1 . To be faithful to our charisma,
recognizing the poor and abandoned youth as prophets
and transforming into a prophecy our ministry among them.
I was invited to present a reflection explaining and deepening the first of the nine guidelines arising from the Londrina Forum.
First I think it is important to analyze the text and almost cut it in its parts to grasp its essential elements through the key words.
The keywords are: faithfulness, charisma, prophecy, the poor youth, ministry.
I think that deepening the meaning of these words, in the context in which they are, may be a precondition for our reflection and already part of its contents.
Faithfulness, therefore (and charisma).
What is faithfulness? It is to honour a taken commitment, to keep one’s word. It is time, usually, faithfulness’ peculiar place and space, because only in time we can see or show faithfulness. In the changing situations faithfulness means having a point of reference that guides our choices and behaviours, which binds us to remain in the agreed terms with ourselves and with others. It is not easy because life changes and changes us. Faithfulness commits us not to change the rules of the game.
But we talk of "faithfulness to our charisma".
And this means something specific.
The charisma is a gift that we received, by the grace of God, through the holiness of Saint Leonard Murialdo as a precious heritage. Those who belongs to the Murialdo family by their vocation know they received this gift and have to live and witness it with the yes of their life: a life seeking to express the same passion for Christian education of young people, especially the poorest, which Murialdo lived.
This is the faithfulness of which we speak.
It is clear that it must be a "creative" faithfulness. In fact, the situations we today live are no longer those of his time. Murialdo himself had written it: "for new times, new works." Times have changed but the condition of poverty, neglect, exploitation of children and young people is a tragedy that even today goes through the world. Creative faithfulness means that today we seek and devise new answers that be adequate to today’s needs, but the object of our educational passion, by which we are heirs of Murialdo and his charisma, does not change, nor the privileged attention he had. "Poor and abandoned: here are ours own".
I think that the events involving the Family of Murialdo last year, and that we still have to metabolize and digest well so that they may produce fruit in our midst, have brought a great contribution in richness and clarity to our discussion on the topic in question, whether through the experience that the participants from all over the world lived and through the abundant material that was produced.
I refer to the Pedagogical Seminar in Buenos Aires and the Pastoral Forum in Londrina.
One could say that we have focused, once again, the "how" and the "who" of our fidelity to Murialdo’s charisma.
I tried to gather something of all this wealth for the confreres of the congregation in two circular letters, No. 9 "Letting ourselves be loved in order to evangelize" and No. 12 "Let us meet with joy in the service to the last ones".
At the seminar in Buenos Aires, as I said, we were exhorted to fidelity to the "how" of our apostolate among young people, especially the poor.
Our strong points have emerged: welcome, family style, the wholeness of the educational proposal and attention to people.
In the numbers, images and words the faces and the names of so many boys and youth went before us, and their vicissitudes, their tears, their dreams and their paths: Fatima, Esteban, Juan Diego ... ... and many others.
Really we became aware to be, as educators with the spirit of Murialdo, those who care with love of the most fragile swallows, creatures that are only bones and wind, to help them resume their flight. So all over the world.
Murialdo’s face appeared behind our histories and our tales, especially in his characteristic of friend, brother and father: this "relational" heritage seemed to all one of the main trails on which to walk further, and, anyway, from ever, a kind of sign of recognition for our educational environments: the family spirit.
"The teacher takes care of what is most precious in society: young people and of what's more precious in young people: the heart". [cf. Writings, IV, p. 326, year 1880].
In the Londrina Forum we went, so to speak, at the heart of the charisma: "Poor and abandoned, here are ours own. And the more they are poor and abandoned, the more they are ours".
Concerning "creative" faithfulness, so I have commented the Forum in the circular letter No. 12 written to the confreres:
“The problems of youth and the guidelines of the General Chapter push us to a conversion to the poorest young people, which is not yet a fully achieved reality in our congregation and ask everyone to put concrete signs so that our dedication to the last be more visible” (IC09, 4).
Here, if words have a weight and a sense, we need to stop a little and reflect.
It is written “conversion” to the poorest young people as reality “not yet fully achieved in our congregation.”
It means that we started a route, but that there is still a lot of road to do.
Which road? What to do?
Sometimes, visiting the communities, I meet good and zealous confreres who tell me: “But do you see all the work we are doing? Our devotion, our fatigue? What else do you want from us? Which other dreams do you further want to ask us, while we are being almost crushed by the quantity of the things to do?.”
I would like that all (all means every confrere and every community, under the responsibility of its superior) would let themselves be provoked by the binding and strong words: the conversion to the poorest young people is not yet a fully achieved reality in our congregation!
I would like that when you sit around a table to do a project and a planning or a verification, you would ask yourselves: what are we doing for our poorer young people, what can we do more? Which concrete sign can we set in our reality here so that our dedication to the poor be more visible?
A Josephite, a Josephan community or a province that unwillingly accept the provocation to constantly question themselves on this point, who do not feel “the bite of the more” about the poorest youth, certainly would not look like Murialdo. He in fact, in his condition, could even have afforded the luxury not to see the poor youth in his Turin at the end of XIX century, devoting his priesthood to be a 'canon' or 'theologian' - as they called him - and instead he first went to look for the poorest youth in the oratories and then he was surrounded by them for his whole life in the Artigianelli institution, completely taking upon himself their problems and their sufferings. We all know that Murialdo above all founded the Congregation so that it would continue the impassioned service to the poorest young people: “poor and abandoned: here are our ones! ”. (from the C.L. 12,4).
I think that these indications and routes can be important and challenging for the whole Family of Murialdo.
Prophecy and prophets are the other words to understand.
It is said that we need to recognize the poor and abandoned youth as prophets and change our ministry with them into a prophecy.
What does this mean?
In Londrina Forum Ildo Bohn Gass for one whole day had the participants working on the subject, showing how in the Bible God shows himself the defender of the small and poor ones and speaks through them. So they are his prophets.
More important for us it is to understand and deepen how the poor and abandoned youth are "our" prophets, speak us of God and show us his face.
After all this is the basic idea of the Josephites’ Chapter "dream" in 2006: "With eyes fixed on Jesus and the poor young people ... ".
In Londrina Forum I tried to say something about this, commenting on the parable of the Samaritan and "reversing" the relationships of the characters who are into action.
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”. (from the paper at the Londrina Forum, No. 3)
Here is the prophecy of the poor and abandoned youth for us: they are the face of God and reflect our own face.
Our ministry with them, then, requires to be a prophecy, to speak to the world about God, and this reversal of relationships, to be also political action.
Politics was one of the "signs" I had indicated in Londrina, with a different and nobler meaning than the one we normally see.
In a text of Fr. Milani, Letter to a Teacher, I read in this respect a striking passage: "Those who love the creatures that are well-off remains apolitical, they do not want to change anything. Knowing the children of the poor and loving politics is one and the same. You cannot love creatures marked by unjust laws and not want better laws; for everyone, however, not only for yourself".
In the end I believe that faithfulness, prophecy, politics meet in our efforts to show, in our ministry, our passion for God and our passion for man as the fruit not of an only rational maturation but as an experiential fact, which deeply marks our existence.
Let me explain it with an example from one of the masterpieces of Kieslowski on the Ten Commandments, Decalogue 1.
The child actor is playing the computer.
Suddenly he asks his aunt "How is God?".
The aunt looks at him in silence, then she goes closer to him, embraces him, kisses his hair and holding him tight to herself whispers to him: "How do you feel now?".
Pavel does not want to leave her embrace, raises his eyes and answers: "Fine, I feel fine".
And the aunt: "Lo, so it is God".
Good journey to all the brothers and sisters of the Murialdo Family: let us meet with joy in the service of the last ones!
Fr. Mario Aldegani
Father General
