To develop forms of collaboration, co-responsibility and communion among the FdM members, remaining open to the possibility to create communities characterized by life in common
The chance to live new relationships between religious, consecrated and the laity recognizing in the unique Murialdine charisma is a gift and a responsibility which the Spirit entrusts us with at this moment.
It is basically what comes out from the Congregation's chapters and various official documents but also from the contributions of the other Murialdo Family's members; how to exert this responsibility being faithful to the gift given us is the task we are called to carry out. It is after all the essence of consecrated life: to remain always listening to the Spirit to follow his voice.
In these years diverse solutions or relationship modalities were attempted among religious from different Institutes and between them and the laity; not always the taken paths led to shared solutions and the reason is that there are not few difficulties in understanding if it is about stopped routes or answers that have only to overcome the unavoidable starting troubles.
It is not an easy task how to distinguish the formers from the latters, but I believe that we all, religious and lay people, have to question ourselves about what we are doing; we cannot delegate to anyone the responsibility of understanding which is the way we must follow, no Institute or religious community can entrust others with it without betraying its task and the meaning of its existence.
If the ultimate norm of every consecrated life is the following of Christ set forth in the Gospels1 and if this is done “living and safeguarding the apostolic and spiritual experience of the founder, deepening and developing it in the diverse situations for the service of Christ and men”2, then it is peculiar to consecrated life to be on search, always in evolution, never defined and closed in its modalities of putting the charisma into effects.
Maybe it is true that it is ending a phase of consecrated life in which the modalities of putting the charisma into effects went through well defined charismatic and juridical–administrative structures, maybe the future reserves us new ways of reading our consecration and dedication to the poor youth. In facts we are called, today more than yesterday, to be able to distinguish what is essential and founds our identity as religious, consecrated or lay people, from what marked and differentiated us in a particular phase of history3.
Then the attempt to read new possible relationship forms within the FdM requires to be lived with consciousness and responsibility: the consciousness that every idea and proposal, as every historical realization, is marked by incompleteness and partiality; and the responsibility of a constant verification of our realizations in order to understand if and how much they correspond to what the Spirit suggests to the Church.
Our congregation did only a part of this journey, which we find marked by steps fixed in the many official documents or in the realizations and experiences that in the diverse parts of the world are distinguishing our relationship style. Redoing this journey can help us to understand where we come from but above all can give us some aid for understanding the direction the Spirit is pointing out to us.
Making its own the indications of the Vatican II that outlined a new image of Church and new relationships among her diverse components, the ecclesiology of communion brought back the experience of consecrated life into the ambit of God's people journey, deleting the isolation in which it came to be and bringing it again in the mainstream life experience of the believers in the world.
This call to the institutes to rediscover and update their original charisma helped we Josephites too to bring back to light the original spirituality and the value of fraternal life and made us rediscover the great gift of the lay world's presence and the radicalism of commitment towards the poorest youth.
In the 1969 Special Chapter therefore the final documents speak about laity as “contribution to be used to advantage” but above all they recommend the creation of “friendly relationships, facilitated by the common educative vocation, offering to the laity collaboration, adequate salaries, possibility of professional qualification, religious assistance etc…” It is at this moment that the value of lay presence in the “educative community”, singled out as the main subject of apostolic activity, is explicitly recognized.
In the 1976 General Chapter this educative community centrality is reaffirmed and its identity is clarified singling out its mixed composition of laity and religious and underlining the family climate that had to characterize its relationships and the co-responsibility in managing the educative project.
But right from the start the socio-cultural context and the processes of marginalization of the sacred, radicalization of social tensions and intergenerational constraints and relativism of values heightened the uneasiness already provoked by other changes going on from a long time, this time within the religious life: the persistent decrease of vocations, the appearing of new forms of consecrated life, the commitment of many religious in less specific apostolic fields and the visibility crisis of the testimonial dimension.
In the 1982 General Chapter, almost as an answer, new collaboration modalities between laity and religious and the need of formation paths are pointed out, recognizing the right – duty of Christian laity of participating, according its charisma, to the church's evangelizing work.
Here begins a new phase of reflection and exchange that leads to read the lay identity in a different manner: if until then the seculars where substantially considered “collaborators” and executors of the religious' guidelines (the latter keeping for themselves the key offices in the institutions and in particular the ones more directly concerning educational ambit), now they are read under the light of the reflections offered by the just ended Synod: called by Christ and sent to carry out his salvific mission.
However the revaluation of lay life as another possible road towards holiness and the progressive weakening of a ministry model caused also by the new spaces occupied by the State (that moreover imposes a progressive professionalization of apostolic commitment) seems to witness the end of a religious life model that until now seems to have held on.
The 1988 General Chapter gives a look to the respective identities and highlights the utility of a real collaboration: it acknowledges the lay vocation as necessary mediation for the religious in view of understanding the situations of the world, family and culture, while it sees as peculiar to religious vocation the offering to the seculars of a prophetic tension both personal and common.
It is particularly important the statement saying that “the presence of lay people near the Josephan religious continues to be a stimulating element for our communities and constitutive for our institutions”: the encounter with the lay world does not sign the religious’ identity, since this comes from another fundamental encounter with the person of Jesus and his life style; it is instead a different matter about the institutions: in this ambit it is possible to think different relationships forms, identities mutually completing and both revealing “constitutive”.
Therefore a chance of “co-management” of the apostolic project between religious and laity takes shape and takes more vigour the need of formation paths not only addressed to the lay people but also to the religious, to educate them to collaboration, team work, democratic participation and respect for the contexts in which they work.
It is in this Chapter that the discussion begins on managerial roles to be entrusted to lay people: “some among the lay persons sharing our life and charisma can end up… taking, in the forms the competent superiors shall see opportune, specific responsibilities in the running of activities, notably the educational and care ones”.
But it is in the 1994 General Chapter that the choice of communion with the laity is suggested as priority: the focus switches from the Congregation's apostolic and managerial needs (to wich lay people was giving their fundamental contribution) to the Church's expectations, to wich Josephites and laity are called to answer.
The Congregation feels to be called to this fraternity conversion and for this reason acknowledges that she has to make available to the world all her resources and particularly the lay people closer to her and sharing the founder's charisma.
A Charisma that is no more seen as Congregation's property (since it is a gift of the Spirit to the Church and for the Church and the world) and at this point the Congregation feels to be part of a “Charismatic Family” having its centre just in the adhesion to this charisma.
A Congregation living her choices and apostolic projects no more as the sole referent, responsible and administrator: her presence in a certain place is for the growth of God's people right there, where she is called to act, and she does it assuming together with the lay people of that same place the responsibility of answering to such task.
Faced with the alternative of dividing the responsibilities (to the religioui animation and care for spirituality and charisma, to the laity the running of structures and daily routine), the Congregation chooses the way of co-responsibility and communion: the common building of a plan and the sharing of a dream.
In a 1995 Circular letter Fr. Luigi Pierini reminded “the urgency of a path of true and profound conversion towards a fraternity… with all those the Lord convinced that the wealth of Murialdo's charisma is fully manifested when it is concretized in the diverse ways of living Christian life and leads to the maturation of a vocations communion”.
From these stimulating ideas comes out the understanding of the Murialdo Family as “new reality in which the spiritual and apostolic charisma of the Founder dilates and gets richer” and the consequent new way of living relationships within the FdM: “the Lord asks us to give a wider sense to what till now was given us starting from MR 11”.
In order to apply the 1994 General Chapter the Superior General, in the following years, encouraged to test collaboration forms between confreres and lay people in running the institutions and requested that in each province at least one house would be chosen where to start and test a shared management with lay people.
So begins the trial of the Institution's Council, an attempt of realizing a communion of intents on the less demanding ground of the apostolic institution.
In facts in those years was published the Apostolic Exhortation Vita Consacrata that gave quite precise suggestions for managing the relationships between religious and laity and about involving the latter ones in the activities and charismatic sharing. Even if the document saw with sympathy and optimism this getting closer however it invited to take care that the inner life's identity of an Institute would not be damaged. The position on responsibility roles was clearer: “Moreover, it should be borne in mind that initiatives involving lay persons at the decision-making level, in order to be considered the work of a specific Institute, must promote the ends of that Institute and be carried out under its responsibility. Therefore, if lay persons take on a directive role, they will be accountable for their actions to the competent Superiors4”.
Therefore, if the identity of an institution is given by its reading and juridical situation as presence and activity of a religious Institute in a certain context, this nature cannot be entrusted to the lay people, and not even to mixed organisms, unless on condition that the last word and responsibility remains to the leader of the Institute.
This is why the Institution's Council, even if is configured as a participation organism, at the end is called to submit to the Congregation's indications and as a whole and in each member is submitted to the decisions of the local and provincial religious superiors.
If therefore this way only partially allows a real communion, which other roads are possible?
After the substantial confirmation of the research path by the XX General Chapter, more precise indications are offered by the successive Chapter, the XXI, which opens at once perspectives that until then were so only in the intentions of a few ones or in the diverse attempts done in order to concretize them.
In facts the Chapter sees “with interest and confidence the experimentation of integrated communities and we promote other new forms of communitarian life also, with adequate instruments for comparison and evaluation5”.
So here there is a path sign that, if from one side does not diminish the value of collaboration and co-responsibility, however points out at communion as the completest modality of living the relationships within the FdM.
The progression seems to point out to a well precise direction in developing the relationship among the Murialdo Family's members, but I do not believe it may also mean taking value judgements or recognizing lesser or greater closeness as regards charismatic sharing.
The diverse modalities with which relationships among the various FdM members is expressed and lived are closely dependent from the contexts where inter-personal contacts historically develop and from the characteristics the diverse subjects give to such relationships.
Not even activity typologies are neutral from this point of view. Some modalities for living relationships and co-responsibility are easier in some apostolic ambits rather than in others and even the dimensions of the religious communities and the institutions' structures influence these relationships; not to mention then the individual sensibility, formation, customs of life and management of the relationships with one's own and others' faith experience.
Admitting the legitimacy of every historical concretization of the relationships, understanding and accepting that not in all the contexts it is possible to carry out experiences of co-responsibility or communion, means to acknowledge the different possibilities of concretizing the FdM without creating graded lists.
Collaboration and communion however are not the nsame thing and the depth of sharing the charismatic experience in the FdM is measured not only by the degree of personal adhesion to the charisma, but also by the level of involvement in the relationship between the diverse FdM components.
Surely this is a different way of understanding and living the charisma; for many it is still just an idea or daydreaming, for someone else maybe a goal still to be reached. It is certainly a challenge for all, even for those who do not accept it or do not think it may constitute a real chance of future, since at stake, if there is not the Murialdine charisma's presence in the history and in our places, surely there are the modalities with which we lived and carried it out until now.
Maybe we can change our same old questions, leave the perplexities on “how keeping the charisma”, or “how continue to keep the gift of the past” and go back in order to understand how the Spirit acted, how moved hearts and persons to ask them something new and untold.
The choice done by the XXI General Chapter that recognizes the Congregation's identity only within the communion ecclesiology and the “communion of vocations that for us takes the name of St. Leonard’s Family” of committing the Josephan communities “to open themselves up, to read themselves, to integrate and to experiment every more in a communion of life, in the Congregation, enlarged in St. Leonard’s Family”6 seems however to crash with various difficulties of different kinds which hinder its understanding and slower its carrying out.
But true communion requires a further step from all, it demands to all to get free from their own certainties and really meet the other and the others. We only have to understand which is the place where to live this communion.
It is clear that no form of communion can put into risk the single identities: religious and laity must remain such and as such recognizable in their life and relationship style both where there are spaces of common life, and where communion is lived at apostolic level.
But in this case, so that it may be a true experience of communion, there should be a neutral “place”, thought, built and managed together, and not a place first of all belonging to someone and being benevolently given.
Since until now the charisma was like this and this are still the Congregation's institutions, the property of someone.
Of course they are the fruit of years of sacrifices and hardships, a gift received from the Founder and all along kept and passed on. But in an exclusive form, almost as owners.
We needed a Council in order to realize that the true gift is that particular way of reading God's presence in history and life, that particular sensitivity accompaning us and which first our Founder made his own and transmitted us.
But his true gift is docility to the Spirit's presence and proposal in loving the poorest youth; answering to this presence is gift and duty of everybody and each one, not only of the religious, but of each member of Murialdo's Family.
The meeting “place” therefore can be such only if it is of all, only if everyone builds it, only if no one claims the esclusive right to decide.
Apostolic act surely cannot live without taking the form of real action, solidarity and attention; attention and love for the last ones, for the poorest youth, cannot renounce to become concrete and visible.
But this, and now we know it, is the task not just of some people, but of all the members of the FdM; each one for his part, each one with his specific way of living and working.
We can build a common “home” where the meeting between religious and lay people happens on a common ground: not one's or other's own, not where one or the other has the last word, but where what is built is dreamed, thought, done, built and runned together and where all, since the beginning is fruit of all's work and commitment.
Until we religious will ask lay people to “enter our institutions” to manage them, we will remain in the co-responsibility and, as the Institution Council experience testimonies, we will always live in an imbalanced relationship.
Communion therefore can be thought and lived in different ways, even to the point of creating situations of “life in common”.
But first it is necessary that the diverse FdM members verify their dreams and expectations, comparing them and checking if they can become, from a “communicated and shared dream”, a “unique dream”, the dream of all.
Fr. Mauro Busin
