Intervento del P. Generale - Inglese

POOR AND ABANDONED: THESE ARE OURS OWN

The Family of Murialdo at the service of the last ones

Pastoral Forum – Londrina, 26 April 2009

1. Foreword

There are some significant and characteristics elements of novelty in this meeting of ours that it is worthy to underline at once since they point out its value and sense, and also the importance it has for all of us.

In the first place this “event” that sees us gathered here in Londrina does not begin today.

It began many months ago in the diverse provinces and nations where the FdM lives and found an echo in an apposite section of murialdo.org site, which presented us each time apostolic experiences, biblical reflections and deepening studies on our charisma.

The section in the “forum” then allowed many to intervene personally, to dialogue with others, so that we can say the participation to the Londrina Forum is much more numerous and important than the one we see today in this hall, even though it is conspicuous. This moment, therefore, is the peak of a process started quite before today and that will not finish with the end of this Forum. It will remain alive among us as qualifying and also unifying element for the building up of the FdM reality: our passion for the poor and abandoned boys and youth.

Another significant element, to which we are pleasantly getting used and of which by now we cannot do without, is being together as FdM, a reality of lay and religious men and women who are fascinated and brought together by the charisma of Murialdo.

By the way, here the FdM is gathering from every side of the world and celebrates its international and intercultural dimension, as a follow-up to the Buenos Aires Pedagogic Seminary experience and anticipating, at is were, the great appointment that will see it gathered around St Leonard Murialdo urn in Turin on May 2010.

The FdM is no more part of our book of dreams: it is our reality, our way ahead and also our hope to keep giving vitality and freshness to our charisma at the service of the youth and for the building of the Kingdom.

Finally it seems to me important to highlight from now that we are not here to talk or discuss on a broad theme or abstract issues: the Forum’s theme touches our life, its meaning since it goes to the heart of the apostolic charisma St Leonard Murialdo lived and left us.

Speaking about those who are “poor and abandoned” means for our vocation and our life what for an engaged couple is listening to the song that made them fall in love. It is a theme that makes the depths of our soul vibrate, which thrills and brings us together, which consolidates our belonging beyond whatever difficulty, which awakens our spirit and conscience to question if we are truly and always, wholeheartedly, on their side, and have the courage to make it understood to them and to all.

2. Murialdo speaks to us

Murialdo’s most known text on poor youth is the one containing the famous words «Poor and abandoned: here are the two requirements constituting a youth as one of our ones...» (Writings,V, p. 6).

It was prepared for a speech to the teachers and watchers of the “Collegio Artigianelli”, in 1869, and then it was again proposed to them in 1872.

This expression has to be understood, in its origin, as meaning to explain which boys were received by the Charity Trust and in particular those of the boarding school.

However it was inserted in the Regulations of the Congregation of Saint Joseph, 1873, thus joining the Josephan charisma and, in time, the one of the Murialdo Family, a more extensive reality, blossomed little by little, after many decades.

It is worth, I believe, putting ahead of everything the true words of Murialdo and his own commentary.

«Poor and abandoned: these are the two requirements making up a young as one of ours, and the more he is poor and abandoned, the more he is one of ours.(…) Poor and abandoned! How good [is] the mission of caring for the education of the poor! And how more good that of looking for, helping, educating and saving in this time and for the eternity the poor abandoned!

Abandoned [he is] from the moral side if not the material one.

(...) Our youth are poor, are boys and, we can also add, sometimes they are quite the opposite that innocent.

But this last characteristic, although it is of course not amiable in itself, should perhaps make our youth less dear to us? less, allow me the expression, less interesting?

Maybe we forget sometimes this condition of the youth for whose good we intend to consecrate our life.

As soon as a young man appears to be ill-natured, or even perverse, with a undisciplined and little disciplinable character, riotous towards education, proud, stubborn, and stationary into evil, or rather gong from bad to worse, at once we are disgusted, we lose heart, and definitely we would desire that the poor soul would free us from any trouble going away about his own business, he and his vices.

Who will deny that a young man for whom all labours were useless (provided that really all labours were made), a young man who besides not improving does not give any hope of improvement, above all a young man who is spoiling and corrupting his innocent companions, such a young man should be removed from the others’ company?

(...) But however we should not be too easy to get tired, discouraged, and to lose hope. We should not forget that, collecting abandoned youth, we must expect to find youth having all the ignorance, the roughness, and all the vices deriving from a condition of abandonment.

If they even were young men belonging to civil and Christian families, we should not be surprised to find defects and even vices in the boys; since if they were already perfect, why [should we] educate them? And parents probably would not consign us their sons to be educated, as sometimes an untilled, hard, arid land is given to be tilled, worked, ploughed, and weeded, before sowing the good seed.

Now what should we expect, who take in boys picked up from the public road, or sometimes coming out from the hands of uncouth or scandalous parents?

(...) Their moral misery ought to move us much more than the material one: and instead of causing us to get angry, or lose too soon patience and hope, it must animate us to work bravely and filled with commiseration on these poor souls, truly often more wretched than guilty, and such as probably we would be, if had been abandoned as they were» (St Leonard Murialdo, Writings, V, pp. 6-8).

On September 14, 1880 Murialdo gave a speech to the second Piedmont’s Catholic Meeting that was taking place at Mondovì, in the Cuneo province.

His appeal so that people would notice the poor youth was finalized to a material help, but even more an educative and religious one.

The relevancy of this text still today is indeed surprising.

Listening to it again we are invited above all to open our eyes to see the poor boys and youth, since perhaps the first deception of the society and cultures within which we live is trying to make them invisible.

«Take for a moment a look around you. See how many poor, abandoned, and misled boys are there in the city and the countryside. They wander along the streets and squares, the meadows and the fields, unfortunate victims of misery, and often of others’ vice. They are orphans, or were abandoned by their father who emigrated to a faraway country. They have no one who would teach them which is their noble destiny, who would make them love virtue, and who would help them to avoid vice, which they embraced without knowing or fully evaluating its horror.

They are left to fend for themselves, in the company of older and already expert in evil young men, thus grow up in idleness, in ignorance, and as slaves of passions that by now are still dawning, but, if they are not contrasted, will grow like giants.

Here are the people of tomorrow; it shall be what you will have made: Christian or impious, law-abiding or revolutionary. These boys will soon become adults, and will either go to church or to the tavern; they will live by their work or by theft and robbery; they will be the honour of their family or members of anti-social lodges, they will defend their country or set fire to the monuments.

Today you can approach this small people, educate and make them Christian. Tomorrow it will be too late: they will avoid you, seduced by the doctrines of unbelief.

It is one of the most serious questions the one faced in the humble and silent work by the institutes of popular education. Think over this great social danger and come to give a hand to those who try to avert the dangers menacing our society» (St Leonard Murialdo, Writings, IX, p. 153).

3. A reference icon: The Good Samaritan

Always, when I develop a reflection for me or for others, I like searching a point of reference, an icon in the Gospel, since in the words Jesus said and in the things he did I believe we can always find inspiration and motivation.

In order to develop our reflection on our Forum’s theme I propose to refer to the parable of the “good Samaritan”, narrated by the evangelist Luke, at chapter 10 of his Gospel.

We know the unrolling of the parable and I do not repeat it here.

I only dwell on the Samaritan’s attitude towards the man assailed by the robbers and left half dead on the roadside, because this is the image, the parable’s photogram over which I want to think.

In it I see what each one of us is for the poor and abandoned youth: the one who goes towards him.

But not with the attitude of one who from the height of his sureness or the solidity of his position gets near to those in need, but rather with the mind of the indigent needy one.

In this attitude, according to me, is the right meaning also of the educative relationship with the poor and needy youth.

Why the Samaritan stopped?

Because as that man thrown at the roadside he felt to be a poor fellow, an emarginated, a wretch: it is the consciousness of his limit that brings him close to that man, abolishing the distance.

It is the consciousness of one’s own weakness and poverty that releases love in the evangelic meaning, and bring us close to the other person as possible completion of our poor humanity.

The one who feels to be complete in himself, strong and rich, and does not need others, will go towards him in the wrong way: with the attitude of one doing condescendingly his alms, of the rich giving to the poor.

But who is the rich one? Who is the poor? Here things are completely upturned: paradoxically I say you that the Samaritan gets close to that wounded man because he above all, the Samaritan, needs that encounter.

After all it is the sentiment Murialdo expresses when he speaks about the poor and abandoned youth writing: “just like we would be, if like them we would have been abandoned”.

The evangelic proximity, which for us finds its place of manifestation also in the educative relationship, is born from this keen sentiment that our being is completed in others. And when we love, we do not give, but we receive.

When we help others, truly, we are helped to be ourselves, to be realized as persons. But the revolution first happens into our heart: I need the other one and the one to whom I give back his life, it is he who makes me live.

This is the “upside down” reading of the parable of the Samaritan, which questions also our way to see and meet the “poor and abandoned ones”, who normally are neither good-looking, nor likeable, nor easy. They are for us the “far ones”, the “last ones”.

But see, when we say, for example, “far”, we presuppose the choice of a “centre”, of a point of reference. And usually when we say “far” we mean “from us”, from our position, from our condition, from our sensibility.

If we remain centre of reference, those who are far, in order to come close to us, must change just in the aspects by which we feel them far. He must accept the conditions we set for them.

If instead it is us who try this approach, we accept then the far one for what he is, we accept, we, to set out, abandoning the safe place of our tranquillity.

We enter an unknown territory, without fully knowing if we are adequately prepared to tackle it. We risk. But in this risk of approach to the far ones, we bet on the humanity that is within them, behind and inside whatever appearance.

Therefore, getting close to the one who, whatever the reason may be, is far from us is a duty not above all as regards him, but as regards us. Each man whom we ignore or avoid is an irreplaceable portion of humanity that we eliminate from our horizon.

The first step, within this reference frame, is always the most difficult one, since it binds to recognize the other one’s dignity, whoever he would be, to recover the human dignity inside him, beyond any wickedness.

He is integrally man, beyond his attitudes and his behaviours.

He is my travel mate, sharing humanity with me: he is my brother.

Within these perspectives, it is also important to accept to question oneself and tray understanding in which measure some temptations can enter in our educative action and in the service we carry on.

First of all there may be the temptation of living the service as privation of something ours for others’ benefit. And perhaps there are moments in which we remember (or bring up) all the things we are doing because they are not used as we expected … as when the disappointed parent tells his son: “With all the sacrifices I am making for you!”

To serve is an unselfish, free action. One gives and is happy because he gives.

You cannot be in debt to yourself. The mentality of those who “sacrifice” for the others is the self-destructive mentality of those who need to be esteemed, to get gratitude in order to have self-esteem. So much so that, when they get discouraged, they denounce the lack of gratitude from others.

Another possible temptation is that of living the service as “private preserve”, enclosed zone. We protect the person we want to help with an impassable wire-net; we prevent him from having direct and personal contacts with others, we want to filter all his relations, convinced that we only know what is good for him.

Indeed we are transforming a partial dependence in total and absolute dependence from us. We become “the only one” of his life: the best but also the worst, loved as indispensable and hated as the one preventing, with his excess of goodness, from freely approaching others.

Still another temptation is the one of bringing along some ulterior motives, that is asking for any return in change of our labours. The thing by far most difficult is being able to renounce personal gratifications, hearing somebody saying “thanks” to us, seeing the gratitude of the one we are trying to help.

Precisely from Murialdo’s experience we learn that he can love deeply not so much the one who is committed to love with enormous efforts of will, as the one who more simply finds out and knows that he is loved.

The last temptation which I would like to touch upon is the worry for the result: our educative action must produce some visible change in the one receiving it? And if the expected changes do not happen? And if even the situation worsens?

Normally our crises of impotence happen when the answer to some expectations fails.

But if serving is already a sufficient action in itself, the result is already in the action. As for the rest, is something more comes, it is all a grace of God.

The wheat grows even if the farmers sleep: the efficacy of our actions is never totally in our hands. And then how can you establish if a certain effect is really a result? Which are the criteria for evaluating the results? Usually we follow outward criteria, quantitative ones (how many boys, how many groups, so high popularity rating…). But these results are signs, relevant and positive indications, and they are never sure criteria that we found the right formula.

The true result is already in the love and trust we manage to put into the action; it is already a great thing that I manage to trust someone I would never have believed to do it; it is great the fact that I forget some fear that blocked my life for a long time.

The educative action educates the one who does it together with the one who receives it.

Probably the real gift the difficult boy, the “poor and abandoned” makes to us is that of getting us against the ropes, helping us to find what we really are, giving us the desire of becoming more and more our true selves.


4. The educator: one who meets

There is another passage of the Gospel that seems to me very inspiring to express our relationship as educators with the poor and abandoned boys and youth.

It is the encounter of Jesus with Nathaniel.

Nathaniel’s first reaction is to refuse Jesus: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” He manages to recognize Jesus only because Jesus first recognizes him: “I saw you when you were under the fig tree”.

The educative encounter begins with the “recognition” of those whom we are turning to.

Maybe the poor, those who are far, the last ones feel certain resentment against us, the Church milieus because they have the impression, not at all unjustified, of being invisible for us.

In his encyclical Deus Caritas est, Benedict XVI writes that Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave.” (n. 18).

The youth build their identity essentially in two ways: through consumption and relationships.

The clothes they wear, their piercing, their way of combing, all of this proclaims: “It is me”.

The second way to claim their identity is constituted by the friends’ network and the family.

First of all it is necessary to love the youth as they look, before loving them as they shall be or as we hope they shall become.

It is not an easy challenge for us. Numerous boys and youth, quite among those who are more “ours”, appear with an identity whose family roots are broken or “irregular”.

Recognizing these youth means also loving their relationships.

We also must try to understand what the youth tell us about themselves and about the world and try to go into this idea.

The majority of them, probably, believe in God, but in a God who remains in the background in resolving their problems and their crises. Recent researches reveal us that often they are happy to live without reference to the transcendence. The majority does not feel that emptiness which would allow them to get close to God.

They are simply happy to live in the ordinary world, day by day.

Their refusal of religion is not at all aggressive. As a young man was saying: “If faith is convenient for you, good, but if it is not the case, let us forget about it!

The youth want to be happy. But the happiness they are looking for is fragile and menaced.

They must fight to defend it from a world marked by violence, sexual abuses, drugs, urban misery, family break-down.

Above all it is a compulsory happiness. In the United States, after shopping, the traders greet their customers with the word enjoy! We are not free to feel unlucky once in a while! “It is not easy to have your sadness recognized when happiness is considered realizable. For this motive in the youth sadness can be an important source of shame, of hidden solitude”.

5. Asystem of signs for our routes

The life of each one of us is a road made up of itineraries, which are sometimes difficult, sometimes easy, and often alternative. Along this road it is important to put meaningful signs, which may help us not to lose the horizon, above all when darkness and confusion come and cloud the objective and the goal.

I would like to leave some of these signs for the educator: prophetic, inevitable, essential.

The first sign is the person.

The person is a world to be discovered, a project in continuous evolution, a harmonious being expressing uniqueness and diversity. The person is the other in continuous dialogue and becoming. It is the interaction and the exchange; the centrality of every global interest, therefore subject and object of reciprocal growth. Hence it comes out the person’s centrality. Always.

Lo, it is necessary that the person may find his/er emotive, affective, intellectual, cultural and political space in our educative places. A place where each one is himself and is evaluated for what he is and not for what he gives or manages to give.

It does not exist the mass, it exists the person with his/er history, social and familiar experience. There it is necessary to graft a pedagogy that may be respectful of the needs and resources of each single boy.

The second sign along the road is this one: I encountered humanity.

It means: I always gave respect; I always reasoned with my own head and taught to do likewise. I tried to get me free and to free others from any conformism; to be critical, therefore, open to confrontation, to what is diverse, to debate, for the search of what is best.

Third sign: solidarity. “Make way to the poor without making way to yourself”: a slogan that was a landmark in Italy some decades ago. It is still relevant.

Others are not an instrument so that I may get something, but I must be the instrument so that others may come to be someone. The others’ problem is like mine. Getting out together from it is politics. Solidarity is also justice. Nothing is as unjust as making equal parts between unequal people.

Another sign: politics. This term however takes a different and nobler meaning from the one usually assumed.

In a text by don Milani, Letter to a lady teacher, I read a dazzling passage concerning this: “Those who love the creatures who are well-off remains apolitical, they do not want to change anything. Knowing the children of the poor and loving politics is the same thing. You cannot love creatures marked by unjust laws and not want better laws; but for all, not only for you”.

The fifth sign: the educators.

Who is the educator?

Don Milani wrote (sorry, I quote the authors I know and who left their mark on me): “Teachers are like the priests and the prostitutes. They quickly fall in love with the creatures. If then they lose them, they have no time for crying”. A very bitter phrase.

He again told the teachers, and it seems to me to hear the echo of certain discourses of Murialdo: “Would you fight for the child most in need overlooking the luckier one, as all families do? Would you wake up with your thoughts fixed on him, looking for a new way of teaching, custom-made for him? Would you go to look for him at his home if he does not come back? Would you not be able to accept it, since the school that loses John is not worthy of being called a school?”

The educator gives to the boy all that he believes, loves and hopes. And the boy adds to it something he has within himself and which we help him to “get out” (e-ducere).

Educating means accompanying, guiding. An author says: “The educator is the one able to self-educate and to educate to what is beautiful. It is a finality without return of efficiency, therefore it is efficacious”. Educating means to propose to oneself and to the other one, to research, for oneself and for the other one, a diverse point of view by which we may say: life can be beautiful.

The educator is the one able to educate himself and to educate to what is difficult. In the life’s training ground we encounter many hurdles: we need to face them alone and together.

The educator is the one able to self-educate and to educate to adventure, understood as going beyond what is already given, already done.

The educator is the one who always keeps in his hand the compass, in order to go beyond.

Fatigues and delusions must not stop us.

Vladimir Jankelevitch writes on this matter: “Many repeated winters did not dissuade nature from producing flowers. Long winters of derision, failure and diffidence were of no avail, because the first warmth of spring finds us always madly forgetful. Remember the little anemone: while sad he at evening observes its little calyx close and cramped with a sense of bitterness and pain, he, the anemone, smiles ironically to us. After the sun avidity of a whole day nothing else could happen to me, but remain with me. Towards dawn your eyes will close out of sleep while my calyx will open again for a new sun avidity of a whole new day”.

The educator is the one having inside a passion and expressing it with the gift of him.

The encounter in which men do not simply pass one near to the other, or only walk a short span of road together is never a mere chance.

Good thoughts can come to mind which we would never have thought to. We can do actions we would never have done unless we had met precisely that person, experiencing his/er friendship and love.

It is difficult to educate without judging, without expecting some results, but the educator is one giving without security. He tirelessly and regularly gives all, without any interest, only thinking to do the other’s good: make way to the poor, without making way to yourself!

The boys need fathers. Unfortunately, never as today, the boys have experiences of lack of mothers and fathers. This absence marks their hearts, which however keep desires and aspirations like those of all the others.

They need love and attention. They are thirsty for values, even when they deny and betray them because they too were betrayed: by life, by adults, by institutions, by educational agencies which instead should have had the role to educate them to life.

Living near to boys and youth with hardships – you teach it to me – means however to enrich with something that perhaps the so called serene boys do not offer.

Their characteristic is to be extremely affectionate, generous, altruist: they are able to risk for good and evil, but when they manage to undertake the way of good, maybe they can become saint!

6. Conclusion

The “poor and abandoned ones” have dreams too.

We are guardians of their dreams.

But how to transform dreams in reality?

I believe that in short or as working hypothesis we could answer that we have to do an educative work, a cultural work and a political work.

Above all there is the educative work in that which I already called the “recognition pedagogy”.

We know that without trust in the boys and youth there is no education: Murialdo teaches it to us. In each boy there is a resource, a point on which to play, maybe it is a small one, but is always there. This means that we are doing recognition pedagogy of his capacities. Even in the most difficult boy there is a resource: our task is “recognizing it” and making the most of it.

Buenos Aires Pedagogical Seminary concluded that the identity brand of the FdM is the “pedagogy of Love”, its educational places are those in which the boy and the youth feel to be welcomed, listened, respected and personally accompanied; those where each one can hear: “Come: here there is room for you!”.

This must be much truer for the “poor and abandoned” youth.

Easier said than done.

It is a downright educative praxis going against the tide and alternative, since more often the educational places tend to defend themselves turning down or pulling away those who bother.

The FdM educational place instead seriously accepts this challenge: it does not defend itself, but above all defends the last one, the poor, the most difficult, so that he first of all may hear in our milieus: “Come: here there is room for you!”.

The cultural work consists in the “pedagogy of hope”.

Pedagogy of hope means helping the boy to “memorize achievement”, since they tend more to memorize failure than memorize achievement; memorize achievement means, in some way, offering them the capacities of believing in themselves and using as capital successful things.

The third element is the “pedagogy of covenant”, that is the commitment to weave a web of virtuous relationships with all those who in any way want and truly seek the good of the boys and youth.

And this is the political work. It is about educating our cities, making a good use of the volunteers, helping to grow the educational resources that are among us and around us and making them become political resources.

I believe that on these paths we will give more easily wings to the dreams of our boys and youth, which are our dreams, which are the dream of God for a better word.

We will play together with conviction and tenacity our part. We will continue to play it together, as FdM: a family of educators at the service of the Kingdom.

Thanks for your listening. Good work.

Fr. Mario Aldegani


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