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Marinella Perroni is a lecturer on the New Testament in
the Philosophy and Theology Faculties of the Pontifical Athenaeum "St.
Anselm", Rome. She is also the President of the Italian Women Theologian
Co-ordination, a member of the Scientific Bible Committee (a lay
association of Biblical culture), a member of the CdA of the Bible
Society in Italy. She is the author of many scientific essays on the
question of "Women in the New Testament, as well as of exegesis and
theology essays in various collective works. She has recently written
Women and faith tradition in Italy: a contribution to the theology of
gender, Acts of the National Congress of the Italian Women
Theologians Co-ordination, held in Rome on 27th March 2004.
We have approached her with questions on themes which will be at the
centre of the ecclesial reflection in the following months
The Instrumentum Laboris of the Bishops' Synod, scheduled
in the Vatican for 2nd-23rd October, has recently
been presented. The theme of the Synod is, "The Eucharist: source and
apex of the life and mission of the Church". The key document of the
Synod aims at improving "the knowledge of the Eucharistic mystery". To
you, what is the Italian situation seen from this viewpoint?
The Italian Catholicism has changed a lot during the past
twenty years. In the years 70-80 our country could rely on different
generations of believers who had taken faith seriously, also from the
viewpoint of biblical-theological deepening. For them the ecclesial
belonging entailed an attentive and qualified participation. In that
climate, practising the Sacraments, above all the Eucharist, without
awareness before sentimentalism, was unthinkable. It was the answer to
the exit from an epoch of precepts. On the contrary, today they prefer
the ways of affectivity, they confuse mystagogy with smokiness, they are
satisfied with a liturgical participation at low cost: the rising
indices of religious practice is what matters. It makes no difference if
the faithful participate in something whose sense is unknown to them
and, above all, if the participation does not mean for them the solid
assumption of ecclesial corresponsibility.
Paradoxically, however, in this way we have surely
contributed to increase the number of religious pilgrimages and tourism:
there is a running after ever more multiplying mass events, but the
Sundays are deserted and the churches are empty. The decades we have
left behind have taught us that, if we reduce the Eucharist to a
practice of devotion, unhooking it, for instance, from an attentive and
on going study of the Word of God, sooner or later the Church will pay a
very high price. This is because, as Paul tells the Corinthians,
Eucharist and Church are each other's mirror. Unluckily, the temptation
of making of the Eucharist the apex of devotion rather than the apex of
the ecclesial life, recurs also in the Italian Church. In fact, it
creates illusions and, in a time, which requires a great argumentative,
relational and creative capacity, the illusions are useful.
The text underlines " a certain slow down of the pastoral
life from the Eucharist", but also the great disproportion between the
many people who go for communion and the few ones who go to
confession". This situation implies also Italy. Could anything be done
to invert this tendency in act? Which contribution could the women
religious, committed to the Parish life, offer?
Frankly speaking, I feel to say that we don't know
whether the evil is worse than the invoked medicine. This type of
tendencies cannot be reverted! True: the custom does not make the law
and we cannot say that a behaviour, even a religious one, must
automatically become normative, for the practice of faith, only because
it spreads easily The problem, however, is different. It is difficult to
synthesise it in a few words. We hope that the fathers of the Synod will
face it frontally, for what it means and it entails, without nostalgia
and with a deep sense of reality. The bond, linking up the full
participation in the Eucharist to the sacrament of reconciliation, is
broken, and we cannot say that this may not be also a healthy happening.
It could be a healthy happening for the single believers,
who must get rid of sacramental practices, condemned to a certain
mechanism, who have the right of re-discovering the true value of the
sacrament of penance, in its Gospel meaning, and need to be initiated to
such a faith as it cannot be found in the squares, in the stadiums, nor
in elite convents. However, this is true, above all, for the Church who
must learn to listen to, to decipher the messages, which come from the
faithful, from their needs and uneasiness. The Church, who must not be
afraid of herself, when she interprets ways of re-thinking and of
newness. Whatever we live today is the consequence of a phenomenon,
which we were not able to consider seriously yesterday. Paul VI had
tried, by proposing a serious, though initial, reform of the penitential
praxis of the Catholic Church. The one who was afraid of it is the
Church herself, not the mass of the faithful: these, at the end, have
made up their mind to do what they feel like to do, but However, we
cannot give up to all the illusions of the mass religiosity,
nostalgically called popular piety, nor regret the privacy of religious
life inherited from the previous centuries.
Today, the religious life experiences times of great
changes crossed by complex challenges. In particular, the women
religious are in intimate relation with the ecclesial community, in a
society characterised by contrasting signals. What to do in order to be
credible witnesses of Christ and the hope of a not yet pacified world?
It may seem foolish, yet I wish to answer this question,
which actually would require a different analysis and diagnosis, through
a simple image: the habit. If I were to have a synod on religious life,
I would propose only this theme: the habit. What has happened during the
past years? Rome offers an absolutely unique perspective of this
viewpoint. I know, in fact, very well that it is not like this all over
the world. It seems to me that what we see over here, along the
streets, more than within the convents, has a highly indicative value as
far as representation of serious problems is concerned, I would say: of
very serious ones, with which religious life is called to confront
itself. Such problems go from the selection of candidates (which seems
to be no more), up to the management of international situations within
the convents; from the growing old of the communities up to the silent
haemorrhage of vocations; from the internal state of conflicts, typical
of situations deprived of a future, up to the illusion which leads to
the resolution of patches on the old habit.
Paradoxically, the youths cause worry almost more than
the aged. If some movie director had the masterly touch to shoot, with
critical intelligence and good sense, a film on the adventures of the
religious habit which, evidently, is the most " ideological "of all
other habits, this would compel us to understand that the latest half
century of church history is enclosed in it, with all its travail. I
would not like to exaggerate, but we can say that the religious habit is
an icon of the Gaudium et spes, namely of how the religious
understand and live the church relation with the world.
The ever growing multiethnic and multicultural presence
in the women congregations is surely to be read as a resource,
especially today, when the religious fanaticism tries to prevail with
the logic of attacks in Europe. How to value this resource concretely?
I teach in a pontifical university: in a class of 23
students there are 19 nationalities. When I look around me, above all
when I see the students speaking among themselves, I tell myself that
the Church, today, is one of the laboratories in which the future of
humanity, not only of the church, is built. In fact, this multiethnic
and multicultural parable has an "added value", which says something to
a world that lives the travail of globalisation. I don't know whether
we are actually aware of it. Our "added value" can be found in the fact
that we can witness how the defence of a bimillenary tradition is
possible only if we accept the plurality and integration of cultures, of
genders, of perspectives, of needs. "I have made myself a Jew with the
Jews, a pagan with the pagans to win all to Christ", Paul said with an
immense apostolic wisdom. It is not the matter of guaranteeing the
survival of our orders, of our religious houses with the admission of
religious from other countries and cultures. Its is the matter of
favouring an assimilation that may produce an inedited identity, that
baits mechanisms of creativity and freedom, with the courage of
perpetrating the future more than of hoping for it, of looking into the
future.
Peace and reconciliation have been a long desired and
never attained objective of John Paul II. Initiatives of sensitisation
on it have not been missing. We can't forget the considerable
contribution of religious communities in this regard. Do you have an
opinion on all this and, perhaps, some experience which has impressed
you most?
I think that the religious communities, as well as
the family communities, are supposed to witness, first of all, to the
discipline of peace. This is because peace, the true one, demands
disciplines: obedience to reality, respect for diversity, free choice.
Only in this way the religious communities can be truly communities of
men and women who believe in the Risen Lord. It is, then true, that
there is a historical and political dimension of peace which has become
also for Christians an indispensable value. On one side, wars have been
changing face during the past century, becoming massacres of innocent
civilians. On the other side, thanks to the development of the logic of
human rights, the individual life has become a value in itself. From
this viewpoint, facing firmly the request of legitimising war, John Paul
II has called the catholic world to come out in the open.
There has been and there still is a certain division
among the faithful on this point. The first ones not to catch the
appeal of the Pope have been, at times, just the Catholics. This is
unavoidable, perhaps, given the complexity and ambiguity, which every
choice and every individual or collective action connotes. Better,
however, to be divided than to be inactive, better to be perplexed than
self-secure. On the day of the great manifestations for peace, 15th
February 2003, it was important to see religious among the multitude.
This not because those who went down to the square were right and those
who remained at home were wrong, but because in the evening, after the
manifestation and, on the successive days, and even today, before the
gloomy daily TV news, the communities in religious houses are compelled
to choose: either pretending not to care, by shutting oneself in a
hypocritical silence, or growing in the discipline of peace.
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