Reawakening the faith

“The priest and the animator must be like a ‘grain of wheat’ that renounces itself to do the Father’s will; that knows how to live hidden from the clamour and the noise of the world; and that renounces the quest for the visibility and greatness of image that often become in our time criteria and even aims of life in so much of our culture, and fascinate so many young people”, said Benedict XVI. The Holy Father was addressing the participants in the European conference on vocational pastoral-care “Sowers of the Gospel of vocation: a Word that calls and invites” that ended in Rome on 5 July; they were received in audience in the Vatican on 4 July.The hour of God. “Dear friends – exhorted the Pope -, be sowers of trust and of hope. The sense of disorientation that the youth of today often feel is indeed deep. Human words are often devoid of future and prospect, devoid even of sense and wisdom. An attitude of frenetic impatience and an inability to wait are spreading”. Yet, according to the Holy Father, “this can be the hour of God: his call, mediated by the strength and efficacy of the Word, generates a journey of hope towards the fullness of life. The Word of God can truly become light and strength, and source of hope”. This, said Benedict XVI, “is the message that comes to us from the Pauline Year that has just ended” and is also “the message of the Year for Priests that has just started”.Youth and future. The intervention at the conference of the psychologist and educationalist Father Amedeo Cencini was also focused on the young. In the current context of their “progressive psychological alienation from the Church, of their rejection or ignorance of, or their attitude of self-sufficiency towards her proposal of faith”, according to Cencini, “a good opportunity to re-open a certain discourse” may consist in the introduction in this proposal of “the question of their own future, of which each person is inevitably interested”. “An intelligently proposed pastoral form of encouragement (divorced, that is, from mercantile interpretations or those that fail to respect the process of maturation of any young person) – explained the expert – could be a way of reawakening a dormant faith or of giving birth to a new one”. “European geography” of faith. Attempting to trace the approaches for the pastoral care of vocations in Europe today, Father Cencini delineated a “European geography of faith”, explaining that “vocational pastoral-care is often identified with first evangelization”. He identified four macro-areas, each of which requires a personalized attention. First there is the area affected by what Cencini called the “extraculturation of the faith”: Belgium, France, the Netherlands and, to a slightly different degree, the Scandinavian countries. How should we react to a situation in which “Catholicism seems no longer to form part of the cultural universe” and we are faced by “a genuine rupture in the transmission of the faith, stifled by a combination of amnesia and resistance?”. “By enabling the young to experience the faith and arguing” its merits, is the answer of Father Cencini: that means combining the proclamation of the Gospel at an “experiential and initiatory” level with an “apologetic” approach understood as capacity to proclaim the faith anew in a culturally inhabitable way”.Four pastoral challenges. The second macro-area (Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain), observed Father Cencini, is characterized by “a process of secularization of mentalities (especially in the Iberian countries), though this is not such as to wholly supplant the traces of Christian references”. In such a context we need to “help the transition from a traditional faith to a faith that is freely and existentially assumed, by modifying the different religious representations anchored in mentalities that are an obstacle to the faith or that distort its face”. A situation of “clandestinity of the faith” can be spoken of in the countries of Eastern Europe that have only recently emerged from the domination of the former Soviet Union, with the exception of Poland. “The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR mark the return of faith – pointed out the expert -, but the long time in which the faith was clandestine has resulted in a situation in which it continues to be experienced in a rather private dimension, one fundamentally reduced to worship and with little impact on public life”. Hence the importance of “accompanying a process of serene reappropriation and recreating a community fabric of faith”. A significant exception among the aforesaid countries is East Germany, “with the specific feature, unique in Europe”, of a serene abandonment of religion that involves 75% of the population” (4% say they are Catholic, 21% Protestant). It’s a peaceful form of atheism, notes Cencini, and “felt as something quite normal”. In this context “the proclamation of the Gospel ought to be presented as a capacity to stir people, to astonish them as a gratuitous gift that can offer a new meaning of life and a new appreciation of the beauty of life”. According to Father Cencini, “it’s useful to place the different geographies and the pastoral challenges that are their consequences in a reciprocal relation; each country should warn the other in advance of what could happen or perhaps is already happening”. For example, “East Germany and France are already widely present in Italy, and similar situations to that in East Germany can be encountered in Sweden and the Czech Republic”.