for self-realisation. Slowly, slowly, during the 70s great values, such as work, progress and reason lost the interest of the youths and were substituted by hedonism, cult of the body, sexual attention. The gliding from modern values has been more or less slow, but relentless: today the important words are no longer progress but present; no longer work but pleasure; no longer reason but emotion.  

With the post-modern epoch, epoch of the utmost technologicalisation and invading secularisation, we bring to record the affirmation of the radical man. Man is seen as good and fully autonomous: every ethical heteronomy is understood as an attack to the sovereignty of the absolute subject, Stimer wrote, “I oppose we are all perfect to the Christian sentence we are all sinners”. This is where permissivism flows from: our instincts are good, therefore, they are not to be repressed or ruled, but freed. Authentic freedom consists in     the full satisfaction of needs, desires and passions. We are not bound to any duty towards others; only rights exist and they make right to coincide with desire, “Every desire is a right”. They affirm a kind of supreme freedom of independence, freedom from poverty, from misery and ignorance, up to freedom from duty and responsibility.

The emblematic figure of reference for our exasperatedly individualist culture is Narcissus, the mythological hero, pathologically fallen in love with himself who, it is said, one day found his death while, bending himself on the frozen surface of a water mirror, overbalanced himself to embrace his own image, thus falling and being miserably washed away by the gelid current of the lake. If we find correct the etymology of “narcosis-narcotic” as deriving from the narcissus –the azure lily-flower, which according to Sophocles (Oedipus, Colono) was entwined in the necklaces of Demeter and Persephone, then we have the narcissus-narcotic love for one’s own image drugs and kills.

The three challenges of Narcissus

What about the Christians? In our Western world, where often the traces of God seem to have disappeared, the testimony of a “beautiful, good, blessed” life on behalf of Christians today seems to be provoked by three main challenges: a possessive and hungry materialism, a shamelessly hedonistic culture, a conception of freedom disengaged from the truth. there have always been these three challenges, but today they are particularly acute, because they have become the current fashion and custom ever more diffused and pervasive. 

The challenge of materialism

The challenge of materialism and economic reality ever more impudently attacks the fundamental value of social justice and equality among all citizens. Today, we cannot help opposing a certain exasperated utilitarism imposed by the society of the wellbeing that looks more at profits than at the occupation, while it seems to be less worried for the future. Many surveyors think that this generation is wasting the savings of the previous generations and is squandering tomorrow’s resources, thus throwing the costs of the present well-being society on to the future generations

With this regard, J about the consecrated life, John Paul II stated something that, with the due precisions and proportions, can be said first of all of Christian life in general.  “The consecrated Life strongly contests the mammon idolatry, by proposing itself as a prophetic appeal to the society that, in many parts of the wellbeing world, risks losing the sense of measure and the very meaning of things. This is why today, more than ever, its recall is paid attention also among those who, being aware of the limitedness of the planet’s resources, invoke respect and safeguard of creation through a diminution of consumes, sobriety, imposition of a dutiful control on one’s own desires”. (VC 90).

The hedonistic culture

The hedonistic culture unbinds affectivity and sexuality from every objective moral norm and, indulging to a sort of idolatry of the instinct, exalts total freedom of the single individual, reducing to game and consume all that is linked with the sexual sphere. After the sexual revolution of the 60s, the delicate questions concerning this field started taking a direction, in the mentality of people, totally different from the orientation of the Church and Christian tradition. It seems that the sense of sin has weakened in this sector, almost dragged away by the inexorable erosion of values produced by the spreading secularism and hedonism.   

The culture of pleasure, of desire and, often, of caprice, is dangerous: it celebrates triumphs and sows disasters. How to ignore the sea of suffering produced by desegregated families, by abandoned spouses, by contested children, by people trampled upon, by the ugly production of pornography, by the shame of infantile prostitution, by a society “without heart” (See: Rom 1, 31), for the exaltation of free pleasure, insensitive of the sufferings inflicted to others?

After the horrible cases of violence, which some years ago upset the Belgium (the scandal of Marcinelle, 1995), Cardinal Danneels intervened with a very severe reflection, “No wonder to see that the mafia of the sex, the eagerness for money and the instinct of power are connected. Many people with the taste of power finish by participating in “businesses”. A true idolatry of the body is at the basis of this chaos: the body dominates the soul, and money dominates the body

A few months before his departure from this world, Giuseppe Dossetti wrote, “The sexual act tends ever more to get dissociated from every rule, in the exclusive search for a pleasure,  which becomes more and more autonomous and sophisticated, up to the most perverse forms, this has always happened in periods of decadence  of people and of serious loss of cultures. Moreover, this obsession of sexual pleasure, causes a constant stimulation of the natural instinct and at the same time weakens it in its natural potentialities. It lead also to the blunting of the intelligence superior faculties, namely creativity, natural contemplation, discernment, because of inability to the duration of attention and confrontation, therefore, of the critical capacity”.  

Freedom unfastened from the truth

The third challenge is the conception of a freedom unfastened from the truth and from solidarity. The modern epoch opened with the declaration of “lights” which located freedom in the first place of the trinomial French revolution. Liberty was understood as deliverance from every religious bond. Freedom from religion to obtain freedom of reason, The only true authority is the one constituted in the name of reason, to which all men –including the king- should be subjected. In fact, “the grass I want” does not grow even in the garden of the king.

This epoch now is considered to be at its waning: from some decenniums we have entered the post-modern epoch, a passage that Zygmunt Bauman expresses with the couple “solid-liquid”. After all modernity could be considered still “solid”, being it characterised by certainty, rigidity and repetitiveness. It was an orderly modernity, built within shut up worlds of the national society. It was the matter of solid, strong, institutionalised worlds in which individual identities were marked and stable, thanks to the social role they played, where a pervasive order of the law was in force. Globalisation has inaugurated a “liquid” condition: we feel more uncertain, insecure and unstable. Personal life, made up of breakage and changes, has lost its structures and, though rarely it generates pleasure and a sense of omnipotence, generally it arouse nostalgia and anguish. Often we lose the very sense of what we are doing and the idea of not being able to keep the individual and collective life under control.

They speak of the “narcissism culture” with its inviting constellation of rights: we have the right to choose the behaviours and conceptions of life: This sacred-holy right of choice is defended also by juridical systems, which do no longer intend to sacrifice the persons to exigencies of presuming non discussable ordinances.  

In the post-modernity (or late modernity) we see the prevailing affirmation of a freedom as self determination -self realisation –self gratification; a radical freedom aiming at breaking the given external impositions, at deciding in solitude,  going as unique limit against the freedom of others: nobody determines the others and each man determines himself. Being free in oneself, nobody partakes in the freedom of others. Freedom as power which presupposes the image of a society made up with isolated individuals who meet in the exercise of functions. It is a society of the individual, not of persons who perceive themselves as members of a bigger family.

The answers of consecrated life
The life of poverty

In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul does not speak of poverty explicitly, as he had done in 2 Corinthians 8, 9. In the letter to the Romans, the accent falls on unity: the exhortation is repeated before and after the recommendation of charity,  to say that humility constitutes and nurtures charity: “Through the grace that I have been given, I say this to everyone of you: never pride yourselves on being better than you really are, but think of yourselves dispassionately, recognising that God has given to each one his measure of faith, (…) Give the same considerations to all others alike; pay no regard to social standing, but meet humble people to their own terms”  (Rom 12,3.16).

The term used by Paul in v.3 can be understood as “sobriety-humility”: evangelical poverty is born from humility and is expressed in society. The disciple of Christ is not as poor as Diogenes was: very poor, but also very proud. The poor according to the Gospel is the man who, being aware of his own misery, feels enwrapped by the mercy of his Lord.  This is enough for him. Therefore, material poverty is not the disdainful and angry reaction, imbued of hatred, against the bourgeois class; it is not dictated by the duty of safeguarding the resources of creation, legitimate and dutiful as it may be. The poverty of the Christian is “Christian” when it is inspired by the desire of being configured with Christ, who “although he was rich, he became poor for our sake” (2 Corinthians; 8,9).

The evangelical poverty is substantially wanted by faith. It is faith in the total, singular and unconditional love of the Lord for me that gives me the courage of detachment; detachment, then, leads to freedom and freedom generates joy. In other words: only faith in the love of the Lord sets me free from the seduction of idols; it snatches me from the blindness of my illusions. Money, pleasure and success shine like mirages that dazzle, but then they inevitably delude us: they promise life, yet procure death. The Lord, instead, asks me to die to my false and selfish I, so that I may taste the true life, a full, authentic and luminous life. If the disciple knows that his Master loves him, his request of leaving behind everything will not seem to be hostile. In fact, the renunciation of little and precarious goods is the condition to receive the Good, the true, great and absolute Good. When the disciple becomes aware of having found his treasure in the love of his Lord –your grace is worthier than life”, the Psalm recites- then he is convinced that the discovery has automatically devalued his mediocre little treasures, which belonged to him for what they really are: false pearls, tarots bits and pieces, stunning but alienating-devastating drugs. Thus, renunciation, though radical, will not be felt as cruel, exorbitant and impossible.   

Only true love –a total and totalitarian love- can quench the thirst for the infinite that burns in the heart; only the love of the Lord pacifies and satisfies. We shall never get bored in the new life!

The life of chastity

Chastity is the answer of the Gospel, reminded by St. Paul. In the parenthetic section of the letter to the Romans, we find the following passage, “The night is nearly over, daylight is on the way; so let us throw off everything that belongs to the darkness, and equip ourselves for the light. Let us live decently as in the light of the day; with no orgies or drunkenness, no promiscuity or licentiousness, an no wrangling of jealousy. Let your armour be the Lord Jesus Christ; stop worrying about how your disordered natural inclinations may be fulfilled”.(Rom 13,12-14).

First of the Christological motivation of Christian chastity is to be re-founded.  It is interesting to note that when the New Testament speaks of purity and impurity, it uses the language of pagan moralists, for instance, of the Stoics who exalted self-dominion only in function of self-control. Therefore of lordship on one’s own instinct. However, to St. Paul, in his catechesis of 1 Corinthians, 6, 12-20, everything flows from the resurrection of Christ, from the sacrament of Baptism, from the eschatological fulfilment of the resurrection of our mortal bodies. “Do you not realise that your bodies are members of Christ’s body (….) that the body is for the Lord and the Lord is for the body? (…) You are not your own property” (Corinthians 6,15.19.13). The motivation in favour of the enkrateia (self- dominion) is reversed before the pagan ethic: the most important thing is not self-dominion, but to hand over this dominion to the Risen Lord, to the end of affirming, with the chastity of heart and body, that “Jesus is the Lord!”.

Thus, the prophecy of the evangelical chastity becomes critical before the hedonistic idolatry; the announcement becomes denunciation. “It is necessary to show that chastity is a social virtue” (Lacordaire).

We need to acknowledge that the presence of Christians in this sector has been particularly weak or fugitive during the past decenniums: Is it the fear of falling again into the puritan moralist ideology? Is it the fear of subjection before the new permissive mentality, or lack of powerful means of social communication? It may be the hesitation of committing oneself to a field in which one is considered to be irreparably overcome or the scarcity of adequate arguments. It is positively urgent to prove that Christian chastity does not demand of loving less, that rather it makes us love more, because the agape does not extinguish the Eros, but keeps it at its quota; because it heals at the very root the unhealthy desire of possessing and using the other.  In a highly erotised and polluted atmosphere, we need to form new singers of the “Song of Songs”,, who may narrate the holy disquietudes and ineffable tenderness of divine Eros. We feel the urgent need of youths capable of flying up high and helping other youths to fly, so that they may “shine like the starts of the sky, keeping the word of life up high”  (See: Philippians:  2,15s).

The way of obedience

The letter to the Romans often speaks of obedience and “freedom”. First of all, we remember Romans 5, 19, “Just as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience are many to be made upright”.

If the obedience of Christ has freed us from sin, we are left with nothing else but to follow the way of obedience to Christ to the end of becoming truly free men. “ You know well that if you undertake to be somebody’s slave and obey him, you are the slave of him whom you obey: you can be the slave either of sin  which leads to death, or of obedience which leads to saving justice. Once you were slave of sin, but thank God you have given whole-hearted obedience to the pattern of teaching to which you were introduced; and so, being freed from serving sin, you took uprightness as your master. (….)  When you were the servants of sin, you felt no obligation to uprightness, and what did you gain by living like that? Experiences of which you are now ashamed, for that sort of behaviour ends in death. Now you are set free from sin and bound to the service of God, your gain will be sanctification and the end will be eternal life. For the wage paid by sin is death; the gift freely given by God is ternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord” (Rom 6, 16-23).

From the perfectly filial heart of Jesus, which finds its nourishment in doing the will of the Father (John: 4, 34) and can say in all truth “I always do what pleases to Him” (John: 8, 29), we draw a great lesson: if there is no salvation without obedience, there is no obedience without love. Father Congar wrote, “Our filial life will be our obedience, our search for conformity, made up of love and faithfulness, to the will of God”. In other words: to the Father who sees in me the image of his only begotten Son and says to me, “You are my son”, there is but the answer of the Son, “You are my Father, I am ready to do your will”. If I know the “One in whom I believe, if I have discovered that God is my Father, then I shall read his will always and only, not like the caprice of a despot, but as the will of a total and irreversible love. If I trust in this love, if I am convinced that God loves me more than I love myself, I believe also that He wants before me and more than I what the best is for me. It is all a question of love.

If, instead I do not seriously believe In the wise providence of God, then I shall always live in fear and will never succeed in believing truly that “God turns everything to the good of those who love Him” (Rom. 8, 29). If I do not truly believe that the love of God is stronger than death to the point of rising from the dead his obedient Son, then I shall never accept to die to my projects and shall try to give life to myself making of me a Lord of myself. By doing so, however, I shall finish by finding myself in a blind path.

Situations of obedience

Let us now speak of three concrete “exercises” of obedience which no Christian man can subtract himself from.

The first obedience to which every man is called is the acceptance of self. Each of us comes to the world  with some gifts and limits. The as much as possible tranquil acceptance, with all the gifts and limits, is an act of obedience and wisdom. To resist and complain with God for being made in a certain manner, is useless. Who do you think you, a human being, are to answer back to God? Can something that was made say to its maker: why did you make me this shape?”(Rom. 9, 20). A youth who is sad because he does not have the health of Mark or the intelligence of Thomas or the fascination of Roberta has still a long way to go, before he can dream to be ready of doing God’s will in difficult situations. The first yes we are called to say to the Father is the yes to oneself. ..

Another “place”, which we cannot forget as a normal place of adhesion to the will of God is the humble and responsible fulfilment of our daily duties. The Saints had a secure intuition of this. St. Philip Neri would say, One who lives an ordinary daily life in obedience is to be esteemed much more than a man who makes great penance of his own free will”. The daily life, with its monotonies and daily unforeseen happenings, the obscure and often heavy daily life, daily life lived in faithfulness and in the availability for the surprises of grace: this is the favourite place of the Lord to make us practise and fulfil his holy will. A Christian who does not obey with joyful adhesion to this ferial will of the Lord, and does not know how to look in the light of faith what is missing in the milieu in which he lives (family, parish, etc.), cannot deceive  himself  of being able to love one day with a mature heart the persons who will be entrusted to him

Finally, there is an open field in which the will of the Lord can be attained with absolute evidence: it is the field of reciprocal charity. This is so very clear as the Gospel sums it up in the first typical commandment of the Master, “This is my commandment that you love one another, as I have loved you” (John: 15, 12).We cannot have doubts on this will of God, and we cannot hide ourselves behind comfortable alibi: If non observances and laziness are seen in the community, if the realisations of the Commandment of Love result always imperfect and distorted, if the conditions for an optimal community are scarce, would this not be a motive to donate ourselves more, thus promoting the growth of charity level? St. John of the Cross would say, “Put love where love is missing and you will find love”. More than once, sooner or later, we shall be asked of a love capable of giving up our life; we shall always be asked of being constructors of communities in which love and charity may reign, but how would this be possible if we do not submit ourselves to  the sometimes hard bur ineludible practice that daily life asks of us with its severe exigencies of overcoming sympathies and antipathies, of breaking the golden chains of our restricted bonds, of not being selective in our friendships and reciprocal relationships?  

Francesco Lambiasi
Bishop of Rimini  
Via IV Novembre, 35 - 47900 Rimini