Vatican City, 7 November 2014 (VIS) –
The participants in the national assembly of the Italian
Confederation of Major Superiors (CISM) – around a hundred people –
were received in audience by the Pope this morning in the Clementine
Hall. The Pontiff wished to share with them a few points of reference
for their path, emphasising that religious life helps the Church to
achieve the “attraction” that enables her to grow. Faced with the
witness of a brother or a sister who truly lives a religious life,
people ask themselves, “what is there here?”, “what is it that
leads this person beyond a worldly horizon?”. This is the first
issue: helping the Church to grow by attraction. Without
proselytising: attraction”.
The second point was that radicality,
in different forms, is required of every Christian, but in the case
of religious persons it assumes the form of prophetic witness. “The
testimony of an evangelical life is what distinguishes the missionary
disciple and in particular those who follow the Lord in consecrated
life. And prophetic witness coincides with sanctity. True prophecy is
never ideological, it does not oppose the institution: it is
institution. Prophecy is institutional, it does not follow fashion,
but is always a sign of contradiction according to the Gospel, like
Jesus was. Jesus, for example, was a sign of contradiction to the
religious authorities of His time: to the heads of the Pharisees and
the Sadducees, the doctors of the Law, but also to the others, such
as the Essenes, Zealots, etc”.
To explain the third point, the Pope
quoted the president of the Major Superiors: “We do not want to
fight rearguard battles in defence, but rather to spend ourselves
among the people”, certain of the faith that God has always made
germinate and grow in His Kingdom. This is not easy, it is not to be
taken for granted; it requires conversion; it requires, first and
foremost, prayer and worship; and it means sharing with the holy
people of God who live in the peripheries of history. Removing
oneself from the centre. Every charism, to live and to be fruitful,
is required to decentralise, because at the centre there is only
Jesus Christ. The charism is not to be conserved like a bottle of
distilled water, but must instead be made to bear fruit, with
courage, placed at the service of current reality, of cultures, of
history, as the great missionaries of our institutes teach us”.
Fraternity is another of the signs that
religious life must offer in our time, the Pope affirmed; a time in
which the dominant culture is individualistic and focused on
subjective rights. “Consecrated life can help the Church and
society as a whole, offering witness of fraternity, that it is
possible to live together as brothers in diversity, because in the
community one does not put oneself first, but rather one finds
oneself with people who are different in terms of character, age,
formation, sensibility … and yet we seek to live as brothers. Of
course we do not always succeed, but one recognises one's mistakes,
asks for forgiveness and forgives others. This is good for the
Church: it causes the lymph of fraternity to circulate. And this is
also good for all of society.
But this fraternity “presupposes
God's paternity and the maternity of the Church and of the Mother,
the Virgin Mary”: a relationship cultivated day by day “with
prayer, with the Eucharist, with worship, with the Rosary. In this
way we renew each day our 'being' with Christ and in Christ, and in
this way we place ourselves in an authentic relationship with the
Father in heaven and the Mother Church, our hierarchical Holy Mother
Church, and the Mother Mary. If our life is always located in terms
of this fundamental relations, always renewed, then we are able also
to achieve an authentic fraternity, a brotherhood of witness, that
attracts”.
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