Words are not enough” “” “

If she wants to be credible in the eyes of youth, the Church of our time must overcome the temptation of the “small flock” and open herself to an “apostolate of open arms”, that focuses attention on the quality of interpersonal relations. Convinced of this is Msgr. Sergio Lanza , professor at the Pontifical Lateran University, who traces some “images of the Church on the roads of Europe”. “Communities in search”. Young people, in Lanza’s view, “with their mobility and cosmopolitanism, decree the end of fixed frontiers and declare themselves against ghetto communities that resemble orphanages, prisons or lunatic asylums more than they do places of freedom”. Hence the need to “overcome every form of parish totalitarianism”: the parish, in fact, is a “typical, indispensable but not exhaustive form” of evangelization and has a need to be complemented by a “network” of “multiple forms of association”, both eccesial and territorial, like the movements. The plea that comes from the youth planet is that in favour of “communities in search”, able to respond to the demand for a “expansion of faith” that comes from the young generations: “The fascination of the exotic, of ‘experience’, signals a deeper need”, which is not even touched on by the common pastoral language. Success, happiness; objects of desire, themes that sound so remote from the tone and language of preaching. Only their critical assumption, through the inculturation of the Gospel, permits scope for real communication. In the search for faith, the young fall into the hands of magicians and seducers, or turn to far from distinterested counsellors and comforters”. “Adult communities”. “Without a community to which to belong, man loses his own identity”: but the young, Lanza notes, seek “adult communities”, and “the mainly adolescential connotation of parish youth groups is a sign of the uneasy relationship that forces our pastoral care into a position halfway between infantilism and senescence. We need to overcome the compartmentalization of the ages, the non-communication between the generations. The young person seeks significant figures as models to whom he can refer, We cannot permit his hopes to be disappointed”. A Church “open to dialogue” and “fixed in her own identity”: that is the identikit of the European Church traced by Lanza, according to whom “renewed and convinced styles of ecclesial communion” are needed, given that “the young love variegated multiplicity, but don’t understand forms of provincialism”. “Narrating the future”. The young, in Lanza’s view, have a need today for new “languages of the faith” but words alone are not enough: “authority and authoritativeness” need to be combined through a style of “mission” that “is not proselytism, but that reaches man in the place where he was born, where he studies, works, suffers…”. All this leads to the need for a “global review of the cultural coordinates in which the faith is called to express itself” and a strong “cultural commitment” of Christians to formation. Giving rise to “ecclesial places of political dialogue”, concludes Lanza means thinking of a “more incisive and qualified presence” of believers, beginning with catechesis and in particular the catechesis of adults. Catechesis is called to “become the original and appropriate place where Catholics dialogue on perspectives for the common good, on the basis of the fundamental values of the faith. It must, he says, be characterized by a “new vitality of dialogue within the Church” and also have positive effects “for the concrete life of society”. nome file: est