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Bruno Secondin (1940), a Carmelite, studied in Rome, in Germany and
Jerusalem: he is a doctor in Spiritual Theology and resides in the
Pontifical Gregorian University of Rome. He carries on his Pastoral
activity in Rome and is endowed with a vast international experience. He
has published some thirty books and is actively committed to
re-elaborate the spirituality of the new ecclesial and cultural context.
Being a collaborator of the magazine “Consacrazione e
Servizio” since 1980, he has actively collaborated as a theologian
with the Union of General Superiors for two important World Congresses
(1993; 2004), for the Synod on Consecrated Life (1994) and in many
semester assemblies. We have addressed to him some pieces of thematic on
the ecclesial actuality.
Today we witness a renewed attention paid to the Holy Scriptures that
will be at the centre of the coming Synod of Bishops. How can the Bible
be a more fruitful instrument of relations between the Laity and the
Religious?
“This
attention paid to the Holy Scriptures is going on for over a century and
surely it has gone on being strengthened and approved from the Biblical
Theology as well as from the Biblical Pastoral viewpoint. In particular
Chapter VI of Dei Verbum remains an inspiring text up-to-date.
The newness of the latest decenniums consists in a synergy among lay and
religious persons in their drawing close to the Bible: now there are
many lay men and women who know the Bible well and can comment it
eminently and fruitfully for the spiritual life. Many sisters also are
able to do this: let us consider the many testimonies of Lectio
Divina, for instance. I think that this new experience,
totally unknown in the past, may bear further fruit if feminine and
non-clerical perspective readings will be implemented: the Bible reveals
an unsuspected richness through these hermeneutical keys. We must try in
order to believe it!”
Benedict XVI keeps on exhorting us not to live faith as a series of
moralistic prohibitions: how to make this comprehensible for the laity
in our daily life?
“We
have inherited a tradition of Christian education that emphasises
precepts and prohibitions, observances and transgressions. Consequently,
a moralist system was the common syntax of the whole Christian
existence. Today these things have totally changed, at least in theory
(or in theories), but there are still many after-effects in the concrete
life. I think that we are to give a different value to faith itself if
we want a daily life free from moralist systems, dynamic and liberating
from the viewpoint of faith: like a loving and trustful adhesion, a
healing and transforming journey, like an adventure open to new seasons
and new encounters with God and with the others. If there is a heart
that loves and investigates with love, the Word will not be marginal,
the liturgical celebration will have the thickness of a living mystery,
the community will be the place of warm and creative relations rather
than a mere scenario in the background; the presence in history will be
animated by the orienting wisdom of evangelical criteria; the signs of
the times will be read and interpreted with passion for the Kingdom,
rather than with the taste of catastrophe or claming. Before teaching
these attitudes to the laity, they must be taught to many religious who
are too much shut up in their “religious” world, made up of very little
essential leftovers”.
In his prolusion, on the occasion of the latests general assembly, the
Archbishop of Genova, Monsignor Angelo Bagnasco, treated the theme of
families at risk of poverty. How can the women religious carry on a
really efficacious apostolate in this situation?
“The
warning launched by Monsignor Bagnasco in the latest assembly of CEI
makes public something that all of us have been realising in our daily
life. There is an actual pauperisation of the less protected segments
that is going on devastating the life of millions of families. This
phenomenon, whose dimensions perhaps are ampler than what we suspect,
requires an adequate visualisation of the phenomenons contours: a
strategy of interpretation, in view of soliciting interventions of
voluntary, benevolent as well as of structural and political type. The
religious can and must be responsible at local level of what is
immediate and concrete. They can also operate in synergy with many more
organisms that are sensitive to this problem, towards a strategy of
interventions aiming at alleviating sufferings and humiliations and
creating new mediations, favouring the overcoming of this uneasiness
through a far-sighted action. If we do not intervene with long-terms
structural proposals (e.g. funds for social emergencies of this type,
re-evaluation of pensions for the aged, re-distribution of resources to
support the weak segments, etc.) we shall always have to face swarms of
cases, without ever finding any way out”.
In his message for the World Missionary Day 2007, to be celebrated on
next October 21, Benedict XVI emphasises the “urgent need of
re-launching the missionary action before the multiple and grave
challenges of our time”. How to do it?
“To
me, the missionary constant re-launching is obvious. I say this not
because it is missing –a thing that could also be true in some
circumstances- but because the challenges to be faced are new. The old
answers to old challenges and old religious demands are no longer enough
today, before the new situations –dialogue and mixing up of religions;
explosion of a thousand phosphorescent “do-it-yourself” beliefs;
fundamentalist resurgences that reach the sacred violence; new cultural
currents challenging old religious categories; the market idolatry and
the instantaneous globalisation of nations, etc.- we must put ourselves
seriously in a process of knowledge and discernment, of elaborating new
answers and the actuation of coherent and adequate projects. We need to
carry on our missionary activities always with a loving heart, with a
passion capable of challenging obstacles and barriers, fears and
intolerances. We should question ourselves whether certain modalities of
missionary activities, which we have inherited and carefully
kept, have the required evangelising strength.
I
think of the many religious institutes that rushed to East Europe with
powerful means and with look of self-secure evangelisers: did those
people really need our “Western” assistance to resume their journey of
faith? Have we truly been able to respect the values of communion and
testimony that, in those countries, had survived skimming the ground
through the aged, the laity, and minor persons, yet efficaciously
keeping the seeds of true and suffered faith? Suddenly, with the arrival
of a bulldozer of works from various Congregations, these
experiences of synergy and communion, of fraternity and tenacious
“parresia” were crashed like the grass of a meadow run over by a truck.
Too many people rushed to East Europe with the air of conquerors and
teachers, without any respect for the local culture, sufferings and
traditions. I think that the time has come for a Copernican revolution
of the missionary activity on behalf of many Religious Institutions:
will they have the courage and the daring of questioning themselves and
of re-thinking every activity radically?
On the past May 7, during his audience with the UISG Plenary Assembly,
the Pope spoke of the several social, religious and economic challenges
that the Consecrated Life must face today. To you, what is the most
complex, as well as most urgent knot to be faced?
“There are tens of social challenges and it would be difficult to number
them. However, the thing that poses more difficulties is the strategy
with which they are acknowledged, interpreted and inserted in a new
evangelical testimony. Too easily we take for granted of having
understood the new challenges just because we have heard of them or have
read from newspapers and “our own” magazines about generic and
superficial diagnoses, which we welcome as angelic revelations. We miss
the habit and, even more, the cultural mentality for a serious and
exhaustive diagnosis, because these years the cultural commitment is low
enough among the religious. We adopt hear-said interpretations and
solutions, with a superficiality accompanied by the presumption that
things can equally be understood even without so many theories: anyhow,
everything can be adjusted with our good intention. This “fideism” that
would like to honour God finishes by offending Him. The style we need
today is a thinking and questioning faith, a serious and documented
reading, rather than at the span of social and cultural phenomena, an
intelligent, professional and efficacious elaboration (also from the
rational viewpoint) of reactions and remedies, of projects and
initiatives. Too much irrationality clothed with over-devout
super-naturalism, as well as with an irresistible trivializing of
complex events and phenomena, characterise many activities of the
religious, despite our updating. To me, the valid and adequate premise
for answering the challenges of the time is that of a serious and robust
culture, in synergy with the territory and the institutions”.
“We are called to weave a new spirituality that may generate hope and
life for the entire humanity”, this was the theme of work for the latest
assembly of religious. The chosen symbol is that of weaving. What does
this suggest you about the expected contribution of women religious?
“I
like the language of weaving, and have used it many times during these
years. More than doers of already completed works, I like to see the
religious as weavers of encounters and dialogues, of provisional answers
and partial solutions, as wise interpreters and flexible orienting
persons. Certain texture weaves take shape and beauty on the long run,
but we need to work provisionally, with just intuited certainties, which
keep on maturing along the journey, which acquire splendour and shape in
their entwining with other points of view and action. We need to free
our collective imaginary from the conviction that we possess already the
well manufactured and planned solution, which needs only to be carried
on; this demands a considerable effort as well as resources of persons
and mentalities, which perhaps do not abound among us.
Could
it not be just the lack of planning skill open to thousand
self-promotions, yet controlled to the least details at their very start
against any loss of dominion, the cause of a scarce availability of the
youths to be with us? For many of us, the up-keeping of what exists
already is too sacred, with a paralysing fear for creative and exploring
adventures. We take shelter under the shell of whatever is known and
repeated, just like the hermit crab under its shell, living out of
positional incomes.
While
the new feminine awareness pushes women towards an ever more courageous
and freeing self-promotion, the religious continue to be afraid, to the
point of avoiding the use of the specific terminology for this cultural
vision, fearing of offending and annoying the “males”( even more the
clerics), who have been holding schemes and evaluations, languages and
symbols along the centuries, never giving them up. Even John Paul II
spoke of a “new feminism” with reference to women religious (See: VC
58), but this awareness –in a better and positive sense- continue to
take off at a low height in very many women religious, who rather feel
guilty if at times they are attracted by some “feminist” position, meek
and innocent as it may be. Once, the women religious were seen by girls
as a symbol of emancipation and autonomous self-promotion, before the
toxic masculine prevalence, while today the women religious offer a
quite different symbol, far from that of a fascinating emancipation.
What do we think about the eventuality that we could start a serious
revision of life, starting just from this allergy of the youths, to
become a heuristic course of new enterprises? In some countries this
process is in action from the past tens of years; in Italy it never
takes off: everything is without any originality”.
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