"From
'Do-it-yourself' to Responsibility"
Dr (Fr) Barnaba An Phong Le sdb
3450 June 2014
-- Amongst
the EAO diaspora are men who are both holding down a full-time
responsibility and studying at the same time. Fr Barnaba
An Phon
Le
is a good example: he is currently responsible for the
two year
Brothers' formation located at Valdocco, and has been
completing his
doctoral thesis at the Alphonsianum 700 kilometres further
south in
Rome!
Finally, on 6 June 2014, Fr Barnaba successfully defended his
thesis: "From 'Do it
yourself' to Responsibility':
the Salesian educative proposal in the moral maturing of
young people".
Shortly, Fr Barnaba will be returning to Vietnam where his
Province is
eagerly awaiting him - and of course with new responsibilities
to take
up!
--------------
In his thesis proposal, Fr Barnaba sees that young people
today are
very much influenced (and he is drawing on his Vietnamese as
well as
his Italian experience) by what he likes to call the 'do it
yourself'
approach, which might be a call to independence and
responsibility at
one level but in fact risks taking away ones freedom, autonomy
and
responsibility, especially during the process of maturation of
a young
person.
He suggests that the humanistic tradition's "Become what you
are" is
now understood more as "Be what you are."
His response to this situation is to identify the elements of
Christian
theological anthropology which include:
The fact that we have our limits and can
easily fall
into sin.
That we are rational and free and to guide
this freedom
we seek norms, true freedom, and recognise the role of
conscience,
responsibility.
The human being is an integral being:
individual but
communal, with a history and a culture.
Faith offers us revealed truth which,
combined with
human reason, shows us that out life is gift, vocation,
has a purpose
(God) and is modelled by Jesus.
He
then turns to Don Bosco's writings where he
identifies precisely these same elements, showing up in the
classic and
characteristic features of the Salesian charism: "good
Christians and
upright citizens", Preventive System ...
But Fr Barnaba goes a step further and sees that this charism
of Don
Bosco's, despite its development in a Christian and indeed
Catholic
cultural matrix, is also applicable to the non-Christian and
the
non-believer for its deep sensitivity to human dignity. As he
puts it:
" The Salesian educative proposal has an anthropological
leaning
towards the development of the young person, for its attention
to human
values and its notion of the holistic, natural but also
spiritual
nature of the youngster, his (or her) human capacity,
transcendence".
