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We had promised it! We have reached its fulfilment. The
Congress on Religious Life cannot and must not remain a glorious, happy,
well-organised moment in the Church History. The many meaningful points
which have been brought to light, must continue to be light; the
proposals and the suggestions are to be translated into the reality of
the multiple contexts in which the religious live and work. We wouldn't
like to see that within a few years, not many, we are bound to repeat
the question: What about its outcome? What has been its use? According
to the common witness, it has been a strong experience, a gift of the
Spirit to His Church. What do the non-participants think of it, those
who anyhow have followed the event with " their own " thought?
How to incarnate today the "passion for Christ, the
passion for humanity", which has been the leading thread of the Congress
held in Rome last November?
"I
wish to keep as reference point above all the central figure of this
sentence, the person of Christ, who, within the theology, appears
substantially with the two great faces sung by the prologue of John's
Gospel. On one side we have the logos, namely the transcendence,
the divinity, the Absolute, the eternal. On the other side, we have the
sarx, that is the flesh, history, the contingent, the relative,
the weakness and the misery of the human life. In this light, if we keep
the navigation bar of spiritual life pointed at Christ, it is
unavoidable for the Christian to be an uninterrupted witness to Jesus
in and for humanity. Even more so, for those who have dedicated
their existence integrally to the proclamation of the Kingdom. In this
sense, they are supposed to build uninterruptedly their own
spirituality: they are to build their theological type of faith
intensely and very deeply at all levels, and not only at some areas of
the different religious Congregations. On the other hand, each with
one's own charism and based on one's vocation, they must be capable to
be present within the history of humanity. They are to be constantly
attentive to decline the message of God which they have received. This
is what Christ himself did, who, after all we shall never forget, in the
Gospels presents the proclamation of the Kingdom, yes, but also keeps
on reminding us that we are expected to anoint the infirm and to free
the creatures from evil; that we need to go continuously along the
streets of the lepers, of all those who suffer, and thus allow this deep
passion for humanity to spring up.
To you, how is consecrated life perceived by the public
Italian opinion?
"If
we take television, which is the dominant means, as a reference point,
we must say that there have been two profiles which have constantly been
offered. Sometimes in a very banal manner, sometimes more intense or
perhaps more provoking. On one side there is surely a conception of
Consecrated Life as something somehow with an air of mystery, something
transfigured, sometimes perhaps acute. It is evident the tentative of
showing a choice of total consecration, of total interior happiness and
also of total generosity. There has been an exhibition in the Ambrosian
library, which has lasted a few weeks, realised by the photographer
Grazia Alissi. This photographer is known for trying her hands at
personages of the spectacle and of the musical landscape. Alissi has
decided to dedicate herself to the instantaneous art of great intensity
just on the religious experience, above all that of the monastic life,
of all those who have a strong vertical dimension, as dimension of the
consecration.
On one side, therefore, there is a positive
presentation. Let us think of the one that presents the mini-series
recently dedicated to Don Bosco and Don Gnocchi. Surely, sometimes this
positive aspect tastes of rhetoric, of emphasis, almost the little
saint. A kind of golden syrup, which is the non-authentic perception of
spirituality and it is rather superficial. Therefore, I say that we are
not to exalt it straightaway, but that we must develop a critical sense
towards this attention.
On the other side, we have had also banal realisations
through the T.V. or the cinematography products, even real and unjust
acts of accusation, though with some foundation. Let us think, for
instance, of the film "Magdalene" taken in an English college where the
religious formation of the girls was marked by a pharisaic hypocrisy
up to evident excesses. Or, let us think of the last film of Almodovar
"La mala educacion", a film that introduces obscure elements which
display a form of rebellion and an insult against an experience that has
deeply incised in the history of culture and of the Western humanity,
like the religious one.
For this reason I feel to say that before this question
there is a double judgement: on one side we witness a return to the
taste and desire of knowing this world, situated somehow behind a bush,
on the other side there is somebody who enters with both feet and tries
to trample only on paths that deserve to be walked on, but also on
flower-beds.
Can the Television, and in general the mass media of
communication, contribute to the cause of evangelisation?
"Surely,
they must contribute, because this is today's language of communication,
mainly the television, taking for sure that all the other means,
particularly the press, have a constant and decisive function. We are
supposed to compromise on these resources. The first attention to be
paid is that those who use these means, I refer to the work addicted and
not to the consumer, must know the language and the mechanisms. We
cannot go unprepared within instruments, thinking of being
spontaneously led, instinctively destined to this work. We need a
preparation, capable of calibrating our own interventions. I often
receive from priests and religious texts and articles to be published on
weekly or daily papers with which I collaborate: Well, they have not the
least sense of the literary genre of the newspaper, though they read
it, and they imagine that the newspaper may be able to bear twenty
pages of their lucubration. They don't have the exact sense of how to
communicate, though their message is, perhaps, worthy of respect.
The second attention to be paid is that of not falling
into the risk of an excessive presence in the media. The CEI has rightly
emanated a directory to control a certain presence of the religious in
the media of communication, above all those of the image: a presence
which, not seldom, misses the Christian and human style. The desire of
exposing ourselves resembles a drug very much. We need the capacity of
abstaining ourselves, we need to understand that when we go to certain
programmes, the context is necessarily decisive and succeeds in
misleading anyone, even those who think of going to announce the Word.
The context sometimes becomes a boomerang for the person who deludes
himself of being able to send a message. We must learn to renounce to a
programme that needs the presence of a religious to create notice, in
the awareness that one could finish by being crashed and reduced,
perhaps not to a mock presence, but surely without reaching the fixed
purpose.
We, therefore, need preparation and caution in dealing
with the mass media of communication".
Which contribute can the consecrated persons offer to the
actual society?
I think that if we retrospect the life of the consecrated
persons, we see that, according to an expression of the great theologian
Dietrich Bonhoeffer who died in the Nazis concentration camp, it has
always got the rhythm by two adjectives: they have proclaimed on one
side the last but one realities, and their function was, above all,
that of proclaiming the last realities. The centres of social
commitment, of love to neighbours based on the XXIV chapter of Matthew.
We must say that surely the last but one dimension, which belongs to the
history we live in, has always been practised and is still to be
practised, though with different sensitivity. There are, in fact many
consecrated persons who manage or are managed by structures, for
instance in the sector of health assistance, which are truly in the
vanguard.
Having said this, however, what the world expects from
them is that they may be able to show the last sense of our existence,
that they be able of speaking about life and about death, about good and
evil, about ethics. They are expected to present the Gospel worthily and
with the dragging force of the beatitudes. I think that there will be
always a lot to do in this light and that a rigorous examination of
conscience is required on behalf of the consecrated persons. This is to
be done to understand if they have been able to be, as Jesus said, not
only the leaven in history, but also the city on the mountain, the light
on the candlestick which ultimately indicates directions, projections,
itineraries that go beyond the fashions and the ways of the time; that
go beyond what we have to eat and to drink, though these are fundamental
things belonging to history. The consecrated person is the sign par
excellence of God's Kingdom, and this is what is to be shown in a as
transparent as possible way".
Do you think that after 11th September 2001,
even consecrated life has been influenced by the climate created by it?
"Perhaps this date has changed a lot the atmosphere and
the climate. It has consequently changed the convents themselves, even
the monasteries, which have not been alien from being affected by this
wind that blows all over the world. However, I believe that a state of
major tension might have been created, that the task of the consecrated
persons, in a time of fear like the present one, be that of not riding
this huge temptation: the fear of the other, the despise of the other,
attempting to start a duel with the Muslim world. Before the insecurity
of present time so much terrified by terrorism, the Christian, and
particularly the witness to consecrated life, is not to let himself be
tempted by this fear, remembering that Jesus won the world by going on
repeating: courage, do not be afraid!! This is also the typical sentence
of the prophetic oracles. In this light, the function of the believer is
that of being a witness to trust and dialogue, capable of betting till
the end in the possibility of confrontation, before taking out the arm
of the duel. I must recognise that many religious communities have done
a lot in this regard. They truly show to be a sign of the Kingdom that
continues with its littleness, with its being microscopic, but also with
its fruitfulness".
According to Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, to be signs of the
Kingdom in the society, the religious must stop choosing always the
secure option, and must accept precariousness and vulnerability. Do you
share this statement?
"This
is, to me, a very important and meaningful consideration. The statement
is at the base of an authentic structure of faith. It ought to be shown
in a much more limpid and dazzling manner. Julienne Green said that as
long as we are restless we can be quiet. There is, in other terms, the
Agostinian restlessness, a deep search that is a sign of the
authenticity of our faith, which is constantly a journey towards
infinity, towards the never exhausting infinity of God.
He who possesses the truth just as if it were a precious
stone in a case and is, therefore, convinced to possess the security of
the future, does not know what authentic faith is all about. It is,
indeed, the faith of Abraham who has to leave his own land and to set on
a journey towards an unknown country. The same as when he climbs mount
Moria on the basis of an incomprehensible command of God, ready to go
on till he reaches the end of the ascent. Or like Jacob when he fought
with God in the darkness of the night and finished by being wounded. Or
also like Job who keeps on asking himself on the mystery of the trouble
which pervades him, of the evil that grabs us, and is not satisfied with
second hand and well made explanations, but goes on asking God.
This vulnerability or precariousness is not so much the
discovery that we are frail and limited; it is the sense of the
relativity of things before the fullness of God's Kingdom. This,
however, does not mean loss of interior security, it doesn't mean
absolute restlessness and frenzy, but the possession of peace and
serenity that are constantly born from research, from the journey, from
the interrogatives of man. A life without research is not worthy of
being lived, Socrates said in his Dialogues of Plato. In this sense, to
be perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect means having the capacity
of going on at the sight of so many dreams, so many securities which the
world offers, thus continuing to seek a transcendent goal. This demands
that we are supposed to empty ourselves uninterruptedly of the goals we
have already attained with the conviction that they were the ultimate
ones. They are, instead, only the stages of a great final representation
of the new Jerusalem sung by the Apocalypse".
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