Astonishment, not scorn” “

“A brazen attempt to convert the Orthodox people to the Catholic faith”: that’s how the Orthodox bishop of Novgorod, Msgr. Azmas Georgij Danilov, calls the project, turned down by the local authorities, to establish a little convent for Carmelite nuns in the Catholic parish of the city. The accusation of proselytism made against Catholics in Russia continues to remain one of the main obstacles to the rapprochement between the two Churches. We present a reflection by CRISTIANA DOBNER , discalced Carmelite Sister, on the issue. Theresa of the Child Jesus, faced by the breach in Christianity headed by Martin Luther, did no more than ask those who wanted to follow her to become a fortress capable of resisting any assault. The weapons were precarious but the only enduring ones: faith, hope and charity. The term “proselytism” does not arouse scorn in the heart of the Carmel and in each of its sons and daughters. It only arouses astonishment: how on earth could a praying, solitary, silent and poor witness succumb to proselytism? Mary is the Sister and Mother of each person, man or woman, who dwells on Mount Carmel, and her “Yes” arouses and inspires the “Yes” of each Carmelite brother or sister. Just because She stayed below the Cross, she may teach each of us to “stay” before the Face of God: like Elijah, venerated Father for the inhabitants of Mount Carmel; like Raphael Kalinovski, persecuted politician who died invoking the union with the Orthodox Church; like Edith Stein who knew how to “stay” for her people, for the Church and for everyone, when the persecution raged all the more fiercely. The young boy Alexiei was taught to “stay” by his venerated parent who suffered for the faith; by his mother, intrepid wife of a patriarch and mother of an only son consecrated to God. He recalled, in thanksgiving to God, the moments spent in the woodshed when soldiers searched the house; his relatives were deported while his family escaped the danger. The Mother of God shone on the breast of the Patriarch of all the Russias. She accompanied him in his harsh and long sufferings at the service of the Gospel. She taught him how to “stay” vigilant over his flock, how to extricate himself from every snare placed in his path by the power of evil. The whole life of the venerated brother, in his faith in the Trinity, in the Lord Jesus and in the beloved Mother, was a hymn of praise to God, in a constant search for His Face. The Orthodox Church, with its solemn liturgies, with the beauty of its rites, is pervaded by the invocation to the Holy Spirit who wants all men to be saved, who wants everyone to give themselves to Him. So many events, so many memories divide us, but the heart of those who belong to God only knows the memory of God and hence only what unites: from our patron saints, the two brothers Cyril and Methodius, to the martyrdom in the death camps of he who, for the water of Baptism, could shed his own blood for the one title that never dies: being Christian. The rest is wickedness, the rest is that of the forces of evil that want to continue to divide where already wounds were being healed, unity was being forged. Anyone who reads the biography of His Beatitude cannot but admire him, or desire to know him better to be able to speak of him and experience how many sisters and how many brothers congregate around him when he struggles for the good of man. To this brother we Carmelite brothers and sisters open our houses, because they are houses of God and therefore also houses of him, of Alexiei, and we await him to unite our hands open to the Father with his. The praying presence of the women who ascend Mount Carmel in their life of solitude and silence, linked to their vow to live inside their convent, ought to represent the fulcrum and heart of the ecumenical hope. In the daily life of each Carmelite nun is enshrined with joy and trepidation the prayer of Jesus to the Father in the Last Supper: “That they all be one”. Every yearning or desire returns to that like a magnet, frustrated though it is by a reality that overturns it: the scandal of the division of Christians is a cry ever directed to the Father: an invocation that He, in his immeasurable bounty, may arouse witnesses, situations, events that may lead to the great breakthrough, that may hasten the achievement of the goal of the Church, that of being catholic (according to the etymology of the term), i.e. one and indivisible, though with its own tradition. Each praying Carmelite body is characterised by specific peculiarities: its impact on history takes place and is crystallized by mysterious ways, traced by the Spirit. Carmelites do not know what it means to proselytise: they give themselves, that’s all.