Introduction

My presence in this seminary is a sign of feminine solidarity. I never answer in the negative when women ask me something. If the SOS, then, comes from women religious, I feel obliged to answer in the affirmative, at least because we, lay people, are gratefully indebted towards all those who make this choice. On the other hand, without the Religious Life (RL) we would miss centuries of theology made by women.  Moreover, ecclesiology, the discipline that I cultivate and teach, has induced me to be acquainted with the problems of RL. The responsible persons of the Claretianum University, whose specialisation is just RL, have asked me to hold a course on “RL in the Church”. This thing has actually surprised me, because it is a fundamental course and I am a layperson. It is a course, which I have to carry out with a lay parresia.

True, we are at a difficult junction. RL seems to be in crisis, above all in its most important forms, historically rich. However, the crisis touches the Church more generally. At the end, the question is always: Which kind of Church, and consequently, which form of RL shall we have in the future? We must answer these questions frankly. We must try to imagine the church of the third millennium. We must equally try to imagine a RL apt to seduce and to influence the model of Church.

My proposal articulates into five points. The first three serve as introduction. They offer some elements about my declination of the Church. In it, we find my reading of RL, which is somehow different from the usual one. In fact, my pretence is that of reading it as a structural fact, placing it at the heart of the Church. One of the problems Vatican II has left behind for us is just this: were to place RL?  Does it belong to the structure, to the deep essence of the Church? Or is it something contingent, without affecting the mystery because of this? My thesis is that RL belongs to the mystery of the Church, particularly to that appellative of Church, which defines it in terms of wedding.

I want to add that I differ also from the usual reading of RL as charism. In my approach to the Church and to RL in her, rather the permanent charismatic character of the Church, I read the charism as well as the permanent charismatic character of the Church, as a datus concerning all the Baptised. Moreover, we must compulsorily translate the charism, the gift lavished to each individual, into service, thus appealing to the corresponding ministerial character.

These statements are there as a premise to make my talk comprehensible. I add only that in this picture, to me, RL receives a stronger and more adequate theological foundation. Anyhow, it draws us out of the polemic: this is yes and this no; this is okay and this is not.  Above all, we are free from the overconfident contraposition between charism and institution.

1. The Religious Life in the Church between structure and function

At systematic level, I break down the ecclesiology into a structure-function polarity. I call “structure” the mystery of the Church; and I call “function” its ministry, the service. If there is a dialectic, which makes up the community of the believers in Christ Jesus, a community illumined by the Spirit, it is just the one between the mystery and its operative translation. The structure reads the Church in what she is; however, the Church cannot exhaust her being with her own self-understanding. We must comprehend the Church in her being for others, therefore in her function, her service, her ministry.

Within the structure, there are many ways of preaching the Church. Personally, I use four expressions from the Scriptures and four from our profession of faith. I read the Church as a mystery-sacrament, people of God, bride of Christ, one, holy, catholic and apostolic. Naturally, the Church is also something else –temple, pleroma, for instance. Nevertheless, I feel that this way of preaching her, accounts sufficiently for what constitutes the mystery.

I herewith exemplify, by limiting myself to the first four locutions. If we renounce to say that the Church is the people of God, we give up his historicity, his wandering character; we give up the original and native common vocation. These are values, which Biblical images do not equally guarantee. Analogically, if we give up calling the Church as the Body of Christ, we miss the organic reciprocal link among the members, as well as the relation with the assembly of the Church, with the syntax and the liturgical action. In producing the Eucharistic body of the Lord, the Church produces herself.  Thus the body is the Eucharistic body of the Lord, but it is the ecclesial body that offers bread and wine to the Father, so that they may become the body and blood of the Lord.  Analogically, it is not possible to subtract the Church from the area of sacramental reality, which is a bridge, an opening, a missionary issue, a being for others, as I said above.

1.1.   The nuptial reality of the Church and Religious Life as her bill

With regard to RL and to the anthropological structure of the human being in its obstinacy according to the duality of the gender, I like to see the Church in the image of the “bride”. In his blood, Jesus has acquired this bridal image, this otherness, encounter, interpersonal communion and dialogue. All this acquires sense with the existence of each living being, who has received the privilege of the call to life and to the ecclesial community. Obviously, we express the nuptial reality with a sacrament, yet even if not in a sacramental way, we express it also in the religious consecration. In reality, do forgive me, I would like to read also the enrolling of the single person in the horizon of the uniquely loved God, in the area of the sacramental reality. Probably, in signing with a sacrament only the wedding, the wisdom of the Spirit has worked to enlighten us about the act that the nuptial reality is a fulfilled dual experience. The nuptial character of continence and of consecrated virginity is “postulated”. I must fill in my solitude by offering myself totally to God. Perhaps, this is the reason why, they have defined the marriage as a sacrament and, vice-versa, the religious consecration as non-sacramental.

Anyhow, the orientation of each human being, man or woman, to the other takes place in two contexts, which define the Church as a Bride, who knows to have been generated by Christ, and waits for his return. Both the Christian spouses in the fulfilment of their conjugal union and the Consecrated in the virtual tension to the full and definitive union with Christ, attest the same nuptial mystery of the Church. The nuptial character of the Church is not something that can or cannot be there. The Church is bride in her mystery statute. From this viewpoint, I believe that we must recognise RL in her emblematic force. A church without the religious consecration is unthinkable, just as it is unthinkable without the nuptial reality of those who marry in Christ. The image of the “bride” is not an allegory. We must give a real content to the words, the expressions we use, even when the starting point is a metaphor. Moreover, people, body, bride, mystery cannot be reduced to simple metaphors. Whether we like it or not, be it simple or complex, to give up the nuptial dimension of the Church, would mean to cut off ourselves from a relational dynamics, without which the intelligence and the fruition of the mystery of the Church would be truly difficult. It is sufficient to read Ephesians, 5, 22-32 to learn the value of the nuptial symbol and the dynamics it implies. Similarly, the metaphor to say that the Church is the body of Christ is not a metaphor. If we try to give it a purely metaphoric interpretation, we demolish one of the strongest issues, starting from the NT throughout the Fathers of the Church up to Vatican II: I mean the ecclesiology of communion.  Even less, we must speak of “living metaphors”, to recognise the vital and existential dynamics. True, these approaching keys do not exhaust the mystery of the Church, whose definition remains “exceeding”.

1.2 The ministerial nature of the Church and the religious life as service

If the Church is between “structure” and “function”, between “mystery” and “ministry”, evidently no modality of ecclesial existence is thinkable –individual, dual, collective- if not in the area of translating the mystery into service, into ministry. I am personally convinced that the RL expresses the ministerial nature of the Church. It is easy to understand that she is not an end to herself.  The different ritual forms of the religious professions prove it. The moment the celebrant recites the prayer of consecration on the candidate, we find explicitly expressed the practical modality to which the candidate commits himself/herself in the spirit of the institute, within the spirituality and the charism of foundation, which constitutes the specific character of the consecration itself.

When we find liturgical expressions, like: “may the divine grace bring to completion what God has started in you”, we are before a constitution to ministry.  I have read attentively both the rite of religious profession and that of the consecratio virginum, and I have found that this is a constant expression. I used to say that the Church does not need to institute a women deaconate: she has it already; it suffices to take seriously the rites of the religious profession or of the consecration of virgins.

This means, that RL is not an ego-centred or egoistic determination, an end to itself, be it on the emotional or intellectual wave of a proposal seducing heart and brain. RL is in the ecclesial horizon of service; the reason of its being is service. We see it more or less as a public activity, yet it will always be service. Even the contemplative life aims at service. Once again, what identifies the choice of self-determination in a life of absolute, full and unique contemplation; it will not be only absolute and full contemplation, but the service we offer the ecclesial community by living it.

2. THE CHARISM AS A STRUCTURING ELEMENT OF THE CHURCH

Between the structure and the ministerial nature of the Church, however, we need to invoke its mainspring: the sewing element of both the things, which makes the service ultimately possible. I refer to the Holy Spirit and His charismatic gifts. In my ecclesiological reading, I call the Spirit as the “structuring subject” and His charismatic gifts “structural elements”. Without the Spirit and His gifts, the Church could never change into ministry; the structure could never become function.

2.1. The Spirit is giver and gift

The Spirit himself is giver and gift. The charism, therefore, is not something graciously lavished to this or that in pure liberality. The charism is something by which the Church reveals herself as a creature of the Spirit, as a reality in which the Spirit interacts and, constantly purifying her, leads her towards her Lord.

The Spirit, who leads the Church-bride towards meeting Christ-bridegroom, lavishes His multiple gifts to the community. It is trough them that the community is planned in its way of being internally and externally. In fact, the gifts edify the community; lead her to her fullness thanks to the specific contribution of each one. Moreover, they give to the Church the power of announcing the salvation externally, through her own members, and to work consequently, by shouldering everybody’s needs.

2.2. The gifts of the Spirit

All this happens in a sharing of gifts, which are different, yet directed to the common good.

Personally, I distinguish the gifts in syntactical and a-syntactical. I call syntactical gifts those gifts that are necessary for the growth of the ecclesial body. I call a-syntactical the extraordinary gifts that are not necessary: healing, languages, charismatic discernment, charismatic faith and charity. With great freedom, I borrow this classification from the lists of St. Paul in the NT. I remember that both the Old and the New Testament witness to the presence of the gifts from the Spirit, but this does not imply the classification or distinction, as it often happens when one makes an experience of it.  In spite of this, Paul works some corrections, above all, with reference to the charismatic effervescence of some communities, like that of Corinth for instance.  In his letters, we find the distinction between charismatic states and charismatic gifts.

Paul describes the phenomenon in its full amplitude –for instance in 1Co. 12-14- or states –see Ephesians 4,11- the charismatic states led back to the apostles, prophets, evangelists, doctors and masters.

Whatever the problems are, tinged with the exuberance of gifts and with the indications of gifts, which edify the community in a very special way –mainly the apostolate and prophecy- the Trinitarian articulation of the charism remains fundamental. It leads back, in 1Co 12, 4-6, to the Holy Spirit in his liberality; to the Lord, the kyrios, in his deaconate; to the Father in his active reality.  This is so because the Father is the principle of every operation, the Son is the principle of service and the Spirit is the principle of every liberality.

2.3. The discernment of the gifts and its criteria

The Scriptures declare the presence of the gifts and warn us about the need of discerning them. The gift always wants to be recognised and to recognise it means particularly two things: first, to place oneself in the area of the community’s growth. Second, Paul says that nobody can state that Jesus is Lord, if not in the Spirit. The gifts have a regulating criterion, which is the agape, reciprocal love. Therefore, they direct to growth, to common utility.

The correspondence gift-service in 1 Co 12, 4-6, authorises us to assume a lexicon analogous to that of the charismatic gifts. This, on one side would state that the service is itself a charism, on the other side it makes possible for us to operate a passage between the gift, in its given peculiarity, and its translation into work directed to the good of the community.

The charismatic gifts, therefore, are many but we must translate all of them into service. Now it is not difficult to understand that our frailty will never succeed to translate the received gifts entirely into service. Woe, however, for that community, which recognises services without being supported by a charism. This is a thing, which has unluckily happened and still happens. I remember that Lumen Gentium 4, acknowledges the existence of charismatic and hierarchical gifts, putting with it the same ordained ministry, the same hierarchy within the charismatic syntax. This, however, is not enough. The problem is whether a charism truly corresponds to an ordained ministry. For instance, we must see whether a candidate to episcopacy has truly received the gift of the episcopé. It is a specific charism of vigilance, supervision, capacity of global vision, a particular

capacity of discernment, thanks to which it becomes possible to exercise the government of a community. If a person receives the Episcopal ordination, but does not have the gift of the episcopé, we shall have a church without her effective pastor.

3. The syntactic ministry-charism of Christian initiation

Beyond the questions linked to the ordained ministry and to its corresponding ministry-charism, I wish to bring to focus the fundamental ministry-charism –which touches all of us directly- of the people of God, on which it will then be possible to modulate the ministerial-charismatic richness lavished to the churches. I mean the Christian initiation. In Baptism, Confirmation and participation in the Eucharist, all of us receive the anointing of the Spirit, thus participating in the Messianic anointing of Christ, in his kingly, priestly and prophetic dignity. All the charismatic gifts lead to this triple structure of saving mediation. Obviously all the ministries –in the Baptismal horizon and in the sacramental and non-sacramental successive horizon- root us in this kingship, priesthood and prophecy.

Only in the acquired fullness of the sacrament of initiation, the Christian can exercise his kingly, priestly and prophetic dignity and can translate his right-duty about the “word”, the “praise” and the “communion”. We need to underline, that this is an original and common right-duty.

3.1. The Christian initiation and the service of the Word

Generated to faith with the washing in water and the Spirit, every baptised discovers himself as an active subject, with birthrights to the word of God calling him to salvation.

This is the horizon of the common prophecy, which belongs to all the baptised, excluding no one.

Bearers of a prophetic task, we baptised have the right of listening to and of going deep into the Word of God. Among all other inalienable rights, we have that of instruction and of nurturing ourselves with the Scriptures. We have the right to receive the content of the faith, which we profess. In other words, we have the right to acquire all the instruments, which enable us to give the reason of our hope (see 1 Pt. 3, 15).

Our right is the access to the Word of God and to its understanding. The right is active and passive at the same time, because if it involves the ministerial nature of the Church into her dispensing the Word, it involves also our individual adherence to it and our commitment to assimilate it.

Equally inalienable duties flow from it. In fact, the Word that generates us to faith, asks of us to announce It. We baptised must show ourselves persons who live the received announcement coherently. We cannot but be missionaries, witnesses, martyrs, even in the radical and ultimate sense of giving up our life for Jesus.

3.2. The Christian initiation and the service of praise

By obtaining the remission of our sins, the Christian initiation makes us children of God.  It offers us, in Christ, the condition of new creatures.  It transfigures us with Him in the Spirit, making us fit to witness to Him up to the maturity of His chrism body, the Church. All this richness cannot remains unanswered, and the answer cannot but be a rendering of praise.

In the horizon of the common priesthood, the praise is mainly the blessing of God, a confession of His mercy. It is particularly a self-offering, the offering of our life. It is a returning our life and that of others with the entire creation to the praise of God.

This implies the acknowledgement of our being creatures and, therefore, the adoring confession of His transcendence and His merciful bounty.

However, living among other believers his faith in a God-communion, who has called us to experience his salvation as a community; we have the duty to translate his blessing through forms of communitarian cult.

The Christian cult –a cult in “spirit and truth”(Jo 4,24); a ”spiritual cult” (Rom 12,1); “holy priesthood”(1Pt 2,5)- is mainly the Eucharist, the solemn action of praise, in which the community gathered in the Spirit, offers to the Father once again the holy and immaculate victim, his only begotten Son, given up for our sake.

The community lives its nuptial mystery above all in the Eucharistic liturgy, by acceding to the flesh and blood of Christ. It nurtures itself with the body of Christ, thus becoming one with Him. This is not an arbitrary choice. By doing this, the community, the priestly people, picks up the indications of the Lord Jesus, who gave testamentary and memorial valence to the bread and wine in the Last Supper.

All the members of the people of God know to be a praise-giving subject. . Now, since the Church makes the Eucharist and this makes the Church in the Eucharistic celebration, the Church manifests her mystery articulation, not less than her ministerial articulation.  The readers, acolytes, ministers, psalmists, ostiaries, commentators, those who collect the offerings, the extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, all of them represent the priestly people in connection with the celebrated word, the community and its needs.

The celebration of the Eucharist does not foresee “spectators”. All the members of the people of God are co-celebrants. The various ministers, from the unavoidable one who presides down to the humblest and minor ones, are all a service of the common priesthood, which thus expresses to its best the Messianic statute.

3.3. The Christian initiation and the service to the “ecclesial community”

The priestly people as subject, particularly evident with the participation in the liturgy and in the Eucharist as culmen et fons of the whole Christian life (LG 11), translates itself into the service to the community and to te world. The shouldering of the reality we live in, the assuming of a wider context in which the community makes its pilgrimage, lead us back to the exercise of common priesthood in its kingly aspect.

For us Christians, the kingship is inseparable from solicitude and service. In fact, the example is that of Christ who is among his own like one who serves and declares expressly of having come among us not to be served, but to serve (see Luke 22, 24-27; Jo 13, 1-17).

Therefore, the Messianic kingship, the common kingship of those who have accomplished the entire Christian initiation, has the proper names of service, co-responsibility, attention to others, solicitude and care.

There is, obviously, a “powerful” aspect of our participation in the kingship. It is the call to partake in the lordship and power of Christ. Having been restored to the original condition, through Baptism, we baptised bear the mark of His dignity. But, contrary to the powerful kingship of him who guides the nations, the Christian kingship cannot dismiss the solidarity attention, the shouldering of others, of the world we live in, even in the mystery of the restored image.

The kingly service of the laity moves outside the ecclesial body, to realities we are supposed to respect in their own autonomy, which the conscience of the believer must look at without schizophrenia. In fact and in the last analysis, we can subtract nothing from the lordship of God.

The community needs to be in good order. To be authentically so, it needs the presence and the initiative of persons who have been baptised, confirmed and have received the Eucharist. They cannot, bury their talent, like the servant of the parable (see Luke 19, 11-27). They must get into the habit of discerning and trading it for the growth of the community.

In particular, they must pay attention to the needs of the community as well as of the area. of the country, the culture in which they live. There is no reality of children, youths, aged, men, women, sick, healthy, rich poor, workers or unemployed, handicapped, marginalised, which does not wait for the answer of the kingly service.

4.       The specific translations

The religious life is no exception. In fact, at the heart of my talk, the specific traditions, as I call them, tell us about putting together the common original gift proper to the Christian initiation.  It is, therefore of kingly, priestly and prophetic character given to us by the initiation itself, with a personal call, the personal gift which makes us a personally loved “you” in the eyes of God. There is a common gift, which becomes our proper name.

When a child comes to this world, the family gives it a name. This is not only to individuate and recognise it, but also to underline the difference, the newness, the richness, which the newly born child implies. We do not notice this too much in our culture, but it was not like this in the cultures, which have preceded us.

Well, just as there is a family, a registry name, there is also a name of grace, a secret name, which we acknowledge with difficulty. In many hagiographies the topos of this name of grace is, perhaps,  revealed to the mother before the birth of the child. Whether it coincides or not with the given registry name, the secret name shows the task the child receives as a call. We have the example of Emmelina, the mother of St. Macrina, who receives in revelation the name of the child in her womb: Tecla. We know very well that the name of the child will not be Tecla, yet this name, the name of the legendary companion of Paul, indicates her ecclesial task. The myth of Tecla is so strong, as Giacomo Alberione will call by this name the first teacher of the Daughters of St. Paul. This means that the Church History is a family history, in which themes come back in a seducing way even after 20 century.

4.1. Charism of the individual – collective charism

Well, I repeat, each of us receives a name of grace from God. This name of grace is our own charism, anyhow written in the trio of the common kingship, priesthood and prophecy. We can translate this name of grace into the vocation of matrimony, of consecrated life, ordained, instituted or non-instituted ministries. Whatever the translation is, the problem we face is to discern, recognise our own charism and to translate it into its corresponding service. This task involves the individual as well as the community it belongs to.

Some years ago, in a debate before the synod on RL, I wanted to individuate the typology of the charism that calls persons together. I tried to distinguish the “single” charism, from the “dual” and the “collective charism. I called “dual charism” that of two spouses (perhaps also of two friends). This charism is characterised by the need of living one for the other. Each one has a proper name of grace, yet one realises and lives it in relation with the other. Paradoxically a thing that should happen only in married life has very often happened in elective affinities. For instance, this has happened in the life of not a few founders. I am speaking of a strong relation such as one finds in the other the answer to the reason of one’s being and task.

I have called “collective charism” that which involves more persons. This means that I find a syntony with more persons, my choice of life is also theirs, what seduces me seduces them also. To use the language of the charism, it is the matter of recognising that my own charism is also theirs, thus I decide of living it with them.  My proper name is also theirs. My proper charism is the charism of each one of them.

4.2. Charism of the Founder – charism of foundation

This recognition can happen in different modalities. For instance, there may be a person who bears a gift apt to arouse an echo and a response. It is as if the gift of this very particular person found a natural affinity with others, thus forming a chain, a following, a communion circle. In this case, we would have a founder, around whom many more persons recognise it as their own charism. It may also happen that, the echo of the consent, of recognising the gift as one’s own, does not end with the death of the founder. The charism of foundation, as we call it, will keep on creating the dynamic of recognition, which binds the individual with all those who find their own gift in it.

Why should I choose that particular Congregation, if not because of the existential knowledge and adequate discernment that the reason of my being before God, coincides with the reason of being of the one who gave birth to it, with the particular understandings, form and service?

It is clear that any charism risks a sclerosis after the death of the founder. The open problem is that of gearing the charism of foundation to the original charism of the founder. The generations pass, sometimes even only one is sufficient, centuries, up to 15 centuries pass away … it is evident that the situations keep on changing deeply. Often the vital context of life itself is over. The context, which has urged the need of a given charism, which has seen the founder realising it in a given way, does not exist anymore.

I want to offer some examples, apologising for it. I choose them from long ago, but this does not forbid us to reject the analysis I am going to make of it. I speak at  personal title.

Let us take for instance the Benedictine community. For goodness’ sake, if we listen to the essence of the rule, we find that it is a kind of empty shell, in the sense that it leaves an enormous freedom of applying its guiding principles.  However, if we look at its historic realisation, the empty shell, to me, becomes the oppression, for example of a habit, which has no more any reason to exist.  Is there any place where the XX century women -I speak of the Western women- wear such a complex habit: wimple, bonnet, veil, vest, scapular   …. The example may sound unfitting, what is the habit after all? Yet, if we move to a more exacting plan, the real knot is that of paternity/maternity assumed as founding referent, as the ultimate criterion of the community. In other words, paternity/maternity evokes the patriarchal family, the unequal-hierarchical political and social order proper of antiquity and later of the Christian culture itself.  This model has gradually gone on acquiring the rules, which have re-interpreted it in time, without undermining it.  Let us think, for instance, of the medieval feudality.  Can a religious rule born in this context arouse seductions, other than alienations, unless we reform and found it again?  As a matter of facts, the Benedictine monachism has gone through a series of correctives and reforms, both for males and females. In spite of all this, I do not think that its patriarchal scaffolding has ever received any crack. You may tell me that the “Ora et Labora” remains as a productive model, which has re-vitalised Europe. I do not deny its merits, but it is undoubtedly the matter of an economic circle of gain and profit. With regard to poverty and the following of Christ, they have elaborated an attitude deeply different from that of the fathers in the desert. They had no tunic, and if they had one at the beginning of their hermitage, they were not afraid of remaining naked once the habit  was in rags. Their witness to Christ was strictly bound to radical poverty –let us read the life of St. Anthony.

In the Benedictine community, the individual person lives poorly, but the context in which he lives is surely not poor. It suffices to pay attention to the changing history, to be aware of how anti-evangelical is a choice, which lets the individual be poor, but goes on increasing the wealth of the community he belongs to, thus reflecting and introducing the rules of social inequality.

If we move towards the Franciscan sorority and its choice of poverty –a choice soon abandoned by the Franciscan fraternity- even in this case we cannot help noticing the changed socio-political context. The community of St. Clare is born as a religious protest, as an alternative to the powerful feudal monastic model.  It personifies the anti-feudal feelings of the rising urban bourgeoisie. Having come out of that specific context, rather out of that specific contestation, what is the sense of that form of life, of that poverty, which anyhow, because of cultural motives, cannot realise a feminine begging and itinerant model? Of course, I cannot help respecting the Clarisse nuns for their faithfulness to the “privilegium paupertatis”. I cannot help recognising the retaliation, which has forbidden them of living out of their own work, separating the obligation of work from the practice of gain and profit. What I ask myself is whether it is truly possible today to actuate that model and if that model is adequate to today’s world.

According to me, the history of  the women RL, apart from its original moments, has been characterized by three different models: This first moment, an elite and learned model, that of monachism, has produced subjects of considerable thickness and culture. The obligation of sanctifying the time with the office made the reading of the Scripture compulsory. Therefore, it obliged the subjects, even the women, to interpret it and to produce theology. It consented also the women to exercise an objective power even outside the monastery, though inscribed in an unequal and hierarchical model.

A second model has underlined more strongly the radical following of Christ, but has attenuated the relation with the Word of God. It has actually made the prayer of the psalm and the liturgy of the hours optional, causing an objective impoverishment, above all among women. Let us add to this the obligation of the cloister with all that it implies from the viewpoint of feminine subjection. However, along with a situation of dependence, it has elaborated a model of sorority.

The third model is that of modern age Congregations. This has caused the exit from the aut murus aut maritus. The religious have finally dismissed the cloister and personified the prophecy of the needs. This has happened at the cost of a definitive estrangement from the culture, investing everything on the works. This third model has placed us before an extraordinary profusion of gifts, a multiplicity of charismatic gifts, which have prophesised the model, perceived later, of an advanced social solicitude. The social state, as we call it today, is truly indebted to this third model. However, to me, there has been an institutive malice, which has multiplied the RL immeasurably, extending the figure of exemption to the new Congregations, born in its time with specific finalities. This has structured the male and female RL at universal level, alienating them from the locality, from the local church. This has made it difficult the adequacy with the charism of foundation, the discernment of the personal charism, the translation and the realisation of the collective charism.

I think that most of the problems of the RL, in our present cultural transition, is the dependence of  authoritarian nature, which in reality underlies the reading of RL in universalistic terms. I refer to the things you reflected upon during the spring assembly. There was an intervention, which brought to evidence the violence inflicted to RL, starting just from the universalistic principle, which apparently exempts it, but which places it outside history.

How would I see RL? In which sense would I speak of adequacy of RL and its gift? How would I think to solve the anomaly determined by the violent and multiform lavishing of charismatic requests of modern Congregations, in our today’s situation?

Just to begin, we must never place RL outside the local community of belonging. Sure, I have the power of influencing the Churches, thinking of putting into their circle the charism of foundation or the collective charism, which is at the origin of the Congregation. In reality a charism of foundation (I say charism, but we must understand ministry-charism, otherwise we cannot understand what we speak about), in reality has its roots in a local need. The Spirit does not blow in a universal sense, but answers the concrete needs of a community, a church, a region, a situation.  It is not by chance that the Clarisse experience, which I have spoken of, took place in the rising communal civilisation, in the new bourgeois class.

The provocation and the prophecy of needs, which are the founding spring of consecrated life as of all ecclesial ministries, are always contextualised. According to me, we should have the courage of stopping to think of ourselves in universalistic terms, in order to accept the confrontation with our local church. This is obviously valid, above all, for the countless new forms of RL, because, and I say it firmly, the ministry-gift of RL will never be missing. Its historical forms naturally pass away. Not every charism is present in the church at the same time. The Spirit lavishes those gifts needed by the church to overcome the deceit of the “meanwhile”. The Spirit is the beautician of the church, the one who frees her from wrinkles and stains, who makes her beautiful, fit to appear before the Lord. Perhaps, in a given time the wrinkle is that like the legs of hens around the eyes and in some other moment it is the one around the lips. In another moment it may be the problem of cellulite, of obesity or deceases of internal organs. The Spirit must heal. The gifts He lavishes are meant to heal, to embellish, to put the church in the condition of overcoming the dangers of the meanwhile. It is difficult to walk with history: its changes are a constant challenge. Let us be careful never to deceive ourselves by thinking that we have solved our problems, because we have hardly solved one problem, when the other sprouts out.

What is equivocal in the church, not only in RL, is the static image, the static model in which everything is either white or black,  and above all is such once for good. Yet we know that, between white and black there are many shades of white and many of black and all the possible and imaginable grey colours. Who has ever said that we can reduce the world to the yes/no opposition? I do not want to deny the word of the Gospel, but that one has a different sense: an invitation to coherence.

On the plan of history, even on a personal plan there is a very ample spectrum of changes. The intelligence consists in the capacity of adapting ourselves to the change. We have deceived ourselves wanting to manage the church, as if she were a watch mechanism, which would never get stuck. We have thought of transferring these static rules to all forms of ecclesial life, which instead we can never plaster.

Our problem today is to accept that our charism of foundation, which once was seducing and which the Church has used to realise her mission, sanctifying hundred and thousands of persons, today must give the place to new realities indicated by the Spirit. We must live this experience with an attitude of hope and trust. Hope, because the Spirit will go on enriching the Church with the gift of RL; trust, because our fatigue is not in vain, on the condition that we do not shut up ourselves within a therapeutic obstinacy.

If the problem is that of living the existing change, we need to get together according to similarity, to establish concentric circles freeing us from oppressive situations and allowing us to move towards the newness, in as less as possible painful way. We may possibly transfer to others whatever is still valid in our heritage. If, instead, we choose to insist at any cost, even with the trade of white and black people, to keep up our institutions, we must know at the very start that the Holy Spirit will not help us. In fact this attitude denies the constitutive nature of the Spirit, his freedom to blow the way and wherever he wants, of transforming whatever he wants, without allowing any rule or law to bind Him.

If it were possible for me to express my opinion at universal Church level, I would sincerely transform the Congregation for the RL into an agency that would help to localise the communities, without recognising or allowing them to sink into the level of the universal church. We cannot homologate the phenomena. I cannot compel or impose laws at world spectrum. If we want to see a future, we must re-centre and place once again the RL at the level of the local church.

Of course, I do not intend to have any doubt about the dialogue with different cultures. We must do it because our world is not only “globalized, but it lives the acute experience of an epochal migration. In the year’90, I already spoke about the similarity of our time with the IV century, with the invasions of the barbarians, when enormous masses of new subjects broke into the boundaries of the Roman Empire, changing it deeply. We shall not stop the migration from the East, West, south, North. The multicultural challenge is already among us and is going to commit us for long in the future.  Sure, there are also the tensions towards the mission ad gentes, in which case we must accept the cultural challenges of the place where we intend to proclaim the Gospel.

As I have already said and repeated to the point, perhaps, of arousing antipathy, if I announce the Gospel in the clothes of a white, bourgeois, Western, well-to-do  and privileged person, my announcement will have no sense and following. If, vice-versa, I assume littleness, poverty, illiteracy, sickness, marginalisation and persecution in solidarity with the people I want to evangelise, then I go to dialogue, to seek the values and resources of others. I do not limit myself to propose my model as the best of the best, to oppose my developed model to the underdevelopment of others.

I think of the many damages we have caused by elaborating a concept of unlimited development, without perceiving prophetically the need of a compatible development. Yet as Christians, we should have in our DNA the idea of a compatible development, because the koinonia, the communion, which the Spirit guarantees and circulates, is not the craziness of exploitation, or the indefinite and unlimited race to identify and exploit the resources, but to accept moderately the shared goods.

 Going back to what I am concerned about, I must say that the real problem is to make a discernment, which gives the first place to persons and, if possible, to hijack them elsewhere, in the conviction that our charism of foundation is obsolete. Truly, before the enormity of Congregations flourished from the ‘800 onward, I would suggest that rather than welcoming the youths into one’s own Congregation, after the due authentic discernment, to orient them towards other realities where they can use their energies.

There will be persons who want to partake in planning the future of a Congregation. We need the courage of practising a healthy euthanasia of our own institution. The question is not so much the gift, the charism of foundation, as the forms they have gone gradually assuming along the history of the Congregation. The world over action of the Spirit looks at the gift, but eliminates the obsolete forms, which are no longer able to let the gift be transparent.

Allow me some more examples. Many Congregations were not born at the service of formation and instruction, and many of them later on homologated themselves, betraying their constitutive vocation of forming the poor. Let us ask ourselves what has happened to our ordinary and rural schools. Evidently, the mass schooling made some activities and services superfluous. Thus, we have created schools without their specific characteristics, schools which we can no longer run, for which we need professional persons, often strangers to the original charism. Moreover, they are people who shoulder the load of having their qualification recognised by a legislation, which safeguards the rights of the workers, of the teaching and non-teaching staff. Allow me to add that, many times so much fatigue, now directed to well-to-do people, has not even been able to propose a seducing and vital faith. Very often we have transfused an asphyxiated Christian faith, unable to breathe with full lungs, to dialogue and recognise in the interlocutor a subject created to the image and similitude of God, thus educating him to respect the other.

I want to conclude with words of hope. We must elaborate the diagnosis in full lucidity of mind. This is an act of justice towards us, an act of loyalty and respect for the choices of our life. We must make discernment, always trusting the Spirit. He will never cease to suggest the church, to arouse new charismatic gifts and ministries for the nuptial bride. The practice of the Evangelical Counsels and the search for a vivendi forma will never be missing. The following of Christ, in its radical, total seduction will never cease. RL will never disappear.

The Spirit will never cease to make of it a threshold reality, a reality of frontier to the end of urging the entire community to re-appropriate the values, which the existence and faith of the multitude tend to put at the second place. RL connotes those who practise it as sentinels, vigilant persons. Its task is to point at the Christian ideal in all its beauty.

This means thinking of the future stating the issues of our present culture, which requires the best of life. It is not a little thing to realise oneself, one’s aspirations and talents; it is not insignificant to look at ourselves seriously. Our world is so much disappointed as to flow towards positions of savage individualism.

RL, on the contrary, can re-propose a community in its aspect of mutual acceptance, of deep word, which circulates within and assigns a place to each one.

How to call community that in which the personal charism, the proper name does not appear, which nobody individuates or circulates. Once we handed over all this to asceticism, to mortification. Now, our world wants no longer to hear of all these things. We must be prophets of joy. Joy is another name for the Spirit!

Finally, if you allow me, you need not be afraid of the laity. RL was born fundamentally as a lay experience. The institution has normalised and deprived it of its lay character.  Because of a different nature of juridical motives, the women have remained laywomen. Perhaps, the only possibility of a dynamic presence of certain charismatic gifts is just that of being perceived and received by new subjects, who do not stay inscribed in the known forms of RL, but create new, broader and informal ones.  

To me, we need to discourage the new forms of RL. to seek immediately institutional structures. They will surely acquire these even too soon, whether they want it or not. We need to invite them to live a long season under the guidance of the Spirit.

***

I have tried to modulate the theme assigned to me in my own way. I now wish to conclude it by summing up the key points of my intervention. First, we affirm the pertinence of RL to the church. It is an expression of the nuptial character, which connotes the very structure of the church and re-proposes the charismatic-ministerial dynamic polarity inscribed by the presence of the Spirit in the church.

Before the crisis, which crosses the RL, I have underlined the need of welcoming the newness, accepting one’s own experience, one’s own history as a gift lavished by the Spirit and acknowledging in the Spirit the native characteristic of bearing new things.

With the wish of seeing the realisation of the newness, of being present in the re-generation of RL, I conclude this intervention on the background of the Advent season, which is just going to begin. Let us rise up our eyes, because our salvation is near.