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Fr.
Antonello Erminio, an appreciated collaborator of "Consacrazione e
Servizio", is the superior provincial of the Missionaries of Saint
Vincent for the Province of Turin. At present he is working at the
Italian edition of the "Opera Omnia" by St. Vincent de Paul, the Saint
of charity. The fourth volume is expected for Christmas. He has written
a biography of Sr. Giuseppina Nicoli, a daughter of Charity who spent
her life in Sardegna bridging two centuries, thus dedicating to her "A
mystic of charity", published by CLV-Rome, 1999. He is a scholar of
modernism in theological key, with a thesis on the thought of Guillaume
Pouget, teacher of Jean Guitton, Jacques Chevalier, Emmanuel Mounier
and other French intellectuals at the beginning of XX century:
"Guillaume Pouget, witness of the theological renewal at the beginning
of XX", Glossa Edition, 1995.
We have
interviewed him with some questions on the Eucharist and Consecrated
Life.
"The Eucharist: Light and
life of the new millennium". This is the theme of the Eucharistic
Congress to be held in Guadalajara, with which the year dedicated to the
Eucharist begins. How can the consecrated life today live the celebrated
and adored Eucharist with an increased commitment and be a testimony of
dialogue, of peace in the new millennium- in a multiethnic and multi-
religious world so very much upset by atrocities?
Life has
taught me that, before reflecting on anything, we are to ask ourselves
about its reality. Certainly to say "The Eucharist: light and life of
the new millennium" is a sacred and holy truth, but it implies a daily
nature of the reality itself, without which words remain empty. It seems
essential to me to start from the simple question, "Is the Eucharist
Jesus, or is it not?" Without a clear-cut answer to this question we
risk to fall into the characteristic aphasia of religious rhetoric, for
which whatever is said sends back to nothing. The consecrated life lives
the experience of Christ present in its own history: and the Eucharist
is the place in which we can find and listen to him again and again,
every day. "I am with you every day till the end of the world". On 17th
October the Pope referred to it, "In the bread and wine turned into the
body and the blood of Christ, there is He, the Risen Lord, who opens our
mind and our heart and reveals himself to the two disciples of Emmaus".
The
Eucharist is, therefore, the reality of a presence. It is his Presence
that can change the world and I, consecrated, am his reflection in
history. To me, the only way we consecrated can assume the Eucharist, as
an agent of change in the world and in ourselves, is that of living
constantly our personal relationship with Him. The relationship
between Presence and presence changes our own self-awareness: it
removes the conscience from its solitude and from its need
of prevailing, because the radical need of relation is filled in by the
experience of communion with Christ. The first consequence of
this approach is that the world gets pacified with itself. It is always
from here that we are supposed to start for the liberation of the world:
from the person. If not, what prevails is the ideology: and ideologies
are always the roots of divisions from which violence derives.
In fact, the world is going to get drowned
into a violence that can be defined as primitive or, in its softer
westernised form, as indifference. In this context, a community of
consecrated persons, or a person who experiences the Presence of Christ
in the daily difficulties, lives with an expanded heart, spreading the
serenity and taste of life. This faith, witnessed by the simplicity of a
serene face, is the typical contribution of the religious prophecy.
It has always been insisted on our duty to be, like
Christ, broken and shared bread, blood shed for the salvation of the
world. Concretely: how to do it and with which criteria?
I repeat
the idea we have already spoken of with an expression of John Paul I
during his very short pontificate. He said, "The drama of the Church
that loves to define herself modern is the tentative of dimming the
wonder of the event of Christ with rules". The Eucharist
itself does not escape this tendency. Christ, present in the Eucharist
and encountered in the body that the Eucharist generates, namely the
Church, is a wonder! The Eucharist is a font of life and not just an
example of life. The Eucharist truly puts me in relation with Christ, it
realises on His behalf, the "remain with me, for cut off from me you can
do nothing" (Jo 15, 5). The insistence on "the duty to be" shifts
the axis of the spirituality from the event to the commitment: thus the
inversion of this delicate hierarchy dissolves the originality of
Christendom and of grace by introducing an old variant, the Pelagic one,
to say it clearer. It is as if, moved by heroic generosity, we were able
to give up our body, to be burned, and this could save the world.
Actually, the event of the Presence comes first and it calls me to feed
myself with the Eucharist, namely to enter an affectionate relation with
Him. Because of love, Jesus gives up himself in the Eucharist as
self-sacrifice. If I enter into a relationship with Him and love him,
the "to donate myself to others" becomes a joy: in such a donation the
received love doubles and multiplies itself in the love of my brothers.
Here is
where the ascetic commitment flows from: this gives sense to
mortification, renunciation, sacrifice, because in these acts I lead my
humanity to personify itself with Christ. It is not the duty of being
that lets me try to give up my life for others. It is from the love
of Jesus, present in me, daily encountered in the Eucharist, that the
spontaneity is born of offering myself as broken bread to the
poorest of my brothers or shed blood in the hardest toil which a
consecrated person can be called to fulfil. We do not sacrify ourselves
if not for the person we love. To love our brothers in Christ means
loving them in the perspective of a love that has previously seduced us:
and this is "other" than the voluntary altruism. Good as it may be, this
carries always the limit of the one who poses it: above all, it has the
tendency to become weaker and to extinguish.
The C.L is expected to be a sign of the
"Future". It is here that the "prophecy" has the reason to be. Eucharist
and Eschatology: what is their relation? Is it here that the discourse
on hope is based?
The
consecrated life is a sign of the future because it anticipates the
relation of friendship with Christ in the present. We consecrated beings
have been given the awareness of an intimacy with the Lord: and this is
already a paradise! Therefore, there is already a future in the
consecrated life. In our existence as consecrated persons, poor and weak
as it may be, yet made luminous by the relation of intimacy with Christ,
we make the future world transparent. It is precisely our humanity that
the Eucharist tends to transform. It transforms it in the sense that it
makes love to be present as something definitive, because the Eucharist
is the sacrificed love of Christ for man: a love which no other can be
greater of. Actually, the Eucharist shows us that the dynamics of love
is the infinity, the eternity. This love heals our little love that
clashes continually with our own limits and with our sin.
A glance
of the truth makes us to discover this limit most painfully. If the
future is the love of relations in Paradise, unluckily it is still
painfully far. The consecrated life tends to shorten this distance. It
tends to anticipate it in its own humanity: Slowly, slowly transformed
in the way of the Eucharist and enabled to love with the infinite
tenderness of the one who feels loved gratuitously, the consecrated
beings invent life once again, for themselves and for others. In fact,
hope is just betting there where nothing shows any possibility of
change. Yet the consecrated person lives it and makes it visible in its
positive, simple, humble, authentic humanity. This, of course, in an
inceptive way, since the splendour of the future remains hidden, though
contained in the contradiction of a cross. It is the way Christ has
chosen for himself and for us: the way of showing that, in the silence
of Holy Saturday, the crucified love germinates a new life.
In the Instrumentum laboris of the world congress on
consecrated life, we read, "The Eucharist, sign of fraternity and
communion". Wouldn't this sound as a stereotyped expression no longer
capable of being incisive in the concrete life?
I have
already exposed my idea about the stereotyped expressions. Considering
seriously the theme of fraternity that flows from the Eucharist, I
answer in the affirmative. Yes, the Eucharist is a sign of fraternity
and of communion, but in its strong meaning of causative sign.
The Eucharist really builds the communion; it is the cause of fraternity
in the classical sense of the term. The Eucharistic life puts the
consecrated person in a condition for which any violation of charity
turns the whole life into a state of interior contradiction, thwarting
it inwardly. To me, it is not possible to celebrate the Eucharist and to
remain insensitive to a life of fraternity: if this happens it is
because the awareness of the Eucharistic encounter is effaced. This is
possible, but I am not scandalised. Yet this type of dynamics cannot be
suppressed from incoherence. I understood this through a personal
experience several years ago: when as a little boy, I couldn't overcome
a dislike against one of my companions. My spiritual father said to me,
"See if tomorrow he also goes to communion like you". I observed him and
when my spiritual father met me, he wanted to know the result of my
observation. "Yes, Father, he has gone to take the Communion". Then,
looking at me in the eyes, my spiritual father said to me, "How can you,
then, hate that Jesus who dwells in you and in him?". The living
awareness of faith relation with the Eucharist generates fraternity,
which overcomes all the dividing forces in us. But we need to keep our
faith awake continuously.
The Eucharist and evangelisation. From the Eucharist to
the mission. Could you, please, clarify some concepts?
If the
Eucharist is Jesus Christ present in history, it follows that it is
itself an evangelisation. In fact, evangelisation means: making the
salvation presence of Christ visible to the eyes of the world. It means
to allow the persons who meet the faithful - among whom first of all
the consecrated ones - to be taken to the heart of a relation experience
with Christ through the community fraternal relationships. This is a
concept repeated in simple words to the youth by Card. Re , in
Gualajara, on the conclusion of the 48th international
Eucharistic Congress. "It is not enough to be friends of Jesus: you must
be such friends as are committed to seek and to lead to him other
friends". First, the missionary dimension safeguards the lowering of the
Eucharist to a pious intimacy. To enter the logic of the Eucharist is to
enter the dynamics of love, which is expansive by its very nature. Then
it urges the man, who meets the Lord in an experience of faith, not to
keep the experienced good only for himself, but to communicate it to
others. On the other side, the Eucharist safeguards the mission from
the idea that evangelisation consists in just explaining a doctrine We
need to overcome the cultural filter of the rationalistic illuminism,
whose contagion infects more or less all of us, namely that to teach
right ideas is enough to make persons good. Spiritual experience and
charity can propagate Christianity.
The
Eucharist protects us from the illusion of stating the equality between
a spiritual conviction and an ideology. To enlighten this thought, I
want to quote an expression of Card. Ratzinger: "The conversion of the
old world to Christianity was not the result of a planned activity, but
the fruit of the profession of faith made visible by the Christians and
the Christian community. The real invitation from experience to
experience and nothing else was, humanly speaking, the missionary
strength of the old Church. The community life of the Church was an
invitation to share the life, which disclosed the truth flowing from it.
The new
evangelisation is not going to be realised with cunning thoughts of
theories: the catastrophic failure of modern catechism is even too much
evident. Only the entwining between a self-consequent truth and the
guarantee in the life of the said truth can allow the evidence of faith
to shine forth, as fondly expected by the human heart. This is the only
door through which the Holy Spirit enters the world" (J. Ratzinger,
Guardare Cristo, Jaca Book, p-31).
The Eucharist and Mary. Jesus is present in the Eucharist
because He was born from Mary. The womb of Mary was the first
tabernacle. What does this mean for us today?
In considering the figure of Mary, I would
not like the words of the question to re-echo some form of devotion,
important as any devotion may be. Mary is at the centre of our journey
of faith. She is the one "in whose womb love was enkindled again"
(Dante), and continues to generate Jesus in the conscience of the
faithful. She keeps on putting before our eyes and within our hearts the
relation with Christ as a founding relation of our consecrated life.
The reference to Mary is a mediation of
tenderness, typically feminine, to dissolve the too voluntary features
of our culture, helping us to understand that life is not only what we
do or we obtain. Life develops in the tenderness of a glance of truth on
us and on the world. Mary looks at the Son who is given to her, follows
Him in the mystery of her freedom throughout her existence, remaining
faithful in that glance even when everything is dark. Thus Mary
continues to point at the way of assimilating ourselves to her Son: to
look at Him, to follow Him, to stay with Him. In other words, she
introduces us to the Christian experience I have spoken of above, which
prevents us from treating Christ in the rationalist and willing sense of
the term.
She
points at Christ who offers himself in the Eucharist, through the
experience of the Holy Spirit. She accompanies us tenderly and motherly
to the experience of Christ: she supports us and chases discouragement
away. In this sense she is a motherly womb, which warms our spiritual
sensitivity, taking it away from the dullness of the rationalistic forms
of faith. In other words, her company, as a woman of faith, does not
allow us to stay before the Eucharist, namely before Christ, with the
insensitivity of the one who wants to put everything under control,
measurement and contour. She makes life simple: she introduces us to
feel that we are children, because she opens the door of her house for
us. She enriches our relationship with Christ with a family dimension.
Through the mediation of Mary we make the experience of belonging to the
family of Jesus.
After
all, according to the Gospel of John that makes all its personages
universal, this is precisely the peculiarity of Mary: to be not only the
mother of Jesus, but also the mother of all the believers. Without this
familiarity offered to our consecrated life by Mary, saying it openly:
without her feminine welcoming gestures, the friendship with Jesus would
remain deprived of every sensitivity: the sensitivity which He himself,
on the cross, wanted in every believer when He said to John: Here is
your mother. In the relationship with Jesus, the presence of Mary makes
us feel at home: This is a very important function because it transforms
our consecration into a welcoming abode for our brothers.
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