“Inventing” hope

“Yes, parishes are places of hope”: that’s the conviction of Hubert Windisch, priest and professor of pastoral theology at the University of Freiburg in Germany, who drew the conclusions of the 26th European Colloquium of Parishes held at Nyíregyháza (Hungary). This year’s meeting was dedicated to the theme “Parishes, places of hope. Prepared to make a defence to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15). It was an occasion for debate, exchange and memory of the difficulties suffered between the Churches of Eastern and Western Europe, as well as an opportunity to reflect on the experience of ecumenism. Windisch recognized that today parishes are considered “places of small daily hopes, just like many others”, but it should be emphasized that a “great hope” is also embodied in them: a hope that “is anchored in God himself and is a virtue that comes from Him”. To transmit this hope, those who work in parishes must be “icons of Christ and of heaven for the world”. They must “radiate a kind of spiritual transparency” of their life of faith and of the bonds of brotherhood and friendship they experience.“Decomposing” bonds. With regard to the bond between parishes and hope, Father Luca Bressan, professor of pastoral theology at the Archiepiscopal Seminary of Milan, pointed out that “urban culture obliges Western Christianity seriously to reconsider its traditional presence among people”. What’s required of parishes, he urged, is “a patient and attentive operation of discernment and pastoral imagination”. Fr. Bressan stressed that the meeting with this culture is “an occasion for ecclesial bonds to experience a salutary operation of decomposition”. This, he suggested, should be realized in three ways. The first is to “construct liturgies that are able to communicate to urban man the awe of the Kingdom towards which we travel”; the second is to “use the bonds of solidarity to proclaim the universal and utterly gratuitous dimension of Christian salvation”; the third is to “establish networks of relations able to turn churches and parishes into spaces in which the ‘other’ and ‘alternative’ logic of the preaching of the Kingdom accomplished by Jesus can truly be experienced”.A community without conditions. In the view of Alphonse Borras, Vicar General of the diocese of Liege and professor at the Catholic University of Louvain, both hope and parishes have now become “problematic realities”. In our age, in fact, the bond between local life and parishes has been broken. “Post-modern culture is less sensitive to the dimension of time, to the future and to the history that tends towards an end, which is the Judeo-Christian vision”. In this context the parish becomes a place of hope that is presented as “a community for everyone without preliminary conditions”. Parishioners experience faith and hope in the context of the present day, and parishes are “places for the word, the Eucharist, charity and discernment”: local Churches cannot think of “reforming society”, but they certainly can “invent the present”.The enemy to be conquered. In this year’s Colloquium considerable space was given to testimonies of life in the parishes of the countries of Eastern Europe, during the period of the Communist dictatorships, for which “religion was the enemy to be conquered”. This was recalled by Franciscan Father Kálmán Peregrin: “Catholics in particular were opposed by the regime, because they made reference to Rome and manifested in a concrete way that man has at his disposal certain spheres that are not amenable to the dictatorship of the State”. The repression of religion, however, was not implemented in the same way in all Communist countries. “In Hungary – he recalled – the last trial of a person accused of being a member of the Church ended in 1971, while the last person sent to prison on religious grounds was released in 1977”. Even if the churches were not closed down, the difficulties they had to endure in Hungary were many, and here as elsewhere “the schools, hospitals, as well as all the pastoral activities performed by religious were eliminated, religious congregations were disbanded and monks and nuns sent to work; many of them, however, maintained their faith and transmitted it in the places in which they found themselves”.The “secret” church. The “Ukrainian Church is also able to give an eloquent testimony of steadfastness and hope, because it survived”, recalled Oleksandra Krypyakevych in recounting her own experience: both her father – a priest of Greek-Catholic rite – and her mother were arrested. As a young girl she lived with her brothers in a gulag, together with many other detainees, because “there was a project of the regime to liquidate the Catholic Church. Many priests and bishops were also imprisoned or sent to Siberia”. Krypyakevych, however, was able to experience the “secret, underground church: when my parents were freed we returned to Ukraine, but we had nothing. My father worked as a violinist, and celebrated marriages and baptisms in secret”.