Jubilee of Ecclesial Movements, Associations and New Communities

 The days 7th-8th June 2025 are being celebrated as a Jubilee of Ecclesial Movements, Associations and New Communities. The days are chosen to be those of the Vigil and celebration of the Feast of Pentecost, when the Church celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit on the infant Church. Some examples of the movements that might be represented in the celebration of this Jubilee are: Communion and Liberation, the Focolare, the Charismatic Renewal, the Legion of Mary and FAITH Movement. I also include SIGNIS as an ecclesial movement, though it has a specific commitment in the fields of film, media and communications. The Jubilee takes place immediately after the annual meeting of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life with the moderators of international associations of the faithful, ecclesial movements and new communities. Some 70 000 pilgrims are expected to take part.

The movements are due to meet with Pope Leo XIV in St Peter's Square on the Vigil of Pentecost, an event which re-creates a meeting of the movements with Pope St John Paul II on the eve of Pentecost in 1998. The memorable expression of that occasion is the reference that Pope St John Paul II made to the co-essentiality of the institutional and charismatic dimensions of the Church, developing the teaching of Lumen Gentium n.12:

The institutional and charismatic aspects are co-essential as it were to the Church's constitution. They contribute, although differently, to the life, renewal and sanctification of God's People. It is from this providential rediscovery of the Church's charismatic dimension that, before and after the Council, a remarkable pattern of growth has been established for ecclesial movements and new communities.

This meeting with St John Paul II took place in the context of the first World Congress of Ecclesial Movements and New Communities. The Holy Father referred to some of the difficulties that had occurred in the growth of these new movements and their relationship to the wider Church. 

Their birth and spread has brought to the Church's life an unexpected newness which is sometimes even disruptive. This has given rise to questions, uneasiness and tensions; at times it has led to presumptions and excesses on the one hand, and on the other, to numerous prejudices and reservations. It was a testing period for their fidelity, an important occasion for verifying the authenticity of their charisms.

Today a new stage is unfolding before you: that of ecclesial maturity. This does not mean that all problems have been solved. Rather, it is a challenge. A road to take. The Church expects from you the "mature" fruits of communion and commitment.

On the Vigil of Pentecost in 2006, the movements gathered again in St Peter's Square, this time with Pope Benedict XVI. After a reflection on the place of the Holy Spirit in creation and within the life of the Trinity (Pope Benedict's words on the abuse of creation foreshadow Pope Francis teaching on the same theme), Pope Benedict spoke on three words: life, freedom and unity.

When all that people want from life is to take possession of it, it becomes ever emptier and poorer; it is easy to end up seeking refuge in drugs, in the great deception. And doubts surface as to whether, in the end, life is truly a good.

No, we do not find life in this way. Jesus' words about life in abundance are found in the Good Shepherd discourse. His words are set in a double context.

Concerning the shepherd, Jesus tells us that he lays down his life. "No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord" (cf. Jn 10: 18). It is only in giving life that it is found; life is not found by seeking to possess it. This is what we must learn from Christ; and the Holy Spirit teaches us that it is a pure gift, that it is God's gift of himself. The more one gives one's life for others, for goodness itself, the more abundantly the river of life flows.

Secondly, the Lord tells us that life unfolds in walking with the Shepherd who is familiar with the pasture - the places where the sources of life flow.

We find life in communion with the One who is life in person - in communion with the living God, a communion into which we are introduced by the Holy Spirit, who is called in the hymn of Vespers "fons vivus", a living source. ... 

Dear friends, the Movements were born precisely of the thirst for true life; they are Movements for life in every sense.

Speaking of freedom:

True freedom is demonstrated in responsibility, in a way of behaving in which one takes upon oneself a shared responsibility for the world, for oneself and for others.
The son, to whom things belong and who, consequently, does not let them be destroyed, is free. All the worldly responsibilities of which we have spoken are nevertheless partial responsibilities for a specific area, a specific State, etc.

The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, makes us sons and daughters of God. He involves us in the same responsibility that God has for his world, for the whole of humanity. He teaches us to look at the world, others and ourselves with God's eyes. We do not do good as slaves who are not free to act otherwise, but we do it because we are personally responsible for the world; because we love truth and goodness, because we love God himself and therefore, also his creatures. This is the true freedom to which the Holy Spirit wants to lead us. 

And of unity:

The Holy Spirit, in giving life and freedom, also gives unity. These are three gifts that are inseparable from one another.  ...

He wants your diversity and he wants you for the one body, in union with the permanent orders - the joints - of the Church, with the successors of the Apostles and with the Successor of St Peter. He does not lessen our efforts to learn the way of relating to one another; but he also shows us that he works with a view to the one body and in the unity of the one body. It is precisely in this way that unity obtains its strength and beauty.

May you take part in the edification of the one body! Pastors must be careful not to extinguish the Spirit (cf. I Thes 5: 19) and you will not cease to bring your gifts to the entire community. Once again, the Spirit blows where he wills. But his will is unity. He leads us towards Christ through his Body.

In a concluding word that foresees the theme of the Jubilee 2025, Pope Benedict observed:

The Holy Spirit gives believers a superior vision of the world, of life, of history, and makes them custodians of the hope that never disappoints.

It has been a common place since Vatican II to speak of a "universal call to holiness", that is, a call to Christian living that is derived from Baptism and Confirmation and that is addressed to all Christians. However, the response to that call is given in the specificity of the life of each individual, and for many people that specificity is found in the charism of one or other of the new movements or communities. Without the presence of these movements, pastoral life can too easily lack the element of specificity necessary to a lively Christian witness.

Rimini: Meeting 2023

 This August sees the 44th edition of the Meeting for Friendship among Peoples, held in the Adriatic resort of Rimini. Though not strictly speaking an activity of the movement Communion and Liberation, the annual Rimini meeting is very much associated with that movement. The theme for this year's meeting is "Human existence is an inexhaustible friendship", and it is possible to see in that choice of theme a reflection of Pope Francis' writing and activity in favour of fraternity among peoples. 

The theme is presented in the theme and poster for the Meeting 2023. It is interesting, I think, to offer this reflection on the nature of friendship at a time when the public conversation about LGBTQ+ issues so often features the assertions that "we should be free to love who we choose" or that "love always wins" - without any attention to exactly what that word "love" really means.  Pope Francis' message to the meeting takes up the theme:

Addressing the young, the Holy Father exalted the value of true friendship, which expands the heart: “Faithful friends … are also a reflection of the Lord’s love, his gentle and consoling presence in our lives. The experience of friendship teaches us to be open, understanding and caring towards others, to come out of our own comfortable isolation and to share our lives with others” (Christus vivit, 151). And we can couple this with another reflection from Don Giussani: “The true nature of friendship is to live freely together for destiny. There cannot be friendship among us, we cannot call ourselves friends, if we do not love the destiny of the other above any other thing, leaving aside any advantage” (Attraverso la compagnia dei credenti, Milano 2021, 184).

And it is possible to recognise in this the idea of a love understood as wishing what is true and good for the other (cf, I think, Thomas Aquinas).

A scroll down the programme of the meeting, listing day by day each of the main events, gives an idea of the range of the exploration of the theme. Do persevere down it, to get a feel of the very wide range of te engagement with the idea of friendship.

What particularly attracted my attention in the meeting programme was one of the exhibitions, that dedicated to Eugenio Corti's novel The Red Horse. I am linking to the Italian version of the page describing this exhibition, as it is more complete than the English page: Il Cavallo Rosso di Eugenio Corti.

The exhibition offers a re-reading of the 1280 pages of the work, with particular attention to the dynamics that led the author to conceive the activity of writing as a task assigned to him by Providence. In fact, the path intertwines the biography of the Brianza author with the events narrated in the novel, observing, in some respects, almost an overlap between his life and the content of the work.

Eugenio Corti's novel places its characters in a very wide ranging account of the Italian involvement in the Second World War, from the participation in the German campaign in Russia (Corti himself survived that campaign), through the Italian surrender and the subsequent events in Greece (cf Captain Corelli's Mandolin, and its account of the killing of essentially unarmed Italian soldiers by the Germans), to the fighting by Italian soldiers on the Allied side after the surrender. This latter includes, alongside the better known partisan activity in the mountains of Northern Italy, the much less well known part played by Italian soldiers at Monte Cassino. The novel continues after the war, as its protagonists engage with the post-war election and the campaign on the referendum on divorce. 

Alongside the exhibition, a series of presentations introduced participants to each of the key characters in the novel. There are also a series of more academic presentations about Eugenio Corti and his novel. The one of these that struck me was the one entitled "From The Betrothed to The Red Horse: a Lombard connection". Whilst it is now a few years since I read The Red Horse, it is only a couple of months since I finished a reading of Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed. In their different historical settings, both can be seen as classics of Italian literature; both have a setting based in the Lombardy region of northern Italy; both place their narratives within a historically accurate context; and both contain an expression of a profoundly Catholic culture. It is very striking to read The Betrothed after our experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. The narrative of the novel is to a significant extent set against the background of an outbreak of the plague brought to northern Italy and to the city of Milan by an invading army. One can recognise in the account of the experience of the plague a number of things that are familiar to us from the COVID-19 pandemic: plague denial in the early stages, with reluctance to limit population movements; isolation of infected households in the city, though enforced more drastically than for our pandemic; overwhelmed medical provision in so far as such existed at the time; conspiracy theories; and, towards the end of the novel, an instance of meeting out of doors with social distancing that might have been part of our regulations in 2020 or 2021.

And my final thought. Another of the exhibitions is dedicated to Giovanni Guareschi's characters  Don Camillo and Peppone, with the title "Always rivals, but never enemies". Guareschi's writing and life story occur simultaneously with the family story described in The Red Horse - his work on posters for the elections in 1948 is referenced in the novel. I first read Don Camillo stories before I left home, as they were on the bookshelves at home. I now possess a complete set, and am currently re-reading some of them.

Worldliness in the thought of Pope Francis

 I have just read the text of Pope Francis' address to the Bishops of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, during his current visit to the African continent. It reminds me that the Church in that country lives amidst an ongoing context of violence, a context that must give a very different sense to Catholic life than that which is experienced in a country such as our own. The full text can be found here: Meeting with Bishops.

It was this passage, however, that caught my attention, as it reflects a theme characteristic of Pope Francis:

Above all else, may we never open the door to the spirit of worldliness, for this makes us interpret ministry according to the criteria of our own advantage. It makes us become cold and detached in administering what is entrusted to us. It leads us to use our role to serve ourselves instead of serving others, and to neglect the one relationship that matters, that of humble and daily prayer. Let us remember that worldliness is the worst thing that can happen to the Church, the worst. I have always been moved by the end of Cardinal De Lubac’s book on the Church, the last three or four pages, where he puts it like this: spiritual worldliness is the worst thing that can happen, even worse than the time of Popes who were worldly and had concubines. It is the worst thing. And worldliness is always lurking. So let us be careful!

The reference to Cardinal de Lubac is to the last two or three pages of his book The Splendor of the Church; and de Lubac in his turn cites a passage from Dom Anscar  Vonier's The Spirit and the Bride. Pope Francis' most complete treatment of the theme is in Evangelii Gaudium nn.93-97, which includes a citation from the passage of de Lubac.

The passage from Anscar Vonier, from a book first published in the 1930's, reads as follows:

To become worldly is a peril that is never absent; when we say that worldliness is her snare we mean by worldliness a more subtle thing than is usually meant by this expression. We generally understand by worldliness the love of wealth and luxury amongst the Church's dignitaries; this is, of course, an evil, but it is not the principal evil. Worldliness of mind, if it were ever to overtake her, would be much more disastrous for the Church than worldliness of apparel. By worldliness of mind we understand the practical relinquishing of other-worldliness, so that moral and even spiritual standards should be based, not on what is the glory of the Lord, but on what is the profit of man: an entirely anthropocentric outlook would be exactly what we mean by worldliness. Even if men were filled with every spiritual perfection, but if such perfections were not referred to God (suppose this hypothesis to be possible), it would be unredeemed worldliness.

It may be worth appreciating that Dom Vonier goes on to suggest that it is the Holy Spirit who saves the Church from this evil by means of the seven gifts of the Spirit, and theme of the Holy Spirit in the Church is the context of his observations on worldliness.

As with his remarks about ideology (see Luigi Giussani's The Religious Sense), it is useful to recognise that Pope Francis' words on a type of spiritual worldliness are well founded, and should not be seen as directed against just one particular group in the Church of today. Anscar Vonier's The Spirit and the Bride is a natural read for someone familiar with the Charismatic Renewal; and The Religious Sense is foundational work for those familiar with Communion and Liberation. Pope Francis' familiarity with both these movements in the Church is useful in helping us to understand what he has to say about these two themes.

Placuit Deo

I have been finding the recent Letter to Bishops of the Catholic Church on Certain Aspects of Christian Salvation a somewhat difficult read. As an attempt to explain the way in which two particular references in the ordinary magisterium of Pope Francis should be understood, my first instinct is to think that such an exploration might have more suitably come from the International Theological Commission rather than from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The authorship by the Congregation appears to me to constrain the range of the conversation contained in the letter to more strictly doctrinal/dogmatic sources (cf the footnotes to the Letter).

I suspect strongly that, if we want to really grasp Pope Francis use of the terms "neo-Pelagianism" and "Gnosticism", we need to look at his familiarity with the charism and life of Communion and Liberation, just as this familiarity also enables us to understand what Francis meant when he referred to the possibility that the Christian life can be lived as an "ideology".

See here for my post on Pope Francis' talk when presenting Luigi Giussani's book The Religious Sense in Argentina in 1999. The text of Pope Francis' address can be downloaded from this page.

See here for an account of his talk when presenting the book The Attraction that is Jesus, also by Giussani. I do not have a copy of this book, so cannot fully verify Pope Francis' words in relation to what might be considered their original source. I posted on this when part of it was used as a meditation in MAGNIFICAT.

This address during Pope Francis' visit to Brazil also expands on the three themes of ideology, Pelagianism and Gnosticism, and suggests an origin in the Aparecida meeting of Pope Francis' thinking.

Those who are not familiar with these wider conversations in the life of the Church will inevitably find Pope Francis' references to ideology, neo-Pelagianism and Gnosticism somewhat disconcerting.

There is a further term in Pope Francis' lexicon that is worth a similar background search. One place in which the term "ideal" is used is in Amoris Laetitia n.292:

Christian marriage, as a reflection of the union between Christ and his Church, is fully realized in the union between a man and a woman who give themselves to each other in a free, faithful and exclusive love, who belong to each other until death and are open to the transmission of life, and are consecrated by the sacrament, which grants them the grace to become a domestic church and a leaven of new life for society. Some forms of union radically contradict this ideal, while others realize it in at least a partial and analogous way.

Those who might want to criticise the use of the word "ideal" here might do well to carefully read how that term is understood in the early experience of the Focolare Movement (cf the text entitled "The Beginnings" in Chiara Lubich's Essential Writings) and in Luigi Giussani's Generating Traces in the History of the World.

The "correction" of that which is in no need of correction ....

I have already posted on why I have no problem with Amoris Laetitia:  see here and, for a "compendium" of my posts on the subject, here.

I also wonder how much an "anti-Francis" attitude, rather than just the question of Amoris Laetitia, sits behind those passages in the so-called "correction" that address other aspects of Pope Francis' exercise of the Office of St Peter. I quote, for example, the full section of Pope Francis' address to members of Communion and Liberation in March 2015, an excerpt of which in the so-called "correction" seems to suggest that we are forgiven without conversion and which demonstrates very little appreciation of the charism of Communion and Liberation:

One cannot understand this dynamic of the encounter if astonishment and adherence are inspired without mercy. Only one who has been caressed by the tenderness of mercy truly knows the Lord. The privileged place of encounter is the caress of Jesus’ mercy regarding my sin. This is why you may have heard me say, several times, that the place for this, the privileged place of the encounter with Jesus Christ is my sin. The will to respond and to change, which can give rise to a different life, comes thanks to this merciful embrace. Christian morality is not a titanic, voluntary effort, of one who decides to be coherent and who manages to do so, a sort of isolated challenge before the world. No. This is not Christian morality, it is something else. Christian morality is a response, it is the heartfelt response before the surprising, unforeseeable — even “unfair” according to human criteria — mercy of One who knows me, knows my betrayals and loves me just the same, appreciates me, embraces me, calls me anew, hopes in me, has expectations of me. Christian morality is not a never falling down, but an always getting up, thanks to his hand which catches us. This too is the way of the Church: to let the great mercy of God become manifest. I said in recent days to the new Cardinals: “The way of the Church is not to condemn anyone for eternity; [but] to pour out the balm of God’s mercy on all those who ask for it with a sincere heart. The way of the Church is precisely to leave her four walls behind and to go out in search of those who are distant, those essentially on the ‘outskirts’ of life. It is to adopt fully God’s own approach”, which is that of mercy (Homily, 15 February 2015). The Church, too, must feel the joyous impetus to become an almond blossom, i.e. spring, like Jesus, for all of humanity.

And this passage from the so-called "correction" is to me a gross misrepresentation of the integration of persons into the life of the Church by way of the "via caritatis" that is proposed in Amoris Laetitia nn.305-306, the fuller context for n.299:

How can we not see here a close similarity with what has been suggested by Your Holiness in Amoris laetitia? On the one hand marriage is supposedly safeguarded as a sacrament, while on the other hand divorce and remarriage are regarded ‘mercifully’ as a status quo to be – although only ‘pastorally’ – integrated into the life of the Church, thus openly contradicting the word of our Lord.

Pope Francis: A Revolution of Tenderness

In editing the links bar this morning, I came across two things of interest. [Lessons for the future: look at websites as well as blogs - and there is a big wide world out there beyond the traditionalist enclave! To get the full force of this post you will need to follow and read the two links.]

The first is from the link to Catholic Charismatic Renewal: Pope Francis and TED: A Revolution of Tenderness. The embedded video of Pope Francis' talk is well worth watching. One thought I had as I watched it was that it represented a wonderful example of the "new evangelisation" in action - it demonstrated a clear intention to speak to a culture and experience that did not necessarily share a living Christian heritage but which would at the same time still recognise the Christian story. The second thought was that it represented a wonderful encounter between Christian life and contemporary culture. I thought it gave a strong insight into Pope Francis and how he sees his calling to the office of the Successor of Peter. [An aside for those familiar with the thought of Fr Edward Holloway and FAITH Movement - look out for Pope Francis' comparison of the inter-relational nature of physical science and the requirement of inter-relationship between persons, beautifully expressed in a comparison between the discovery of the planets that orbit our world to the people that orbit us in every day life.]

The second is an article on the website of Communion and Liberation: ‘If you don’t think Francis is the cure, you don’t grasp the disease’. Fr Carron expresses something of my own conviction that in Pope St John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and now Pope Francis, the Church has at each time been gifted with precisely the Successor of Peter who meets the need of the time. Like Fr Carron, I have found a number of occasions listening to our reading Pope Francis where I have thought "that could have been Benedict".

Far from seeing a rupture between Francis and his immediate predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Carrón insists that Francis is actually the “radicalization” of Benedict.

“He says the same thing, but in a way that it gets across to everyone in a simple way through gestures, without in any sense reducing the density of what Benedict said,” he said.

In essence, Carrón’s book is a synthesis of the vision for Christian life that comes from Giussani, as amplified by each of the last three popes. The key idea is that Christianity is about “disarmed beauty,” meaning a way of life that imposes itself through no power other than its own inherent attractiveness.

“I wanted to get across that the power of the faith is in its beauty, its attractiveness,” Carrón said. “It doesn’t need any other power, any other tools or particular situations, to be resplendent, just like the mountains don’t need anything else to take our breath away.”

And watching Pope Francis' talk on TED offers something of exactly this attractiveness of faith.

The way ahead for gay Catholics

Read here.

This makes interesting reading. The point that I found thought provoking was the observation about the need for a pastoral/theological approach that can be verified in the experience of those who live from an LGBT background. There is something in this thought that reflects the charism of Communion and Liberation which I might try to explore ...

Realities and ideas: Francis vs Benedict?

Just before Easter, the aether carried a conversation (here and repeated uncritically here) which suggested that Pope Francis' principle that "realities are greater than ideas" put him at odds with Pope Emeritus Benedict, particularly as the latter had expressed himself in a recently published interview.

Pope Francis' articulation of the principle is found in the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium nn.231-233 (but see my comment below about the English of the first sentence of n.232):

Realities are more important than ideas

231. There also exists a constant tension between ideas and realities. Realities simply are, whereas ideas are worked out. There has to be continuous dialogue between the two, lest ideas become detached from realities. It is dangerous to dwell in the realm of words alone, of images and rhetoric. So a third principle comes into play: realities are greater than ideas. This calls for rejecting the various means of masking reality: angelic forms of purity, dictatorships of relativism, empty rhetoric, objectives more ideal than real, brands of ahistorical fundamentalism, ethical systems bereft of kindness, intellectual discourse bereft of wisdom.

232. Ideas – conceptual elaborations – are at the service of communication, understanding, and praxis. Ideas disconnected from realities give rise to ineffectual forms of idealism and nominalism, capable at most of classifying and defining, but certainly not calling to action. What calls us to action are realities illuminated by reason. Formal nominalism has to give way to harmonious objectivity. Otherwise, the truth is manipulated, cosmetics take the place of real care for our bodies. We have politicians – and even religious leaders – who wonder why people do not understand and follow them, since their proposals are so clear and logical. Perhaps it is because they are stuck in the realm of pure ideas and end up reducing politics or faith to rhetoric. Others have left simplicity behind and have imported a rationality foreign to most people.

233. Realities are greater than ideas. This principle has to do with incarnation of the word and its being put into practice: “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is from God” (1 Jn 4:2). The principle of reality, of a word already made flesh and constantly striving to take flesh anew, is essential to evangelization. It helps us to see that the Church’s history is a history of salvation, to be mindful of those saints who inculturated the Gospel in the life of our peoples and to reap the fruits of the Church’s rich bimillennial tradition, without pretending to come up with a system of thought detached from this treasury, as if we wanted to reinvent the Gospel. At the same time, this principle impels us to put the word into practice, to perform works of justice and charity which make that word fruitful. Not to put the word into practice, not to make it reality, is to build on sand, to remain in the realm of pure ideas and to end up in a lifeless and unfruitful self-centredness and Gnosticism.

Even a cursory reading of this passage, written in the context of an exhortation whose subject is the new evangelisation, indicates Pope Francis' concern that ideas and realities should be aligned with each other, and not that ideas should he superceded by realities:

.....Ideas disconnected from realities give rise to ineffectual forms of idealism and nominalism, capable at most of classifying and defining, but certainly not calling to action. What calls us to action are realities illuminated by reason.....

And the most fundamental reality is that of the Incarnation of the Word:

.... The principle of reality, of a word already made flesh and constantly striving to take flesh anew, is essential to evangelization....

[The first two chapters of Luigi Giussani's foundational text, The Religious Sense (and remember that Pope Francis, as Cardinal Bergoglio presented the Spanish translation of this book at its launch in Argentina, and acknowledges his debt to the movement Communion and Liberation) are instructive background reading to this passage in Evangelii Gaudium. They are entitled "The First Premise: Realism" and "The Second Premise: Reasonableness".]

The English of the first sentence of Evangelii Gaudium n.232 as published on the Vatican website does not appear to be the same as the French and Italian (nor, so far as I can tell, of the Spanish and Portuguese), which would be more carefully translated into English as "The idea -  the conceptual elaborations - is a function of the grasping/perception, of the understanding and of the conduct/operation of the reality":

232. Ideas – conceptual elaborations – are at the service of communication, understanding, and praxis.

232. L’idée – les élaborations conceptuelles – est fonction de la perception, de la compréhension et de la conduite de la réalité.

232. L’idea – le elaborazioni concettuali – è in funzione del cogliere, comprendere e dirigere la realtà.

The non-English languages seem to better express the alignment of ideas to reality that is the intent of this section of Evangelii Gaudium. Likewise in this paragraph, what appears in English as referring to "what calls us to action" appears in the French and Italian as "what engages us" ... the sense being not dissimilar, though perhaps appearing more idiomatically correct.

In the light of the above, I was struck by the first of the answers in Pope Benedict's recently published interview. This seemed to express exactly the balance of "reality" and "idea" that Pope Francis has presented in Evangelii Gaudium and which Luigi Giussani offers in the first two chapters of The Religious Sense. It also strikingly includes a similar assertion of the necessity of the encounter with the community of the Church as part of the reality of faith as does n.233 of Evangelii Gaudium:

....faith is a profoundly personal contact with God, which touches me in my innermost being and places me in front of the living God in absolute immediacy in such a way that I can speak with Him, love Him and enter into communion with Him. But at the same time this reality which is so fundamentally personal also has inseparably to do with the community. It is an essential part of faith that I be introduced into the “we” of the sons and daughters of God, into the pilgrim community of brothers and sisters. The encounter with God means also, at the same time, that I myself become open, torn from my closed solitude and received into the living community of the Church. ....

.... Faith is not a product of reflection nor is it even an attempt to penetrate the depths of my own being. Both of these things may be present, but they remain insufficient without the “listening” through which God, from without, from a story He himself created, challenges me. In order for me to believe, I need witnesses who have met God and make Him accessible to me. In my article on baptism I spoke of the double transcendence of the community, in this way causing to emerge once again an important element: the faith community does not create itself. It is not an assembly of men who have some ideas in common and who decide to work for the spread of such ideas. Then everything would be based on its own decision and, in the final analysis, on the majority vote principle, which is, in the end it would be based on human opinion. ....

The challenge of dialogue in opposing Daesh

By accident, as the House of Commons was debating (or indeed actually voting on) the motion to extend RAF air strikes to Syria yesterday evening, I re-read Fr Julian Carron's article published in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera after the earlier Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris. It bears re-reading. Do read the whole at the website of Communion and Liberation - The challenge of true dialogue after the attacks in Paris - to put the following extracts in context:

We Europeans have what our forebears desired: Europe as a space of freedom where each person can be what she or he wants. The Old Continent has become a crucible of the most varied cultures, religions and visions of the world.

The events of Paris [ie the Charlie Hebdo attacks, though the reference might equally have application to the more recent attacks] document how this space of freedom should not be taken for granted as self-perpetuating: it can be threatened by those who fear freedom and are willing to impose their own vision of things with violence....

....the problem is primarily within Europe and the most important part is played here at home. The true challenge is cultural, its terrain daily life. When those who abandon their homelands arrive here in search of a better life, when their children are born and become adults in the West, what do they see? Can they find something able to attract their humanity, to challenge their reason and their freedom? The same problem exists for our children: do we have something to offer them that speaks to their search for fulfilment and meaning? In many young people who have grown up in the so-called Western world there reigns a great nothingness, a profound void that constitutes the origin of the desperation that ends up in violence. Just think of the Europeans who go to fight in the ranks of terroristic formations, or of the lost and disoriented life of many young people of our cities. This corrosive void, this far-spreading nothingness, requires a response.

It makes interesting reading compared to my earlier post in which I argued that aerial bombardment did not offer a proportionate - ie correctly directed - resistance to the evil of Daesh.

The Day of Christ, the Day of Mercy

I have just encountered a book Generating Traces in the History of the World,  a book which according to its blurb, "is a synthesis of Monsignor Luigi Giussani's reflection on Christian experience". In the last few months, excerpts from the book have appeared in Magnificat.

I was struck by the title of the last chapter of the book: "The Day of Christ, the Day of Mercy". Given Pope Francis' familiarity with the movement Communion and Liberation, I wonder whether that familiarity provides at least something of the background to his calling of the Year of Mercy, and a helpful way of understanding what the year is and is not about.

Just as the Bull of Indiction for the Holy Year includes a discussion of the relationship of justice and mercy to each other in the Christian mystery (nn.20-21), so does the chapter in Generating Traces suggest, albeit briefly, that where the reason of man can arrive at a notion of justice with regard to wrong doing, it takes the revelation of the Christian mystery to enable man to access the experience of mercy. The chapter does suggest an eschatological character to the revelation of divine mercy:

If every hour of history is the hour of Christ's human glory that happens through the conscious offering of believers, there will come a day that no one knows (neither the angels of God, nor the Son, but only the Father) when the definitive revelation of the Mystery will take place, as the valuing of every good the Father has generated, the Son has assumed, and the Spirit has made fruitful. All the good, even the furtive move stirred up in the almost unconscious darkness of human endeavours in history, will not be erased by God who, as the summit of Being, cannot contradict Himself by annihilating on single instant of good. It will be the day of the triumph of Christ, who will hand over everything to the Father, so that the Father may be "all in all".... If Christ is the protagonist of the "last day", the day of Christ's triumph will therefore be the day of mercy....

It is also worth reading the account of the parable of the prodigal son given in Generating Traces .. alongside that of Pope St John Paul II in his encyclical letter Dives in Misercordia (nn.5-6), in order to capture a nuance that is important in understanding a significance of the parable for the Holy Year:

In Rembrandt's famous painting, the prodigal son is the mirror image of the Father. The Father's face is full of sorrow at the son's error, at his denial, full of a sorrow that flows back into forgiveness. Human imagination can reach this point. But the most spectacular and mysterious thing is that the Father's face is the mirror image of the prodigal son. In Rembrandt's painting, the Father is in a position that mirrors the son - in Him is reflected the son's sorrow, the despair overcome, the destruction prevented, the happiness about to rekindle, in the instant in which it is about to rekindle, when goodness triumphs. Goodness triumphs in the prodigal son because he weeps for his mistake. But goodness triumphs in the Father: this is the concept of mercy which man cannot manage to understand, or speak of. And the Father's face is mercy, because it is pity for the one who has gone wrong and is there, turned towards the one who is coming back.

When we put this alongside words which occur about a page later in the chapter, and still commenting on the parable, it is impossible to take away from the proposal of the Jubilee of Mercy any sense that it is indifferent to wrong doing. Indeed, the call to conversion is of the essence of the response to mercy.

The concept of forgiveness, with a certain proportion between mistakes and punishments, is in some way conceivable for human reason, but not this limitless forgiveness that is mercy. Being forgiven arises here from something absolutely incomprehensible to man, from the Mystery; in other words, from mercy. It is what cannot be understood that ensures the exceptionality of what can be understood, because God's life is love, caritas, absolute free giving, love without profit, humanly "without reasons".

The chapter in Generating Traces .. suggests two ways in which we might in our turn try to be merciful as the Father is merciful. The first is that we should be sorrowful for what we have done, but sorrowful in a way that is at once also joy:

In virtue of the revelation of His mercy - which would seem to sanction all human behaviour, but it does not - God fills us with sorrow for the evil that we were not even aware of before ... his is a sorrow full of gladness, but it is still sorrow, sorrow at oneself.

The second is that of responding in astonishment at God's mercy, expressed in an attitude of entreaty, or begging, before the Lord:

We are not truly human if we do not wish to be merciful like our heavenly Father. The question is whether or not we really desire it. So the miracle of mercy is the desire to change.... This desire defines the present, the instant of man who is a sinner. The miracle is accepting oneself and entrusting oneself to an Other present so as to be changed, standing before Him and begging.

Entreaty is the whole expression of man now, in the instant.

Just as Pope Francis, at the end of the Bull of Indiction for the Holy Year of Mercy, indicates the dimension of evangelisation contained in the proclamation of mercy:

[The Church] knows that her primary task, especially at a moment full of great hopes and signs of contradiction, is to introduce everyone to the great mystery of God’s mercy by contemplating the face of Christ. The Church is called above all to be a credible witness to mercy, professing it and living it as the core of the revelation of Jesus Christ.

so does Generating Traces.., though from the viewpoint of an experience of Christian life:

The reality of mercy is the supreme opportunity that Christ and the Church have for making His Word reach man, not just as a mere echo of this word in man.

Pope Francis and the Charismatic Renewal

I have more than once noted on this blog that there exists a profound influence on Pope Francis of the movement Communion and Liberation. This influence originates in his encounter with the movement in Argentina, before his election to the see of St Peter; and it enables us to understand a number of his more challenging remarks since that election. [Enter the term search term "Pope Francis Communion and Liberation" in the search box of this blog to see relevant posts.]

Pope Francis participation on Sunday in a meeting of the Charismatic Renewal in the Olympic Stadium in Rome reveals the influence of another of the ecclesial movements. Abbey Roads has some coverage of this meeting: The Pope and the Holy Spirit and Pope Francis at the "Renewal of the Spirit" Convocation in Rome. An English language report is here: Francis at Rome’s Olympic Stadium: “The devil wants to destroy the family. This latter report appears a little out of sequence when compared to the original text of Pope Francis' address at the Vatican website (at the time of posting, only an Italian version available): Discorso del Santo Padre ai partecipanti alla 37ma Convocazione Nazionale del Rinnovamento nello Spirito Santo.

There is a very tangible warmth in the meeting of Pope Francis with the members of the Italian Catholic Charismatic Renewal, a warmth that can be seen in the Vatican Insider report linked above and in the words of the full Italian text. One thing I particularly noted - and it is reflected in my own experience of Charismatic Renewal - is the way in which Pope Francis places the particular gifts of the movement in the context of the Church as a whole.

When I think of you charismatics, there comes to me an image of the Church itself, but in a particular manner ...

I was particularly struck by Pope Francis account of how his own understanding of the Charismatic Renewal grew over time:

Come voi forse sapete – perché le notizie corrono – nei primi anni del Rinnovamento Carismatico a Buenos Aires, io non amavo molto questi Carismatici. E io dicevo di loro: “Sembrano una scuola di samba!”. Non condividevo il loro modo di pregare e le tante cose nuove che avvenivano nella Chiesa. Dopo, ho incominciato a conoscerli e alla fine ho capito il bene che il Rinnovamento Carismatico fa alla Chiesa. E questa storia, che va dalla “scuola di samba” in avanti, finisce in un modo particolare: pochi mesi prima di partecipare al Conclave, sono stato nominato dalla Conferenza episcopale assistente spirituale del Rinnovamento Carismatico in Argentina. 

[As you probably know - because the news reports carried it - during the first years of the Charismatic Renewal in Buenos Aires, I did not love much these Charismatics. And I said of them: "They appear like a Samba school". I did not share their way of praying and the many new things that occurred in the Church. Later, I began to know them and, in the end, I understood the good that the Charismatic Renewal does in the Church. And this history, which goes from "Samba school" onwards, finished in a special way: a few months before taking part in the Conclave, I was nominated by the bishops' conference as the spiritual assistant to the Charismatic Renewal in Argentina.] 

The report from Vatican Insider describes something that I too have encountered with the Charismatic Renewal - that is, a direction of praise towards Jesus Christ rather than towards an individual speaker or personality (I recall vividly seeing Fr Cantalamessa turn towards an image of the face of Christ at the end of a talk and join in with the applause of his audience, thereby redirecting that applause towards the Lord and away from himself):

Francis crossed a section of the stadium pitch on foot to get to the stage. He was accompanied by the president of RNS, Salvatore Martinez and the Regent of the Papal Household, Fr. Leonardo Sapienza. Some of the delegates who stood along the course which had been marked out for the Pope, shook his hand. In the meantime, the crowds cheered, sang and called out Francis’ name. In his brief greeting to the Pope, Martinez reminded faithful that Francis wanted them to call out Jesus’ name, not his.

Martinez started singing “Jesus is Lord” in Spanish and Francis joined in.....

And a final thought from the words of Salvatore Martinez to Pope Francis, a thought which reflects the experience of a generation in the life of the Church:

We were born with Paul VI, we grew up and matured with John Paul II and now here we are with you.

Pope Francis on Time - and Andrei Tarkovsky

In a section of Evangelii Gaudium devoted to "The Common Good and Peace in Society", the first of four principles offered by Pope Francis is that "time is greater than space" (nn. 222-225):

A constant tension exists between fullness and limitation. Fullness evokes the desire for complete possession, while limitation is a wall set before us. Broadly speaking, "time" has to do with fullness as an expression of the horizon which constantly opens before us, while each individual moment has to do with limitation as an expression of enclosure. People live poised between each individual moment and the greater, brighter horizon of the utopian future as the final cause which draws us to itself. Here we see a first principle for progress in building a people: time is greater than space.  

....One of the faults which we occasionally observe in sociopolitical activity is that spaces and power are preferred to time and processes. Giving priority to space means madly attempting to keep everything together in the present, trying to possess all the spaces of power and of self-assertion; it is to crystallize processes and presume to hold them back. Giving priority to time means being concerned about initiating processes rather than possessing spaces. Time governs spaces, illumines them and makes them links in a constantly expanding chain, with no possibility of return. What we need, then, is to give priority to actions which generate new processes in society and engage other persons and groups who can develop them to the point where they bear fruit in significant historical events. Without anxiety, but with clear convictions and tenacity.  

This criterion also applies to evangelization, which calls for attention to the bigger picture, openness to suitable processes and concern for the long run. The Lord himself, during his earthly life, often warned his disciples that there were things they could not yet understand and that they would have to await the Holy Spirit (cf. Jn 16:12-13). The parable of the weeds among the wheat (cf. Mt 13:24-30) graphically illustrates an important aspect of evangelization: the enemy can intrude upon the kingdom and sow harm, but ultimately he is defeated by the goodness of the wheat.

I have added the italics above because they represent the point in these paragraphs where the thought of Pope Francis most readily points to that of Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian film director.  In writing about his film making in the book Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky writes of the "image" that is presented in a film. What that "image" can do is take an impression of time, an imprint of time:

For the first time in the history of the arts, in the history of culture, man found the means to take an impression of time. And simultaneously the possibility of reproducing that time on screen as often as he wanted, to repeat it and go back to it...

In a discussion of the process of editing a film after it has been shot, Tarkovsky writes of "time imprinted in the [individual] frame" and of "time itself, running through the [different] shots". It is in a section at the beginning of Chapter III of Sculpting in Time, entitled "Imprinted time", where one can recognise in Tarkovsky's thought something of what Pope Francis expresses in Evangelii Gaudium:

Time is necessary to man, so that, made flesh, he may be able to realise himself as a personality. But I am not thinking of linear time, meaning the possibility of getting something done, performing some action. The action is a result, and what I am considering is the cause which makes man incarnate in a moral sense.

History is still not Time; nor is evolution. They are both consequences. Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul.

Time and memory merge into each other; they are like the two sides of a medal. It is obvious enough that without Time, memory cannot exist either.... Memory is a spiritual concept!.... As a moral being, man is endowed with a memory which sows in him a sense of dissatisfaction. It makes us vulnerable, subject to pain.

....The time in which a person lives gives him the opportunity of knowing himself as a moral being, engaged in the search for the truth; yet this gift which man has in his hands is at once delectable and bitter. And life is no more than the period allotted to him, and in which he may, indeed  must, fashion his spirit in accordance with his own understanding of the aim of human existence.... The human conscience is dependent upon time for its existence.

Time is said to be irreversible.... by contrast, I want to draw attention to how time in its moral implication is in fact turned back. Time cannot vanish without trace for it is a subjective, spiritual category; and the time we have lived settles in our soul as an experience placed within time.

I have no way of knowing whether or not Pope Francis was influenced by Tarkovsky in writing the passage of Evangelii Gaudium devoted to time. However, as I have observed in earlier posts - here , here and here - Pope Francis is very familiar with the charism of Communion and Liberation. And Communion and Liberation have been admirers of Andrei Tarkovsky for many years. Tarkovsky twice attended the Rimini meeting, and Communion and Liberation publications have over the years presented articles about him. At the very least, we can suggest that Tarkovsky's thought helps us to understand what might otherwise appear a somewhat obscure piece of writing from Pope Francis.

Pope Francis and Ideology

As I pondered the reaction to Pope Francis' remarks about a faith that can become an ideology (and here), I found it interesting to read this week two blog posts suggesting that the (however delicately expressed) criticism of Pope Francis from Traditionalist, or Traditionally minded, circles is not really the way to go: Just a thought .. and Is this the Pope's Response to his Critics? There is something in these posts of my own thoughts expressed here: Puzzled ... but not by Pope Francis. The efforts of the Chair of the Latin Mass Society to argue that it is the Traditionalists who are really the most Franciscan are entirely different in character than the criticism being offered from other quarters, though I suspect that they still do not issue in what I might term a "comfortable attitude" towards and with Pope Francis.

That the emergence of Traditionalist discomfort with Pope Francis should prompt the question in dogmatic terms of what must be followed of a Pope's teaching and what may be the subject of  "respectful" disagreement is surely very telling: Assent and Papal Magisterium. In the discussion around our response to Pope Francis' interviews and morning homilies this is not the question at stake, and only to one whose ecclesial environment is "dogma" alone could it appear to be the question at stake. Rather it is a question of trying to grasp in the manner of Pope Francis' exercise of his office as a Christian, as a priest, as a Bishop, as the Successor of St Peter the roots from which his life in the Church emerge.

So, for example, with Pope Francis' decision to live at the Casa Santa Martha rather than in the apartments of the Apostolic Palace. Time and again, Pope Francis has explained this as being, not the result of any great sense of poverty or virtue on his own part, but rather as being a result of his own felt need to live with and alongside others. Some Traditionalists have wanted to see in it a certain turning away by Pope Francis from the dignity of the Office of the Papacy. But perhaps one should see its root, consistently with Pope Francis' own explanation, in his experience of the movement Communion and Liberation where there is a great sense of the encounter with Christ being experienced and lived out in a community of life with others in the movement and in the Church.

And I suspect that a familiarity with Communion and Liberation is perhaps the way to gain some understanding of the homily in which Pope Francis refers to the possibility that a certain manner of living the Christian life can in fact constitute an adherence to an ideology. Don Luigi Giussani's book The Religious Sense , which represents the most fundamental articulation of the charism of Communion and Liberation, for example has a section headed "Preconception, Ideology, Rationality" (and, as Cardinal Bergoglio, Pope Francis presented the Spanish edition of this book at its launch in Argentina):

Ideology is the theoretical-practical construction developed from a preconception.

More precisely it is a theoretical-practical construction based on an aspect of reality, a true aspect, but taken up in such a way that it becomes unilaterally and tendentiously made into an absolute; and this come about through a philosophy or a political project.

This last suggests the way in which an ideology achieves intellectual expression in the realm of ideas or practical expression in the pursuit of objectives that are more or less explicitly political (with a small "p"). Towards the end of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt discusses something of the role of ideology with regard to the practice of totalitarian regimes. Don Giussani continues:

Ideology is built up on some starting point offered by our experience; thus, experience itself is taken up as a pretext for an operation that is determined by extraneous or exorbitant preoccupations.

Vaclav Havel's essay "The Power of the Powerless" (an edition, with other essays, is currently the "Book of the Month" at the website of Communion and Liberation) is a classic account of the part played by ideology in the ordinary life of people under the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. To quote from Havel, though you need to read the whole essay to grasp his full notion of what ideology is and does to a human person:

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.

All of this can help us understand what it is that Pope Francis refers to in his use of the term "ideology". What Pope Francis is warning against is a shift (which can happen all too imperceptibly) from centring our Christian life on the person of Christ to centring it on the proximate requirements of a moral system - not to say that Catholic moral teaching does not form a consistent whole that is based in the dignity of what it means to be a human person, nor that it is "secondary", but rather to say that the living of the moral life arises in the encounter with Jesus Christ and not apart from that encounter. Without that openness to the "whole" of Christian experience, the Christian life becomes an ideology - a partial perspective, a theoretical-practical construction developed from a preconception rather than being something rooted in the "whole".

It is possible to go further in suggesting Communion and Liberation as a way to help understand this homily by Pope Francis. Don Giusssani has a short book entitled Morality: Memory and Desire in which he gives an account of what Christian life should look like. The suggestion that the one who does not pray falls into living the Christian life as an ideology in the sense indicated above, expressed in Pope Francis' homily, can be recognised in this book, though the book does not identify it by the term ideology.

... the key point at which we begin to do good [in the world at large] is found first of all in those whom Christ has placed at our sides: our fellow Christians.

According to a "moralistic" attitude, however, this key point is derived from ideas or plans that originate in our own consciousness.

.... which could be termed an "ideology" in the sense suggested above.

But what happens if you read of Pope Francis' homily outside of this kind of context, particularly from a somewhat Traditional background? It isn't going to make much sense, not helped by its nature as an unscripted (though not necessarily unprepared) homily, by the lack of a full text and, possibly, by being delivered in a language other than Pope Francis' first language (Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul II would appear to have been much stronger linguists than Pope Francis).

So perhaps it is going to take an effort to get to grips with the ideas of this homily. But for me the idea that the Christian life could be lived in a way that constituted an "ideology" was not new....

Archbishop Bergoglio: ".. the privileged locus of the encounter is the caress of the mercy of Jesus Christ on my sin."

The "Day by Day" meditation in Magnificat for today is an extract from the text of an address given at a book launch by the now-Pope Francis but then-Archbishop Bergoglio in 2001. The original source, and a fuller text, is the magazine Traces of Communion and Liberation, in an article entitled: The Attraction of the Cardinal.

What is topical in the text of this address is the way in which the now Pope Francis presents the Christian conception of morality as a response to the encounter with the person of Jesus. The articulation of the primary proclamation of God's love for us in terms of God's mercy towards us has become an almost every day feature of Pope Francis' teaching. It is now very familiar when, listened to during his first Angelus address, for example, it sounded very unusual. In the text of this address published in Traces we can detect a long history of this theme in Pope Francis' own personal thought, and we can see it as Pope Francis' particular way of experiencing the charism of Communion and Liberation:

Everything in our life, today just as in Jesus’ time, begins with an encounter. An encounter with this Man, the carpenter of Nazareth, a man like all men and yet different. The first ones, John, Andrew, and Simon, felt themselves to be looked at into their very depths, read in their innermost being, and in them sprang forth a surprise, a wonder that instantly made them feel bound to Him, made them feel different.

Thus far Fr Luigi Giussani and a classic account of the idea of the encounter with Jesus according to the charism of Communion and Liberation. But then what, with the hindsight of Pope Francis' preaching since being elected Successor of St Peter, we might see as Archbishop Bergoglio's distinctive articulation in terms of mercy (this section of text taken in its fuller form from Traces - my emphasis added):

We cannot understand this dynamic of encounter which brings forth wonder and adherence if it has not been triggered–forgive me the use of this word–by mercy. Only someone who has encountered mercy, who has been caressed by the tenderness of mercy, is happy and comfortable with the Lord. I beg the theologians who are present not to turn me in to the Sant’Uffizio or to the Inquisition; however, forcing things a bit, I dare to say that the privileged locus of the encounter is the caress of the mercy of Jesus Christ on my sin.

Archbishop Bergoglio then goes on - following the line of thought of Fr Giussani and the classic presentation of Communion and Liberation - to indicate how a moral imperative arises from this encounter:

In front of this merciful embrace .... we feel a real desire to respond, to change, to correspond; a new morality arises. .... Christian morality is not a titanic effort of the will, the effort of someone who decides to be consistent and succeeds, a solitary challenge in the face of the world. No. Christian morality is simply a response. It is the heartfelt response to a surprising, unforeseeable, “unjust” mercy .....The surprising, unforeseeable, “unjust” mercy .... of one who knows me, knows my betrayals and loves me just the same, appreciates me, embraces me, calls me again, hopes in me, and expects from me. This is why the Christian conception of morality is a revolution; it is not a never falling down but an always getting up again.

 And, again in a manner that is familiar from his preaching as Pope Francis, Cardinal Bergoglio goes on to speak about the Church as the place where Jesus is encountered today:

Jesus is encountered, just as 2,000 years ago, in a human presence, the Church, the company of those whom He assimilates to Himself, His Body, the sign and sacrament of His Presence.

The topicality of Cardinal Bergoglio's words lies in the way in which a Christian conception of morality is consequent upon the encounter with Christ. It allows us another insight into Pope Francis' controversial observation about the teaching with regard to abortion etc coming after the first proclamation of God's mercy, an observation that I have previously understood in the context of an understanding of the different stages in evangelisation archetypally taught in the Decree Ad Gentes and Pope Paul's Evangelii Nuntiandi.

In politics, too, the other is a good.

Fr Julian Carron's letter to La Repubblica was written to address the political situation in Italy. But perhaps it has some relevance to our situation here in the United Kingdom, where the funeral today of Mrs Thatcher has been the cause of strong comment.

Now, thinking of the present, I say that unless we accept the elementary experience that the other is a good and not an obstacle to the fullness of our ‘I’, in politics as well as in human and social relations, it will be difficult to emerge from the situation in which we find ourselves.

Acknowledging the other is the true victory for each of us. The first to be called to travel this road, as happened in the past, are precisely the Catholic politicians, whatever their party. But unfortunately, they too often seem more defined by party alignments than by self-awareness of their ecclesial experience and the desire for the common good. Yet precisely their experience of being “members of each other” (Saint Paul) should enable them to view the other as part of the definition of self and thus of a good.

These days many have watched the Church and been surprised at how she was willing to change, the better to respond to the challenges of the present. In the first place, we have seen a Pope who, at the apex of his power, made an absolutely unheard of gesture of freedom, amazing everyone, so that another man with more energy could guide the Church. Then we witnessed the arrival of Pope Francis, who from the first moment has surprised us with gestures of disarming simplicity that are capable of reaching each person’s heart.

The Mystery of Holy Saturday: Luigi Giussani and Pope Francis

The "Meditation of the Day" in Magnificat for Holy Saturday is from Luigi Giussani, the founder of the ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation. I am sure that it was chosen before the election of Pope Francis but, given Francis association with the movement, its choice seems fortuitous.

I have not been able to read fully the text of the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires when he presented the Spanish edition of Luigi Giussani's book The Religious Sense, the book that offers the first insights into the charism and method of Communion and Liberation; but the quick read that I did have suggests that Jorge Bergoglio has been profoundly influenced by that charism and method. The text published in the magazine Traces can be downloaded from here: The Gratitude of Buenos Aires. Indeed, I am currently speculating that Pope Francis' anxiety for a Church that moves out to the peripheries, to the margins, can be traced at least in part to the methodology of verification of the Christian claim in the existential experience of human life that belongs to Communion and Liberation. One might also find there the wish for a community life that lies behind Pope Francis arrangement of living in the Casa Santa Marta rather than the Apostolic Palace. Is the key to understanding some of Pope Francis' more challenging (and, in the view of some, self-centred) actions since his election to see him as trying to live something of this charism as Successor of Peter in the same way that he tried to live it as Archbishop of Buenos Aires?

The meditation in Magnificat is extracted from notes written to accompany a CD of Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestral work, and comments particularly on his Russian Easter Festival overture. Luigi Giussani's full Italian text can be found on Google books here - but you might need to scroll down a bit to find it among other contributions. The more familiar you are with the ethos and history of Communion and Liberation and other ecclesial movements, the less obscure the language of the meditation is!

If we stifle the Mystery as a dimension of our relationship with people and things, all reality become like a game: it falls to pieces - looks and hands split it into parts that have no connection with each other ...

The alternative in life is between the response to the Mystery which we are called to give, and living according to a rule of "whatever I like". The task that has been give to us is for us and, as an example, for the world; this task is for the world. Christ, alone, died to call the world back to the fact of the Father; thus, no matter how few we are, we are called to this task to call the world back. There is no middle ground between the task and "whatever I please".

During the night of Holy Saturday, the fact occurred that saves human existence from the confused tremble to which it could seem destined and lifts it up towards a festive task ...

Reality is already in the hands of the one who conquered it, who won it back to himself. All of reality is his creation, to the point that the meaning of all of reality is his person. In him everything consists. To us falls the task to show it to everyone, to declare it, because it is something that is....

Everything is ordered towards a purpose, a beauty, so in our lives what gives meaning and purpose to everything, what recreates harmony, has entered in.

It is a companionship that, above all, opens up this perspective. It is a companionship for the world, a companionship that opens up, adopting the same perspectives as Christ's, that is to say, the redemption of the world, the salvation of the world, to shout the truth to the world, to shout the happiness the world is waiting for, to shout what the world is made of and to shout the world's destiny ... that little by little invades and determines everything.

If one has been attentive to the words and actions of Pope Francis during the first days of his mission as Successor of Peter one cannot read this meditation (taken from a radically different kind of context) without finding in it echoes of what has been offered by Pope Francis as a teaching for the Church and for the world.

New Movements and New Media: Discuss

[This post is a response to Fr Tim's New movements John Paul II, new media Benedict XVI: discuss.]

Pope John Paul II's encouragement of the new movements in the Catholic Church has its highlight the meeting between those movements and the Pope on the eve of Pentecost in 1998. And the highlight of the highlight was John Paul II's assertion of the "co-essentiality" of the institutional and charismatic elements in the constitution of the Church, as foreshadowed in the teaching of Lumen Gentium n.12:

The institutional and charismatic aspects are co-essential as it were to the Church's constitution. They contribute, although differently, to the life, renewal and sanctification of God's People. It is from this providential rediscovery of the Church's charismatic dimension that, before and after the Council, a remarkable pattern of growth has been established for ecclesial movements and new communities.

A charism is a specifically given gift of the Holy Spirit arousing in the person or persons receiving it a call to fulfil a particular ecclesial mission. Each of the major ecclesial movements has its own unique charism, but it is interesting to identify common themes.

 

1. As Fr Tim pointed out, a Catholic with an intelligent and well formed commitment to the practice of their faith will, almost without exception, have received a formation from one or other of the new movements. Parish life has not been providing that formation in recent times (personally I am not sure how far it was providing such formation in more distant times either). At first sight this suggests a point of tension between ordinary parish/diocesan life and the life of the movements. However, it is worth recognising that the engagement of a person with the life of a movement should be seen as a specific way of experiencing baptismal consecration in commitment to Christian life. Seen in that way, there should be a continuity between parish life and the life of a movement. [The Marian consecration typical of the Legion of Mary at its Acies ceremony and of the last day of the "Fundamental Retreat" of the Foyers of Charity is explicitly articulated as a specification of baptismal consecration; "baptism in the Spirit", typical of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, is also understood in this way.]

 

2. The 1983 Code of Canon Law, in c.321 ff, allows a status as "private association of Christ's faithful". In summary, this status allows a movement, subject to the approval of its constitutions by appropriate ecclesial authority (the Bishop or the Holy See, the latter in the case of universal associations), to govern itself rather than being under the governance of an ecclesiastical assistant. This is a canonical expression of the idea of "co-essentiality"; I do not know whether or not there was an equivalent status under the provisions of the 1917 Code, though I suspect not.  [However, this self-governance does not exempt an association from visitation by those in ecclesiastical authority, which should provide safeguard against abuse of power in those associations.]

 

3. If we look at the specific charisms of some of the movements, a number of common themes appear that are worthy of further examination. These common themes run through the more unique aspects of the charisms proper to each movement.  They are: (1) a strong Marian character which is not a "devotion added on" but a natural part of the ecclesial life - the Legion of Mary, Focolare (official title "The Work of Mary") are not the only examples; (2) a natural ecclesial sense, expressed in a faithfulness to the Holy See and the official teaching of the Church that lacks any dogmatic or ultramontane spirit; (3) an interaction of a male and female figure in the founding charism - Pere Finet and Marthe Robin in the case of the Foyers of Charity, or indeed, the relation of the inspiration of Agnes Holloway to the mission of Fr Edward Holloway described in the introduction to the booklet "God's Master Key"; (4) an affirmation of the value of the vows of the evangelical counsels as appropriate not just for priests and religious but also for the lay faithful, often emerging as a group sought to live the charism of the movement in a more radical way - the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, the life of members of the Foyers of Charity are examples.

4. As suggested at 1 above, there is a question about how the life of the ecclesial movements, perhaps particularly those that are universal rather than diocesan in nature, relate to the life of parishes and dioceses. And indeed about how the life experienced in one ecclesial movements relates to the life of other such movements. This has been part of the process of "ecclesial maturing" to which Fr Tim referred, a process that has involved the explicit articulation of a founding event, often in the preparation of constitutions, and the discernment undertaken by ecclesiastical authority in approving such constitutions. It is at this point that the question of examining and ensuring the authenticity of a founder/founding charism, and questions of behaviours of founding figures, should come to the fore. The task of promoting unity among the movements was a particular task undertaken by Focolare (with its charism of unity) after the meeting at Pentecost 1998. Increasingly the word "communion" has been used to express the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council, and the theology of communion perhaps offers a way of understanding the "co-essentiality" of charisms and institutions in the Church and of how they should relate to each other in living the Christian mystery.

5. If one can see Pope John Paul II as a particular promoter of the new movements in the Church, one can also see Hans Urs von Balthasar as being a particular theologian of the new movements. The  evangelical counsels as an option for the life of the lay faithful can be seen in his writings on the states of life in the Church and on the secular institutes. His book Engagement with God is prefaced by a dedication to Luigi Giusani and Communion and Liberation. He recognised in the Focolare exactly the living out of the "Marian profile" that features in his understanding of the Church and shared with them a strong sense of "Jesus forsaken" on the Cross.

Can we see Catholic blogging as a form of new movement akin to those being discussed above? I would suggest rather that, generally speaking, it partakes of an aspect of ecclesial life that has a certain analogy to the idea of the different ecclesial movements, but is not so readily capable of a positive evaluation. Unless I have misunderstood some recent reading, John Henry Newman referred to the Oxford Movement in a significantly different way when an Anglican than when a Catholic. As an Anglican, he would not have seen it as a "party" engaged in a (political) struggle for supremacy in the Church, but as a call to live Christian faith in its fullness; as a Catholic, he asked those who continued in the Church of England to recognise that they could not continue as a "party" (among other parties) following the general rejection by the Church of England's bishops of the Catholic principles of the movement. Colonised largely as it is by those of a traditionalist inclination, I would suggest that the Catholic blogosphere is closer to representing a "party" in this Newman-esque sense than an ecclesial movement in the sense considered above. It's campaigning behaviours, and sense that the Extraordinary Form of the liturgy as the only show in town and the subject to which every Catholic is devoted, seem to me characteristic of a "party".

Just as a final comment, and at  risk of arguing ad hominem but hopefully not without charity. The challenge that a traditionalist Catholic faces in considering the new movements derives from a strong sense of the institutional aspect of the Church. In consequence, the traditionalist might well have a reluctance to recognise the legitimacy of the charismatic and be put off by those who fail to live the charisms of their movements as well as they should; and they might also let their attachment to the Extraordinary Form trump all else as far as liturgy goes. But the witness of the movements, and of the support given to them by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, is precisely a witness to "co-essentiallity" between the institutional and the charismatic.

UPDATE: See also Fr Tim's observations on this post, which particularly respond to my suggestion that the Catholic blogosphere has the nature of a "party".

Three takes on authority

And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority...

These words from the Gospel at Mass yesterday (Mark 1:21-28) provide a kind of strap-line that prompts several thoughts on authority.

The homily that I heard at Mass rather mischievously suggested that perhaps Pope Benedict had sent a goodwill message to Rev. Ian Paisley on his retirement from full time preaching. It pointed out that Rev. Paisley had founded his own church, the Free Presbyterian Church, some sixty odd years ago. In the Roman Catholic Church, however, the successors of St Peter have taught Christian truth with authority for over two thousand years.

In his Angelus address, the present successor of St Peter, Pope Benedict XVI contrasted the authority of power with the authority of service:

 "For man", the Holy Father observed, "authority often means possession, power, dominion, success. For God, however, authority means service, humility, love. It means entering into the logic of Jesus Christ Who leans down to wash the feet of His disciples, Who seeks man's authentic good, Who heals wounds, Who is capable of a love so great as to give His life, because He is Love. ...

And the meditation in Magnificat for yesterday was taken from the writings of Mgr Luigi Giussani, founder of the movement Communion and Liberation. The italics are in the original, and reflect an aspect of how Communion and Liberation articulates its charism.

In our particular milieu some individuals have a greater sensitivity to the human experience; in fact they develop a deeper understanding fo any given situation and of others; in fact they are more likely to influence the movement that builds a community. They live our experience more intensely and with a greater commitment. We all feel that they are more representative of us. With them we feel closer to, and stay more willingly in community with, others. To acknowledge this phemenon is to be loyal to our own humanity, a duty spurred by wisdom.

When we discover ourselves helpless and alone, our humanity spurs us to come together. If we meet someone who better feels and understands our experience, suffering, needs, and expectations, we naturally are led to follow that person and become his or her disciple. In that sense, such persons naturally constitute authority.... The Jews said of Christ: "This is one who has authority" and they abandoned the schemes of the Pharisees to follow him.

Tony Blair in Rimini: what is "Faith"?

In his address to the 30th Rimini meeting, Tony Blair speaks of "faith" in a way that has now become customary in public discourse but which has a certain novelty when compared to the way in which the word is used in religious discourse: "Faith", "people of Faith", "the world of Faith", "Faith communities". Interestingly, there is a passage in Tony Blair's address which removes a possible indifferentist understanding of this term (though one could ask whether it treats the different Christian denominations indifferently):

In my foundation - dedicated to respect and understanding between the religious Faiths - I always say clearly: I am and remain a Christian, seeking salvation thru our Lord, Jesus Christ. Globalisation may push people of different Faiths together. But it does not mean we all become of one, lowest common denominator, belief. We are together but retain our distinctive Faith. We respect each other. We are not the same as each other. However, we work together.

The use of the term "Faith" in this sort of way has a certain ambivalence. By the word "Faith" do we refer to the act of believing in certain things, generally seen as religious? Or are we referring to a body of belief, referring therefore to what it is that is believed? In the first of these, the use of the word is essentially undifferentiated in referring to people of widely differing religious beliefs, or indeed, to people whose beliefs might be loosely spiritual but in essence not religious at all. In the second case, the use of the word is still often undifferentiated - but it should not be so. Clearly the different religions have beliefs that differ greatly, so to refer to them under the one word heading "Faith" is to suggest an identity of content that is not fair to the religions themselves. It is to treat religions as a secular phenomenon (a secularist is not going to recognise differences between religious beliefs as being of importance, but simply to put them together as different manifestations of the same phenomenon); and to be fair to religions they need to be treated as religious phenomena. There needs to be an explicit recognition of their supernatural character.

To return to the first of these ways of using the word "Faith", the undifferentiated use may not even be justified here. It is not the case that "Faith" seen as the act of believing is understood in the same way by different religions - the difference in the what is believed has a reflexive kind of effect on the act of believing itself, and how that act is understood.

According to the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church we can understand both faith as an act of believing (n.28) and faith as referring to what it is that is believed (n.32) - my emphasis added:

28. What are the characteristics of faith?
Faith is the supernatural virtue which is necessary for salvation. It is a free gift of God and is accessible to all who humbly seek it. The act of faith is a human act, that
is, an act of the intellect of a person - prompted by the will moved by God - who freely assents to divine truth. Faith is also certain because it is founded on the Word of God; it works “through charity” (Galatians 5:6); and it continually grows through listening to the Word of God and through prayer. It is, even now, a foretaste of the joys of heaven.

32. In what way is the faith of the Church one faith alone?
The Church, although made up of persons who have diverse languages, cultures, and rites, nonetheless professes with a united voice the one faith that was received from
the one Lord and that was passed on by the one Apostolic Tradition. She confesses one God alone, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and points to one way of salvation. Therefore we believe with one heart and one soul all that is contained in the Word of God, handed down or written, and which is proposed by the Church as divinely revealed.

There is a certain contradiction between Tony Blair's assertion of his Christian faith, as cited above, particularly if we imply that as referring to Roman Catholic belief, and his continued use of the term "Faith" in an undifferentiated way. There are also curious references in his address to "our Faith" and "our Church", into which it might be possible to read to much, but which would not be out of place in a secularised understanding of religious believing.

Towards the end of his address, Tony Blair offers what might be seen as his definition of what faith is. He refers to the role of Faith as representing God's Truth to the world, "Faith as the salvation of the human condition ... Faith as purpose in life. Faith, not as a mystery we seek to solve; but Faith as a mystery which expresses the limitations of the human mind". One can see something of the Compendium's description of faith as a full surrender of ourselves to God (n.25), but again, perhaps not. And Tony Blair's appeal for the voice of the Church to be heard in the world contains a persisting sense of the ambivalence of the usage of the word "Faith":

That is why the voice of the Church should be heard. That is why it should speak confidently, clearly and openly. Because within any nation and beyond it, in the community of nations, the voice of Faith needs to be and must be heard.