Not
a few are 50 years today, because the acceleration of the cultural and
anthropological disarrange all. Much more then if it transitions from
forms and lifestyles that 50 years ago were already late (and a lot!)
and then the distance is lengthened by a lot. In fact, right this is in
the life of the Church and even more so in the religious life.
The Council in intention and in the prophetic and wisdom
thrust of John XXIII had set as a task and purpose of creating a
trusting dialogue in an Institution that had been for a long time
suspicious and resistant to modernity, entering new air in situations
and styles that felt the resistance was the right and better thing. It
is only from this perspective (backlit) thought that could be the
fertility and quality of life as "religious", often confusing obsolete
traditions with the substance, lazy habits and out the culture with
essential sacred.
The light of dawn
In fact, according to the expert judgment of John XXIII,
the Council could not be just a sunrise, a beginning of a very long
journey, without being able to predict stages and crises, stopping and
braking, escapes and utopias. So in fact it was: a first dawn, the first
appearance of a new sun, but also of truth, that only decades to come
they would understand what is required and where it was conducted.
He was also the case for the Council of Trent, which gave
effect only through three or four centuries, until the close of Vatican
II. And as far as culture and experiences, are now rapidly evolving, and
then the changes will not take place with the typical slow and ever
"Tridentine", but it remains true that the momentum needs to reconcile
long seasons of "autumn rains and rains Spring "(Hos 6:3) repeated,
insistent.
Perhaps this cognitive dissonance between the culture of
effectiveness, all at once -in which we move and live- and the culture
of grace and salvation, that despite the modernity still moves with
time-consuming and slow doses, prevented us from understand and
appreciate, and continue to trust in the momentum balance. The process
of decomposition and reassembly, breaking the intergenerational
transmission and reconstruction of the new model, driven by the Council,
has not been exhausted, in fact we're not even half-way. Too many
outbreaks of resistance and revenge, too nostalgic about the past does
not die, too afraid of "where are we going?" are ruining the road and
undermining confidence.
For this we must take up the torch of boldness and
confidence that the Council fathers have entrusted to us: to put on the
lampstand and it gives light to the whole house (cf Mt 5:15). Many seem
to build bridges to go back under the proper concern of a correct
hermeneutic of renewal in continuity and fertility of communion. The
bridges are burnt, continuity does not mean immobility and nostalgia
that sanctify a dusty past.
For many, what was there before was clear and valid in
every way. But, to be honest and truthful, we know that many things
before, and now sacred done and now remembered at face value, they were
actually pettiness and soulless formalism. Even the Jews in the desert,
water proof was lacking and food was scarce, raved saying that Egypt was
better, because they were eating and their belly was filled with: best
full belly even though slaves and oppressed, and they cry it to heaven
with fury! (Cf. Ex 16:3).
Finding the Council’s breath
Despite all the troubles and resistances, the breath of
the Council was a great, immense grace of wisdom and liberation. It
always repeats Pope Benedict XVI, we must believe and assert ourselves
too. But it is also a breath that requires us availability to be leaders
both of its reception and its operational effectiveness.
We must devote ourselves to search for a new holiness:
the Council has invited everyone to ask himself this aim, lay and
consecrated men and women. Over time, this ideal open to all looks
faded, it has become a chimera: who now teaches this truth and offers so
that meet convinced reactions? Many religious people, and not just
ordinary Christians, have as an ideal perfect a "good life" where do not
miss the happiness and well-being, comfort, warranty on everything.
Despite that continually are proposed "ideal" figures of saints -through
beatifications and canonizations- this passion for a "high standard of
Christian life" (John Paul II) did not take root a lot. Perhaps because
a good portion of those who come to the title of "blessed" or "holy"
offer a model of existence and religious values embodied in patterns
and styles that clash with our culture and sometimes even our religious
sensibilities. How many new Blesseds and Saints, for example, have
placed at the center of their spirituality the Word of God,
so you can truly say that in them the primacy of holiness and prayer
life was fed by an "intense listening to the Word of God," as John Paul
II wrote? (Cf Novo Millennio Ineunte 39). How many of them, to take
another example, have assumed the risk of prophecy and of solidarity in
the history of injustice and have worked with creativity and boldness,
and not rather have spent much of their time and their anxieties to
inner miniature, away from the dramas of history and the anguishes of
the poor in agony?
If the liturgy is the “culmen et fons” "source and
summit" of Christian life and not just celebratory system run by
clerics, many of the new saints and blessed reflect this vital focus in
their spiritual experience and also in their lived prayer? Did not they
continue to consider the liturgy a mine of merit for oneself and for
others, a sacred ritual to be managed with care, without derogating from
a thousand rubric that made it incomprehensible?
Just a few examples, to say that the Council’s impulse in
the area of sanctity, of liturgy, of the Word -and we could continue
with many other areas of primary importance- is likely to be
anesthetized (if not contradicted and become sterile) by these
ecclesiastical transactions. While it is recognized, and rightly so, the
holiness lived in centuries past, we risk creating a dangerous
dystonia/highly strung: if these are exemplary and admirable believers
who are with us, then certain emphases present, they have not lived, but
often also escaped, make uncertain and insecure our present, because
their priorities -and then the heroism that adorns them- there were
somewhere else.
A genuine and new breath
One of the innovations intrinsic to the Council’s
inspiration was the distinction between representation and
functionality. While the previous Councils had worked hard to impose
"reforms" of discipline, to remedy ecclesiastical trouble and
"scandals", the Vatican chose to move towards an emphasis on the reasons
for Christian living. All documents in fact are not intended to reaffirm
disciplines and prohibitions, but to give reasons and voice to the great
values of the faith. And they did it without trivializing it all with
wholesale proposals. They wanted that the Christians were capable of
real depth, not purely ritual or ecclesiastical, and at the same time
bearers of meaning in a society that threatened to put in the center the
myth of efficiency and production purposes as self-certified.
The major criteria for "appropriate renewal" of religious
life proposed by the Council demanded precisely that return to recognize
the essential roots -the Christ of the Gospel, the charisma of the
Spirit, the function / passion in the Church- but also to take seriously
the story where you live, not because of clever camouflage, but to
ferment with the radical values and "friendly" and not aggressive
presence. And on these two perspectives we played all in these years,
but also with the risk of skidding.
The search for a genuine interpretation of own original
identity and of the charismatic intentions of the early, sometimes led
to fundamentalist skidding, with the myth of a "primitive" identity to
be preserved, despite the passage of time and changes of cultures. Or on
the other hand, the paroxysmal need to feel useful and efficient brought
the proper concern of the mission to a neurotic activism, however, to an
inventive, without verification of the relationship with the normative
identity.
Prophets of evangelical hope in a world that is sometimes
sick, but also full of many new resources –to whom God is no stranger
certainly- we have become incapable of convincing form, for example, to
the fraternal life in common, on which the Council had offered a
Copernican revolution (cf Perfectae Caritatis, 15), unable to live in
the desert with its risks and also its purification and essentiality’s
function, although, as we all know, from where God wants us to be reborn
in fidelity (cf Hos 2). Yet we cling to a pagan inactivity, to existing
structures, for too much afraid.
We should be researchers and witnesses of vital
evangelical projects, just instinctively known and that only in the hope
will take shape and texture; men and women of radical faith, but also of
genuine and not hypocritical warmth, of creative spirit and explorers of
trails barely visible, avoiding drown the spirit and charisma in
sacralized structures and in the fear of leaving. How much anguish in
the last decade for the erosion of our presence and locations, and the
less authentic impulse in which to live the real purpose that justifies
us: "As the living memory of the way of life and work of Jesus" (VC 22).
Yet one of the characteristics of the counciliar renewal
for Consecrated Life was just the radical return to Jesus and to follow
Him, as presented in the Gospels (PC 2a). Returning to Christ, so not
only devoted but also theologically solid and biblically genuine, can
guarantee the authenticity and quality for our future. This demands put
at the center the Word, which the Council had reported as central (cf PC
5, DV 21.25) and that in the last decade has become a leitmotif of the
teaching of the Church towards us. This is not a listening that only
serves to decorate our inner little temples, but to become prophetic
heralds and bold witnesses of the intentions of God in history and His
effective action for salvation (cf VC 84-85). Only like this can we can
be the "masters" of the wisdom of the heart and not just social workers.
Not to rest
We can apply to ourselves the words of the indignados of
the Plaza del Sol in Madrid: "Since you don’t leave us dream, we don’t
leave you sleep." A similar idea long before Isaiah said: "Do not rest,
not even grant rest to the Lord" (Is 62.6 s). Troubled weavers of new
life we have to be: where is highlighting the centrality of Christ and
His Word, the genuine warmth of fraternal relations and transparency in
relationships, sincere passion for real people, especially for the most
vulnerable and marginalized, wisdom of a simplicity that is not
associated with the waste and irresponsible consumerism, the prophetic
insight on future scenarios that lead to genuine happiness and not to
false mirages of well-being empty of soul, the proof of the presence of
the living God is not pure frame reference, but the daily practice of
listening and discernment.
And to continue, we must learn to combine the mystique of the lonely
night with the momentous nights of generations and nations; to share
utopias and rebellions not to the taste of the desecration, but with
confidence in a world less unjust and more reconciled; holding hands and
turn our gaze to where it is most atrocious exclusion, darker the night,
more fragile the life, more humiliated the dignity. These are genuine
veins of the Council’s impulse, to the rhythm of the Spirit: you do not
play hide and seek with him, not to shirk to his hot disputes, to his
appeals shaking all over, as at Pentecost.
It's up to us the religious show that the Spirit had not been distracted
at the time, and indeed had used bold prophets and obedient theologians,
which had overthrown old securities and made grow unexpected news. And
we want to obey the Spirit and give vital shape to his original
"motions", without sterilizing them with our sloth. Not even we want to
block his news with our fears and anxieties, with our needs for
certainty clear and distinct. Without any certainty our founders and
foundresses followed the Spirit, with no certainty and risk we also with
them are following the Lord on the streets of men and women, raising
again the prophetic breath of the Council. It is a deadly challenge
that, we can not neglect, otherwise our safe failure.
Bruno Secondin o.carm
Pontificia Università Gregoriana
Borgo
Sant’Angelo,15 - 00193 Roma
