The time for reading” “

A half hour’s reading each day: that’s what is suggested by the French bishops in a document prepared by COPIC (the permanent Committee for information and communication of the Bishops’ Conference of France) and published in recent days, with the title “Finding time for reading”. In the document the French bishops invite the faithful to rediscover the value of reading. COPIC has in fact set up a work group with the participation of publishers and booksellers and, in tandem with the distribution of this text in Catholic bookshops, is promoting various events to encourage reading in the dioceses, including lectures, “basic libraries”, public readings, etc. Below we publish a summary of the document. Books, a living tradition. In the course of our history, the bishops recall, “Christians have never stopped writing”, so that “reading the works of the past means embracing a living tradition”. “Our whole cultural and literary tradition, the tradition that has constituted our humanity, is based on the presuppositions inherited by the Christian culture of the book”. Praise of reading. Reading, write the French bishops, means “developing and gaining access to an independent interior life, with its own resources, its own intimate personal geography and its own individual identity”. It means “breaking the monotony of our days. It means rebelling against the waste of our time” and “giving ourselves the joy of enriching ourselves with what we discover”. “A book – they observe – may assume new colours, depending on the circumstances of the moment; it diffuses perfumes that enter the mind or sink into the heart depending on the seasons, and the rhythm of our desires”. “The book is first of all a gift we make to ourselves” and offering it to someone else means “making that person an accomplice of what one is”. Through the book – the bishops underline – each Christian “may become the educator of himself”. And today? “What role has reading today?”, ask the bishops. “Everyone acknowledges, in his own professional life, that he cannot content himself with his initial formation, and it is normal for a person to try to improve his language skills or dedicate his time to the study needed to develop his own profession”. So why “should it not be normal to develop our own faith and Christian life by making time in our lives to engage in regular reading?”. “Personal human formation, transmission of fundamental values, reawakening of faith and growth in Christian life, books – all books – may truly help us if we decide to make use of them”. Hence the proposal that we should dedicate half an hour each day to reading, on condition that we don’t put reading on a par with the other mass media, which privilege, by contrast, “rapidity of information, immediate clarity and are aimed at reaching as large an audience as possible. In this way the book risks becoming the “poor relation” of the mass media, without realizing that it is something quite unique and irreplaceable. Another risk, according to the bishops, is that of reducing the book to a “practical” instrument, turning it into a kind of aid (encyclopaedias, dictionaries, etc.). “We need to return to the heart of the act of reading – they stress –. Like the art of writing, it teaches us the secret construction of interior freedom”. “Communicating this experience to others, and drawing on the help of experts – booksellers, librarians, teachers –, we will gradually discover the literary experience as a ‘source of theological insight'”. It is an experience – the bishops conclude – that has always been “one of the spheres, now largely ignored, of dialogue between cultures and the Christian tradition”. Patrizia Caiffa