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 Luciano
Nicastro was born in Ragusa in 1942, graduated in Philosophy at the
Catholic University, Milan, and in Sociology at the Studies University
of Urbinoè. For many years he has been a Professor of Philosophy and
history in the “E. Fermi” Liceo of Sciences of Ragusa.
He was a Philosopher and Sociologist of “Mounieran”
orientation,
and is actually a lecturer of Philosophic Anthropology in
the Ibleo Theological Institute of Ragusa, as well as a lecturer in
Sociology of Migrations and Sociology of education in the LUMSA of
Caltanisetta. He is the author of many books, such as “The revolution
of Mounier”, “Politics, is it a useless passion?”, “Quo vadis?” (a
modern letter to Diogneto 159), a research on “Faith and laity, between
fundamentalism and insignificance”, and the very recent “A Bishop
for our time”- written in memory of Monsignor Cataldo Naro.
We are living the Advent season: which suggestions would you offer a
believer to live this moment in the right spirit?
“First of all, we must specify the context. The removal of God is an
epilogue of late modernity and now it is the very air we breathe, in
the sense that even the believers are involved in the general
atmosphere of God’s removal in the sign of reducing Him to a purely
subjective and private need. Often Christmas becomes a fact “ad intra”
of the believer and of the Church, more than an event in the intimacy of
the person, of the family and public society. It is not the matter of
“reviving” nostalgically the past Christian society, but of re-building,
in the changed historical conditions of our multicultural society, the
sense of Christmas for each believer, whether Christian, Catholic or
belonging to other religious confessions, or atheist or indifferent
(shut up in the drama of his/her life), in such a way as it may become
once again a public, meaningful event of liberation and hope in the
individual life and in the global society of many cities, that is, a
time of fraternity and communion with our most needful brothers and
sisters. What I mean is that the authentic sense of Christmas, the birth
of a God objectively one and unique in nature, must go through a new and
more diffused convinced awareness. It is no longer possible, and it
would be of no sense for the contemporary man to conceive a God in an
abstract way, separated from the human conditions and from the future of
man.
The
new event of of multicultural reality is the new altar of plural variety
where God continues his incarnation in the history of men, of society
and peoples. The “new” fact of our multicultural society takes us to
consider this Christmas not so much as one of the many religious feasts,
threatened by consumerism and by the blind path of the secular society,
but as a research and discovery of a Gospel for today’s man. The
Christian Christmas is still a “good news” because it realises a saving
universal event concerning and touching everyone. It cannot be
celebrated in apologetic polemics but, for the legitimate defence of our
ancient religious traditions and of the sacred value itself inherent to
religious freedom, we cannot accept the “lay cancellations” of our
religious symbols and events.
Along
with a sweet Christianity, it is time to state “a Christmas of God”
for all men of our time, in the global society of our home. God
belongs to all because He is the Creator, the Father and Redeemer of all
men and women. For the believer Christmas must be a re-discovery of the
face of God who is Love, as Pope Benedict XVI has underlined in his
first encyclical letter. We can reach the God of all, who is Love, not
through our arid reason, or through a religious conflict, but through
the varied and deep experience of love towards men and women, which
leads reason itself to open up beyond what is experienced, towards
horizons of transcendence, to attempt more courageous and less
fundamentalist, above all less triumphalist and disincarnated visions”.
The birth of God is made precise as the horizon of a more optimistic
sense, as trustful and universal inclusion in the history of Salvation
flowing from the crucified, dead and risen God.
What does Advent say to the Church?
“Actually, at this phase Advent may seem to be a fiction of the heart
and of the reason more than an eschatological hope. Somebody has adopted
the well-wished expression that it look more lay, more “multicultural
and multi-religious” than other Happy Feasts, but in this case the true
hope and the wish as a living project at the existential and
eschatological level get extinguished in the silence of God’s Birth. It
seems that today’s Church has gone back to fear the enemy and shuts up
in her securities. She seems to have forgotten that without God’s abode
in us, namely without the incarnation of God as project and reality of
the resurrection no true civilisation is possible, no new evangelisation
to find once again the “Deus absconditus” (St. Augustine) that
the faith of the Church has made us to re-discover throughout the
centuries. The face of the unknown God (St. Paul) is the Lord, the
implicit Christ, present in all the monotheistic religions. We are not
expected to renew or re-discover only the emotions but also a new
awareness of Christmas.
In
the Church, today’s Advent should be an occasion to go to Bethlehem as
children to find afresh the Baby God of Religions, of all the religions,
the common, freeing and respectful foundation, not the Lord of one
part, but the Father of all men and women. It is time to recuperate the
hope of Vatican II, the pedagogy of dialogue and the signs of the times,
trusting humanity “coloured” in races and religions, not along the paths
of competitions to mark the differences but, on the contrary, along
totally unexplored ones, weaving treads of dialogue and communion
towards all men. It is because of our obstinate “veiling” the face of
God with techniques and power and our presumption to cover his heaven
that God seems to be silent and absent from the world.
God
is the most urgent objective need that humanity feels today, though it
is felt in different ways by every single individual, believer or
unbeliever, in our society of fear, of risk and uncertainty. Our not
finding God in Jesus Christ is, unluckily, the result of our omissions
at testimony level, as Gandhi used to say. We do not proclaim the God of
love who is patient and merciful; we are no longer and always “those of
the greatest love”, as Don Primo Mazzolari used to say when he brought
back to our mind the parable of Jesus, for which “there is no greater
love than the love of him who gives up his life for his friends”. Many,
even Christian persons, are worried for the presence of the immigrated
people in our life and our cities, but we have forgotten that God
himself was an immigrated in Jesus Christ just as we are. In fact, God
is an immigrated , in the sense that today God does not live and does
not possess a “public” abode in our cities; he has become “ a
clandestine” (cfr. il mio “Fratello immigrato”. EdiArgo 2005).
What can Advent say to today’s society?
“Today Advent should dilate our hearts and minds to a new great hope:
that of a future unity of mankind. Humanity does no longer have a dream
of fraternity; it is not yet committed to realise a concrete project of
globalising solidarity on behalf of all the faithful. From this
viewpoint, the believers cannot oppose or contra-pose one another. The
different religious confessions are different modalities through which
God is met and reveals himself as the Lord of history, as authoritative
and great Christian thinkers have said. We cannot reduce God or adapt
him to the cultural and historical short-sightedness of some
contemporary societies. God opens new and inedited horizons of freedom,
solidarity and equality for today’s one-dimensional society. For the
present individualistic, selfish and consumerist society God offers a
new hope, towards the possibility of building “new heavens and new
lands, to the measure of human person and according to the project
that the God of Eden has made.
“Word of God and ecumenism” is the theme
chosen for the Congress of the diocesan delegates on ecumenism and
dialogue, recently held in Rome, to be in continuity with the third
European ecumenical assembly of Siblu and the XII ordinary assembly of
the Bishops’ synod, dedicated to the Word of God in the life of the
Church. This is, therefore, an extraordinarily actual theme, even if it
has emerged that few Italians approach the Bible. How to help them
discover words of eternal life like those of the Sacred Scriptures?
“First of all, we must say that mastering the Word of God is the fruit
of a lengthy and patient catechesis of the people. Unluckily we have
been brought up in a conceptual reduction of the Word of God to a few
sentences or a few slogans. The cultural and existential primacy of the
Word of God, -“gentle light, way, truth and life- should be revived
among the Christians, but broadly speaking, also among all those who
believe in the transcendence of God. The God of the monotheistic
religions is not only Lord, but also a good and merciful Father who has
not yet finished accompanying humanity as at Emmaus. How to help others
discover words of eternal life like those in the Bible? We must not
start from a philological alphabet, but from a mystical one: we need to
pray with the Scripture, to speak to God with his own Word.
Ecumenism finds afresh the key of its journey and its heart just in the
Word, though here, as Catholics, we pay the cost of our delay. There
will not be any future for men, or space for a better world, if we do
not start again from the common Word of God, from Christ, the incarnate
Word, and the Church, concrete sign and sacrament of the Word. In other
words, we cannot think of the signs of the times without including in
them the new and great sign: the re-discovery of the Word of God. I
remember Cardinal Suhard who, in ’48, said, “”God has no longer any
dwelling place in this world created by Him. He is now the absent One”.
In
reality, the absence of God cannot be the real and logical lack of
foundation, but it is the existential and “public absence of a fatherly
face, of a “presence” that gives sense, security and hope to men of good
will. The absence of God has been “shouted” before the radical evil of
the 1900 century, before the total wars of massacre and State atheism.
Perhaps today, more than in the past, we feel this absence as a going
far away and alienation. Therefore, we feel more forcefully the need of
a less folkloristic and more ecumenical and universal Christmas. However
we wish an authentic and more recognisable Christmas in the paternal
heart of God, not the Christmas of an indistinct God. We need to raise
the curtain to show the renewing mystery of Christmas, even in a more
“colourful” shape, more than the changing traditions. This was the
authentic original intuition of the crib by St. Francis: a living memory
of the incarnation of God who is born among the poor for all men, for
the poor humanity of all times”. “
“The other is never an enemy to be
defeated, but a brother to be sought, met and helped”; this is what the
Archbishop of Cosenza-Bisignano, Monsignor Salvatore Nunnari, declared
in a meeting with a Rom delegation. How can the women religious help
others to live without fearing to meet the Rom? ´
“As
far as the Rom question is concerned, we must start to work a conversion
of mind and heart, namely, we must pass from the atavist diffidence to
fraternal trustful welcoming. God himself has been, so to say, a Rom.
God is not just a principle to be affirmed, but a presence that dwells
also in the Rom humanity. After all, almost all of us are somehow Roms,
not as in the case of thieves, but of gipsies without a fixed abode. We
must see their marginalisation beyond a folkloristic look and take care
of them. We must look at the Roms within their “hovels and huts” to
understand their difficulties and our own, which flow from the
“bourgeois respectability” of Christians and Catholics, or in an ampler
sense, from the stereotypes and prejudices of as many as feel to be
citizens of A series in the metropolises
Ghetto remains always our prevalent temptation. We have the temptation
of reducing others to ghetto, of marginalising, of living with just a
tiny compassion, rather than with the flag of solidarity. There is no
Christmas of God without the Roms. If we transfer God from His abode in
the world and history, from the sufferings of men, from the life of the
youths, from the minds and the places of those who weep and suffer, we
deny it in his nature. I feel that the words of Monsignor Nunnari are
quite opportune
It is
not the matter of seconding a romantic motion of the heart, but of
stating the ontological reality that started with incarnation and was
definitively consolidated with the Resurrection of Christ, the Son of
God. The Incarnated Word created the world through love and, with his
resurrection, re-created the conditions of a deep and definitive renewal
of humanity. After Christ, humanity without God has no longer any sense
because we have not the power of building a new civilisation for the
coming millennium. The religious like the Rom have a sense of what is
provisional because they are pilgrims walking in the light of what is
essential. As far as the Rom is concerned, we must not forget the “lay”
wisdom of Bertold Brecht when he said, “We sat on the wrong side because
all other sits were occupied’. The “modern” logic of the Christians is
always the old heart of the imitation of Christ”.
What are the consequences of the Verona
Congress after more than one year from this very important event of the
Church?
The most important message entrusted to the lay Christians by the Verona
Congress was human hope as a sign of Christian hope, but hope is born
from the ontological, historical and anthropological process of the
Resurrection of Christ. The “living” hope is born and re-born in the
Church from the love of Christ and changes the heart of repented sinners
as well as the human quality of the vital, existential, individual and
social areas. Being a “smile among tears” (E.Mounier), hope is the
pastoral activity of a Church that suffers in “hostile” times deaf to
the basic values and does not give up to the boundaries of the
individual intimate space, nor to the utopia of the old and new
Christian ideologies. The “living” hope generates maturity and freedom
of adhesion.
Human hopes alone nourish themselves and others with illusions and
betray the true expectations of persons and Society. In the transcendent
dimension, instead, we live the deep bond and the breath of what is
eternal. Only a faith that is friend of Reason and a reason that is
friend of faith can build up an inedited and new civilisation of Love
and Peace in the epoch when the dominions of sense, as well as that of
science and technique, dominate. “Christian faith, in purifying reason,
can give a new impulse to today’s culture”
(Padre Bartolomeo Sorge S. J.). The Church has a specific “Role-guide”
of ethical-religious nature without reducing itself only to a political
and economic presence or to a social force of the Catholics
Last 24 November, Pope Rarzinger presided the second Consistory –the
first one having been celebrated on 24th March, 2006- and
created 18 new cardinals, out of whom ten electors are European. What is
the role of a prince of the Church today in our constantly changing
society?
The
history of Cardinals is bound to a particular genesis and to a precise
hierarchical-juridical motivation. Sometimes, it has been perceived like
an arena for the choice of the Pope or the “Vestals of the temple’ for
the splendour and glory of the Church. To me, we should recuperate the
intuition of Pope John XXIII who wanted that the Cardinals were all
“Bishops”, reviving the old tradition and affirming an equal dignity and
more pastoral prerogatives.
The
cardinals are the prophets of the new evangelisation, the major brothers
of the contemporary apostolic College of Bishops and in communion with
the Vicar of Christ. They have become not so much “the attacking
generals” but the pastoral vanguards of faithful proclamation, of
generous mission and heroic testimony up to martyrdom; therefore “those
of the splendour of the Church’s poverty “ who privilege, meet and touch
the poorest of the poor, according to the logic and witness of Blessed
Mary Theresa of Calcutta”.
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