New charisms” “

The world has changed very rapidly and is changing every day. The twentieth century opened under the impetus of Futurism, with the triple deification of speed, science and violence. It closed after so many tragedies linked to the denial of God and of the human person created in his image: from the futile bloodbath of the first world war to the Shoah, from the totalitarian ideologies hell-bent on the objective of recreating man in their own likeness to the new challenges of genetic manipulation that these very regimes prepared. Just as speed has invaded the contemporary world, after so many “long” centuries characterized by “time that had seemed to stand still”, as historians of the medieval and modern period put it, so history itself has accelerated. The new generations are no longer faced by the ideologies as in the time of Nazism and Communism. But they are confronted with problems that are more difficult to identify, to control and to combat, because it is difficult to draw the line between good and evil, between what is acceptable and what must be categorically rejected. These problems, which are real challenges, can be reduced summarily to three, but all of them pose the fundamental question of the place of the person in society. A first problem is that of the market, which is tending to take the place of all values: the person is crushed between the reign of money and the accentuation of social inequalities within nations and between nations. Globalization is developing every more rapidly and without adequate control by any government. It is being imposed on everyone. It seems it wants to bulldoze society in its passage, and before its advance governments seem incapable of imposing their political will. A second essential problem is that of the growth of individualism. European societies have lost the sense of community. The intermediate bodies, the family, the parish, the local communities, the associations, are in difficulty. Present-day society is no longer an organically organized society, in which each person is incorporated in a network of socialization. The individual is isolated. He lives on his own in a cold, anonymous, depersonalized system dominated by television and by the new means of communication which accentuate personal isolation through a spurious kind of communication. The collective rhythms, the social rites, the festivities that bring together the community cannot be substituted by football matches that diffuse a false collective euphoria, or by the new neo-pagan festivities such as Halloween. A third difficulty derives from science that has achieved enormous, sometimes dizzying progress. The scientist who would like to take the place of God is no longer a myth of the comic strips. Genetic manipulation, the discoveries in the field of biology, create the conditions for a new relation between man and the creation, but also between the strong and the weak, between the rich and the poor. The Church providentially prepared herself to tackle the changes taking place in the world through Vatican Council II, which opened the way to a new understanding of the world. It gave to the ecclesial community the necessary means to cope with the transition from a traditional society, with an institutional form of religion, to a secularized society, which has “exited from God”, to use the expression of Emile Poulat; a multicultural, plurireligious society. In giving primacy to the word of God and the word to the initiatives of the laity, the Council helped various generations of young people to integrate themselves in various ways in the Church. Their presence is at times less visible in the parishes on Sundays, but is expressed in the movements and in emotional events like the World Youth Days. All this reveals the extraordinary capacity of the Church to adapt to the world which is hers after 2000 years, and to give birth within herself to new charisms, in a continuous movement of change. At the same time the Church does not disguise the difficulties that the young generations of Christians experience in an ever more secularized society in receiving the heritage of the Gospel transmitted through the centuries, as the premise for building the “civilization of love and truth”. Not by chance John Paul II wanted to recall these contradictions when he chose as the theme of the next World Youth Day in Toronto the words transmitted by Matthew: “You are the salt of the earth…. You are the light of the world”.