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Vice-president of USMI for Lombardy, and Provincial
Superior of the Institute "Suore Maestre S. Dorotea" for the Province
of Lombardy-Tirrenica, Sr. Fernanda Barbiero is the author of various
appreciated publications, like "La verginità consacrarta e i valori
della femminilità nella Mulieris Dignitatem"(Consecrated virginity
and the values of femininity in Mulieri Dignitatem), "Augustine of
Ippona: the man and his passion for the Truth" and "L'Opera di Santa
Dorotea: profezia nella comunità ecclesiale e nella realtà culturale di
oggi (The Work of St. Dorotea: prophesy of today's ecclesial community
and cultural reality)". Sr. Fernanda Barbiero is well known also as a
lecturer in the Pontifical Urbaniana University and the Pontifical
University of Sciences of Education "Auxilium". Presently she is active
with many and qualified interventions as speaker on pastoral, ecclesial
themes, on the question of women, on the spirituality of the family, in
several congresses in Italy and East Europe. She is a qualified member
of the Council of editors for the national USMI's review
Consacrazione e Servizio, for which she offers valid contributions.
She has guided sessions on formation and seminars on
study in various religious congregations, offering contributions of
reflection in themes on religious life. We have addressed to her some
questions on the planning lines emerged at the conclusion of the 51st
General Assembly of USMI:
The intergenerational dialogue as a formation choice …
What does this option tell you, if we read it also in a multi-religious
and intercultural key?
The talk is valid at all levels, within the families and
in social relations. It acquires a particular meaning in the Church and
today, more than ever, it widens urgently up to the religious life. The
dialogue demands a formative support because it does not live on
improvisations, nor on average realities. The dialogue fosters the
desire of encountering the truest and most authentic life in the depth
of a person. It is made up of a patient listening to the different
cultures, to the capacity of intuiting the potentiality of realizing
the one heart and one soul", of walking together, with the rare
attitude of walking side by side without imposition or superposition.
The dialogue orients the gratuity of relationships to the opening of new
horizons, to the loving care for others, never being afraid of
diversity, above all, to assume courageously the challenge of identity.
The consecrated life is the theological place for the
dialogue with God and with men. Every tentative of renewal and
re-foundation of religious life demands to prepose a life with the sense
of "vocatio" to the personal projects, to a self-centred and
auto-promotional life. It demands self-emptying to be in relation, in
listening, in dialogue, in communion with others. All this in the
awareness that we need the other for our own self-fulfilment. The
dialogue makes us to grow in the desire of research, as companions in
the life journey of today's man. The research of what is essential in
religious life leads to the attitude of listening, of being merciful, of
accompanying and sharing. I think that it is not possible to elude the
centrality of togetherness, the holy seed of communion. It is together
that we can find the fullness and beauty of the truth. It is together
that we shall reach salvation. Paul Eluard expressed this poetically:
'We shall not reach the end one by one
but two by two.
If we come to know two by two
we shall all know
one another
we shall love one another and the children one day
will laugh at the black legend where a man is
in tears in his solitude.
In this sense and according to you, which attitude do we
need so that the Eucharistic Year, which we are living, may be for us an
appropriate stimulus?
The theme of the Eucharist is of an immense spiritual
expanse, dense with significance. It is the mystery that makes the
Church. The Eucharist is the sense of life and of history, as well as
the source and the style of religious life. We must not forget
history. We must rather treasure up its root and its fulfilment so
that we may learn to safeguard not only faith, but human life as well.
First of all, I would suggest to let ourselves be educated by the
Eucharist.
The Eucharist, "broken bread and shed blood", is
the price which had been paid for the salvation of the world. The
dialogue is a value and a challenge; the dialogue demands "to pay the
cost". In reality, this attitude is not easy today. Nobody would
deny or contradict the word dialogue. Yet, to dialogue often is not only
difficult, but it constitutes also an authentic ascetic journey, a
precise attitude, fruit of a deep work. Often the enthusiasm of
the heart and spontaneity reveal themselves insufficient for it. The
dialogue requires a poverty, which excludes every self-sufficiency and
affirms a kenosis, a dimension immanent in the Eucharist.
"Yes, the dialogue follows this trajectory: it begins when two men bow
to each other and become ready to wash each other's feed"
(E.Bianchi).
Finally, understood as a Eucharistic space, religious
life expresses the importance of the dialogue in the Spirit as a high
form of prayer. Sometimes we ask ourselves whether religious life leaves
any space for the action of the Spirit, if it has the courage to open
its doors to the Holy Spirit, who alone creates unity and knocks down
the walls of division. We wonder whether it obeys the Spirit who asks
"to widen the space of one's own tend" (Isaiah 52,7). If we confront
ourselves with the Spirit, we become a space of peace, of re-builders of
relations; we become concrete places of fraternal charity in which
people can know and experience the love of God … and, just here, in
charitable relations, the mission of religious life is fulfilled.
What type of situation do you live in your Institute in
the field of intercultural and multi-religious opportunities?
Also my Institute experiences today a new situation of
"diminutio" and of cultural and ethnic "pluralism". She is
expected to assume a new face "to enlarge its tend" (Isaiah
52,7). This, not because of a surviving strategy , but because of
faithfulness to the Gospel. We have been too long shut up within our
world. Today, the opening to other countries finds us in the situation
of risking the Word of the Living who has won death and has freed men
from evil, from fear and anguish, As the number of sisters keeps on
falling, we find the light of far off seas in our heart and in our eyes,
opening ourselves to horizons of hope. Jesus has pleased himself to call
his disciples "little flock" (Lk 12,32). The disciple is
efficacious only when he "announces the word of the cross" (1Co
1,18), when he trusts the strength of charity, not when he craves for a
visibility at any cost, an over exposition in society, a capacity of
pressure.
We cannot presume an exemption from the historical
present. We go ahead in our mission with a modality of getting
impoverished. I am convinced that this is the right time of extending
the communion to all the cultures. The dimension of poverty creates
communion. Just because we are poor, we can meet other poor people,
we can share what we are to other people. In syntony with the desire of
our Founder Don Luca Passi, we are trying every possible thing to extend
the Work which has been entrusted to us, without limiting it to the
western territories, rich in goods and poor in soul. We are dialoguing
with the new generations to open our resources to the cry of the poor in
the east and in the south of the world. The mission of the Maestra di
Santa Dorotea concentrates on the Gospel command, "Go to your brother
and tell him the word" (Matthew 18, 15-18) We are activating ourselves
to bring the Word to the world without thinking of it as our own
word. I think that we should pronounce it by kneeling down, because,
first of all, as disciples of the Lord, we are to obey this word of the
Gospel.
In her relation, mother Simionato has brought to evidence
that "the elevated presence of the sisters from other Countries and
their service within our Congregations, seems to be motivated more by a
problem of re-distribution of resources than by specific pastoral
projects". She has also underlined the importance "of reading this
phenomenon ad intra, without isolating it from the phenomenon of the
ethnic mobility present in Italy". Do you share this statement" Which
solutions would you suggest for a true confrontation based on the
differences and the resources of each person?
I think that the situation presents signals of ambiguity.
In the panorama of the Congregations we evidence phenomena which
announce quite different perspectives and results. There are
Congregations with a long experience of presence in foreign countries
where the sisters of different cultures and races have gone through a
process of a successful integration. Generally they are big religious
congregations in which the globalisation seems to be a datus of facts
which tends to realise relations without boundary. Other, instead, have
a recent and raw experience in Countries of
Missions.
Sure, the presence of sisters from other Countries
recalls the stranger in society and in the church.
It evokes inevitably the problem of acceptance of the
immigrants, of the foreigners among us, who are bearers of diversities -
of language and race, of culture and religion, of customs and ethics
which could confuse us and make us to feel unprepared to welcome them.
The problem is more interior: the stranger is the other. Indeed,
more radically, the human experience shows that man is a stranger to
himself.
The human condition is under the sign of a nature, which
is stranger. This means that all of us find ourselves in a provisional
and transitory living of cultural assets; to understand that the truth
is not a belonging to be imposed on others, but it exceeds everything.
Thus, the disciple of Christ is not allowed to cultivate attitudes of
arrogance, rather his characteristic is that of choosing, like his
Master, the company of men. Company means reaching man there where he
is; it means to meet the brother with sympathy and love: it implies to
have patience, to be in a position of support, sharing the patience of
God, a patience capable of waiting and wanting that "no one may ever
perish. This is the task of the disciples committed to the
communication of faith and to Christian testimony. The following of
Christ is not an organisation.
Faith is not capable of elaborating a culture fit for all
peoples; faith is not omologation. Faith does not generate ideology
projects in competition with those elaborated by men, but looks at the
face of the cultures, accompanying and opening them to the encounter
with the Lord Jesus, Saviour of all men. Faith is always something
ecclesial, communitarian, that is, a reality which does not get consumed
neither in sitting rooms, nor in the squares, but in a meeting place
where each one can see the face of the other. The multicultural
situation, namely the cultural pluralism, not the generic one which
admits of swarming perspectives, but the deep one which surprises any
project, any language, any grammar, any communication is an
exceptional occasion of confrontation and development. Here "the other"
is not one of the many indifferent forms, but the difference which makes
it unique, bearer of possibilities, like the inedited, the
surprising, that which cannot be contained. Here faith finds back its
very essence, namely the mystery which it is born from and to which it
tends.
The women religious express a vital and intimate relation
with the ecclesial community in all the complexity of reciprocal
exigencies. In a constantly changing context, does all this require
flexibility and capacity to read the signs of the times, which the women
religious have been able to incarnate in every area?
The first thing to be done is to help the religious
life to see itself. We need to start analysing the contradictions
within the religious life. It does not take much to see our religious
stride, our religious moving before the world just as if our life were a
healthy organism, while it is an organism needful of cures. However, I
am convinced that it is still possible today for the religious life
to play its prophetic role. A mere explanation of phenomena in our
times is not sufficient, it does not catch the mystery which is
underneath, like the fire under the ashes. The Church, by her intimate
constitution, is essentially a reform, an updating: "Ecclesia semper
reformanda". In spite of her limits, we find in her the fire
which Jesus has come to bring on earth and, starting from it, we hope
that sooner or later a new Gospel fire will flare up (Lk12,49). In this
situation, we feel the exigency of a new evangelisation, the
urgency of proclaiming the Gospel, of a dialogue with cultures, as well
as a strengthening of the ecumenical and inter religious dialogue.
Undoubtedly, the attention to the signs of the times, concretising the
reflections which have gone on maturing during these years and
conjugating them within a noteworthy capacity of flexibility, avoids the
danger of a disembodied faith. What is to be
changed is not faith, but the way of living it.
The territory is the fundamental place of incarnation,
because only within the territory the Church can become a concrete
place, not to evade from reality and to suffer charity within history.
Today, more than ever, the religious life needs to confront itself with
history. This implies an active attitude, necessary within an epoch of
weakened belongings. Besides big projects, we need daily ethical
options and commitments, which would help to overcome the needs and
to transform the structures in which nobody may feel a stranger, but
where all of us are called to be or to become co-citizens of the saints
and children of God. The religious life within the Church feels the need
of experiencing the humility of walking among new problems and, if it
has to announce the good news of God, it will have to do it in the
sharing of everybody's life. This sharing with the world becomes
fundamental not only to have a hope for the furture, but above all to
get a theological re-discovery of the reality we live in.
The religious community is called to be in the territory
as in a place of sense.
This process requires important passages; among other things, today, we
are asked to possess a more or less inedited capacity of fraternal
spiritual communion. Too often the community has been felt as a place of
apostolate. The community was once identified with the work. The person
was seen for the work, to its function. We need a conversion. The
community must go back to be a place of life and hope, of fraternal
relations, which build up hope, true human relations, in which the
commandment of reciprocal love may run and circulate. All this so that
the religious community may not be a closed community, but an open one,
called to a high measure of Christian life, called not only to be holy,
but also to be visible as holy. If a sign exists, it is naturally seen.
Lack of visibility contradicts the nature of the sign.
It is indispensable "for consecrated persons to face the
courage of being ever more church, so that they may acquire their clear
and definite identity". How to translate this statement into the daily
dialogue with the world, as indicated by Vatican II?
Ours is a time of great creativity. New religious
Congregations, mainly born in Africa and in Asia, try to inculturate the
religious life in societies different from ours. This will be a new
wonderful richness. There are also new ways of belonging to religious
orders, new lay groups which share the life and the mission of religious
Families. Religious Life is vital for the Church. But I would put the
question in this direction: a religious life for which church?
Nobody ignores how it is just the religious life that is influenced by
the epochal change which has invested the Church: the crisis of
vocations, the growing old of its members, the difficulty of a
theological reading of it and of its location in the Church, have made
it weak and little eloquent. I remember what Bro. Enzo di Bose said, "It
is necessary that the Church pays attention to the religious life: its
loss, or its less meaningful presence would actually change the face of
the Catholic Church and would impoverish it. While in the Orthodox
churches it is ever more vivid and determining for the spiritual
vitality of the Church, often in the Catholic Church the religious Life
seems to be neglected, almost confined among the treasures of the past,
as a precious furnishing, good for the antiquary".
In his speech to the religious in Washington, John Paul
II brought to focus the ecclesial dimension of religious life.
Here is the thought of the Pope:
The religious Life is in a deep relationship with the
Church. Religious life is not an end to itself, it is in and for the
Church. The bond of unity with the Church is to be manifested in the
spirit and in the apostolic commitment of every Religious Institute,
because the faithfulness to Christ, mainly in religious life, can never
be separated from faithfulness to the Church. The faithfulness to the
Church has many important consequences on the practical plan for the
Institutes themselves and for all their members. For instance, it
implies a public witnessing to the Gospel, above all for all those who,
like the women religious, represent the nuptial bond between the Church
and Christ.
The ecclesial dimension, moreover, requires, on behalf of
the individuals and all the Institutes, fidelity to the charisms, which
God has given to the Church through the Founders. This means that the
Institutes are called to go on promoting, with a faithful dynamics, all
the commitments of the original charism, declared authentic by the
Church, and which meet the needs of the people of God. It is not
difficult to recognise that the religious life is at the centre of the
Church. Personally I would like to write something like … religious
life: for an ecclesial mystics, the genuine mystics which does not
isolate, but immerses, does not estrange, but radiates, which is not a
gem, but a fruitful seed.
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