Those who seek God

“The pastoral way of the Italian Church must not be the ordinary, habitual response to the demands of believers and of Christian communities. Rather, it ought to be viewed as the effort to address an urgent situation considered decisive in the realm of contemporary education”, said Msgr. Mariano Crociata, Secretary General of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI), in his address at the Conference of the Directors of diocesan Catechist Offices, Organized by CEI National Catechesis Department in Reggio Calabria on the theme, “‘You yourselves are our letter’ (2 Cor 3:2). Listening to questions, communicating the Gospel, sharing the encounter with Christ”. For Msgr. Crociata, “we ought to start anew from essentials”, namely from “the question of God” since “a new beginning” is needed, in a present time “threatened by dispersion, by oblivion and by void”. At the centre of the works is the “Letter to those who seek God”, recently published by CEI. The temptation of “fulfilment”. “The real temptation of the faithful is fulfilment”, said Msgr. Bruno Forte, archbishop of Chieti-Vasto and President of the Bishops’ Commission for the Doctrine of the faith, Proclamation and Catechesis, presenting the “Letter” to the over 250 participants in the meeting. Indeed, according to the bishop, “the faithful are never fulfilled, rather, they live as pilgrims in a sort of nocturnal knowledge, marked by expectation, suspended between the first and the last advent, comforted by the light that shone in the darkness in the midst of a ceaseless quest”. Msgr. Forte said that from this “apology of the quest” stems “the rejection of heedless faith, and the departure from an indolent and static expression of faith whilst embracing a faith that seeks, capable of starting anew every day in dedication of the other, living the eternal exodus towards the silence of God”. “If a difference is to be found in the quest for truth that is the quest for God – the speaker affirmed – this does not refer to believers and non-believers. Rather, it is difference between thinkers and non-thinkers, distinguishing those men and women who have the courage to experience suffering, to continue in their quest to believe, to hope and to love, from those men and women who renounced the struggle and are content with the second-last horizon”. A question of “quality”. Without the “quality of our faith and of our ecclesial life all pastoral activity would fail to produce its fruits. These very fruits that ought to provide stimulus and support and that need to be generated in return”, claimed Msgr. Crociata. “Given the social and religious changes of contemporary society, baptism received as a child is sometimes viewed as a justification of the departure from the fundamental request of Christian life: the gift of baptism and faith and the related pastoral conversion”. Since today “there is no social system that can act as a surrogate or endorse an affiliation that is not bound to a deeply personal adhesion”. Today “one is not born Christian, it only possible to become Christian. The second conversion is not a question that regards only those who undertake ‘a renewed beginning’ since it mostly involves the so-called practising faithful, thus, everyone. Cherishing the first proclamation. “Cherishing the first proclamation ought to be our current language”, was the encouragement of Domenico Pompili, CEI undersecretary and director of the National Office for Social Communications, delivered to participants in the Conference of Reggio Calabria. “The Church – said the speaker – gradually cleared the field of popular imagination leaving it in the hands of the cultural industry that is often marked by pure entertainment. In the meantime popular and commercial media have had the liberty to ‘re-evangelize’, colonising public imagination with suggestions and provocations under the banner of religious imagery that was even used for advertising purposes”. Hence the need “for confrontation with the cultural environment where religious communication takes place and where the possibility of the encounter with God is either given or denied”. “Those who wish to commit themselves in Gospel proclamation – stated Father Pompili – must have a profound knowledge of the mechanisms of narrative and symbolical language and of communication rules”. “The inflation of images developed outside the horizon of faith is hampering religious imagination”. This, according to CEI under-Secretary is the “contemporary variation of the divide separating the Gospel from cultural expression”, which also the Catechetical world must acknowledge, taking Saint Augustine’s claim that “a merely rational approach to faith is not sufficient” as the point of reference. Fr. Pompili guarded against the “decadence of certain catechesis that rapidly relinquished the rational-informative method without taking on the symbolic-narrative one”.