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Witnesses of the Love of God |
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WITNESSES
OF THE
LOVE OF GOD
Theological and Spiritual Reflections on the
Preventive System of Don Bosco
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WITNESSES
OF THE
LOVE OF GOD
Theological and Spiritual Reflections on the
Preventive System of Don Bosco
José Luis Plascencia Moncayo, SDB
Kristu Jyoti Publications
Bosco Nagar, Krishnarajapuram
Bengaluru - 560 036
India
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Copyright © Kristu Jyoti Publications.
All Rights Reserved - 2018
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the
prior written permission of the author.
ISBN
:
978-81-936029-7-3
Price
:
₹ 140.00
Cover
:
Kodappanamkunnel Sanil SDB
Typeset by :
Kristu Jyoti Publications,
Bengaluru - 560 036.
kristujyotipub@yahoo.co.in
Ph : (0) 9481201282
Website :
www.kjcpublications.org
Printed at :
National Printing Press,
Koramangala, Bengaluru - 560 095.
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CONTENTS
Presentation
9
1. Meditation on hope
11
1. What may we hope for?
11
2. Hope in the postmodern era
13
3. Hope in biblical revelation
17
4. Don Bosco, man of hope
21
5. To conclude: A parable…
23
Prayer: Hope
25
2. The spirituality of our charism: Da mihi animas 27
1. “Da mihi animas”: Salesian spirituality
and asceticism
27
2. “…the glory of God and the salvation of
souls…”
28
3. Passion for humanity, for Christ, for God…
31
4. Don Bosco’s apostolic passion
35
Prayer: “Give me souls”
40
3. The asceticism of our charism: Coetera tolle…
42
1. Christian asceticism: expression and
consequence of love
42
2. The two sides of love
43
3. The “God who is love”: A poor God
45
4. Love and poverty in Salesian life
48
5. Poverty as an aspect of Salesian consecrated
life
50
Prayer: “Take away the rest”
56
4. “It is not enough to love…”: The manifestation
of love
58
1. Love needs to be manifested
58
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2. The expression and the manifestation of love 61
3. “…We have known the love God has for us…” 63
4. The incarnation of the Son of God, epiphany
of divine love
65
5. “It is not enough to love”: The Preventive
System
68
Prayer: Manifestation of love
74
5. Gift – grace – Eucharist
76
1. The loss of the sense of gift
76
2. Giving freely: A fundamental human reality
78
3. “…grace and truth came through
Jesus Christ” (Jn 1, 17b)
83
4. The love of God, agape and eros
85
5. “Do this in memory of me”: The gift of the
Eucharist
88
Prayer: Gift – grace – Eucharist
91
6. The Salesian mission: “Poor and abandoned
boys”
93
1. “His predilection for the little ones and
the poor…”
93
2. “…with Don Bosco we reaffirm our preference
for the young who are poor…”
97
3. “…poor, abandoned and in danger…”
99
4. “Our mission sets the tenor of our
whole life…” (C 3)
103
Prayer: Poor and abandoned youth
107
7. “Starting afresh from Don Bosco”
109
1. “The Lord has given us Don Bosco as
father and teacher…” (C 21)
109
2. “…We study and imitate him, admiring
in him a splendid blending of nature and
grace” (C 21)
113
3. “…we too find in him our model” (C 97)
122
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4. Conclusion
124
Prayer: To Don Bosco
125
8. Mary, mother and teacher
126
1. Introduction
126
2. “…full of grace”
128
3. “The Lord is with you…”
129
4. “Let it be done to me according to your word” 130
5. “Blessed are you among women…”
132
6. Mary Immaculate, Help of Christians in
our Salesian charism
134
Prayer: Mary, mother and teacher
138
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PRESENTATION
José Luis Plascencia’s retreat talks to the 26th General Chapter
of the Salesians of Don Bosco are the most extraordinary
theologico-spiritual reading of the Preventive System of Don
Bosco I have come across. Repeatedly the preacher takes up
well known themes – such as Da mihi animas, coetera tolle and
“it is not enough to love” – and plumbs their theological depths
in a manner that is entirely unexpected and delightful. In ways
that Don Bosco intuited, in ways that he never even suspected,
the guiding lines of the educative system he left us begin to
reveal their potential and wealth. General Chapter members
are not necessarily professional theologians – they tend to be a
good reflection of the Congregation at large – but I remember
very well the electric attention with which they followed
Fr Plascencia as he gave his talks.
Ten years and another chapter have passed since GC26,and
we have already begun preparing for GC28. Why pull
out retreat talks from 2008, where ‘Rector Major’ means
Fr. Pascual Chávez and the pope is Benedict XVI? My simple
answer is that we are dealing here with a “permanently valid
achievement,” one that deserves to be better known, and that
belongs to the patrimony of the Congregation, along with the
official documents of GC26. The intention of that Chapter was
to invite Salesians to appropriate the ‘Salesian’ aspect of their
identity and vocation, and it did that by asking us to revisit
Don Bosco so as to discover in him the passion that animated
his life. For me, Plascencia’s reflections at the beginning of the
Chapter are an essential element of that rediscovery. They have
accompanied me in the years that followed the Chapter, and
I am happy to present them, in their English version, to our
confreres and to all those who share in the spirit and mission
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of Don Bosco in the English-speaking world. As the Rector
Major Fr. Pascual Chavez himself said, “The Retreat talks…
gave us elements of important insights for a greater theological
understanding of the charism, the mission and Salesian
spirituality” (GC26, p.128). And in their own way, I believe
Plascencia’s reflections will contribute to helping us answer the
great question of GC28: “What kind of Salesians for the youth
of today?”
Fr. José Luis Plascencia Moncayo, SDB one of our outstanding
theologians, belongs to the province of “Cristo Re e Maria
Ausiliatrice,” Guadalajara – Mexico. He did his doctorate on the
unusual topic of the Christology of Dostoevsky, now published
as Nada más humano que Cristo: El misterio del hombre a la luz
de Cristo en Fiodor M. Dostoyevski (Rome: LAS, 2015). He was
Rector and professor of fundamental and systematic theology
at the Instituto Superior Salesiano, Tlaquepaque – Mexico,
before being transferred to the Salesian Pontifical University,
Rome, where taught in the Faculty of Theology for several
years. He is now back in Tlaquepaque, where he continues
his ministry of teaching, while making himself available for
Salesian animation and the preaching of retreats in various
parts of the world.
I cannot end without a very special word of thanks to
Fr. Ian Figueiredo, SDB, for his patient and painstaking
work of preparing the English text for publication, as also to
Fr. Banzelao Teixeira, SDB and Fr. Cyriac Malayil, SDB for
help with the notes and quotes. And to all those involved
in preparing the English translation of the text way back in
2008: thank you for your work and for this gift to the English-
speaking Salesian world!
Ivo Coelho, SDB
General Councillor for Formation
Rome, Feast of the Transfiguration, 6 August 2018
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1. MEDITATION ON HOPE
1. WHAT MAY WE HOPE FOR?
The Post-Synodal Exhortation, Ecclesia in Europa, in which
John Paul II takes up again the work and the conclusions of
the Synod of Bishops in preparation for the Great Jubilee of
2000, says:
Throughout the Synod, a powerful impulse towards hope
gradually became evident. While taking seriously the
analyses of the complexity characterizing the Continent,
the Synod Fathers saw that possibly the most urgent matter
Europe faces, in both East and West, is a growing need for
hope, a hope which will enable us to give meaning to life and
history and to continue on our way together.1
The most recent papal magisterium has chosen hope as
its central theme. Benedict XVI’s Encyclical, Spe Salvi, offers
us some precious elements to enrich our reflection on this
theological virtue. Apparently, one of his main objectives is to
offer a response, based on our Christian identity, to a universal
and not just a European need. Suffice it to quote, for example,
number 22, where he says:
Again, we find ourselves facing the question: what may
we hope for? A self-critique of modernity is needed in
dialogue with Christianity and its concept of hope. In this
dialogue Christians too, in the context of their knowledge
and experience, must learn anew in what their hope truly
consists, what they have to offer to the world and what
they cannot offer. Flowing into this self-critique of the
1JOHN PAUL II, Post-Synodal Exhortation, Ecclesia in Europa, n. 4.
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modern age there also has to be a self-critique of modern
Christianity.2
As we glance at the Congregation worldwide, we have to
admit that there is a “growing need for hope” in all our settings,
albeit in a different way. Among the many factors that make it
difficult for us to look at the future with enthusiasm are the
shortage of vocations, except in some Salesian geographical
regions; the fragile formation of the young generations;
the problems of present-day youth, aggravated by external
factors like violence, drug-trafficking, and old and new forms
of poverty; and sometimes, on a deeper level, the waning of
apostolic passion and the adoption of models of religious life
far from the ideals of the Gospel. In various portions of his
letter convoking the Chapter, the Rector Major presents as
challenges some of the features of this disquieting situation of
the Congregation (cf. AGC 394, pp. 9-11, 17-20, and passim).
In the run-up to GC26, a similar feeling has surfaced
almost everywhere (perhaps with some exceptions). The very
insistence of the Congregation on “starting afresh from Don
Bosco to reawaken the heart of every Salesian” with regard
to his charismatic identity and apostolic zeal, presupposes the
existence of such a situation and calls us to be on the alert.
We know very well that hope is generated by faith, and
sustains love. But, there can also be a situation in which faith,
based as it is on a concrete historical reality, can paradoxically
remain closed to hope, and shut itself up within the pain of
remembrance (etymologically: nostalgia) and lamentation
over the past.
I think we can see this situation clearly reflected in the
biblical narrative of Gideon’s vocation:
As Gideon was beating out wheat in the wine press, to hide
it from the Midianites, the angel of the Lord appeared to
him and said, “The Lord is with you, you mighty warrior.”
2BENEDICT XVI, Encyclical Letter, Spe Salvi, n. 22.
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Gideon answered him, “But sir, if the Lord is with us, why
then has all this happened to us? And where are all his
wonderful deeds that our ancestors recounted to us, saying,
‘Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?’ But now the
Lord has cast us off, and given us into the hand of Midian.”
Then the Lord turned to him and said, “Go in this might of
yours and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian; I hereby
commission you.” He responded, “But sir, how can I deliver
Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the
least in my family.” The Lord said to him, “But I will be with
you, and you shall strike down the Midianites, every one of
them.” (Judg 6, 11-16)
Undoubtedly, Gideon has faith; he is convinced of God’s
salvific intervention in favour of his people… but in the past;
what he lacks is hope, the belief that God has not abandoned
his people but continues to be the “God-with-us”, inviting
them to look to the future with confidence. The upshot is that
Gideon is called to collaborate with God, and not just lament
over his apparent “absence” or withdrawal of support.
We too can be like the People of God in exile, recalling the
divine marvels of the past (and as they did, we too can perhaps
forget all too easily our own responsibility):
We have heard with our ears, O God, our ancestors have
told us, what deeds You performed in their days, in the
days of old, You with Your own hand (…); yet now You
have rejected us and abased us, and have not gone out with
our armies (…) All this has come upon us, yet we have not
forgotten You, or been false to your covenant. Our heart has
not turned back, nor have our steps departed from Your way
(Ps 44, 2.10.18-19).
2. HOPE IN THE POSTMODERN ERA
There is no doubt that in the contemporary world, and
especially in the existing “youth culture”, hope has not become
any easier.
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Phenomenologically speaking, there are three fundamental
characteristics of hope we can point to, in so far as it is a human
disposition:
* it tends by its very nature towards the future; in this way
it reveals the inner dynamic of the human being as a forward
movement: “while there’s life, there’s hope”. Without forgetting
the myth of Pandora, we can say, with Aristotle: “Hope is the
dream of a man ever on the alert”.
* it is always lived within a positive outlook, for not
everything that comes along is “worthy of hope”: it can be an
object of fear or anxiety instead.
* it includes a “passive” element (waiting), but also a positive
disposition on the part of one who lives this period of waiting
(hope).3
We have to recognize that, side by side with this inner
movement towards the future embedded in the depths of the
human being, there is also a danger of his not living the present
moment in a positive way. In this connection, Pascal says:
We do not rest satisfied with the present. We anticipate the
future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its
course; or we recall the past, to stop its too rapid flight. So
imprudent are we that we wander in times which are not
ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us;
and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no
more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists….
We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we think
of it, it is only to take light from it to arrange the future.
The present is never our end. The past and the present
are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never
3Most Western languages maintain this wait-hope duality: aspettare-
sperare, warten-hoffen, attendre-espérer, espera-esperanza.
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live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to
be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.4
Unfortunately, the human experience of time has become
particularly problematic in the postmodern era.
In a conference he gave the Superiors General, the Rector
Major offered the following analysis:
The human being, although always living in the present
(this is a self-evident truth), is a “being of the future”
(E. Bloch, W. Pannenberg): By his very nature, he is faced
with a utopia, something that has not as yet “happened”
in our world and in history. This can be said, a fortiori, of
the younger generation which carries this approach to the
future in its very psychosomatic identity, written into the
“humblest” cell.
This is why we see a tragedy in the postmodern situation:
the threat of the future that weighs on humanity places
us, especially our younger generation, before an existential
contradiction: on the one hand, with the irresistible need
for a future horizon, and on the other, with the lack of this
horizon. If we add to this the rejection of the past on the part
of today’s youth culture, we can understand the sensation
of being “locked up” in the small space that the present
provides, with no other solution than to try to “live the
fleeting moment” (l’ attimo fuggente).
This threat shows up in a double way: on the one hand, in
what J. Moltmann called “the loss of atomic innocence”
from Hiroshima onwards:5 we know – and recent news
items remind us – that for some decades, and for the first
time in the history of the world and of mankind (from
what we know), there exists the real possibility (depending
4Quoted in JÜRGEN MOLTMANN, Theology of Hope (London:
SCM Press, 1967) 26-27.
5Cf. JÜRGEN MOLTMANN, La catastrofe atomica: e Dio, dov’è?
Urbino, Il Nuovo Leopardi, 1987, p. 11.
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concretely on the decisions made by some) that could see
the entire human race disappear as a consequence of a
nuclear conflagration. The fact that the leaders of nations
may reach some possible agreement in this regard does not
eliminate the danger. As the same Moltmann said, we can
never get back our lost innocence. “The era we live in, even
if it were to last forever, is the final era of mankind… We are
living in the end-times, that is, when each day could bring
about the end”.6
On the other hand – and not totally unconnected with
what went before – we find this threat in the universal and
irreversible ecological decline: from air pollution, the loss
of drinkable water, and the destruction of forests to the
giddy exploitation of unrenewable energy. As Moltmann
again said, “We are all equal…faced with the ozone layer”.
This “suppression from outside” of future horizons is a
typical fact of our times, and is fundamental to the
understanding of our obsessive attachment to the present,
and the need for immediate “satisfactions” which are
characteristic of the postmodern era: since it is not the
same to “want to live today” in the perspective of tomorrow,
as having to anchor today, because maybe tomorrow will
not exist… Some days ago a newspaper, writing about the
review of a book by the Hungarian author Imre Kertész,
Nobel Prize-winner for Literature, used this expression:
“Is it possible to have children after Auschwitz?”, which
recalls a famous sentence: “Is it possible to believe in God
after Auschwitz?” It is a question that today so many
young people ask when facing marriage and family: not
with the hope of earlier times, but with anguish in the face
of the future in which they will live: is it worth bringing
new beings into the world?
6Ibid., p. 10, quoting Günther Anders.
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Undoubtedly this “privation of the future”, in a totally
different sense, also affects consecrated life, especially the
new generations”.7
In this respect, modernity can be described as the
disposition of someone who rejects the past, and projects
himself towards the future wherein he lodges all his
expectations; postmodernity, instead, in so far as it is a reaction
to ingenuous modern optimism, is akin to “placing oneself ” as
serenely as possible in the present and living the “carpe diem”.
A very “pertinent” text from the Bible is the witness given by
the elderly man, Eleazar, during the Maccabean war:
“Such pretence is not worthy of our time of life,” he said,
“for many of the young might suppose that Eleazar in
his ninetieth year had gone over to an alien religion, and
through my pretence, for the sake of living a brief moment
longer, they would be led astray because of me, while I defile
and disgrace my old age (…) Therefore, by bravely giving
up my life now, I will show myself worthy of my old age and
leave to the young a noble example of how to die a good
death willingly and nobly for the revered and holy laws.”
(2 Mac 6, 24-25. 27-28)
3. HOPE IN BIBLICAL REVELATION
In contrast with other conceptions of life and history,
Israel’s experience, moulded in the Bible, presents God as a
“God of exoduses”, an advocate of leaving the security of the
present for a future that is promising, certain (in the fullest
sense of the word, i.e., as the object of a promise) but always
insecure because if there is no faith, all the talk of an exodus or
a movement towards the future makes no sense. “If they had
been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would
have had the opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a
better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not
7PASCUAL CHáVEZ, “Per una vita consacrata fedele. Sfide
antropologiche alla formazione”, USG (maggio 2006), pp. 21-23.
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ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a
city for them” (Heb 11, 15-16). Here, then, is a question to put
to ourselves: can we say that our God, in like manner, is “not
ashamed” to call himself our God?
Because of its faith in God, the whole of Israel’s history was
a constant straining towards the future, clearly marked by a
confidence in the fulfilment of the promises made by a faithful
God (fides – fiducia – fidelitas – spes: faith – confidence –
faithfulness – hope).
Similarly, the lack of faith turns into despair and desperation,
the two sides of a coin, and results in a hankering after the past:
“If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of
Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for
you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole
assembly with hunger” (Ex 16, 3 and passim).
The entire history of God’s People is permeated by God’s
promise. In spite of Israel’s infidelity and ingratitude, the pre-
exilic prophets, and Jeremiah in particular, while threatening
God’s punishment and the annulment of the Covenant because
of this infidelity (cf. Jer 13; 19), always announced a New
Covenant. (Jer 31, 31ff.; Ezek 36, 24ff.; Is 40-55)
In the extraordinary vision described in Ezekiel, the dry
bones are an eloquent symbol: “Son of man, these bones are
the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up,
and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely’. Therefore,
prophesy, and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God: I am
going to open your graves, and raise you up from your graves,
O My people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel’.”
(Ezek 37, 11-12)
In the New Testament, more than a single text, it is the
Christ-event in itself which is the definitive (eschatological)
accomplishment of God’s promise. But, the death of Jesus
shows us dramatically that God’s thoughts are not man’s
thoughts. (cf. Is 55, 8ff.)
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Instead, for the one who believes in the “God of Jesus
Christ,”
hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been
poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has
been given to us. For while we were still sinners, at the right
time Christ died for the ungodly (…) God proves His love
for us in that while we still were sinners, Christ died for us”
(Rom 5, 5ff.). Therefore, “blessed be the God and Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he Has given us
a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of
Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is
imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for
you, who are being protected by the power of God through
faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”
(1 Pet 1, 3-4)
It is noteworthy to find mention made of three periods
of time: the past of faith, the future of hope, and the present
of God’s faithfulness and our Christian commitment to love
(cf. the following verses, 1 Pet 1, 6-9). Instead, as Benedict
XVI points out: “Paul reminds the Ephesians that before their
encounter with Christ they were ‘without hope and without
God in the world’ (Eph 2, 12)”.8 This is probably the text most
often quoted in the Encyclical: it appears also in numbers 3, 5,
23 and 27, in different contexts, obviously.
One of the books of the New Testament that clearly expresses
the relationship between the three theological virtues is the
Letter to the Romans. Here are some of its fundamental texts
on hope:
+ In the first place, the Letter sets before us the figure of
Abraham seen from this perspective: “Hoping against hope,
he believed and so became the father of many nations”
(Rom 4, 18).
8BENEDICT XVI, Spe Salvi, n. 2.
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+ A second text presents, conversely, a string of characteristic
Christian virtues: “Suffering produces endurance, and
endurance produces character, and character produces hope,
and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been
poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been
given to us” (Rom 5, 3b-5).
+ A little further, in chapter 8, we are reminded that hope
looks towards the future: “For in hope we were saved. Now
hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?
But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with
patience” (Rom 8, 24-25).
+ Towards the end of the Letter, there are two notable texts
in this regard: “Whatever was written in former days was
written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the
encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope” (Rom
15, 4). And the concluding words: “May the God of hope
fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may
abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Rom 15, 13).
Another of the New Testament books that speaks eloquently
of hope is the Letter to the Hebrews. The Pope dwells on this
Letter too in his Encyclical, especially on two of its passages,
Heb 10, 34 and 11, 1; he offers a broad, and even polemical,
exegesis of the latter text.9
Let me conclude this short biblical reflection with a
beautiful, albeit brief, expression of St. Paul: “Love is patient
(…); [it] hopes all things” (1 Cor 13, 4.7). St. Paul is actually
reminding us that love always goes beyond hope, precisely
in order to hope for everything and always. In this sense,
paraphrasing Hans Urs von Balthasar, we can say that “love
alone is worthy of hope”.
9Ibid., nn. 7-9.
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4. DON BOSCO, MAN OF HOPE
It is important to note that, in our Rule of life, there is a
linguistic inclusion which embraces our Constitutions in
their entirety. Article 1 points out as a certainty of faith that
our mission is not merely a human venture but comes from
God, and constitutes “the support for our hope” (C 1). And
the last article does not speak of God’s initiative, but of our
collaboration with Him in the realization of the mission he
entrusts to us: our fidelity is “for the poor and the little ones a
pledge of hope” (C 196).
Even if it is not mentioned explicitly, hope is very much
present in the sections of our Constitutions describing our
identity and the Salesian spirit, especially articles 17-19. In the
context of the evangelical counsels, their global presentation
concludes with a phrase which embraces a vision of faith and
a commitment: the Salesian is “an educator who proclaims to
the young ‘new heavens and a new earth’, awakening in them
hope and the dedication and joy to which it gives rise” (C 63).
In all this there is manifested our “sonship” of Don Bosco, a
man who had an extraordinary “capacity for hope”, or to put it
better, a man who was able to integrate to perfection the three
aspects of a Christian’s relationship with God: faith, hope and
charity.
Rather than remain on the level of generic or rhetorical
statements, we shall mention, briefly and schematically, three
aspects – the temperamental, the educative, and the theological
– which describe how our Father, Don Bosco, lived the virtue
of hope.
– Blending nature and grace (cf. C 21) and without
forgetting that both are God’s gifts, we speak of a temperamental
disposition in him towards hope: he showed an extraordinary
ability to convert difficulties into challenges that motivated
and urged him onward; he showed, till the last moment of
his life, an enthusiasm and a hopefulness originating from
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his passionate and apostolic love for the young. The times in
which he lived were certainly not easy; yet he never bewailed
them nor did he hark back nostalgically to the past (cf. C 17).
– Furthermore, hope was an educative disposition in
Don Bosco. Whoever works with children and youth needs
hope more than anything else; he must experience the truth
expressed in Psalm 126: “Those who go out weeping, bearing
the seed for sowing, shall return with shouts of joy, carrying
their sheaves” (v. 6).
The only thing is that, in education, the “return” does
not take place within a few days or months, but, in the best
of cases, after many years. Therefore, waiting and hoping are
indispensable in educative work.
In this field (of education), we again come across the
relationship between hope and love: only the one who loves
can hope (in the deepest sense of the word). Once more, we
have here an echo of the Pauline phrase: “love… hopes all
things” (1 Cor 13, 7). I would like to go deeper into it, using
just one sentence which is not a simple play on words but an
expression of a marvellous reality: only the one who loves us,
believes us to be better than we are, and can place his “hope”
in us; however, we can be better than what we are, only if
someone loves us… This is what Don Bosco incarnated in
himself in an extraordinary manner.
Finally, and it could not be otherwise in a saint like him, we
find deep down in Don Bosco an attitude of hope which was not
limited to this world and to this life. Hope, despite everything,
did not prevent him from living the present moment intensely,
keeping his gaze resolutely directed towards heaven and his
feet firmly planted on the ground. The words uttered by the
Servant of God, John Paul II, in his Apostolic Exhortation, Vita
Consecrata, seem to have taken their inspiration from Don
Bosco: “We need to trust in God as if everything depended on
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him and, at the same time, to work generously as if everything
depended on us”.10
In his Spiritual Testament, Don Bosco wrote these moving
words: “Adieu, dear children, adieu. I wait for you in heaven
(…) I leave you here on earth, but only for a short time. I hope
the infinite mercy of God will enable us all to meet one day
in heaven. There I await you”. Here we also come across the
community aspect, on which His Holiness insists a great deal:
“Our hope is always essentially also hope for others; only thus
is it truly hope for me too”.11
5. TO CONCLUDE: A PARABLE…
I came across a very simple but delightful and suggestive
story which I would like to narrate to you. An elderly lady was
very lucid as she approached the moment of her death. Her
good friend asked her: “Have you any wish to be fulfilled after
your death?” The old lady replied: “There’s one thing. I want to
be buried with a fork in my hand.” “A fork?” asked her friend,
surprised by the request. “Yes,” she repeated, “a fork! In all
my years of attending dinners, I always remember that when
the dishes of the main course were being cleared, the fork was
always kept because I knew that something better was coming…
So, I just want people to see me there in that casket with a fork
in my hand, and I want them to wonder ‘What’s with the fork?’
Then I want you to tell them in my name: “Because she well
knew that the best is yet to come!”
In reality, this is the deepest motivation of our life and our
work – what Don Bosco called, in all his simplicity, a “piece
of paradise” in the Salesian garden: “Death for the Salesian is
made bright by the hope of entering into the joy of his Lord”
(C 54).
10JOHN PAUL II, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Vita
Consecrata, n. 73.
11BENEDICT XVI, Spe Salvi, n. 48.
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The Office of Readings in Spanish for departed Salesians
has a hymn that expresses this truth in a simple and inspiring
way:
Think of what it will be:
To leap ashore, and find you are in heaven!
To pass from the storms of life
to endless peace!
To grasp an arm, and find, as you go along,
that it is God’s arm!
To fill your lungs with pure air…
a divine air!
Giddy with happiness to hear a cherub say:
“This is never-ending joy!”
To open your eyes and ask what’s going on,
and hear God say to you: “You’ve reached home!”
Oh! What immense delight
to immerse myself in Your ocean!
to close my eyes and begin to see;
to stop my heart and start to love!
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Prayer
HOPE
Mary, Mother of hope,
Walk with us!
Teach us to proclaim the living God,
help us to witness to Jesus, the only Saviour;
make us helpful to our neighbour,
welcoming of the needy, agents of justice,
passionate architects of a more just world;
intercede for us as we work in history
certain that the plans of the Father will be fulfilled.
Dawn of a new world,
reveal yourself as the Mother of hope and watch over us!
Above all, watch over all young people, the hope of the future,
that they might respond generously to the call of Jesus.
Watch over those responsible for the nations:
that they might devote themselves to building up our common
home,
in which the dignity and the rights of every person will be
respected.
We pray for our Congregation and for the Salesian Family:
help us to be always the pledge of hope
for the little ones and the poor,
above all for young people most in need of God’s Love.
Teach us to love them, as Don Bosco taught us to:
Instil within us a firm hope of their response,
even though very often we do not see the fruit of our hard
work.
Mary, give us Jesus!
Help us to follow and to love Him!
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He is the Hope of the Church and of humanity.
He lives with us, among us,
in His Church.
With you we say:
“Come, Lord Jesus”:
We pray that the hope of glory,
infused in our hearts by Him
will bear fruits of justice and of peace!
***
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2. THE SPIRITUALITY OF OUR CHARISM
DA MIHI ANIMAS
At the beginning of his letter convoking the GC26, the
Rector Major wrote: “For some time now the conviction has
been growing on me that today the Congregation needs to
reawaken in the heart of every confrere the passionate zeal of
‘Da mihi animas’” (AGC 394, p. 6). This will be the focus of
our reflection.
1. “DA MIHI ANIMAS”: SALESIAN SPIRITUALITY
AND ASCETICISM
In the same letter, a little further on, Fr. Pascual reminded
us of an important text of our Salesian tradition:
Don Bosco’s motto is a summary of Salesian spirituality and
asceticism, as expressed in the ‘dream of the ten diamonds’.
Here two complementary perspectives are intertwined:
that of the outward appearance of the Salesian, manifesting
his daring, his courage, his faith and hope, his complete
dedication to the mission, and that of the hidden heart of
a consecrated person with an inner reality made up of deep
convictions that lead him to follow Christ in his obedient,
poor and chaste style of life” (p. 7); “the reason for his tireless
work for ‘the glory of God and the salvation of souls.’ (p. 6)
Although we can distinguish between the two parts of
Don Bosco’s motto, taken from Sacred Scripture (Gen 14,
21) – we have no intention here of entering into an exegetical
discussion – we should not separate them: spirituality and
asceticism cannot be understood apart from each other. In this
connection, we have only to recall the image presented by the
document Fraternal Life in Community: “A community that is
not mystical (communion) has no soul, but a community that
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is not ascetic (common life) has no body”.12 We shall return
later to this relationship between spirituality and asceticism
as a total union of the two in what is their authentic point of
departure, viz. love.
From the formal point of view, Don Bosco’s motto is first
of all a prayer. “Precisely because it is a prayer, it enables us to
understand that the mission does not consist only in pastoral
initiatives and activities. The mission is a gift of God rather
than an apostolic task; its fulfilment is a prayer in action”
(AGC 394, p. 6). We have to remember the words of Jesus in his
discourse on the Bread of life: “No one can come to Me unless
drawn by the Father who sent Me (…) For this reason I have
told you that no one can come to Me unless it is granted by the
Father” (Jn 6, 44.65). From this point of view, then, the motto
is a prayer of petition: we are asking God to give us the young
people to be saved. Are we aware of what we dare to ask the
Lord, of the enormous responsibility our motto entails? Do we
realize that we are asking him nothing less than to entrust to
us the young, “that part of human society which is so exposed
and yet so rich in promise?” (C 1) Are we equal to the task?
2. “… THE GLORY OF GOD AND THE SALVATION
OF SOULS…”
What are we really asking God for when we pray: give me
souls? Doesn’t our request lead to a dichotomy, a spiritualistic
mentality which cuts us off from the integral and historical
situation of our young people?
This objection could have some legitimacy, but in our
times, and especially in the light of the work accomplished
by the Congregation in different parts of the world, it has
become a purely theoretical question, having been discarded
in actual practice. Asking the Lord for “souls” has always been
12CONGREGATION FOR INSTITUTES OF CONSECRATED LIFE
AND SOCIETIES OF APOSTOLIC LIFE, Fraternal Life in Community,
n. 23. The Congregation will henceforth be indicated as CICLSAL.
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understood in the Congregation as a figure of speech for the
integral person: in fact, each and every young person, in his
bodily as well as spiritual reality, is a potential “target” of our
mission. That is why our work is essentially educative and
pastoral: it is the way in which our mission becomes concrete,
“a sharing in [the mission] of the Church, which brings about
the saving design of God, the coming of his Kingdom, by
bringing to men the message of the Gospel which is closely
tied in with the development of the temporal order.” (C 31)
I think that our problem is a different one. To put it in
a nutshell: if the word “souls” is a figure of speech, then we
remain without a satisfactory answer as to what it specifically
means.
And we shall never have an answer if we forget that
salvation was the final and definitive goal of the integral
promotion Don Bosco sought for his boys at every moment.
If this is not our goal too in our educative and pastoral work,
we shall be nothing more than an efficient organization for
the development of the young; but, this means that we shall
no more be a charismatic movement with the sole mission of
being “signs and bearers of the love of God for young people,
especially those who are poor” (C 2).
This is how I would put it in the form of a diagram:
Eternal “Expressions” CONCRETE Mediations Eternal
damnation
of
SITUATION of salvation
perdition OF THE salvation
YOUNG
Obviously, the central box represents the present-day
situation of young people; the boxes at either end correspond
to the “traditional” Christian outlook on the situation of
man before God: everything is “played out” in terms of his
eternal salvation and damnation. The intermediate boxes
(with the texts in italics) depict a more “factual” picture of the
situation; should this picture become exclusive, there is a risk
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of forgetting the novissimi or “the last things”. The diagram in
its entirety describes an integral outlook which alone animates
and does full justice to our Salesian work.
Only when we “work for the salvation of the young”
(cf. C 12) does our labour become an experience of God.
The glory of God and the salvation of souls were Don
Bosco’s deepest interests. Working for God’s glory and the
salvation of souls amounts to conforming one’s will to that
of God, who communicates Himself as Love, thus showing
His glory and immense love for men, all of whom He wants
to be saved. There is a unique point in the ‘story of a soul’
(1854), where Don Bosco reveals the secret of the purpose
of all his activity: ‘When I dedicated myself to this part of
the sacred ministry, I intended to consecrate all my labours
to the greater glory of God and the salvation of souls; to
work to produce good citizens for this earth so that one
day they might be worthy inhabitants of heaven. May God
help me to be able to continue until my last breath. Amen.’
(AGC 394, pp. 37-38)
It is well to clarify once again that “salvation” – to use an
analogy – does not mean “just making it to heaven”. For Don
Bosco, the ideal of Salesian education is holiness, the “high
standard” the Holy Father, John Paul II presents to us in Novo
Millennio Ineunte13 as the goal and the programme of every
undertaking in the entire Church.
To his boys, the majority of whom did not come from
“privileged” (socio-economic or religious) environments, Don
Bosco recommended a practical programme of spirituality
for daily life. He was convinced that all are called to holiness,
including the young who are capable of making a spiritual
journey analogous to that of saintly adults. This journey, under
the direction of a spiritual guide, leads to the joyous gift of
oneself in everyday life; it draws its strength from the moments
13JOHN PAUL II, Apostolic Letter, Novo Millenio Ineunte, nn. 30-31.
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of prayer, the sacraments and Marian devotion, and expresses
itself in a love and concern for others marked by cheerfulness:
“We make holiness consist in always being cheerful”.
To this end, he sought to render the traditional teaching of
the Church more accessible by adapting it in a practical and
convenient way to the young. Dominic Savio, Michael Magone
and Francis Besucco were examples of the youth spirituality of
Don Bosco. Even if not all of them reached the holiness of the
altars, they were certainly models of a Christian life lived to
the full. By narrating the story of their life, and above all, their
exemplary death, Don Bosco showed that he considered them
to have entered the Kingdom of God, Paradise.
It is precisely the youngster whom we would least associate
with the ideal of holiness, Michael Magone, who emerges as
the model of a holy and virtuous life. Don Bosco writes of him:
“We would have certainly wished for this model of virtue to
have remained in the world until a ripe old age – either in the
priesthood to which he felt a strong inclination, or in the lay
state – because he would have done an immense good to his
country and to religion”. Here, in all its clarity, was the human
and Christian ideal of a young man, according to Don Bosco.
3. PASSION FOR HUMANITY, FOR CHRIST, FOR
GOD…
It is very interesting and significant to find the word
“passion” in the Rector Major’s presentation of Don Bosco’s
motto. No doubt, it is a word that has gradually entered into
the language of our time. I would not be able to say if it has
entered into our mentality as well. Barely a few years ago, it
had a positive meaning only when it referred to the “passion of
Christ”, and in this case, solely because it meant the suffering
and death of Christ (cf. for example, Mel Gibson’s film). To the
question: “When did Christ’s passion begin?” the unanimous
and immediate answer was: “the day before he died”.
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In this connection, a Russian author, D. Merezhkovsky,
writes that “it is astonishing… that the church (which calls
every ‘passion’ sinful and ‘lack of passion’ holy) has the courage
to call its holy of holies ‘the passion’.”14
Let us analyze the word “passion” in three progressive steps:
anthropological, Christological and theo-logical.
a) In the anthropological sense, passion (and the passions)
were considered something negative because they were
associated with sin or in any case with the imperfection of
concupiscence; oftentimes, the model man was the person
absolutely without any passions or at least who was able to
control and keep them in balance as he strove for the “golden
mean” (aurea mediocritas). The fact is that the word that
was literally used to express this ideal, apathy, was far from
acceptable. S. Kierkegaard comments on this mentality with
some memorable, thought-provoking words: “It is a greater
loss for one to lose his passion than to lose himself in his
passion”.
I would like to refer to the subject of human love, and more
concretely, to eros. Josef Pieper states in his excellent book, On
Love, that eros has been the object of a campaign of defamation
and calumny ever since it was considered a synonym of
sexuality and sometimes even a morbid expression of the
same. Probably this is not the case nowadays, not because eros
has been rehabilitated but because it has benefited from the
present-day positive appraisal of sexuality. We need to keep
in mind however, that eros and sexuality are two completely
different things. My impression is that Benedict XVI’s
extraordinary Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, and his even bolder
Message for Lent 2007, have not yet sufficiently penetrated
Christian thinking.
14Quoted by JÜRGEN MOLTMANN, The Trinity and the Kingdom
of God (London: SCM Press, 1983) Chapter 2: Passion of God, note 6.
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For us who are pastors and educators, it is indispensable
that we be able to form passionate people, people who know
how to love and to be loved. We ought to recall that one of the
priorities of our human and Christian education, discerned
by the GC23 in 1990, was precisely: education to love and
in love. The need continues to be felt, today more than ever
before.
b) From the Christian standpoint, to speak today of the
“passion” of Jesus Christ in theological and spiritual language15
is to refer to his Love as the ultimate motive of the gift of his life
for us: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life
for one’s friends” (Jn 15, 13).
It is along these lines that we can say, without falling into
a tautology, that Jesus’ passion led to his passion. Much
progress has been made in trying to remove from Jesus, the
Son of God made man, the “apathy” which over the centuries
hindered a full understanding of his humanity and led instead
to the spread of a veiled monophysitism. As the Rector Major
says, “Don Bosco’s programme re-echoes the expression ‘I
thirst’, pronounced by Jesus from the cross when he was giving
up his own life in carrying out the Father’s will (Jn 19, 28).
Whoever makes this prayer of Jesus his own, learns to share his
apostolic passion to the very end” (AGC 394, p. 7).
However, if we were to pause here, it would be tantamount
to stopping halfway, because we would get the impression that
Jesus’ passion was only the consequence of his Incarnation, of
his having “loved with a human heart”, as the Second Vatican
Council puts it so beautifully.16 But, we would not know
anything about Jesus as God; the passion of Jesus, in this case,
would be not so much a revelation as a concealment of God.
15We may recall the recent (2004) Congress on Consecrated Life:
“Passion for God, passion for humanity.”
16VATICAN COUNCIL II, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in
the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, n. 22.
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c) Therefore, the deepest meaning of the word “passion” lies
on the theo-logical level. As J. Moltmann sums it up, “Christ’s
passion reveals to us the passion of a passionate God”.
In the final analysis, the human ideal of “apathy” was a
reflection of the yearning to “become like God”, to resemble
him as much as possible. In no way was such a desire negative
or sinful: we have been created in God’s image and likeness!
St. Thomas Aquinas puts it beautifully: “prius intelligitur
deiformis quam homo” (The human being is to be understood
first of all as a godlike being rather than as man). The error
has been the incorrect image of God, viz., the belief that God
has no feelings or passions; that, in the final analysis, he is an
“apathetic God”; and his Omnipotence has been understood
as: “God there, in his heaven, enjoying perfect happiness, and
I here on earth wishing to be like this God”.
In this regard, Moltmann again asserts:
Man develops his manhood always in relationship to
the Godhead of his God. He experiences his existence
in relationship to that which illuminates him as the
supreme being. He orients his life on the ultimate value.
His fundamental decisions are made in accordance with
what unconditionally concerns him.… Theology and
anthropology are involved in a reciprocal relationship.… In
the ancient world, early Christianity encountered apatheia
as a metaphysical axiom and an ethical ideal with irresistible
force. On this concept were concentrated the worship of the
divinity of God and the struggle for man’s freedom.17
The Rector Major too refers to the root of our apostolic
passion when, speaking of formation, he points out that “it
is necessary to form passionate persons. God has a passionate
love for his people, and to this passionate God the consecrated
life looks up intently. It must therefore, form persons who are
17JÜRGEN MOLTMANN, The Crucified God (London: SCM Press,
1979) 267.
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passionate for God and like God” (AGC 394, pp. 27-28). In
his Message for Lent 2007, Benedict XVI states that “Ezekiel,
speaking of God’s relationship with the people of Israel, is
not afraid to use strong and passionate language (cf. Ezek
16, 1-22). These biblical texts indicate that eros is part of God’s
very heart: the Almighty awaits the ‘yes’ of his creatures as a
young bridegroom that of his bride.”
4. DON BOSCO’S APOSTOLIC PASSION
We shall try to render this “new image of God” more
concrete in the Salesian context. It will undoubtedly be a
particular enrichment from the theological point of view, but
more especially from the perspective of proposing a practical
way of carrying out our mission.
Certainly, it is not just a question of words; otherwise, we
would run the risk of pouring new (and excellent!) wine into
old wineskins. Instead, it must be said that genuine Christians
– saintly men and women, in the first place – have instinctively
grasped this point, perhaps without having the proper
conceptual and linguistic categories to express it: after all, a
genuine experience of the God of Jesus Christ cannot exhaust
itself in ideas or words!
We can describe Don Bosco quite correctly as a passionate
man, overflowing with the passion of Love, which in reality,
from the Christian point of view, means that he was full of
God, the God of Jesus Christ. But, over and above the beautiful
description and so as not to remain on the purely rhetorical
plane, we have to ask ourselves: What are the aspects that this
new outlook can offer for a renewal – including a theological
renewal – of Don Bosco’s passion?
* In the first place, we can say that our Father, Don Bosco,
shared God’s passion for the salvation of mankind, and more
concretely, for the salvation of young people, particularly
those who are “poor, abandoned and in danger” (C 26). This is
what it would really mean to feel “compassion with God”. If we
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do not take this point seriously, we fall back into theological
apathy or into an exclusively inner-worldly preoccupation for
the human promotion of the young. As we said before, to ask
God to give us young people is a tremendously real way of
saying that for their sake we want to collaborate with Him,
feel with Him, suffer with Him…
* In the second place, Don Bosco was particularly mindful
that he had to manifest God’s Love. “It is not enough to
love…” was more than a marvellous expression emanating
from his large heart and a formidable component of his work
of education; it contained an extraordinary theological depth
because, in the final analysis, God’s entire plan of salvation can
be summarized in just one word: epiphany, which consists
not only in God loving us but in manifesting His love for us in
Christ (cf. Rom 8, 39). We shall devote a subsequent reflection
to this theme.
* Don Bosco’s educative and pastoral passion emphasizes, in
a radical way, the gratuitous nature of his love as an expression
of God’s Grace, which is not a “thing” but God giving Himself
totally to us in his Trinitarian reality, without any merit on our
part. This will also be a subject of further reflection.
* On the other hand, in Don Bosco’s life and educative
system, the young person’s response occupies an important
place. Even the phrase, “It is not enough to love…,” points in
this direction: “One who knows he is loved loves in return,
and one who loves can obtain everything, especially from the
young” (Letter from Rome, p. 259). Our hearts resonate with
the words, “Strive to make yourself loved…”, but perhaps we
need to ask the question: does not such a response threaten the
totally gratuitous nature of our love and the unconditional gift
of ourselves?
Benedict XVI himself has something more to say about this
fundamental aspect of love, when he speaks of God himself:
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“In order to win back the love of His creature, He accepted
to pay a very high price: the Blood of His Only Begotten Son
(…) On the Cross, it is God Himself who begs the love of
His creature: He is thirsty for the love of every one of us (…)
In all truth, only the love that unites the free gift of oneself
with the impassioned desire for reciprocity instils a joy
which eases the heaviest of burdens”. (Message for Lent 2007)
In the background of this problem there has been the idea
that love is more “pure” if it is totally gratuitous and receives
no response, otherwise it would appear to be an “interested”
love. We shall attempt an answer to this objection later when
we analyze the experience of love as agape and eros; for the
time being, taking the cue from a beautiful phrase of St. Paul,
“Owe no one anything, except to love one another” (Rom 13,
8), I would like to emphasize that in a total and generous love,
gratuitousness does not disappear; on the contrary, we find, so
to speak, “an encounter between two gratuitous elements”.
This is a fascinating theme in the phenomenology of love.
Since it cannot be treated here at length, we give a few aspects
that can serve to throw some light on the subject. According to
a sharp observation made by E. Jüngel, we have to distinguish
between an intentional “ut” (I love in order to be loved) and
a consequential ‘ut’ (where being loved is a consequence, not
the purpose, of my love).18 St. Bernard said this much earlier
in a magnificent statement: “True love does not calculate, but
it receives its reward all the same. As a matter of fact, it can
receive its reward only if it does not calculate… The one who in
loving seeks as a reward only the joy of loving, receives the joy
of loving. The one instead who in loving seeks something other
than love, loses love, and at the same time, the joy of loving”.19
We can apply to love what Jesus said of the Kingdom of God:
18Cf. EBERHARD JÜNGEL, God as the Mystery of the World
(Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1983) 322.
19Quoted by JOSEF PIEPER, “Amor”, in: Las Virtudes Fundamentales,
Madrid, Ed. RIALP, p. 514.
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“Strive first for the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and
all these things will be given to you as well” (Mt 6, 33). Instead,
the one who seeks “all these [other] things” while striving for
the Kingdom, ends up without the Kingdom, without justice,
and also without all the other things…
In the end, we have to go back to the ultimate Source of
theology (and also of human life), to the acme of theo-logical
reflection that is in no way a ‘third-degree abstraction’: the
contemplation of the Trinitarian God. What theologians refer
to as the perichoresis tells us that, in God, to love is just as divine
as to be loved. And we bear a resemblance to this God, having
been created in His image. What, then, God has united, man
must not put asunder…
In the light of all that we have said, then, we could raise
an important question, and even a dangerous one, if it is not
properly understood: can we speak of an erotic love in Don
Bosco? We can already anticipate the answer: yes, of course,
since it is the matter of a love in the image of the love of God
Himself, and, indeed, of the Love that is God. But this topic
too requires a deeper and more incisive reflection later.
* To conclude: I believe that the traditional expression “Don
Bosco, Father and Teacher of youth” has still a lot to offer us.
In particular, I would like to highlight fatherhood, which is
one of the deepest expressions of being a man, and which Don
Bosco lived to the full. Here again, to avoid getting caught up
in rhetoric, let me point out two typical aspects of fatherhood
(and apparently of motherhood as well, even though the
nuances are different in each case).
• the love of a father or mother is the highest and most
radical way of expressing the unconditional nature of
God’s love: in every other human love, in fact, there is a
prior knowledge of the person loved – except in this one:
parents love their son / daughter, even before he or she
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has a face or a name, even before they know whether it
will be a boy or a girl…
• the love of a father or mother is not at all indifferent
to the response of the son or daughter, but it does not
depend on the response: in this way, it is a reflection of
divine love which is good, even to those who are evil
and unrighteous… (cf. Mt 5, 44-45).
Let us conclude with a phrase from our Constitutions,
which has been turned into our prayer to Mary Immaculate,
Help of Christians: Mary, teach and help us to love as Don
Bosco did! (cf. C 84).
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Prayer
“GIVE ME SOULS”
Lord God, our Father,
You have called us to form part of the Salesian Congregation
to entrust us with that portion of humanity,
so exposed and yet so rich in promise:
young people, in particular the most needy, abandoned and in
danger,
that we might be to them, signs and bearers of Your salvific
love.
Fill our hearts and our lives with Your Spirit
so that we might be faithful in carrying out this Mission,
and that, through its generous and unconditional fulfilment,
we might find the way to our holiness.
Grant that we might always have an experience of Your
Fatherhood
as we work untiringly for their salvation,
following in the footsteps of the Good Shepherd,
just as our holy Father Don Bosco did.
Allow us to share the passion of Your Love
as it was manifested in Your Son Jesus Christ,
who loved us to the point of giving His life for all of us.
Free us from apathy and indifference,
in the face of the dramatic situations in which our young
people live every day,
especially in the areas of greater poverty and alienation;
Free us from the temptation to seek ways
and to take decisions not in keeping with Your salvific Will.
Form in us, through the maternal intercession of Mary,
a heart like that of Don Bosco,
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that found the way to perfection and joy
in the fulfilment, with complete fidelity, of the Mission You
entrusted to him:
to be Father and Teacher of the Young.
At this decisive moment for our Congregation,
at the beginning of the General Chapter, we ask you:
Grant to all of us the light of Your Spirit
so that we might know how to discern Your Will,
and give us his strength, that we might put it into practice.
Give us the courage, even today,
to say as Don Bosco did:
Give me souls!
Entrust young people to us,
so that we might guide them along the path
that leads to their true happiness and realization in Christ.
Amen.
***
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3. THE ASCETICISM OF OUR CHARISM:
COETERA TOLLE…
Continuing our previous reflection, let us consider the
second part of Don Bosco’s motto, “… coetera tolle”, which,
as the Rector Major says in his letter convoking GC 26, is a
summary of Salesian “asceticism, as expressed in the ‘dream of
the ten diamonds’”(AGC 394, p. 7). A little later, he explains:
“‘Coetera tolle’ motivates the consecrated Salesian to keep
away from the ‘liberal model’ of consecrated life depicted in
the letter, “You are my God. My happiness lies in you alone”
(AGC 394, pp. 34-35; the letter mentioned is in AGC 283).
1. CHRISTIAN ASCETICISM: EXPRESSION AND
CONSEQUENCE OF LOVE
Let us try to take a broader view by starting out from some
“human” considerations. They will help us to understand that
asceticism is necessary not only for consecrated persons or for
Christians alone, but for every human being to the extent to
which he desires true happiness.
In the first quote he makes in his Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est,
our Holy Father, Benedict XVI, mentions Friedrich Nietzsche,
whose criticism of a certain type of asceticism bordering
on the masochistic, is widely known: “They (the believers,
above all the priests) called God that which contradicted and
harmed them: and truly, there was much that was heroic in
their worship!”20 No doubt, we need to be humble and sincere
in acknowledging the elements of truth to be found in these
criticisms, which much of the time, were very few. Oftentimes,
the model or ideal of Christian perfection was not really
Christian, but drew on other sources, and even on the concept
20FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans.
R. J. Hollingdale (Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1978) 115.
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of a human being that had nothing to do with the Gospel. In
the loving plan of a God who wants the good of His sons and
daughters, it is not possible to separate the objective aspect
(“perfection”) from the subjective aspect (“happiness”). We
have to admit that in the not too distant past, the insistence on
perfection without happiness led – like the swing of a pendulum
– to the present situation, especially that of postmodern youth
culture. Nowadays there is a quest – even obsessive at times –
for happiness (or rather, for immediate pleasure), but without
any objective reference-points (“perfection”).
When we spoke of love as the basis of the ‘da mihi animas’, we
said that, just as it alone can give rise to an authentic Christian
(and Salesian) spirituality, so too it alone is the source of an
authentic asceticism. What’s more: there is no asceticism so
radical as the one flowing from authentic love. That is why it is
possible to assert that love is the fountain head of Christian
spirituality and asceticism. Or to use evangelical terms: we
can only have “life” and bear much fruit if, like the grain of
wheat, we accept to fall into the earth and “die”. And all this,
not because it is something “imposed” from the outside or “a
price to be paid”, but because it flows from the very essence of
love.
On the other hand, it is only when love flourishes and is
genuinely manifested that the person attains his full self-
realization because of the total integration of two aspects,
the objective and the subjective: only in loving and in being
loved does the human being find, at one and the same time, his
fullness and his happiness.
2. THE TWO SIDES OF LOVE
The Argentinian poet Francisco Luis Bernárdez has written
a beautiful poem in which he says that “falling in love” (the title
of his poem) “es ignorar en qué consiste la diferencia entre la
pena y la alegría (is ignoring the difference between joy and
pain).”
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St. Thomas had said the same thing earlier in a memorable
statement: Ex amore procedit et gaudium et tristitia (S.Th.
IIaIIae, q. 28, a.1): “From love proceed both joy and sadness”.
Writing along the same lines, Moltmann says:
But a man can suffer because he can love, even as a Narcissus,
and he always suffers only to the degree that he loves. If he
kills all love in himself, he no longer suffers. He becomes
apathic.… A man who experiences helplessness, a man who
suffers because he loves, a man who can die, is therefore a
richer being than an omnipotent God who cannot suffer,
cannot love and cannot die.21
This is not an absolutely new idea or a lack of respect for
God. We find the same idea in Richard of St. Victor, and
expressed still more audaciously: “If God were to prefer to
selfishly reserve to Himself alone the abundance of His riches,
when He could, if He wanted to, share it with others (…),
He would be right to hide Himself from the angels and from
everyone, and feel ashamed to be seen and recognized, because
of His grave lack of benevolence.”22
The fact is that we are never more vulnerable than when we
love… If, drawing on the “law of the grain of wheat”, love can be
described as “a fullness and happiness ensuing from the total
gift of oneself ”, we see at once why it is not possible to separate
spirituality from asceticism in any genuine experience of love.
To put it concretely in “Salesian language”: da mihi animas and
coetera tolle are the two inseparable sides of the mantle worn
by the personage in the dream of the Ten Diamonds…
We find the same duality of love in another beautiful text
belonging to our Salesian tradition: Don Bosco’s dream of the
bower of roses. Those who follow Don Bosco, fascinated by
21JÜRGEN MOLTMANN, The Crucified God (London: SCM Press,
1979) 222-223.
22RICHARD OF ST VICTOR, De Trinitate, III, 4 (Rome: Città Nuova
Editrice, 1990) 130.
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the possibility of walking on roses, soon discover that there are
sharp thorns, and therefore feel cheated. The fact is that they
forgot that there are no roses without thorns, that there is no
love without suffering, or better, without vulnerability…
At least twice in the second chapter of our Constitutions
on the identity of the Salesian, we come across this way
of looking at asceticism as something intimately bound
up with the experience of love. In article 14, under the
heading, “Predilection for the young”, we read: “This love is
an expression of pastoral charity and gives meaning to our
whole life. For their welfare we give generously of our time,
talents and health: ‘For you I study, for you I work, for you
I live, for you I am ready even to give my life’”. And, a little
later, recalling the “second motto of the Congregation”, work
and temperance, our Rule of Life says: “(The Salesian) accepts
the daily demands and renunciations of the apostolic life. He
is ready to suffer cold and heat, hunger and thirst, weariness
and disdain whenever God’s glory and the salvation of souls
require it.” (C 18)
3. THE “GOD WHO IS LOVE”: A POOR GOD
Just as in the previous reflection we established the basis
for our passion in the “da mihi animas”, so here too we have
to go deeper and discover the basis for our evangelical and
consecrated poverty, for our most radical asceticism, in the
God we believe in, viz. the God who is Love.
We have normally sought this basis in the life of Jesus, for,
as our Constitutions say, quoting our Father Don Bosco: “We
are aware of the generosity of our Lord Jesus Christ: though
He was rich he made himself poor so that through his poverty
we might become rich. We are called to a life closely modelled
on the Gospel. We choose to follow ‘the Saviour who was born
in poverty, lived deprived of everything and died stripped on the
cross’.” (C 72)
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Whether the example of the Son of God made man is
a norm or not is something we do not wish to discuss here.
But we wish to affirm the central theological concept, viz. that
in the Man, Jesus of Nazareth, God has revealed himself in a
definitive (= eschatological) way.
Without attempting to expand upon this last assertion,
we limit ourselves to recalling the words of Vita Consecrata
concerning the Trinitarian basis of the evangelical counsels:
“The deepest meaning of the evangelical counsels is revealed
when they are viewed in relation to the Holy Trinity, the source
of holiness.”23 Because Jesus Christ is the One who reveals God,
we can, through him, arrive at this Trinitarian basis. (I would not
like to miss this opportunity to point out that, in my opinion,
we have here one of the new and most important theological
and spiritual insights of the Magisterium on consecrated life;
unfortunately, it has hardly been developed).
Let me offer you on this point a personal reflection that
I have very much at heart. In the Synoptic Gospels, e.g., in
Luke 21, 1-4, we come across the moving example of a poor
widow who, putting in two small coins, gave, according to
Jesus, more than all the others: “all of them contributed out of
their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all she had
to live on”. I had always understood this text as a powerful
moral teaching, motivating us to have full confidence in God,
until one day I asked myself: Could not this Word of the Lord
be also a remarkable theological parable? Is the God of Jesus
Christ like one of those rich people who “contributed much”
but out of their abundance, or is he not rather like the poor
widow who gave everything for our sake, all that was dearest
to Him, His only Son?
Understood in this way, the Incarnation as kenosis is a
Trinitarian act, and, in fact, the supreme manifestation of the
Trinitarian God.
23JOHN PAUL II, Vita Consecrata, n. 21.
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But then, a question immediately arises: Does not God
“change” by becoming man? Does not the Incarnation assail
God’s radical immutability?
Without entering into theological disquisitions – which is
not our concern – the first thing we should do is ask ourselves
the deeper question of what immutability means – a concept
that is more philosophical than theological. In any case, I
would think that the positive content of this concept is taken
and brought to completion, in personal terms, in fidelity,
which is a typical characteristic of love, especially when we
speak of God.
Calling to mind the interpretation of the Gospel parable
mentioned above, let us allow Hans Urs von Balthasar to speak
to us through this exceptional text:
What is at stake here, at least in the background, is an
absolutely decisive transformation of the way we look at
God: from His being ‘absolute power’ in the first place to
His being absolute ‘Love’. His sovereignty is not manifested
in His holding on to what belongs to him, but in His letting
it go. His sovereignty is to be found on a plane distinct from
what we call ‘power’ and ‘weakness’. What God empties
Himself of in the incarnation is ontologically possible
because God empties Himself eternally in his tri-personal
giving (…) Concepts like ‘poverty’ and ‘riches’ become
ambivalent. This does not mean that God’s essence in itself
is (univocally) ‘kenotic’, as though the same concept could
embrace the kenosis as well as the divine basis that makes
it possible. What I want to say is that, as Hilary attempted
to point out in his own way, God’s power is such that it can
become a locus in Himself for a self-emptying like that of
the incarnation and the cross, and that it can take this self-
emptying to the furthest extent.24
24HANS URS VON BALTHASAR,“El misterio Pascual,” Mysterium
Salutis III/2 (Madrid: Ed. Cristianidad, 1975) 157.
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Only a God like this is worthy, not only of our gratitude
and appreciation, but also and above all, of our total and
unconditional love which leads us too to a radical “emptying”
of ourselves in order to be completely filled with His Love and
become in this way its bearers to the young.
Later on, we shall reflect on the Incarnation of the Son of
God as a definitive manifestation of God’s love, and also on the
God who is Love. It is within this “positive” context that we
shall attempt to integrate the aspect of self-emptying, viz. the
kenosis of the Son of God made Man.
4. LOVE AND POVERTY IN SALESIAN LIFE
Before presenting the last two of the Chapter themes in his
letter convoking the GC26, the Rector Major states:
For Don Bosco, the second part of the motto, ‘coetera tolle’,
means detachment from whatever can keep us away from
God and from the young. For us at the present day this
becomes concrete in evangelical poverty and in deliberately
choosing to work for youngsters who are ‘poor, abandoned
and in danger’, by being sensitive to the new forms of poverty
and working on the new frontiers where they are in most
need. (AGC 394, p. 41)
Here again, by taking apostolic love as our point of
departure, after the image of the God of Jesus Christ, we shall
be able to give it concrete form in an authentic and radical
poverty.
In his solid but extraordinarily vibrant analysis of human
life, Eberhard Jüngel expresses the relationship between love
and poverty in this way:
What is then of great significance ontologically and
theologically is that the fact that the loving I wants to
have the beloved Thou and only then wants to have itself
transforms the structure of having. For the beloved Thou is
desired by the loving I only as one to whom it may surrender
itself. Love is mutual surrender… The exchange of mutual
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surrender means… that the loving I wants to have itself only
in the form of being had by someone else. And it means at
the same time that it wants to have the beloved Thou only as
an I which also wants to be had.…In love there is no having
which does not arise out of surrender…. The loving I has
itself only as though it did not have itself. It wants to be had
by that very Thou that it wants to have. In order to have this
Thou, it must surrender to it, that is, cease to have itself. This
content is decisive for the understanding of love.25
To put it another way: a poverty that does not stem
from love is not a poverty to be desired, nor does it give us
a resemblance to God. The self-emptying of the Son of God
(kenosis) is, in reality, an expression of his love drawing him
to resemble us: amor, aut similes invenit, aut similes facit. Our
“insertion” among the poor and marginalized, which leads us
to share their life, is, in reality, a version of the Incarnation.
In this regard, we can also recall the words of St. Augustine
in his commentary on the first letter of John:
Whence begins charity, brothers? Pay a little attention. You
have heard how to arrive at perfection. The Lord in the
Gospel has set before us the goal of perfection and the way
to attain it: No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s
life for one’s friends. He, therefore, showed His perfection in
the Gospel, and there too He recommended it to us. But you
ask and say to yourselves: When will it be possible for us to
have this charity? Do not despair too soon of yourselves: the
charity in you is just born, not yet perfect; nourish it, so that
it may not become weak. But you will say to me: how shall
I know the degree of my love? We have heard how charity
can be brought to perfection; let us now hear whence it
begins. John continues and says: How does God’s love abide
in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or
sister in need and yet refuses help? Here then is where charity
25EBERHARD JÜNGEL, God as the Mystery of the World (Michigan:
William B. Eerdmans, 1983) 319-320.
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has its beginning. If you are still not yet disposed to die for
your brother, be at least disposed to give some of your goods
to your brother (…) If you cannot give to your brother from
what you have in excess, how can you give him your life?26
5. POVERTY AS AN ASPECT OF SALESIAN
CONSECRATED LIFE
After the text quoted at the beginning of our meditation,
the Rector Major continues in concrete terms:
Consecrated life in future years will be realized in its
concentration on the radical following of the obedient, poor
and chaste Christ. If all three of the evangelical counsels
speak to us of our total offering of ourselves to God and
dedication to the young, it is poverty that leads us to give
ourselves without reserve or hesitation even to our last
breath, as did Don Bosco. The practice of the evangelical
counsels lets us give free rein to the utmost limits of our
availability. (AGC 394, p. 41)
In my opinion, we Salesians have to find in the theology
of the consecrated life, behind the obvious diversity of the
evangelical counsels, a harmonious and articulated unity
centred on love, which gives them meaning and leads them
to the fullness of holiness. Seen this way, poverty must not be
seen as a “part” or a section of our life, but as a transversal
aspect cutting across the whole of our life, and particularly the
evangelical counsels. I would even go so far as to say, with a
little play on words, that the poverty involved in chastity and
obedience is more radical than that required by the vow of
poverty itself.
In the ExhortationVita Consecrata we read: “All those
reborn in Christ are called to live out, with the strength which
is the Spirit’s gift, the chastity appropriate to their state of
life, obedience to God and to the Church, and a reasonable
26AUGUSTINE, In Ioannis Epistolam Tractatus 5,12, Roma, Città
Nuova Editrice, 1985, p. 1743.
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detachment from material possessions: for all are called to
holiness, which consists in the perfection of love”.27
Analyzing this fundamental text, we find three statements
closely linked with one another:
• every Christian is called to holiness;
• holiness consists in the perfection of love or charity;
• therefore, every Christian is called to live the evangelical
counsels according to his state of life.
Here again we come across a completely new theological
and spiritual insight concerning the meaning of the evangelical
counsels, though it is to be found, in a way, in Lumen Gentium.
What is being said here is that the one and only Christian
perfection, which is that of love, essentially requires the
practice of the “evangelical counsels”. The way in which they
are mentioned shows that it is not required of all the baptized
to “profess the vows”; hence we need a better formulation to
avoid making the mistake of looking upon “normal” Christians
as “second-tier members”, or else of broadening the concept of
“consecrated life” so much that it includes everyone. We must
not overlook the fact that every Christian is a consecrated
person because of Baptism.
Now, if these evangelical “values” (which are not “optional”)
are to apply to every Christian, they must have the greatest
possible latitude and not limit themselves to this or that
marginal aspect of human and Christian existence (which
would be the case, for example, if chastity were understood
solely in terms of sexuality, and obedience solely in terms of
a command issued by a legitimate superior “by virtue of the
vow”).
They must touch upon the fundamental aspects of the
human being before God:
• in relation to “things”: poverty;
27 JOHN PAUL II, Vita Consecrata, n. 30.
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• in relation to persons: chastity;
• in relation to oneself: obedience.
We must remember the first and most important
“commandment”, the first “word of life”, which Jesus pointed
out to the doctor of the law: “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the
Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your
God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all
your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this,
‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other
commandment greater than these.” (Mk 12, 29-31 and parallels)
In the light of this “commandment”, we can understand the
threefold idolatry which threatens the very foundation of our
Christian (and religious) life, viz. absolutizing material things
and adoring “money as a god”; finding in a person (or persons)
the ultimate and definitive meaning of our life, and setting
aside the primacy given to God; and finally, the most serious
and radical temptation of all, putting ourselves in God’s place.
Or what is even worse: instead of serving God, making use of
God to serve our purposes.
Seen in a positive light, the striving for Christian holiness
must consist in growing day by day in genuine love: we put God
at the centre of our life as the ultimate and definitive recipient
of our love; only in and because of Him we love our neighbour
(“chastity”), we use the goods of this world in fraternal
solidarity (“poverty”), and so we find our full realization
in Christ (“obedience”). In this way, and as a service to our
brothers and sisters, our consecrated life becomes a humble
example and a “spiritual therapy”28: we renounce the exercise
of certain values, not in order to induce other Christians to
renounce them too, but in order to relativize them. This is our
28Ibid.,nn. 87ff.
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irreplaceable service, and that is why it is possible to speak of
the “objective excellence of the consecrated life”.29
To be still more explicit: for a Christian, the “centrality
of God”, together with the radical renunciation it entails, is
translated into the following and imitation of Jesus Christ:
“Whoever wants to come after me but does not hate father
and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and
even life itself, cannot be My disciple. Whoever does not carry
his cross and follow me cannot be My disciple (…) None of
you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your
possessions.” (Lk 14, 26-27. 33)
When our Constitutions speak of Salesian life as a formative
experience, they invite the Salesian not only to accept the
“spirituality” derived from living the values of his vocation
but also “the ascetical demands [that vocation] makes on him”
(C 98).
This brings us to a very interesting theme which I shall only
enunciate for the time being, viz. the meaning of renunciation,
and the formation to renunciation. It is a theme of great
relevance today, especially, but not only, in the area of initial
formation.
On this point, I would like to present another text drawn
from the Rector Major’s conference to the Superiors General:
In the short Gospel parable of the merchant with the precious
pearls (Mt 13, 45-46), we find some basic elements that allow
us to describe the “phenomenology of renunciation”:
a) Precious pearls are renounced (“the merchant went
and sold what he had”) not because they are false: they are
authentic after all, and up till then made up the merchant’s
wealth. Applying it to our reality, it is certainly not an
appropriate method to try to diminish the value of what
has to be renounced, to try to make it something easy to
29Cf. PASCUAL CHAVEZ, “You are my God. My happiness lies in
you alone”, in AGC 382, pp. 15ff., quoting Vita Consecrata, nn.18 and 32.
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do. After all, renouncing “bad things” does not make for the
most profound and complete human renunciation. How
many times have we heard the request, as a resistance to
what has to be renounced: “What is bad about what I am
doing?” And one who says this is right: only that s/he has
to understand that it is precisely then that the opportunity
presents itself to take up renunciation in its most authentic
sense.
b) Authentic pearls are renounced sorrowfully and at
the same time cheerfully, because “the” ultimate pearl
has been found, the one that has fulfilled the merchant’s
vision and heart: and he understands that he cannot buy
it unless he sells the others. If our consecrated life, centred
on the following and the imitation of the Lord Jesus, is
not fascinating, the renunciation it requires becomes
unjust and dehumanizing… As Potissimum Institutioni
puts it so splendidly: “Only this love, which is of a nuptial
character and engages all the affectivity of one’s person,
can motivate and support the privations and trials which
one who wishes ‘to lose his life’ necessarily encounters for
Christ and for the Gospel (cf. Mk 8:35)”.30
c) The joy of possessing the “precious pearl” never
eliminates the fear that it may not be authentic: Where it
turns out to be false, my decision will have been mistaken,
and I will have ruined my life. This “risk” in Christian
life, and even more so in consecrated life, is a direct
consequence of faith: only in faith does our life have
meaning: If what we believe in does not have truth, “we
are more unfortunate than any person”, to paraphrase St.
Paul (cf. 1 Cor 15, 19). The day when, in whatever aspect
of consecrated life, we can say: “my life is fully satisfying,
even if what I believe in is not true”, our Institute becomes
30CICLSAL, Potissimum Institutioni, n. 9.
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an NGO, with the further problem of demanding certain
unacceptable requirements from its members…
I conclude with the practical considerations concerning
poverty offered by the Rector Major in his letter:
We Salesians bear witness to poverty by tireless work and
temperance, but also by the essentials of an austere and
simple life, by sharing and solidarity, and by the responsible
use of resources. Our poverty calls us to carry out an
institutional reorganization of our work in a way that will
avoid the risk of seeming to be in the educational business
rather than being educators, or managers of educational
enterprises rather than apostles through education. Anyone
who has chosen to follow Jesus has also chosen to make his
own Christ’s style of life, to shun riches, to live the beatitude
of poverty and of simplicity of heart, and to be on familiar
terms with the poor. (AGC 294, pp. 41-42)
In the end, it is a matter of taking seriously Jesus’ beatitude,
“Blessed are the poor in spirit”, and living it conscientiously so
as to share, already now itself, in the Kingdom of heaven.
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Prayer
“TAKE AWAY THE REST”
Lord Jesus,
You revealed to us the Mystery of God,
whose sole Treasure is the fullness of Trinitarian Love,
making Yourself poor for us,
and inviting us to follow Your example
so as to become Your true disciples.
Grant that, following You radically for the sake of love,
we will be able to make You increasingly the Centre of our life,
before any other person or thing,
even before our own selves, our personal plans and projects,
so that, like the grain of wheat,
we will have the courage to die, to bear much fruit.
We want to learn, at the school of Your Love,
that we can be happy only in the renunciation of our selfishness,
to the extent of giving our life for our brothers and sisters,
especially for the young that You entrust to us,
to be genuine and credible signs of Your Love,
and not only with words and fine speeches.
Teach us to know how to accept the renunciations that are part
of our life
like the person who wants to leave all his treasures with joy
so as to possess the precious pearl that has conquered his heart
and his life:
that Treasure which only You Lord, can be.
In particular, help us to know how to renounce
all that restrains us in the realization of the Mission
that You have entrusted to us on behalf of young people most
in need of Your Love,
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just as our Father Don Bosco did, till the last moment of his
life.
Grant us the courage, in this General Chapter,
to assume the attitudes which will enable us to overcome
the models and the patterns of life and work
that are not in keeping with Your Will and the Mission
entrusted to us,
and help us to take those decisions
that will make, more visible and radiant,
Your predilection for boys and young people
who are the poorest, abandoned and in danger.
Amen.
***
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4. “IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO LOVE…”
THE MANIFESTATION OF LOVE
“It is not enough to love”. This meditation is centred on one
of the fundamental themes of our charism and our Salesian
spirituality. Among the many texts that form part of our
tradition, we wish to recall the Letter from Rome dated 10
May 1884, in which Don Bosco articulated this essential trait
of the Preventive System in a marvellous way. However, we
run the risk of turning it into a superficial slogan, whereas,
in actual fact, it possesses a tremendous depth not only
from a pedagogical or spiritual point of view, but also from
a theological perspective: it calls for deeper reflection since it
has its roots in Christian Revelation itself.
Here too, as in our previous reflections, we shall take human
experience as our point of departure, not because we wish to
minimize the newness brought by the Christian faith, but
because we are firmly convinced that there is no opposition
between nature and grace, between Creation and Redemption.
1. LOVE NEEDS TO BE MANIFESTED
What St. John says of God can be applied analogously to
the reality of love in human experience: “No one has ever seen
love.” Nevertheless, what the title of this section intends to
convey is not only that love cannot be perceived if it is not
manifested – this is obvious – but, more importantly, that
love of its very nature tends to manifest itself and wants to be
perceived by the person who is loved. Furthermore – and this
needs to be clearly stated – love yearns for a response, but this
will not be forthcoming if love does not manifest itself.
I feel that it is necessary to explore this experience, and that
is why I wish to raise the question: why is the manifestation of
love necessary on the part of one who loves? Obviously, because
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he cannot avoid doing so; but also – and here is something
which is not always taken into consideration – because of what
it implies for the person who is loved: precisely because what I
very much want is his happiness, I want him to know that he
is loved.
Such an approach leads us to an aspect that the
phenomenology of love often tends to forget, viz. that our
starting-point is not “loving”, but “being” and “feeling loved”.
This forgetfulness is often bolstered by the misunderstanding
that “it is better to give than to receive”, with the result that
occasionally no response is expected from the person loved,
as though it were more noble to display a “disinterested” love.
One might even go the extent of thinking that this is the way
we bear a greater resemblance to God. In his Encyclical, Deus
Caritas Est, and especially in his Message for Lent 2007, the
Holy Father, Benedict XVI, offers some extraordinarily fruitful
considerations to dispel this misunderstanding at its very
theological root. As we saw when speaking of gratuitousness
and grace, the Pope writes: “The Almighty awaits the ‘yes’ of
his creatures as a young bridegroom that of his bride (…) The
response the Lord ardently desires of us is above all that we
welcome His love and allow ourselves to be drawn to Him.”
Unfortunately, the misunderstanding also appears in the
very conception of Christian life, when it is taken to mean
“loving and serving God” in the hope that God will reciprocate
our love and save us, instead of understanding and living our
Christian life, with the joy arising out of gratitude, as a “being
loved by God”. It is only such a faith-conviction that can give
rise to our grateful and joyful response of love for Him.
To return to the point just mentioned, viz. the “passive”
experience of being loved, we have some extraordinary pages
written by the German Catholic thinker Josef Pieper. After
quoting Jean-Paul Sartre, who affirms that “This is the basis for
the joy of love...: we feel that our existence is justified,” Pieper
goes on to say:
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Here, however, the matter is seen, not from the lover’s point
of view, but from that of the beloved. Obviously, then, it
does not suffice us simply to exist; we can do that “anyhow”.
What matters to us, beyond mere existence, is the explicit
confirmation: It is good that you exist; how wonderful that
you are! In other words, what we need over and above sheer
existence is: to be loved by another person (…) But this
seemingly astonishing fact is repeatedly confirmed by the
most palpable experience, of the kind that everyone has day
after day. We say that a person “blossoms” when undergoing
the experience of being loved; that he becomes wholly
himself for the first time; that a “new life” is beginning for
him.31
I imagine that all of us have had such an experience with
the young in our educative and pastoral work; it is one of those
things that give us deep and authentic happiness. To put it
another way: as long as we do not feel loved by anyone, ‘we feel
ashamed’ to be in this world, as though we were at a feast to
which we have not been invited; but, no sooner does a person
love us than, as Sartre said, “we feel justified in existing”, and
in education, the change (even externally) can often be quite
amazing.
I wish to insist on this aspect of experiencing love, because
“being loved” spotlights the exceptional and irreplaceable
uniqueness of the person loved, whereas the active aspect
of “loving” does not always guarantee that uniqueness. It is
enough to consider the oft-repeated phrase, “Do good; it
doesn’t matter to whom.” Can we really speak here of “love”
when – apart from whether it is possible or not – the anonymity
of the person loved is what we desire? Moreover, will the person
feel satisfied? One could be performing a “kindly deed”, but it
lacks an essential element to make it an authentic act of love.
31JOSEF PIEPER, Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco, Ignatius Press,
1997) 174; cf. also 167 ff.
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I think that here lies the root of eros, without which
sexuality on the one hand, and agape on the other, can become
“impersonal”. As we shall see in our meditation on Don Bosco,
every boy for him was unique, even if those who received his
love numbered in their hundreds or thousands!
2. THE EXPRESSION AND THE MANIFESTATION
OF LOVE
In a bid to go deeper into the phenomenology of love so as
to grasp what love is, it is important to distinguish between the
expression of love and the manifestation of love. The expression
of love flows more “immediately” from the nature of love itself:
it is the consequence itself of loving, and is therefore more
closely connected with the one who loves. The manifestation
of love, instead, focuses more on the recipient: it specifies and
explains the former (the expression of love), and for this reason,
it is more closely connected with the word. Unfortunately,
deceitfulness can enter here, as when the word does not
correspond to the reality which, theoretically speaking, it seeks
to manifest.
Let us try to trace the development of love in the form of a
diagram:
reality – expression – manifestation – perception – response
As we can glimpse, and shall clarify later, all this finds a
remarkable application when it comes to the Salesian charism.
Reminding ourselves of the adage, “The proof of love lies
in deeds and not in beautiful words,” we can say that deeds
are the expression of love, whereas manifestation is all that
enables us to understand the source of those deeds, viz. love.
This manifestation is first of all the word, but other signs too
are possible. We can apply to love (and its human reality) the
words of the Second Vatican Council: “The plan of revelation
is realized by deeds and words having an inner unity”.32
32Cf. VATICAN COUNCIL II, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine
Revelation, Dei Verbum, n. 2.
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Two further observations need to be made regarding this
analysis of human experience. On the one hand, with regard
to the newness of the manifestation, it is possible to say,
paradoxically, that it is new, and at the same time, that it isn’t.
It isn’t new, because it manifests something that, in some way,
already exists; but it is new, precisely because what already
existed had not yet been manifested. The manifestation creates
a new situation, and in this sense one can speak of the “event
of the Word”. To tell a person, “I love you”, is to establish a new
and wonderful reality.
On the other hand, the manifestation is, in a certain sense,
“sacramental”, in so far as a good part of love’s efficaciousness
lies in its perceptibility. When the sign is missing, perception
does not ensue, even if there exists the reality that could make
it possible; consequently, there is no possibility of a response
on the part of the one who is indeed loved but does not know it.
The Spanish poet, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, had a beautiful
way of expressing such a human experience:
A tear appeared in her eyes,
and a word of pardon on my lips.
Pride spoke and wiped away her tears,
and the word on my lips expired.
Today I go my way, and she by another;
but when I think of our mutual love,
I still ask myself: why was I silent that day?
And she will ask: why did I not cry?33
To put it in a simple and universal way: how many times
does it not happen, especially in married and family life, that,
while love exists, and perhaps also its expression (in the form
33“Asomaba a sus ojos una lágrima, / y a mi labio una frase de perdón.
/ Habló el orgullo y se enjugó su rostro, / y la frase en mis labios expiró.
/ Hoy voy por un camino; ella, por otro; / pero al pensar en nuestro
mutuo amor, / yo digo aún: por qué callé aquel día? / Y ella dirá: por
qué no lloré yo?”
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of mutual service, commitment, and even sacrifice for those
whom one loves), the manifestation which makes it possible
for love to be perceived through those expressions is missing?
3. “…WE HAVE KNOWN THE LOVE GOD HAS FOR
US…”
While commenting on the motto of our Congregation, “Da
mihi animas, coetera tolle”, we reflected on some theological
aspects of our charism. We shall now go deeper into them,
taking as our starting point the Incarnation of the Son of
God as the definitive and once-and-for-all (= eschatological)
manifestation of God’s love.
We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we
have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have
looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the
Word of Life – this Life was made manifest, and we saw it
and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal Life that was
with the Father and was made manifest to us – we proclaim
to you what we have seen and heard. (1 Jn 1, 1-3a)
What we really want to say in a nutshell is that God’s entire
plan of salvation for humanity, which is centred on the Christ-
event, can be summarized in just one word: EPIPHANY, for
its aim is that all human beings, of all times and places, should
not only be the object of God’s love, but should be able to
perceive it, grasp it in faith (= believe), and respond to it in love.
When we speak of the “Incarnation”, obviously we do not
refer to a precise moment (“the 25th of March”) but to the total
experience that the Son of God willed to live: that “becoming
Man” (which, from a personalistic point of view would be, in
a certain sense, the theological basis for life understood as an
ongoing process of formation) that lasted all his earthly life
and reached its culmination in his death and resurrection. In
this sense, the word “epiphany” does not mean just a “sensible
manifestation” (visual, for example); in such a case, it would
imply that he only appeared (and that would be “docetism”).
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“Epiphany” instead embraces the entire reality of the Person
who gave himself totally in love “to the very end.” (Jn 13, 1ff)
Catholic theology, in a critical dialogue with the Protestant
Reformation, has always maintained that the God who reveals
himself in Jesus Christ is the same God the Creator, who makes
himself present in history, and in particular, revealed himself
as Yahweh, the God of Israel. This Catholic position has been
definitively confirmed by the First Vatican Council on the
basis of Romans 1, 20: “Ever since the creation of the world His
invisible nature, namely, His eternal power and divine nature,
has been clearly perceived in the things that He has made”.
Nevertheless, the same Council, speaking of this revelation
of God, and in agreement with the Pauline text, makes mention
of “his eternal power and wisdom”, but does not speak of His
Love. Perhaps it was not the explicit intention of the Council to
make this distinction, but I find the omission very significant.
Here we are speaking of Creation and History as the expression
of the true God (therefore, of the God who is Love); but, if
it is to be understood in this way, this expression needs its
manifestation in Christ. Without Him, we would never be
able to understand that, over and above his infinite Power and
his Wisdom, Creation and History speak to us of God’s love,
or better still, of a God who is Love.
To return once more to human experience: how often it is
difficult to perceive the attitude of a person who expresses his
love but fails to manifest it (especially through the word, as we
have said before) and therefore makes it hard to establish a
relationship.
I would dare to say that, without the historical revelation of
Jesus Christ, Creation and History (in the sense of universal
history, and especially “my” history and that of every man
and woman in the world) are dumb in terms of manifesting
agape. Even if a little later we shall try to look at the important
consequences which all this has for our charism, for the time
being, from the “Salesian angle”, I would like to say only this:
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God was not satisfied with loving us, but wanted to manifest
his love by giving us what he held dearest to his heart, viz. his
Son, Jesus Christ.
The definitive nature of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ
does not mean to say that God has already said everything he
had to say in the past or that he will have nothing to say in
the future. Actually speaking, God will continue to speak to
us through (universal, particular, personal…) history, but we
shall not be able to understand what he is telling us if we do not
“read” it in the light of Jesus Christ.
All this has implications (which we cannot examine here)
for interreligious dialogue. Without closing ourselves in any
way to all the values we find outside of our faith, to all that
is “good, noble and just…” (Phil 4,8) in every genuine search
for God on the part of mankind in every time and place, the
considerations we have made enable us to assert that Jesus
Christ is the one universal Saviour of humanity. “For the grace
of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, while we wait
for the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our
great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ.” (Tit 2, 11.13)
4. THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD,
EPIPHANY OF DIVINE LOVE
Nonetheless, we have still to arrive at the core of our
theological reflection: in what sense is the Incarnation of
the Son of God the definitive manifestation of His love so
as to enable us to discover its expression in every moment
and circumstance of our lives and in those of others, in
particular and universal history? Especially since, by taking
His self-emptying (kenosis) seriously, the Incarnation would
seem, at first sight, to be a concealment of God rather than a
manifestation of His Divinity. On the other hand, by not taking
his self-emptying (kenosis) seriously, how would we be able
to understand the definitive revelation of God through His
“becoming man”?
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A superficial reading of the Pauline text, 1 Corinthians 1,18-
25, could give us the impression that, according to St. Paul, God,
who is infinite Power and eternal Wisdom, manifested himself
in Christ in a way opposite to what he is, viz. in the impotence
and insanity of the Cross. This, for example, is how Luther
understood and developed his sub contrario Christology. The
fact is that St. Paul does not say this. The contrast he makes
concludes with these words: “To those who are called, both
Jews and Greeks, we preach a Christ, the power of God and
the wisdom of God” (v. 24); and he adds a phrase which might
appear to be merely a formal paradox, but is not so at all: “For
the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of
God is stronger than men” (v. 25). Since it is a matter of the
power and the wisdom of God’s love, it appears to be weakness
and insanity, according to purely human criteria, but it is
stronger than human strength and wiser than human wisdom.
If we start out from a “theistic” description of God as
infinite Power and Wisdom, we find ourselves confronted with
an alternative that leads up a blind alley. The Son of God, in his
Incarnation, either keeps these prerogatives or empties himself
of them; in the first case, can we maintain that he truly “became
man”? In the second case, his human reality is evident; but he
would cease to be “true God”.
The real theological solution begins with the very statement
of the problem, and that is: what is the authentic image of the
God in whom we believe? God is not, first of all, Power or
Wisdom; He is Love.
Let us go back to our human experience. All of us know
that beautiful expression in Latin which holds that “amor, aut
similes invenit, aut similes facit”: either love finds equals or
makes equals. Let us apply this statement to God’s love. The
difference between God and his creatures – here we mean
human beings – is infinite. Nevertheless, the very source of
this difference (“I am God, and not man”: Hos 11, 9) gives
rise to the pursuit of equality: love does not pretend to ignore
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differences, but neither does it allow itself to be separated by
them, rather it seeks to overcome them by embracing them.
In a beautiful text belonging to the Oriental tradition,
Nicolás Cabasilas says:
Men are distinct from God because of three things:
because of their nature, because of their sin, and because
of their death. However, the Redeemer brought about the
disappearance of these obstacles which come in the way of a
direct relationship. To this end, he eliminated the obstacles
one by one: the first, by assuming human nature; the second,
by dying on the cross; and the third, by rising from the dead,
whereby he completely banished the tyranny of death over
human nature.34
If love (or better: the one who loves) seeks to be equal to
the one loved, the Son in His Incarnation emptied Himself of
his Power and Wisdom, not in order to cease being God but
for the opposite reason, viz. to manifest Himself to us more
fully, in our likeness, as Love, and therefore as God (assuming
that we take seriously our belief that “God is Love”).
In other words: because it was love that prompted the Son
of God to empty Himself of His omnipotence and omniscience
in order to be truly man, He manifested that love to the
greatest possible extent – which is the same as saying that He
manifested Himself fully as God.
Let me have recourse one more time to human experience.
Unlike expression, manifestation has as its reference point not
the person who loves, but those who perceive and receive that
love. Therefore, since, in God, Love cannot be opposed to his
Wisdom and Power – in fact, they are identical in the absolute
simplicity of his perfection – but since in our perception of love
it is possible to see them opposed to each other, God chose to
“condescend” to our limited human understanding, emptying
34N. CABASILAS, De Vita in Christo III, cited in HANS URS VON
BALTHASAR, “El misterio Pascual,” Mysterium Salutis III/2, 151.
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Himself of whatever could, even in the slightest degree, obscure
or overshadow the full manifestation of His Love. Never was
God “so really” God (or, to put it more exactly: never did He
manifest Himself to us so fully as God) as when, out of love
for our sake, He emptied Himself of his omnipotence and
omniscience, viz. of whatever could hinder Him from being
really and truly “one of us”.
This brings us to a tremendously paradoxical conclusion:
any attempt to deny or diminish the radical humanity of Jesus
Christ is an assault on His Divinity, and goes counter to His
“desire” – and infinite power – to share fully in our human
existence, starting out from His personal identity as the Son of
God. (We can never forget, even for a moment, that it was God
Himself who, in Christ, became one of us!)
Here we can again pick up what we said with regard to
Grace, viz. that this marvellous plan of the epiphany of God’s
love hopes for – rather, longs for– a response from each one of
us. I would like to conclude with a statement that has a distinct
“Salesian flavour” and is deliberately provocative: when the
Father, through the work of the Holy Spirit, sent his Son
into the world, He gave Him this injunction: Strive to make
Yourself loved!
5. “IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO LOVE”: THE
PREVENTIVE SYSTEM
The article in the Constitutions on the Preventive System
concludes with these words: “It permeates our approach to
God, our personal relationships, and our manner of living in
community through the exercise of a charity that knows how to
make itself loved.” (C 20; cf. also C 15)
Before mentioning, at least in summary form, some of the
aspects of this key feature of our charism, I would like to recall
some paragraphs from the speech which the Cardinal Vicar of
Rome, Lucido Maria Parocchi, gave in 1884, on the occasion of
the Don Bosco’s journey to Rome, at the time the construction
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of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart was in progress. Our Rector
Major quotes this passage (cf. AGC 394, pp. 35-36), saying that
“apart from some obsolete terms, [it] could have come from
the present day”:
I want to tell you what distinguishes your Congregation
from the others … Just as God confers to every man born
into this world something that distinguishes him among
all other men, so too does God confer something to every
religious congregation that gives it a character, a mark of its
own… You, Salesians, have a special mission that constitutes
your characteristic… Your own Congregation seems to be
akin to that of St. Francis in its poverty, yet your brand of
poverty is not Franciscan. It would seem to be akin to the
Order of St. Dominic, though you do not have to defend the
faith against prevalent heresies….. Your principal mission
consists in the education of the young. It would seem to
be akin to the order of St. Ignatius in learning because of
the extensive number of books you have published for the
masses, and Don Bosco is a man of great genius and extensive
knowledge, learned in many things. But do not take it amiss
if I say that you have not invented the philosopher’s stone. So,
what is there so special about the Salesian Congregation? If
I have understood it properly, its physiognomy, its essential
characteristic lies in the charity it exercises in accordance
with the requirements of our day and age: Nos credidimus
caritati, Deus caritas est (we have believed in love, God is
Love), and it is revealed in Charity. The present age can only
be won over and led to do good with love… Tell the men of
this day and age that the souls now being lost must be saved,
and the men of this world do not understand. We, therefore,
have to adapt ourselves to the days in which we live, and
this is basically a material age. God reveals Himself to the
present generation through love: nos credidimus caritati.
Tell this day and age that you are rescuing children from
the streets that they may not be run over… that you are
gathering them in classrooms to educate them, so that they
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may not become a menace to society, and that they may not
go to prison. Then the men of this age will understand and
will begin to believe: et nos cognovimus et credimus caritati,
quam habet Deus in nobis (‘and we know and believe in the
love that God has for us’). (BM XVII, 70-73)
Among other aspects, I would like to highlight the following:
1. In accomplishing the Salesian mission as signs and
bearers of the love of God for poor and abandoned youth, Don
Bosco was fully aware of the need for this love to be expressed
and manifested in such a way as to be perceived by them as
much as possible (even if he did not say this in these words).
We see this clearly in the dream he recounted in his “Letter
from Rome”: Don Bosco’s interlocutors did not complain
that his collaborators had no love for the young or failed to
express their love. As a matter of fact, Don Bosco argued with
them: “Don’t you see that they are martyrs to study and work,
and how they burn out their young lives for those Divine
Providence has entrusted to them?” What actually was lacking
was the manifestation of that love, and that was why they were
not perceived in that way: “The best thing is missing; that the
youngsters should not only be loved, but that they themselves
know that they are loved (…) Without familiarity, love cannot
be demonstrated, and without this demonstration there can
be no confidence”. Further on, the same relationship between
expression and manifestation comes up again: “By neglecting
the lesser part they waste the greater, meaning all the work
they put in”.
2. Don Bosco gives us a motivation which not only comes
from his pedagogical genius but is above all completely
evangelical: “Jesus Christ made Himself little with the little
ones and bore our weaknesses. He is our master in the matter
of familiarity…. One who feels loved, loves in return, and one
who loves can obtain anything, especially from the young…
Jesus Christ did not crush the bruised reed nor quench the
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smouldering flax. He is your model”. We have to “make
ourselves fellow-companions” with our young people, as the
risen Jesus did with the disciples of Emmaus (cf. Lk 24, 13-35).
As we contemplate Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd,
through the eyes of Don Bosco, we can say that the expression
of his love is the untiring search for the lost sheep, the one
for whom he has a predilection because of its situation of risk
and abandonment; the manifestation of his love is his placing
it lovingly on his shoulders…
Here undoubtedly we find in great measure the influence of
Saint Francis de Sales, which led Don Bosco to take him as a
model and patron right from the beginning of his mission, and
particularly, from that memorable evening when the meeting
that had been announced the previous day, the solemnity of
Mary’s Immaculate Conception, took place. On 9 December
1859, Don Bosco declared that “the moment had come for all…
to state whether or not they wished to join this Pious Society
which would be named – or would continue to be named –
after St. Francis de Sales” (BM VI, 181). Don Bosco called
together his first Salesians for the “practice of pastoral charity”
towards “young people who are abandoned and at risk”… They
were to practise “loving-kindness” as a manifestation of the
salvific love of God (cf. C 15).
3. Cardinal Parocchi’s words attributed the specific
characteristic of Don Bosco’s mission to the ability of Salesians
to make God’s love tangible by fully responding to the authentic
and deepest needs of the young so that they felt themselves
truly and efficaciously loved by God.
This means that, if we really want to be faithful to Don Bosco
and to our mission, we must maintain a constant attitude of
discernment, in keeping with our Constitutions: “The needs of
the young and of working-class areas (…) inspire and shape
our pastoral activity” (C 7); and again: “Our apostolic activity
is carried out in a variety of ways, which depend in the first
place upon the actual needs of those for whom we are working”
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(C 41). It could happen that a type of activity or work, which
is undoubtedly an expression of pastoral love, is no longer a
manifestation of that same love and has become irrelevant from
the point of view of the Salesian charism. What must now be
said – I am speaking ironically here, without any intention of
changing the meaning of Don Bosco’s maxim – is that “it is not
enough to love”. Calling to mind what St. Paul asked of God
for his dear Philippians, our love must be ever on the increase,
in discerning and in being perceived (επιγνωσις –αισθησις:
Phil 1, 9). On the other hand, there can also be the opposite
danger of a manifestation of love not backed up by its
expression, in which case it would be false (“Little children, let
us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action”: 1 Jn 3,
18) or, at the very least, inefficacious (cf. James 2, 15-18).
4. As I recall GC25, I think that one of the great challenges
for our Salesian life is to put into practice this fundamental
trait of our Preventive System… in our community life. Too
many times we forget that “God calls us to live in community
and entrusts us with brothers to love” (C 50) and, of course,
to be loved by them. By living in this way, our community
becomes a reflection of the mystery of the Trinity, we find in it
“a response to the deep aspirations of the heart” which are none
other than those of loving and being loved, and “we become
for the young, signs of love and unity” (C 49). No one can give
what he does not have…
Furthermore: it is not enough to love our brothers in the
community; we have to manifest our love to them in such a
way that it is perceived and responded to. This challenge is
all the more urgent and necessary because of the sometimes
frenzied pace of our life in community, which makes us forget
that our community is a meaningful reality, not because of the
quantity of work it does but because of its quality. If this is
missing, we cannot be signs and bearers of the love of a God
who is, in himself, a community…
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5. I conclude by highlighting a trait that we shall take up
again when speaking of Don Bosco: the phrase, “strive to
make yourself loved”, which is also a programme of life, brings
perfect closure to the ellipse of love as it is lived in persons,
in the community and in the mission. In this regard, we can
quote a remarkable statement of Benedict XVI in his Message
for Lent 2007: “In all truth, only the love that unites the free gift
of oneself with the impassioned desire for reciprocity instils a
joy which eases the heaviest of burdens”.
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Prayer
MANIFESTATION OF LOVE
Lord, our God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit:
How great You are!
We contemplate with admiration and amazement
the Mystery of Your Trinitarian Life:
You are, from the beginning and for ever, perfect Love.
You willed that humankind, every woman and every man,
should participate in Your Life and in Your Love
so that, in the experience of being loved and learning to love,
we might resemble You more and more,
and thus, one day, live forever Your very Life.
Moreover:
You willed to reveal Your Love to us, once and for all time,
in Your Son, the Word made Flesh, Jesus Christ our Lord.
He, who is God, emptied Himself becoming one of us,
sharing fully our very life,
to the extent of taking this love to its extreme: dying and rising
for us.
You have entrusted to the Church the marvellous task
of continuing the same mission of Your Son:
to make present and visible, for men and women in every time
and place,
Your Love and your Salvation.
You raised up the Salesian Congregation
as the animator of a great movement in the Church
so that the full manifestation of Your predilection for the young,
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above all for the poorest and most abandoned, might be
perceived.
We pray you, Father,
to give us not only the gift of an unconditional love for them,
but also the knowledge of how to manifest this Love for them
in ways and in works in which they can better experience it
and believe in You, source of every love.
Grant that in our communities we may be able to live,
in the unity of fraternal love,
the Mystery of Trinitarian Unity.
Through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
***
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5. GIFT – GRACE – EUCHARIST
This reflection will focus on one of the terms most frequently
used in our Christian faith and theology: GRACE. It is one
of those words which, like the other, epiphany, embraces the
whole Christian mystery from a particular point of view.
Unfortunately, it also happens to be a word that is much abused
because we often forget that Grace is Someone (God Himself)
and not something (as when we speak of “different graces”).
Again, we forget the nature of Grace as a free gift, and consider
our relationship with God to be something depending more
on us than on Him (as when we speak of our “preserving” or
“losing” grace). In reality, we can lose everything… except
Grace, because Grace is the gratuitous and unconditional love
with which God gives himself to us.
1. THE LOSS OF THE SENSE OF GIFT
After this theological and somewhat provocative lead-in, I
would like to invite you to take the human reality of “giving
freely” as our point of departure, but not because we intend
to develop it “from below” and then “baptize” it to make it
Christian. Actually, what takes place is just the opposite: it is
only from the standpoint of faith that we are able to understand
and discover the deeper significance,and the human meaning
as well, of giving freely. For us Salesians, who want to live by the
conviction that there is no separation between nature and grace,
it would be appropriate that we examine the “anthropological
infrastructure” of grace so as to become aware of the “lack of
gratuitous giving” in our world today.
There are many signs pointing to this deficiency. I shall
allude to three of them, as they are particularly significant for
us:
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1. In much of Western culture, the model of a “successful
man” is someone who can say with pride: “Whatever I have
achieved has been the result of my own efforts”; “I have not
received anything from anyone as a gift…” This is why many
persons who are able to make a success of their lives “starting
from the bottom”, later become the fiercest opponents of
advancement for the poor and needy, because they think
(perhaps in a Pelagian sort of way) that “all have the same
opportunities: if some didn’t know how to make use of those
opportunities, worse for them; why should anything be ‘gifted’
to them?” With such a mentality, gratuitous giving makes no
sense; it is not even considered a virtue. Unfortunately, this
natural tendency of human beings, mostly limited to economic
or material productivity, is fast becoming a paradigm of
“human fulfilment” today.
2. Within the environment of the family, the treatment
we give to the elderly and the sick, i.e., to those persons who
cannot “produce” any more, is a matter of great importance.
Unlike ancestral cultures, which valued the elderly person as
a pivot of the family grouping and as a “wise person” whose
word served as the norm of conduct and irreversible judgment,
present-day culture unfortunately sees such a one all too often
as a nuisance and, in the best of cases, despatches him or her
to an old people’s residence or a nursing home. Should these
institutional resources be unavailable, nothing remains but
to “put up” with this person at home. Should the criteria for
judging a person’s worth be more human and less consumer-
oriented, such a one would be appreciated for what he or
she gave or could still give; but that is not usually the case.
Unfortunately, at times, such situations exist also in religious
life.
3. At world level, the situation of inequality between the
countries of the so-called “first world” and the “third world” is
unacceptable, and in some aspects continues to grow. The idea
of “cancelling the debts” contracted by poor countries has, with
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some honourable exceptions, still some way to go; it should be
added that frequently this matter (the cancellation of debts)
is not so much a question of economic interests (which of
course it is, and considerably so) as a question of maintaining
the status quo of the dependence arising out of the debt. As
for the concept of “justice” in terms of “giving to each one
what belongs to him”, it leaves no space for gratuitous giving;
however, many things would certainly improve in our world if
there were at least this type of justice, if the norm of conduct
between persons and nations were…the law of retribution. All
this points to the fact that there is still a long way to go before
arriving at a “civilization of love”, and practically speaking, such
a goal will be impossible if no attempts are made to reawaken
and develop a sense and a culture of giving freely.
2. GIVING FREELY: A FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN
REALITY
After what has been said, one could consider moving
immediately to the Christian and theological viewpoint,
leaving a total void on the anthropological level and giving
the impression that the faith-proposal is the only response to
an insoluble human problem. It may be so in reality, but it is
important not to overlook the “intermediate space” in which
every human being (including non-Christians!) can and must
“experience gratuitousness” that will enable the Christian faith
to develop all its richness, as the fullness of something every
human being lives and yearns for.
Gratuitousness is intimately connected with the idea of a gift.
However, it has slightly different connotations. Gratuitousness
emphasizes the absence of merits on the part of the one who
receives a gift: otherwise, it is not gratuitous. The stipend a
worker receives at the end of the week is earned by the sweat of
his brow: he does not receive it as a free gift.
Instead, a gift emphasizes the positive nature of what is given.
Giving someone a blow without his deserving it, is absolutely
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no gift at all. However, ordinarily and without our being aware
of it, we tend to add yet another characteristic to a gift: we are
inclined to see it as something selective, in the sense that it is
given to some and not to others (at least, not to everyone). A
“universal gift” would seem to be something contradictory: it
would not seem to be a gift any more.35
In the light of these clarifications, let us analyze, still at
the human level, the two fundamental experiences of giving
freely.
1. The misunderstanding we alluded to just now often
prevents us from perceiving that, at the very basis of our
existence, there is a gift, the gift of life – a gratuitous, positive
and universal gift. It is a gift par excellence, for two reasons:
• no one can do anything to deserve it, because, to deserve
something one must first exist to be able to obtain it;
• every other gift we receive is subsequent in so far as it
presupposes the gift of life itself.
Finally, it would be important to underline the universality
of the gift of life, because it is lacking only to those who are not
alive.
For all these reasons, a lot depends on the attitude we
assume towards a question that is frequently prompted by
certain exceptionally negative situations in the world: are
there persons who do not deserve to live? I imagine that our
unanimous answer is: no! And it is the correct answer, but
perhaps for a reason that is different from the one we are used
to thinking about. The answer to the question is no, not because
all of us have the right to live, but because, really speaking,
no one ‘deserves’ to live, and therefore no one can dispose of
the life of another person… Perhaps in the case of ‘a right’, a
person could lose it; but in the opposite case?
35From this point of view, it would perhaps be possible to include
the core of the theological discussion of the 1950s on the supernatural, a
central theme of Catholic theology.
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Therefore, at the basis of every human being, without
exception, we find a gift par excellence. Another question –
more pressing for us, Christians and Salesians – is whether
every human being perceives his own life as a gift, i.e., as
something positive. Unfortunately, this is often not the case,
beginning with many young people who, for different reasons,
do not have a purpose in life, perhaps because they do not feel
loved by anyone…
2. This brings us to the second experience of gratuitousness.
If life is a gratuitous gift par excellence, it is so as a foundation
and not as fullness because there is another question to be
answered: why do I have this gift? What can give meaning to
my life? And here the reply is immediate and universal: love.
Let us allow St. Thomas to offer us a remarkable and concise
statement: “The reason for every gratuitous donation is love:
if we give something freely to someone, it is because we want
something good for him. Hence, it is clear that love is the
gratuitous gift par excellence, because of which every other
gratuitous gift is given” (a triple pleonasm!).36 Josef Pieper
places this statement as the epigraph to his excellent book on
love.37
The gratuitousness of love is an inexhaustible theme, even
from a human point of view. In the first place, gratuitousness
could be confused with a lack of motivation, and therefore,
with its incomprehensibility. Why do I love this person? It is a
question that always remains without an answer (and just as
well, because if there were an answer, it would perhaps not be
authentic love anymore). Montaigne put it brilliantly when, to
describe his friendship with Étienne de La Boétie, he wrote:
36S.Th., I, q. 38, a. 2, resp. The original text is: “Ratio autem gratuitae
donationis est amor: ideo enim damus gratis alicui aliquid, quia
volumus ei bonum. Primum ergo quod damus ei, est amor quo volumus
ei bonum. Unde manifestum est quod amor habet rationem primi doni,
per quod omnia dona gratuita donantur.”
37JOSEF PIEPER, Faith, Hope, Love 139.
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“If I am forced to give a reason why I loved him, I feel that it
could not be expressed otherwise than by saying, ‘Because it
was he, because it was I’” (“Si on me presse de dire pourquoi je
l’aimais, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer qu’ en répondant:
Parceque c’était lui, parceque c’était moi”).38
A second characteristic of the experience of love is its
unconditional nature. There are forms of interpersonal
relationship that base themselves on different qualities like
physical beauty, intelligence and abilities (at times, strangely
and inexplicably, they base themselves also on other factors
which are practically the opposite of these). But authentic love,
while not being insensitive or indifferent to all these conditions
(“Ubi amor, ibi oculus!” Richard of St. Victor used to say),
transcends them all.
Nevertheless, like every human experience, love is not
without ambiguity: it can lead either to an unconditional
acceptance of the other person, typical of true love, or to an
“emptying” of the person loved by making the relationship
depend on his qualities, and so ending up with a caricature of
love: in fact, the one who “loves” in this way does not truly love,
and the other person does not feel loved as a person. In many
cases, it could be a subtle ploy of egoism. In a way, it could be
what St. Augustine describes in his Confessions: “I loved not
yet, yet I loved to love”: Nondum amabam, et amare amabam.39
We could continue with this analysis. Instead, as we did
with the theme of manifestation, it seems appropriate at this
point to clarify the other pole of the ellipse of love. Till now,
we were following the usual approach, viz. examining the
attitude of the one who loves. But now it is time to ask: How is
the experience of love lived “from the other side”?
38Cited in MORAND WIRTH, François de Sales et l’éducation (Paris:
Éditions Don Bosco, 2005) 92.
39AUGUSTINE, Confessions III/1, trans. John K. Ryan (New York:
Image Books, 1960) 77.
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And here we come across something tremendously
paradoxical. The Rector Major, in his Letter on the Eucharist,
alludes to it (AGC 398, p.14). What he says (and we shall return
to it at the end) can be enriched, according to me, with some
anthropological considerations.
At first sight, it is evident that all of us want to be loved,
and above all, to be loved in a gratuitous and unconditional
manner. Still, things are not that simple. Let me allow J. Pieper
to speak to us once again:
At bottom all love is undeserved. We can neither earn it nor
promote it; it is always pure gift (…) But there seems to be in
man something like an aversion for receiving gifts. No one
is wholly unfamiliar with the thought: I don’t want anything
for nothing! And this emotion comes uncannily close to the
other: I don’t want to be “loved” (…) C. S. Lewis says that
absolutely undeserved love is certainly what we need but not
at all the kind of love we want. ‘We want to be loved for our
cleverness, beauty, generosity, fairness, usefulness’.40
Here again we come across the ambiguity we alluded to
earlier, but this time from the side of the passive experience
of “being loved”. The person loved could very well ask himself:
“In this experience of being loved, do I want to allow myself to
be ‘emptied’ (apparently, at least) of everything that makes me
a unique and irreplaceable ‘I’?” “If someone were to say to me:
‘I love you, just as you are: it doesn’t matter to me what you are
like’, would that be an expression of unconditional acceptance,
or of disinterestedness and indifference? Imagine saying to a
confrere of your community: “You are the special object of my
agape” – it would be a subtle and hurtful way of offending him.
We find it very difficult indeed to allow ourselves to be loved
unconditionally by others, even by God himself…
40JOSEF PIEPER, Faith, Hope, Love 179-180. The quote from Lewis
is found in C.S. LEWIS, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1960) 181.
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In addition to the afore-mentioned misunderstanding,
there is yet another reason which perhaps explains, to some
extent, this refusal to be loved unconditionally, and it is the
apparent uselessness of the response of the person who is
loved. It could seem that it does not matter to the person who
loves whether we respond or not to his love; and this puts us in
an obvious position of inferiority. Nietzsche did have a point
when he said that “the one who is accustomed only to giving,
has calluses forming on his hands and in his heart”. We must
state it clearly: the essence of loving requires a giving…and a
receiving, even in God. This statement will form the subject of
an ensuing reflection.
3. “…GRACE AND TRUTH CAME THROUGH JESUS
CHRIST” (Jn 1, 17b)
If we recall the difference we explained earlier between
expression and manifestation, then it becomes easier to point
out that all we have said so far, in the life of every human being,
is the expression of God’s gratuitous love. However, in order
to be perceived as such, the manifestation in Jesus Christ is
necessary.
Basing ourselves on this distinction, we can point out three
fundamental characteristics of God’s gratuitous Love:
* Universality: “God desires everyone to be saved” (1 Tim
2, 4). From here arises the missionary character of the Church
in the strict sense and, within it, the Salesian mission with its
particular traits. Personally, I believe that one of the elements
that can best help to understand the “need” of belonging to
the Church for one’s salvation is its communitarian nature.
The fact is that, outside the actual Church, a full experience
of salvation is missing because what is lacking is the concrete,
perceptible and historical manifestation of God’s love in Jesus
Christ, as lived in “God’s Family”, the Church.
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* God’s initiative: “It is not that we loved God but that he
loved us first” (1 Jn 4, 10). Grace, as the gratuitous expression
of God’s love, is always precedent: it always precedes the
human response which, in a certain way, is also a gift from
God, but never excludes human freedom. In this sense,
Don Bosco’s Preventive System has its roots in the core of
our faith: “Don Bosco lived (…) a spiritual and educational
experience which he called the ‘Preventive System’. For him
it was a love that gave gratuitously, inspired by the love of a
God who provides in advance for all his creatures” (C 20). I
think that the word, in advance (‘pre-venire’), has a twofold
meaning: it refers to ‘a precedence’ and to the pre-occupation
of forestalling anything negative. The first meaning refers to
love, which always ‘precedes’; the second meaning refers to
the concern ‘to prevent’ the experience of estranging oneself
from God through sin. (This is why both terms can be used,
precedent and preventive.)
* Unconditional: God’s love, in so far as it is Grace, does
not allow prior conditions to be placed on his love, but – here
is something that baffles us, human beings – goes to the extent
of showing a predilection for the one who is not “lovable”, for
the one who “has no right” to demand to be loved. “For sinners
are beautiful because they are loved; they are not loved because
they are beautiful.”41
I cannot resist the temptation to quote a beautiful text
of Dostoevsky, placed on the lips of that terribly ambiguous
figure, Marmeladov the drunkard:
And He will judge all and will forgive them, the good and
the bad, the wise and the meek. And when He has done with
all of them, He will say unto us, ‘Come forth ye, too! Come
forth, all ye who are drunk! Come forth, all ye who know no
shame!’ And we shall all come forth without being ashamed,
41J. MOLTMANN, The Crucified God (London: SCM Press, 1979)
214.
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and we shall stand before Him. (….) And the wise men will
say, and the learned men will say: ‘Lord, why dost Thou
receive them?’ And He will say unto them, ‘I receive them, O
wise men, I receive them, O learned men, because not one of
them ever thought himself worthy of it.’ And He will stretch
forth His arm to us, and we shall fall down before Him and
we shall weep. And we shall understand all.42
4. THE LOVE OF GOD, AGAPE AND EROS
Man’s experience of love, even of the Love of God, is a human
experience. As such, therefore, it cannot escape the ambiguity
inherent in every perception of love. And, unfortunately, this
is what happens: God’s universal love can be seen as something
generic, God’s prior initiative in loving can be so distant as to
pass unnoticed, and God’s unconditional love can be confused
with indifference. Precisely, therefore, because their task is to
proclaim the manifestation of God’s love, evangelization and
catechesis must help to dissipate these misunderstandings
so as to enable his love to be perceived in all its beauty and
efficacy in the life of each one of us and of the young people
the Lord entrusts to us.
From among all these misunderstandings, there is one I
would like to look into as it is practically unexplored territory.
From what I know, the only person who has been bold enough
to examine it has been Joseph Ratzinger, and it is a great
comfort that he has done it as Supreme Pastor of the Universal
Church.
It is indeed unfortunate that the authors of great treatises
have taken for granted that God’s love is different from human
love because it has, among other traits, a total and absolute
gratuitousness that expects nothing in return. J. Pieper asserts,
without feeling the need to prove it, that “one would have to be
God in order to be capable of loving without being dependent
42F. M. DOSTOYEVSKY, Crime and Punishment (Middlesex, Penguin
Books, 1978) 40.
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on being loved in return.”43 And C. S. Lewis writes: “God is
Love (…) This primal love is Gift-love. In God there is no
hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires
to give (…) The Need-loves, so far as I have been able to see,
have no resemblance to the Love which God is.”44
Pope Benedict XVI contradicts these authors almost
literally, in his Message for Lent 2007, using unusual theological
terms: “The Almighty awaits the ‘yes’ of his creatures as a
young bridegroom that of his bride (…) On the Cross, it is
God Himself who begs the love of His creature: He is thirsty
for the love of every one of us.”
Continuing our effort to “learn” what is Love, and
contemplating its full and definitive manifestation in Jesus
Christ, we ask: In the experience of love, what is the “best
example” of giving freely?
Responding schematically, we can identify different
possibilities:
– One loves without expecting any response from the
person loved: this is clearly not the “best example” of love
(even though Jüngel seems a little inclined to consider it that
way when he says: “Clearly one cannot exclude the possibility
that the essence of love will emerge with greater hermeneutic
sharpness where the beloved Thou does not love the loving.”45)
– One loves in order to receive a response: here too it is
evident that we do not have the “best example” (and perhaps
not even an example of true love, but a hidden egoism).
– One loves in a disinterested manner, expecting a response
from the person he loves, for the sake of that person’s own
good: in other words, I am keen that the other person should
respond to my love, not for my good, but for his: in so far as
43 JOSEF PIEPER, Faith, Hope, Love, 184.
44C.S. LEWIS, The Four Loves, 175-176.
45Cf. EBERHARD JÜNGEL, God as the Mystery of the World, 317
note 11.
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his response will enable him to come out of himself and realize
himself as a person, in love. This is a “noble” stance, but if we
are sincere with ourselves, we have to acknowledge that it is
not humanly satisfying.
– One loves in a disinterested manner, expecting a response
from the person loved, for the sake of that person’s own good,
insofar as the beloved responds to the one who loves him. This
is apparently similar to the preceding example, but there is one
essential difference, viz. the firm belief that the person who is
loved will find his happiness only in the “one who loves him”.
This example is not acceptable in human relations (“Who
do you think you are?”). But, curiously, it would seem to be
typical of our relationship with God. We are talking here about
salvation, properly understood: only God can be the happiness
of the one who responds to His love.
– Still, this is not the “best example”. In the light of all that
has been previously seen, we have to add that man’s response
to God’s love makes for the full happiness of the beloved… and
also of the One who loves him, viz. God himself. If we take
this point seriously, then I think it will give us some incredible
glimpses into the Mystery of God who is Love revealed in
Christ.…
Dostoevsky himself has a marvellous text, in which he
describes a young mother making the sign of the cross on her
newly-born child who smiles at her for the first time. This is
how the simple woman explains her gesture: “Just as a mother
rejoices seeing her baby’s first smile, so does God rejoice every
time He beholds from above a sinner kneeling down before
Him to say his prayers with all his heart”.46
46F.M. DOSTOYEVSKY, The Idiot (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1978)
253.
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5. “DO THIS IN MEMORY OF ME”: THE GIFT OF
THE EUCHARIST
All the foregoing gives us a better understanding of what
the Rector Major says in his Letter on the Eucharist:
The Eucharist is a mystery because in it is revealed so much
love (cf. Jn 15, 13), a love so divine that, going far beyond
our capabilities overwhelms us and leaves us astonished.
Even though we are not always aware of it, usually we find
it difficult to accept the gift of the Eucharist, the love of God
manifested in the gift of the body of Christ (cf. Jn 3,16),
which exceeds our capacity and challenges our freedom;
God is always greater than our heart and reaches those
places beyond our wildest desires (…) A love so profound
frightens us revealing the radical poverty of our being: the
deep need to love does not leave us the time nor the energy
to let ourselves be loved. And so we prefer to be busy, hiding
ourselves behind ‘doing’ so much for others and giving
them so much of ourselves, and we deprive ourselves of the
wonder of knowing that we are so much loved by God. (AGC
398, pp. 13-14)
Obviously, the Rector Major is re-echoing some of the contents
and expressions of the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation,
Sacramentum Caritatis, which all of us, undoubtedly, know and
have meditated upon.
Among the many possible reflections, I would like to
concentrate first of all on the very root of the word, Eucharistia.
We are taken back once again to χαριѕ, which lays great
emphasis on gratuitousness in so far as it is not “a” gift of God
but God himself who becomes a Gift. The Pope’s initial statement
in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est: “Being Christian is not
the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter
with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and
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a decisive direction”,47 becomes concrete in the Eucharist48:
“Jesus continues, in the sacrament of the Eucharist, to love us
‘to the end’, even to offering us His body and His blood. What
amazement must the Apostles have felt in witnessing what the
Lord did and said during that Supper! What wonder must the
Eucharistic mystery also awaken in our own hearts!”49
In the second place, it is well to recall that the Last Supper,
as such, was preceded by many others (otherwise, we would
not speak of it as the “last”). The Rector Major evokes the
meaning of the “banquet” of the Eucharist by taking as his
point of departure Jesus’ “eating together”, particularly with
sinners. Among many Gospel texts, suffice it to recall Mt 9,
9-13; Lk 5, 29-30; 15, 1ff. (cf. AGC 398, pp. 33-35)
At this point, there arises an interesting question: in which
Sacrament is the “Christological foundation” of the Church
to be found more fully: in the Eucharist or in Reconciliation?
I think that the answer ought to be: both, inseparably. We
must not forget that pardon is a central element in the life
and mission of Jesus, and a privileged way for God to show
His merciful Love. Furthermore: only in love can pardon have
its authentic foundation. We see this also in the etymological
analysis of the word. At least in Western languages, the root
of the word “pardon” is simple: to give, to donate, preceded
by the intensive prefix, per (in Anglo-saxon languages: for-
give, ver-geben) as though to say that there is nothing greater
to “give” than for-giveness. We may recall St. Thomas’ phrase
about there being no authentic forgiveness except that which is
born of love.
All this has many practical applications, but there is one that
refers to our community life. “There the community celebrates
the paschal mystery and unites itself to the immolated body
47BENEDICT XVI, Encyclical Letter, Deus Caritas Est, n. 1.
48BENEDICT XVI, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Sacramentum
Caritatis, nn. 86ff.
49Ibid., n. 1.
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of Christ, which it receives so as to build itself in Him into a
fraternal communion and renew its apostolic commitment”
(C 88). Taking the Eucharist seriously leads to an increase
in fraternal communion (including the daily reality of for-
giveness) and in an acceptance of Jesus’ command: “Do this in
memory of Me”, which implies that we too become the body
that is given and the blood that is poured out for the salvation
of our young people.
Finally, I would like to invite you to contemplate the
Blessed Virgin Mary. We do not need to invent “apocryphal”
presences of Mary at the Last Supper (or appearances of Jesus
to her after his Resurrection). John Paul II points out that “the
account of the institution of the Eucharist on the night of Holy
Thursday makes no mention of Mary”. There is no need to
do so because “in addition to her sharing in the Eucharistic
banquet (…), Mary is a “woman of the Eucharist” in her whole
life”.50 “From Mary we must learn to become men and women
of the Eucharist and of the Church”.51
After explicitly stating this with the help of various New
Testament texts, John Paul II, concludes: “The Magnificat
expresses Mary’s spirituality, and there is nothing greater than
this spirituality for helping us to experience the mystery of the
Eucharist. The Eucharist has been given to us so that our life,
like that of Mary, may become completely a Magnificat!”52
50JOHN PAUL II, Encyclical Letter, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, n. 53.
51BENEDICT XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis, n. 96.
52JOHN PAUL II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, n. 58.
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Prayer
GIFT – GRACE – EUCHARIST
Lord God, our Father,
You exist from time immemorial and for ever,
with the Son and the Holy Spirit
in the fulness of Love and mutual self-gift.
You willed to create the human person
in Your image and likeness.
In Your marvellous plan of salvation,
You have willed that every woman and man
should have an experience of Your Love
from the first moment of their existence,
learning in this way to love You and neighbour.
Unfortunately, we human beings refused Your Love,
right from the beginning of history,
and consequently have become enemies, even among ourselves.
Notwithstanding everything, You did not abandon us,
and in Jesus Christ, Your Son, without any merit on our part,
You offer us Your free and unconditional Love.
Jesus Himself desired to remain forever with us,
to perpetuate His Love and the gift of Himself until death,
in the sacrament of the Eucharist.
Help us to be able to contemplate, with the heart of a child
that never tires of admiring and thanking,
this unfathomable Mystery of Your Love,
so that even we can become Eucharist
for our brothers, and for the young whom You entrust to us.
We pray: in this world, closed to Your Love and to Your Grace,
help us to know how to build a culture of Gratuitousness,
that will help relationships of fraternity and of love to grow
among all people,
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so that feeling ourselves loved by You as true sons and
daughters, in Christ,
we may thus return Your Love,
and find, in this response, our joy and our salvation.
Through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
***
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6. THE SALESIAN MISSION:
“POOR AND ABANDONED BOYS”
“You should honour John Bosco, who took care of poor
youngsters and created schools for them”. It is said that Mao
Tse-Tung wrote these words in his famous Red Book. Whether
this is true or not, there is no doubt that St. John Bosco is known
and loved beyond the frontiers of the Congregation and the
Salesian Family, and even beyond the Church herself, because
of his predilection for boys and young people, especially the
poor and abandoned.
As we reflect on this theme, which is central to our Salesian
charism since it refers to those to whom our mission is primarily
directed and our approach to them, we shall find in it a point
of convergence of themes previously dealt with; that is why we
have placed this topic towards the end of this Retreat.
1. “….HIS PREDILECTION FOR THE LITTLE ONES
AND THE POOR…”
As we know very well, the Salesian mission has its roots
in the life, teaching and example of Jesus Christ. The Second
Vatican Council points out that every charism observes the Son
of God made Man from different angles.53 Our Constitutions
assert that we are “more aware of certain aspects of the figure
of the Lord” (C 11). We do not have to demonstrate that the
“predilection for the little ones and the poor” was one of the
clearest, surest and, I would say, “most human” characteristics
of the Lord Jesus. There are innumerable Gospel texts to prove
it. However, I believe that some clarifications are necessary.
53Cf. VATICAN COUNCIL II, Dogmatic Constitution on the
Church, Lumen Gentium, n. 46.
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In the first place, the word used by our Constitutions is
significant: to speak of predilection is to speak of love – of a
“greater”, preferential love, but at the same time, a love that
is not exclusive and does not exclude anyone. I think it is a
more appropriate word than “option”, which, as such, has
no connotation of love, and can even insinuate a certain
discrimination. Jesus never rejected anyone; but, within his
universal love, he had certain predilections.
And so, we can ask ourselves: who were the people for
whom Jesus had a predilection? Faithful to the Gospel, our
Constitutions point to “the little ones and the poor”. Are we
equating the two groups of persons here? Or are we using a
‘hendiadys’ that unifies the two groups without eliminating the
differences?
For an answer we can turn to the Beatitudes: the first one
refers to the “poor” (Lk 6, 20) or the “poor in spirit” (Mt 5,
3). In both texts, the “poor” are promised “the Kingdom of
heaven” / “the Kingdom of God”.
This would be the place to clarify Jesus’ concept of “poverty”.
Without ignoring the complexity of the question or even the
ambiguity of the very word “poverty”, the term designates a
negative situation, one of sin and human egoism, and at the
same time a human and Christian ideal, one that is even
“sanctioned” by a vow in consecrated life.
This clarification is simple and easy to understand if we
go back to the Lord Jesus and his concrete situation (Sitz im
Leben). Even at the risk of seeming tautological, we can say:
the poor man is the person for whom the Gospel is “Good
News”. Such a description does not automatically equate
poverty with a social and economic situation but establishes
a very close relationship with it; at the same time, it does not
automatically condemn the “possession of things” but points
to the real danger it entails. Furthermore, the description
reminds us that the person of Jesus and his message were not
“good news” for everyone, and that different kinds of obstacles
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can prevent a person from accepting him: among them can
certainly be socio-economic considerations (cf. the rich young
man in Mk 10, 17-22 and parallels), but they need not be the
only ones and perhaps not even the ones which, in the final
analysis, determine this refusal.
In the words of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s canticle, the
Magnificat, the human attitude of self-sufficiency appears to be
the opposite of “poverty” and leads to a rejection of the “Good
News” of the Gospel and, finally, of Jesus himself; it shows
itself in three forms: pride – power – money. “He has scattered
the proud – He has brought down the powerful – He has sent
the rich away empty.” (Lk 1, 51-53)
Let us recall the text of Prov 30, 8-9:
Give me neither poverty nor riches;
feed me with the food that I need,
lest I be full, and deny You,
and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’
or lest I be poor, and steal,
and profane the name of my God.
He who has everything is tempted to say, (if not with words,
then with his attitude): “Who is God? Why do I need Him if
I can manage by myself?” At the same time, we cannot ignore
the difficulty a person faces in believing in God’s love when he
does not have even what is indispensable for himself and his
family in order to live a life worthy of human beings, as sons
and daughters of God.
As for the “little ones”, who are closer to our charism, we
need to clarify this central aspect of Jesus’ mission. We are well
aware of His opinion of the “little ones” when we hear Him
inviting us to become like them so as not to be excluded from
the Kingdom of God.
However, it is not an easy task to identify the characteristics
of infants (the little ones) that the Lord has in mind, for there
are several typical aspects of infancy that certainly would not
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be referred to. The fact of the matter is that Jesus himself does
give us the answer, but it often goes unnoticed. In Mark’s text,
which is the more ancient among the Gospels, Jesus clearly
states: “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a
little child will never enter it” (Mk 10, 15). The key-word here
is the verb “receive” (in the original Greek: δεξηται), and it
prompts the question: How do children receive what is given to
them? The answer is simple and clear: with joy and gratitude,
precisely because they have not “merited” what they receive.
Unfortunately, as we saw in another reflection, the more
we advance in years, the more we lose the sense of giving
and receiving as well as the joy and gratitude that go with it:
“that simplicity... the simplicitas of the New Testament, was at
bottom nothing but ‘trusting to love’.”54
In this sense, it is worth giving serious consideration to
the religious character of Jesus’ mission. It will lead us to
delineate a profile of His most radical, and undoubtedly
most “scandalous”, predilection which, without forgetting or
minimizing His unlimited compassion and total solidarity with
the poor, the sick and the marginalized, was His predilection
for sinners, for those furthest away from God and therefore
most in need of His love and forgiveness. Moreover, they were
the ones most disposed to receive, with the joy and gratitude
of a child, what was offered them as a gift, viz. God’s mercy and
salvation (call to mind the “exemplary” case of Zacchaeus in
Lk 19, 1-10).
Obviously, in a theocratic society like that of Israel, being
a sinner also entailed a “social” stigma, but we would be
plucking out the very heart of Jesus’ mission if we were to
place “sinners” in the social category of the “marginalized”.
It was not because they were socially marginalized that Jesus
showed His predilection for sinners, but because they were in
danger of losing themselves. When Christianity ignores this,
54JOSEF PIEPER, Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco, Ignatius Press,
1997) 179, quoting Stanislaus, S.J., Count of Dunin-Borkowski.
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it becomes a social movement which, especially in our time,
means an NGO, often irrelevant and obsolete. And much the
same can be said of a Salesian presence when it does not aim
at bringing about and manifesting this marvellous synthesis of
the pursuit of salvation and integral promotion.
It is quite likely that all this is accepted in principle, but it
does not always become a criterion of action and a “strategy”,
including a social strategy. Actually it is the way in which
the Church offers an irreplaceable service, beginning from
her innermost identity and leading to the transformation of
society, especially in the face of injustice and the idolatry of
power and money, which seem to be vastly on the increase.
All this corresponds to the convictions the Christian has
learned from his Master, viz. that the evil He seeks to combat
does not, in the last analysis, come from social, political or
economic structures, but from the heart of man (cf. Mk 7,
20). He is convinced that “only love is capable of radically
transforming the relationships that men maintain among
themselves”.55
2. “…WITH DON BOSCO WE REAFFIRM OUR
PREFERENCE FOR THE YOUNG WHO ARE
POOR…”
What we have said does not in any way eliminate our
preference in the light of our Salesian charism, but rather
illumines it and leads us to reiterate the typically Salesian
convictions about our mission: on the one hand, we share in the
universal mission of the Church (cf. C 3), which is fundamentally
religious in nature, and on the other hand, we confront and offer
practical responses to the social and economic problems of our
world. We need to clearly reconfirm that those for whom we
work are “the young, especially those who are poorer” (C 26),
“in the first place youngsters who because of economic, social
55PONTIFICAL COUNCIL FOR JUSTICE AND PEACE,
Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, n. 4.
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and cultural poverty, sometimes of an extreme nature, have no
possibility of success in life” (R 1).
The fusion of the two aspects defines our Salesian identity
in the accomplishment of our mission: our charism clearly
defines the type of poverty we are concerned with, and at the
same time explains why we dedicate ourselves to the young who
live in this situation. On this second point, the same article
of the Constitutions (in addition to a brief statement in R 1)
declares: “Young people are at the age when they must make
basic life-choices which affect the future of society and of the
Church. With Don Bosco we reaffirm our preference for the
young who are ‘poor, abandoned and in danger’, those who
have greater need of love and evangelization, and we work
especially in areas of greatest poverty” (C 26; bold and italics
mine).
The Rector Major comments on this essential trait of our
charism:
We do need to note that the predilection in Don Bosco
stems not only from the magnanimity of his fatherly heart,
“great as the sands of the seashore”, nor from the calamitous
situation of the young people of his time – much like that of
our own – and much less from a social or political agenda. At
the base of it there is a God-given mission: “The Lord made
clear to Don Bosco that he was to direct his mission first and
foremost to the young, especially to those who are poorer”
(C 26). And it is well to recall that this took place “through
the motherly intervention of Mary” (C 1); she it was, in
fact, who “showed Don Bosco his field of labour among the
young and was the constant guide and support of his work”
(C 8). “Normative” in this sense, and not simply anecdotal,
is the attitude adopted by Don Bosco at a decisive moment
of his priestly life before the Marchioness of Barolo and her
offer, certainly holy and apostolic as it was, to collaborate in
her works and abandon his ragamuffins: “You have money
and will have no trouble finding as many priests as you
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want for your institutions. It’s not the same with the poor
youngsters…” (AGC 384, p. 19)
In these words, Don Bosco adds a motivation which is not
only affective and pedagogical but also theological: “My poor
boys have only me…” It is a simple but profound statement of
his awareness of being a mediator, an epiphany of God’s love
for them; without him, all of those who are the “least” would
be lacking a manifestation of God’s love and, consequently,
an experience of God as Father. To use a biblical expression,
without him, they would find themselves like sheep without a
shepherd. “As (Jesus) went ashore, He saw a great crowd; and
He had compassion for them, because they were like sheep
without a shepherd” (Mk 6, 34; Mt. 9, 36 adds: “harassed and
helpless …”).
3. “POOR, ABANDONED AND IN DANGER…”
Again, in the same Letter quoted above, Fr. Pascual says:
It would be very interesting to go more deeply into the typical
characteristics of those to whom our mission is preferentially
addressed: ‘the young who are poor, abandoned and in
danger’. Even though we speak nowadays of ‘new forms of
poverty’ among young people, poverty directly refers to their
social and economic situation; abandonment recalls the
‘theological note’ of lack of support through the absence of
adequate mediation of God’s love; and danger refers back to a
determining phase of life, adolescence, the time of decision
after which habits and attitudes formed can be changed
only with great difficulty. A deeper study of this kind serves
as a starting point for deciding in each Province (cf. R 1)
and community, who are those to whom our mission is
directed here and now, in the light of the criteria we have
just mentioned. (AGC 384, p. 20)
As in the other themes, we find here once again Don
Bosco’s exceptional insight and his ability to bring together
in an underlying unity a harrowing socio-economic problem,
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an exceptional pedagogical vision and an unshakable faith in
God’s love towards everyone, particularly to those in need. Let
us contemplate this “marvel of God’s grace”, our Father, Don
Bosco. (We shall dedicate the next reflection to him.) And let
us consider the three expressions, “poor, abandoned and in
danger”, as aspects of a global description of those to whom
our work is chiefly directed, enabling us, in our educative and
pastoral work with them, to make more specific the mission
God entrusts us with.
At the same time, we have to remember that our mission
does not depend on those for whom we work, as though it were
optional, fortuitous or dependent on circumstances to be or
not to be signs and bearers of God’s love! The mission is not
something “negotiable”. All of us must be convinced that the
Salesian mission will never be impossible or irrelevant, and it
should be our endeavour to be faithful to it, and through it, to
God and to the young…
What happens often is that the situation of those for whom
we work, while not taking precedence over the Mission, does
not take precedence over our activities and works either.
If we were to make use of a diagram, we would say that
sometimes our discernment and our decisions are not the most
appropriate ones because we proceed in the following order:
Mission – activities and works – those for whom we work
Whereas in fidelity to the Lord’s will, the correct order
should be:
Mission – those for whom we work – activities and works
It is not a matter of our going in search of those who can fill
up our activities and works (many times, unfortunately, they
are not the ones who should come!); rather, we ought to ask:
for the sake of those to whom the Lord sends us as a priority,
what are the activities and works we need to carry out here
and now?
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Previously we alluded to a “global description” encompassing
three aspects of those for whom we work. Perhaps we could
summarize it like this: following the example of Jesus and
with a view to putting his universal mission into action,
Don Bosco was “charismatically touched” by the danger
that could obstruct the temporal and eternal happiness
(“salvation”) of his boys, viz. their situation of abandonment
in relation to God and others, provoked by their state of
poverty, at times extreme.
If, at the beginning, we spoke of poverty as a value endorsed
by a vow in consecrated life, we ought not to forget that the
word “poverty” is ambiguous and also denotes a socio-
economic situation that goes counter to God’s loving plan,
making it difficult and often impossible for someone living in
such a situation to feel himself / herself a son / daughter of
God, personally loved by Him. How can one speak of God’s
love to a person who does not have the basic necessities of life
for himself and his family?
I think it would be interesting to examine the response
Don Bosco gave (or better: felt called by God to give) when
confronted with the youth situation of his time; that response
would be normative for us too. Apparently Don Bosco was not
the only one to perceive the problem of abandoned youth in
Turin and in the big cities: it was, in some respects, a completely
new situation, and many important personalities took various
stands according to their different viewpoints. There was,
for example, a whole current in literature that denounced the
situation: recall if you will, among other books representative
of this school, Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Karl Marx, for
his part, sought to overturn the unjust situation by starting
out from an atheistic position and offering his own solution.
Dostoevsky too was so intensely moved by the suffering
of innocent people, especially children, that it became the
strongest argument for his not believing in God. Don Bosco was
not less sensitive than all the others, but he did not stop to
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adopt a theoretical position, be it in atheism or in theodicy;
in the name of the God of Jesus Christ and His Love, He gave
His life completely for the integral – that is, the temporal and
eternal – good of a proletariat comprising children and young
people.
To conclude this section, I would like to add a personal
reflection. In connection with those to whom our work is
primarily directed, I would like to use a word which, even if
not drawn from the Gospels, contains a great richness from
the etymological point of view. I am referring to the word
“insignificant”. The usual semantics of the word tends to
identify it with something “small”; but its etymology leads in
a different direction. Let us take an example: a Salesian work
which is significant (because of the presence of Salesians,
because of their closeness to the boys which enables them
to know each one personally, and because of the quality of
education and Christian formation imparted) can run the risk
of developing to such an extent that it becomes insignificant,
that is to say: it does not “signify” any more, it is no more a sign
of what it ought to convey.
Playing around with words, we could say: we shall be a sign
of God’s salvific love, the more insignificant, from the human
point of view, are those for whom we work. As the Rector
Major states, in his Letter on the Eucharist, with regard to
the banquet and its connection with poverty: “The invitation
is not addressed to friends or relatives (cf. Lk 14, 12-13;
Mt 5, 46-47), which wouldn’t be a bad thing; but which wouldn’t
be an ‘evangelical sign’, nor produce a salutary shock, because
Jesus recognizes that ‘the Gentiles do the same’ (Mt 5, 47).”
Instead, “the invitation [is] to take part in this ‘banquet of the
Kingdom,’ with an evangelical predilection, that is the option
of the revealed God, for the poorest and the abandoned, for the
marginalized, for the sinners, for all those, in human terms,
insignificant” (AGC 398, p.35).
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4. “OUR MISSION SETS THE TENOR OF OUR
WHOLE LIFE …” (C 3)
In GC22, the then Rector Major, Fr. Egidio Viganò, clarified
the theological meaning of consecration in [Salesian] religious
life, recalling that, in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council,
this consecration has two characteristics: it is God’s work (He
alone consecrates us; we do not “consecrate” ourselves to Him)
and it is all-embracing: it does not regard only a “sector” of
our life (such as the profession of the evangelical counsels),
but takes in all aspects. From this viewpoint, consecration and
mission are not two “sides” but the “whole” of our life seen
from two different angles. In a way, everything is consecration
and everything is mission. Otherwise, the title of this section
would be in contradiction with lived reality.
To come down to practical considerations, I think it best to
link the predilection for poor youth with the important aspects
we have developed in the course of this Retreat.
1. In the first place, giving freely: I believe that this
fundamental trait of love is totally beyond question, but it
can be endangered to the extent to which we move away from
our “charismatic predilection”. At the same time, it is worth
emphasizing once more that giving freely (because of its very
nature) does not exclude but expects and “requires” a response.
Such a response is full, in the case of a poor and abandoned
boy, because, having “nothing” to give in return, he makes his
response of love by giving himself completely.
Among the many anecdotes in the life of our Father,
Don Bosco, I like to choose an episode which is particularly
eloquent and charming in its simplicity. It refers to a young
boy during the early years of the Oratory who
was returning from shopping. Besides other provisions, he
was holding a jar filled with vinegar and a bottle of olive oil.
At the sight of Don Bosco, the young boy jumped with joy
and called out: ‘Viva Don Bosco!’ [Long live Don Bosco].
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Laughing, Don Bosco asked: “Can you do what I am doing?”
and clapped his hands. Overcome with joy, the boy put the
bottle under his arm and clapped his hands, as again he
shouted: ‘Viva Don Bosco!’ Naturally, as he did so, both jar
and bottle fell to the ground in pieces. Stunned, he began
to whimper that his mother would beat him when he got
home. (BM II, 74)
Everything was happily resolved, thanks to the generosity
of the shopkeeper.
2. From this perspective too, we have to emphasize the
importance of the expression and the manifestation of love. The
Salesian mission assumes that those to whom our service is
primarily directed and who are the privileged object of God’s
love have not had an experience of love manifested to them;
that is why, in their case more than in any other, we need to
ensure that they perceive it in the most concrete way possible.
As Fr. Pascual Chavez says, “It is a matter of giving the most
to those to whom unfortunately life has given the least”. And
undoubtedly, a fundamental element is the effective possibility
of their integral promotion through education; otherwise, all
that remain are beautiful words or pious desires.
3. However, there is another aspect which seems to me
particularly important and delicate, especially in our times, and
it is the need for the manifestation of God’s love to be perceived
through the (paternal-maternal-fraternal) manifestation
of our agape-eros… the way Don Bosco did. This, we must
immediately add, has nothing to do with sexuality, and is
completely the opposite of a risky deviation.
There is a text in the Ratio 2000 – more precisely, in
the booklet on Criteria and Norms for Salesian Vocation
Discernment – which summarizes this trait very nicely. It
alludes to the danger that this love, shown in a Salesian way,
can be confused with its radical falsification, or more explicitly,
with a homosexual contra-indication. We know that, for subtle
psychological reasons, this inclination intensifies especially
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when dealing with fragile and “defenceless” youngsters who,
as such, are the typical recipients of our educative and pastoral
activity.
The text says: “However, on account of its particular
characteristics this vocation [to Salesian consecrated life]
implies special requirements with regard to homosexuality.
It is a question in fact of a vocation-mission that is lived in
male communities, that leads to constant contact with poor
youth, preferentially male, in need of attention and affection, in
a family style and an educational method, which is expressed
through loving-kindness, the ability to make oneself loved and to
show love” (Criteria and Norms, n. 77, p. 57).
Today more than ever, we have to guard against every type
of deviation in this field (which, on the other hand, is more
dangerous today); but we must not, for fear of such a deviation,
renounce the specific and essential trait of our charism! It is
the authentic identity of our consecrated chastity that enables
us to “bear witness to the predilection of Christ for the young;
it allows us to love them in an open and uncomplicated way,
so that they ‘know they are loved’, and it enables us to educate
them to love and to purity.” (C 81)
4. There is another very important and practical
consideration, and the Rector Major chose to emphasize it
in his Strenna for 2008, viz. the promotion of human rights,
in particular the rights of juveniles, as the Salesian way of
promoting a culture of life and a change of structures: “The
Preventive System of Don Bosco has a great social outreach
(…). “Education to human rights, in particular to the rights
of juveniles, is the privileged way to implement in various
contexts this commitment to prevention, to integrated human
development, to the construction of a world that is more fair,
more just, more healthy. The language of human rights also
allows us to dialogue and to introduce our pedagogy into the
different cultures of the world.”
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I would like to conclude by recalling once more the last
sentence in the section on Chastity in our Constitutions: “(The
Salesian) turns with filial trust to Mary, the Immaculate
Help of Christians, who helps him to love as Don Bosco did.”
(C 84)
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Prayer
POOR AND ABANDONED YOUTH
Lord Jesus,
You who invite us to share in Your Mission of the Good
Shepherd,
to care for that part of human society, so precious and fragile,
the poorest and most abandoned youngsters,
as our Father and Founder Don Bosco did,
help us to be faithful to this mission,
in the fulfilment of which we will find the path to our holiness.
Help us to show a loving and efficacious concern
for the most needy and emarginated youth,
so that, as Good Shepherds,
we will be able to know and call them by name,
helping them to experience the dignity of human beings,
in the knowledge that they are loved by You with predilection.
Help us to offer them an integral formation
that will enable them to become honest citizens and good
Christians,
so that, following Your example,
we might be able to offer them all our time, all our energies,
and even our life,
in disinterested and generous service.
Give us, Lord, during this General Chapter,
the light and strength of Your Spirit,
so that we might make an appropriate assessment of the
situation of our beneficiaries
and discern their deeper human and Christian needs,
so that we can thus realize the Salesian Mission
in the variety of situations in which we work as a Congregation,
to be, in this way,
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faithful to You and to the young, just as Don Bosco always
was.
Give us the ability to place all our facilities and our works,
beginning from our very selves,
at the service of most needy young people,
with the unshakeable certainty of faith,
with the joy of hope
and the radicalism of love,
so that, as mediators of Your salvific presence among them,
“they might have life, and have it in abundance”.
Amen.
***
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7. “STARTING AFRESH FROM DON
BOSCO”
Towards the end of our Spiritual Retreat, in an atmosphere
of prayer and encounter with God, we wish to live the
fundamental objective of our Chapter, which is: “starting
afresh from Don Bosco, to reawaken the heart of every Salesian
to return to the young with a renewed Salesian identity and a
more ardent apostolic passion” (cf. Letter of the Rector Major,
AGC 394).
1. “THE LORD HAS GIVEN US DON BOSCO AS
FATHER AND TEACHER...” (C 21)
It is evident that “starting afresh from Don Bosco” does
not mean “a return of the prodigal son to his father’s house”
because, in truth, we have never left our House, our Charism.
Nonetheless, there are objective elements that invite us to
renew our fidelity to Don Bosco and to our Salesian Charism
in the face of the new challenges emerging in our history and
in the lives of the young. In his letter convoking the General
Chapter, the Rector Major tells us:
Today more than yesterday, and tomorrow more than today,
the risk grows greater of breaking the living bonds that keep
us united to Don Bosco. More than a hundred years have now
gone by since his death. The generations of Salesians who
were in contact with him and knew him close at hand are
dead. The chronological, geographic and cultural distance
from the founder is increasing. The spiritual climate and
the psychological closeness which prompted spontaneous
reference to Don Bosco and his spirit, are beginning to
disappear. (AGC 394, p. 9)
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Obviously, my reflection has no intention whatsoever of
producing a “synthesis” of Don Bosco: apart from the objective
impossibility of accomplishing such a feat for a colossal figure
like him, I would be the last person suitable for the job. All of
us know our Father, Don Bosco, too well for me to pretend to
say “new” things about him.
However, I would like to set out from the extraordinary
greatness of Don Bosco, which fills our hearts with legitimate
pride, but is not without its risks. One of these, for instance,
would be to lose ourselves in the complex multiplicity of his
traits, and so to be unable to grasp the essential elements of his
person and his charism, which the Holy Spirit has bestowed
on the Church and on humanity through him. As the proverb
says, there are times when “we cannot see the wood for the
trees”. Suffice it to recall the several professions and activities
that have Don Bosco for their patron, all of them giving
prominence, no doubt, in a superficial and simplistic way, to
the many-sided richness of his personality.
Speaking of St. Francis of Assisi, the genial English writer,
G. K. Chesterton, remarked that the profile of his sanctity
has been interpreted, on occasion, in the most diverse ways
– from iconoclast to patron of ecology – forgetting the most
important thing which gave meaning to all the other aspects,
viz. his love for Christ. And, with his habitual irony, he adds
that these interpreters are like the person who wishes to write
a biography of Roald Amundsen with only one constraint,
viz. that no mention be made of the North or the South Pole.
Perhaps a more contemporary comparison would be writing
a biography of Pele or Maradona in which everything can be
spoken of, except one: football.
In the same letter referred to above, Fr. Pascual gives us a
sharp reminder:
At the foundation of everything, as the source of the fruitful
results of his action and actuality, there is something we may
often overlook: his deep spiritual experience, what we might
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call his ‘familiarity’ with God. Maybe this is precisely the
best thing he has left us in which to invoke and imitate him,
and set ourselves to follow him so as to make contact with
Christ and bring Christ into contact with the young. (AGC
394, p. 12)
An illustration of these words of the Rector Major is the
following not-so-familiar testimony found in the Biographical
Memoirs:
On one occasion when Don Bosco was visiting the
seminary at Grenoble, in France, “at the hour of spiritual
reading that immediately preceded dinner (…), he joined
the seminarians for the pious exercise; on that occasion the
reading was replaced by an exhortation of Father Rua who
chose as his theme God’s love for us. A witness testifies that
‘his fervent words revealed a heart burning with divine love.
It was contemplation rather than meditation, but it became
ecstasy for Don Bosco. Big tears ran down his cheeks and
as the superior noticed this, he remarked out loud with
his warm loving voice: Don Bosco is weeping. It would be
impossible to describe the effect those simple words had on
us. The Saint’s tears were even more influential than Father
Rua’s fiery words. We all felt deeply moved and recognized
Don Bosco’s holiness in his love, and we no longer needed
any miracles to lead us to display our veneration for the
Saint.’ (BM XVIII, 99-100)
In this sense, “starting afresh from Don Bosco” is nothing
else but growing in what constitutes our Christian identity, viz.
the centrality of God in our lives – something that our Founder
wrote in the first article of the Constitutions: “The purpose of
the Salesian Society is that its members, while striving after
Christian perfection, shall be engaged in the various works of
charity, spiritual and temporal, on behalf of the young, especially
those who are poor”. It is the continual effort to attain that “high
standard” of Christian and consecrated life, viz. holiness, by
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experiencing the threefold God-centred attitude which enables
us to live as he lived, “as seeing him who is invisible.” (C 21)
In this regard, the canonization of our Founder, Don Bosco,
as we know very well, has a significance that goes beyond the
simple recognition of his heroic virtues or the proof of God’s
extraordinary intervention in the miracles he worked. It is
what Vita Consecrata states in all clarity: “When the Church
approves a form of consecrated life or an Institute, she confirms
that in its spiritual and apostolic charism are found all the
objective requisites for achieving personal and communal
perfection according to the Gospel”.56 The statement found in
the first article of our Constitutions echoes the same idea: “The
Church has acknowledged God’s hand in this, especially by
approving our Constitutions and by proclaiming our Founder
a saint.” (C 1)
“Dear Salesians, be saints,” was the Rector Major’s invitation
to us in his first letter in which he listed the characteristics of
Salesian sanctity (cf. AGC 379, pp. 8–10). The entire letter was
an invitation to take up this challenge, for “our sanctification
is ‘the essential task’ of our life, in the words of the Pope. If we
attain this, we shall have attained everything; if we fail to do
so, all is lost, as is said of charity (cf. 1 Cor 13, 1-8), the very
essence of holiness.” (ibid. p. 11)
Don Bosco calls us, in the first place, to become saints in
such a way that the mission itself becomes an expression and
a consequence of this holiness, and at the same time a path to
grow in it. “The witness of such holiness, achieved within the
Salesian mission, reveals the unique worth of the beatitudes
and is the most precious gift we can offer to the young.”
(C 25)
A second point I would like to make is drawn from the
Prologue of the book, Jesus of Nazareth, written by the Pope or,
as he himself says, by Joseph Ratzinger. What I shall say here
does not intend to be anything more than a simple analogy.
56JOHN PAUL II, Vita Consecrata, n. 93.
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There is no doubt that we have at our disposal today many
more tools from the various scientific disciplines (history,
linguistics, psychology, sociology…) to study Don Bosco, and
for this we must thank so many Salesian confreres, some of
whom are present here, for dedicating their lives to this study
and communicating the results of their qualified research.
Still, it is possible to run the risk the Holy Father points to,
concerning the use of the historical-critical method. To use a
simple (perhaps too simple) but meaningful example: we may
oftentimes content ourselves with, or attach great importance
to, an “x-ray” of Don Bosco rather than to his living and actual
countenance. When a surgeon has to perform an operation on
his mother, the photographs he has of her are of little or no use:
what he needs instead are the most specialized studies available.
But, in his office or on his writing-desk, he generally does not
place an x-ray but the most faithful and “live” photograph he
has of his mother.
As a Congregation, and still more, as a Salesian Family,
we must always strive for a synthesis which makes it possible
for us to know the authentic Don Bosco in a dynamic way,
because, as we said in the title of this section, he has been given
to us by God as our Father and Teacher.
2. “….WE STUDY AND IMITATE HIM, ADMIRING
IN HIM A SPLENDID BLENDING OF NATURE
AND GRACE” (C 21)
In our previous reflections, we sought to “put into practice”
this blending of nature and grace. I shall now take up once
more some of the elements – among many others – that we
have meditated upon and that were marvellously blended in
Don Bosco, whose personality manifests an extraordinary
integration. On the one hand, as we have said before, he was
gifted with an extraordinary richness: “deeply human, rich in
the qualities of his people, open to the realities of this earth,
just as deeply the man of God, filled with the gifts of the Holy
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Spirit”. On the other hand, he was capable not only of a “splendid
blending” but a fusion in his closely-knit life project, the service
of the young. Seen from this “formal” angle, the Salesian too
is equally gifted (of course, not in the same measure) with
gifts of nature and grace, and is called to be a man of synthesis,
equilibrium and good sense, someone who does not inflate or
deflate any of his basic qualities. The Salesian must be, in the
best sense of the word, a normal man – if we are to go by the
description given by Cardinal Pironio at the inauguration of
GC 22; not “mediocre” but just the opposite: a person who is
on fire with a passion of love for the young and seeks their
highest good, their salvation.
1. We spoke of gratuitous giving – which in the faith-context
is understood as grace– as the atmosphere surrounding every
person, be he Christian or not; an expression of God’s loving
presence. Don Bosco was extraordinarily sensitive to this “sense
of gratuitous giving”. We have drawn attention to it at different
moments, especially when we spoke of our predilection for the
most “insignificant”.
Let us recall what the Rector Major writes in his letter,
“Looking at Christ through the eyes of Don Bosco”. It concerns
Don Bosco’s lived experience with the pupils of the Jesuits:
As a student of philosophy John Bosco had assisted some
boys of well-to-do families at a summer camp of the Jesuits
near Turin, to which they had sent some of the boarders
from their schools during an epidemic. Although he had
no difficulty in relating to them – indeed some of them
were friends who loved and respected him – he became
convinced that his ‘method’ was not compatible with a
system of ‘mutual payment’. At Montaldo (…) he came to
know that he could not exercise over boys of this social class
that influence without which it is impossible to help them
spiritually. Then, he became convinced that his field of work
was not among the children of the wealthy. (AGC 384, p. 17)
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I would like to examine the topic further, using an example
which seems quite relevant. We saw that life, every human life,
is a gift par excellence in so far as all of us possess it and also
in so far as it is the basis for all the other gifts “of nature and
grace”. It would be rhetorical to say that Don Bosco too felt the
same way. But there is something more: I think that, in this
matter, we come across an extraordinary gift of God in his life.
Though all of us know that life is a gift, we do not always
experience it that way. As the proverb says, “nadie sabe el
bien que tiene, hasta que lo ve perdido” (“no one appreciates
what he has, until he has lost it”… or is in danger of losing
it). We do not need to demonstrate the fact that, whoever has
seen his life threatened by death and survived, has learned to
appreciate it immeasurably. There is a classical description of
this experience in the life of Dostoevsky, in connection with a
situation that Stefan Zweig calls “one of the crucial moments
of humanity”. Here is how the Russian novelist describes it, in
the third person:
It seemed to him then that he had only five more minutes to
live. He told me that those five minutes were like an eternity
to him, riches beyond the dreams of avarice (….) He was
dying at twenty-seven, a strong and healthy man (….) he
said that the thing that was most unbearable to him at the
time was the constant thought, “What if I had not had to
die! What if I could return to life – oh, what an eternity!
And all that would be mine! I should turn every minute into
an age, I should lose nothing, I should count every minute
separately and waste none!”57
We are all acquainted with the inspiring text of the
Biographical Memoirs narrating Don Bosco’s mortal illness,
but I cannot resist transcribing some of its paragraphs:
Don Bosco wrote the following comment on his illness: “I
think I was fully prepared to die at that moment. I was sorry
57F.M. DOSTOYEVSKY, The Idiot, 87-88.
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to leave my boys, but I was glad to end my days knowing
that the oratory now had a permanent base”. This certainty
of his flowed from the conviction that God and the Blessed
Mother had wanted and founded the oratory (…) Early in
the week, as the sad news of his sickness spread, the oratory
boys were overwhelmed by indescribable grief and anxiety
(…) Touching scenes would take place. “Just let me take a
peek at him,” one would ask. “I won’t make him talk”, insisted
another (…) “If Don Bosco knew I were here, he’d let me in”,
said a third (…) Don Bosco could hear them talking to the
nurse and was very much affected (…) Realizing that there
was little hope for him in human remedies, they appealed to
heaven with admirable fervour (…) It was a Saturday in July,
a day sacred to the Holy Mother of God.
We know the outcome of this decisive moment, a real
watershed in Don Bosco’s life. Invited by the theologian Borel
to say at least a little prayer for his own recovery, Don Bosco,
with great difficulty, finally said: “Yes, Lord, if it pleases you,
let me be cured”. “That morning the two doctors, Botta and
Cafasso, came to see him, fearing to find him dead, but when
they felt his pulse, they told him: ‘Don Bosco, you have good
reason to go to La Consolata and thank the Madonna’.”
No pen can describe the scene when the beloved father
returned among his sons. “The reception was a scene easier
imagined than described (...) Don Bosco addressed a few
words to them. Among other things, he said: ‘I want to thank
you for the love you have shown me during my illness. I want
to thank you for the prayers you said for my recovery. I am
convinced that God granted me an extension of my life in
answer to your prayers. Therefore, gratitude demands that
I spend it all for your temporal and spiritual welfare. This I
promise to do as long as the Lord will permit me to remain
in this world; on your part, help me to keep my promise’.”
(BM II, 385-386)
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I believe that our Rector Major had a similar experience,
and curiously, around the same age as Don Bosco, at 31. Most
of us will probably never have such an experience. The most
important thing is that we be convinced that, if God has called
us to life, and to this life as Salesians, it is in order that we
might say, like Don Bosco: “For you I study, for you I work, for
you I live, for you I am ready even to give my life” (C 14).
2. When we mentioned earlier that the key to understanding
the entire life of Don Bosco lay in the centrality of God in
his life, we presupposed something that we now need to
make explicit, viz. faith in God is inseparable from following
and imitating Jesus Christ. For our Father, Don Bosco, to
speak of religion was to speak of Christianity. In the social,
cultural and religious context of his time, this was obvious
and beyond dispute. Today, Don Bosco would certainly be the
first one to invite us to take an active part in ecumenical and
inter-religious dialogue because of his conviction that Jesus
Christ is – in the words of the Magisterium and present-day
theology – “the one universal Saviour of all humanity.”
It was Jesus Christ who guided and directed all of Don
Bosco’s actions, from the first years of his life. It was Jesus
Christ who, in the dream he had at the age of nine, pointed out
to him his mission and made him understand that his whole
life would be determined by this vocation and mission, and
that he would receive a Teacher, “without whom, all wisdom is
foolishness.”58 It was Jesus Christ whom he discovered, loved
and served in every person whom he encountered in his life,
above all poor and abandoned youth, taking seriously the
word of the Lord in Mt. 25, 31ff. It was Jesus Christ whom he
sought to “form” in them, following a path in which education
and catechesis were fully integrated:
58JOHN BOSCO, Memorie dell’Oratorio (Rome: LAS, 1991) 36 =
Salesian Sources. 1. Don Bosco and his Work. Collected Works (Rome:
LAS / Bengaluru: Kristu Jyoti Publications, 2017) 1330.
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Like Don Bosco, we are all called to be educators to the faith
at every opportunity. Our highest knowledge therefore is
to know Jesus Christ, and our greatest delight is to reveal
to all peoples the unfathomable riches of his mystery. We
walk side by side with the young so as to lead them to the
risen Lord, and so to discover in him and in his Gospel the
deepest meaning of their own existence, and thus grow into
new men. (C 34)
For Don Bosco, holiness was not an ethical ideal but the
fullness of friendship with a Person, Jesus Christ.
In giving the first place in his life to the Lord Jesus, he was
led by a certain charismatic instinct to accentuate some aspects
of the inexhaustible figure of Christ (cf. C 11). Among these,
as the Rector Major reminded us some years ago, there was the
image of the Apostle of the Father and of the Good Shepherd.
In his contemplation of Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd,
Don Bosco “learned” – and all of us, Salesians, are called to the
same apprenticeship – the Preventive System, viz. gratitude,
the preoccupation for those on the margins, love in the form of
loving-kindness, a personal knowledge (“the Good Shepherd
knows his sheep and calls each one by name”), and above
all, the need of giving oneself and everything to the point of
“giving one’s own life for the sheep” (cf. AGC 384, pp. 26-28).
3. The figure of the Good Shepherd and his concern for each
of his sheep, together with his amazing predilection for the lost
one, prompts us, towards the close of our Retreat, to examine
more closely a particular theme that we had only mentioned
during the first days, viz. the unity of agape and eros in the life
and activity of our Father, Don Bosco.
Confronted by the traditional semantics of the word eros
which is wrongly taken to be a synonym of “sexuality” (and
often, “morbid” sexuality), and provoked by the thinking of
some twentieth-century Protestant theologians (especially in
Northern Europe) who saw a radical opposition between eros
and agape, Pope Benedict XVI, in his highest teaching post
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in the universal Church, has had the merit of restoring the
human, Christian and – why not say it? – theological value
of eros, capping in this way a whole current of humanistic
thinking in this direction.
We can say very briefly that “we know what eros is not”; but,
what is it? Even after an attentive reading of Benedict XVI’s
Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, and especially his Message for Lent
2007, we can remain with the impression that there is no clarity
in the matter and that there even remains some difference of
opinion. For instance, if, in the light of the Encyclical, Deus
Caritas Est, we take agape to mean “descending love” and eros
“ascending love”,59 can we speak of God’s eros toward man?
Similarly, what other kind of love can man have for God, if
not the “ascending” type, and therefore, only erotic love? In my
opinion, it is possible to find at least five or six descriptions of
eros in these documents of the Pope: ascending love – a response
of love – an “ecstatic” feeling or emotion – a possession of what
is lacking to one who loves – a yearning for union… In actual
fact, all these descriptions are not alternatives, but various
attempts, from different points of view, to define what is in
itself indefinable, in as much as true love lies beyond logical
human understanding. St. Anselm’s words are applicable
here: “rationabiliter comprehendit… incomprehensibile esse”
(we understand with our reason that love is beyond reason
itself). But this incomprehensibility does not mean to say that it
is impenetrable, but only that it is inexhaustible when it comes
to knowing what it is.
The path I would like to suggest sets out from the two
elements I have already mentioned. On the one hand, the
Holy Father gives us to understand that eros is indispensable,
even for the realization of agape (cf. among other texts, Deus
Caritas Est, n. 7); on the other hand, we have insisted on
the need to examine love from both sides of the experience
– of loving, certainly, but also of being loved. In both these
59BENEDICT XVI, Deus Caritas Est, n. 7.
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aspects we discover an essential factor which is so evident that
it paradoxically risks being passed over without our noticing
it: we refer to the uniqueness of the person loved. Without it,
agape itself (and, paradoxically, at the other extreme, sexuality!)
becomes impersonal; without it, the person cannot feel himself
loved in the depths of his being. I think that the description –
a babbling description, of course – of eros must be bound up
with the recognition of the person loved as unique. And this
must occur in the entire gamut of love – from sexuality which
must become true human love by being personalized in this
way, to agape which also needs to be personalized by eros60 lest
it turn into a narcissistic egoism in which one hides behind
the mask, saying, “I love everyone”, when, in reality, he loves
no one.
With this explanation, we can perfectly understand what we
called the various “attempts” to define eros in the documents
of Benedict XVI, including feelings and emotions which are
doubtless essential not only in the experience of love in general,
but especially in the amazement arising from the face-to-face
encounter with a person in all its uniqueness, and which is
expressed in the simple words: How wonderful it is that you
are!
The Good Shepherd, who left the ninety-nine sheep in the
sheepfold (or on the mountains! cf. Mt. 18, 12) to go in search
of the lost sheep, understood this to perfection (cf. also AGC
384, p. 27). So did our holy Father, Don Bosco: it was so evident
in him, and I would add, it fires us with enthusiasm. To be still
more precise, I would say that the structure and orientation
of his love was his agape, while the content and dynamics of
that same love was his eros. In realizing himself through
love, Don Bosco did not look out for those who fascinated
60Cf. The extraordinary text (unfortunately, placed in a note which
has been lost, at the bottom of the page!) of EBERHARD JÜNGEL, God
as the Mystery of the World, 319 note 15. (I must, however, clarify that I
am not totally in agreement with the language he uses.)
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him or “gave him fulfilment”, but for those who had a greater
need of his agape-love. But this love was totally personal and
affective (obviously, effective too) so that every boy felt himself
personally loved by him, and even considered himself to be
the object of his predilection, as though he were the only one
whom Don Bosco loved. How the words of those street-boys
at the door of a beloved dying man resound in our ears and in
our hearts: “If Don Bosco knew I were here, he’d let me in!”
Thanks to this agape-love which became an intimate affection
– “entrañable”, we say in Spanish, using a psycho-somatic
expression – his boys felt loved by God to such an extent that,
as Fr. Giacomelli testifies,
they “loved him dearly and held him in such veneration
that all he had to do was express a mere wish to be instantly
obeyed. They avoided also whatever might displease him,
but there was not a trace of servile fear in their obedience;
it stemmed from their filial affection for him. Indeed, some
boys avoided wrongdoing more out of regard for him than
for fear of offending God. When he would come to know
of this, he would reprimand them severely, reminding them
that, God is much more than Don Bosco!” (BM III, 411) And
towards the end of his life, the theologian Piano said to him:
“We still feel the love we felt for you then (...) Was it not here
at the Oratory that the majority of us were fed and clothed
when we were destitute? (...) This heart of mine will beat no
more, before it ceases to love you. We hold that loving you
is a symbol of the love of God.” (BM XVIII, 311-312)
On another occasion, also in the last years, he said to a
group of past-pupil priests and lay people: “Now it is my turn
to say who it is I love the most. Tell me. This is my hand; which
of my five fingers do I love the most? Which of these could I
do without? Certainly, I would not do without any of them
because all five of them are equally dear and necessary to me.
Therefore, I can only say that I love you all, all of you without
any difference in degree or measure.” (BM XVIII, 124-125)
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I believe that the most daring statement of Benedict XVI
(he himself makes us understand it is so) is the one he makes
towards the end of his Message for Lent 2007, and it can be
applied, analogically, to Don Bosco: “One could rightly say
that the revelation of God’s eros toward man (in the cross
of Christ) is, in reality, the supreme expression of his agape”.
Not surprisingly, the great Origen went against a great part of
the Church’s Tradition with his interpretation of a beautiful
expression of St. Ignatius of Antioch (“My Eros has been
crucified”). He wrote: “At least I remember that one of the
saints, by the name of Ignatius, said about Christ: ‘My Eros has
been crucified’, and I do not think he deserved to be censured
because of that” (Commentary on the Song of Songs, Prologue).
All this enables us to discover once more the deep meaning
of Don Bosco’s invitation: “Strive to make yourself loved!”
Desire, and even the longing for a response, is in no way
opposed to the totally gratuitous nature of love; much less is
it an expression of a disguised egoism. When it is authentic,
love implies a most radical kenosis, viz. the total emptying of
ourselves so that Jesus Christ may live in us (cf. Gal. 2, 19-20)
and be the one who loves and is loved through our personal
love. Would that each of us could hear from our youngsters the
very same words Don Bosco heard: “We hold that loving you
is to us a symbol of the love of God!”
Once again I wish to wind up this section by quoting the
synthesis Benedict XVI gives us: “In all truth, only the love
that unites the free gift of oneself with the impassioned
desire for reciprocity instils a joy which eases the heaviest
of burdens.”
3. “…WE TOO FIND IN HIM OUR MODEL” (C 97)
To conclude, I find it necessary to add a word of clarification
about our relationship with Don Bosco, our Father, Teacher
and Model. No doubt, we have often heard statements of
disappointment or even reproach from persons who do
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not belong to the Salesian Family because of the way we
remember, venerate and strive to imitate Don Bosco. Some
even go so far as to say that we put Don Bosco in the place of
Jesus Christ. Obviously, these judgments are unfair but they
point to something we ought to reflect upon, because our
relationship with Don Bosco, our Founder, is not the same as
the relationship that other Orders and Congregations have with
their Founders. This ought not to worry us, much less make us
feel ashamed. But, it is possible that we can fall into the danger
of calling ourselves “sons of Don Bosco” without being so in
reality (cf. Lk 3, 8; Jn 8, 39.42), and this for different reasons.
For example, because we can confuse fidelity with nostalgically
hanging on to the past, or because we can “invent” Don Bosco
for ourselves, with each one attempting his own answer to the
question: “What would Don Bosco do here, today?”
I think that the article of our Constitutions from which
I have drawn the phrase which I placed at the beginning of
this section, offers us a precious response. On the one hand,
it reminds us that at the beginning of our Congregation (not
only in time but also with regard to our charism), “the first
Salesians found their sure guide in Don Bosco. Living at
the very heart of his community in action, they learned to
model their lives on his. We too find in him our model”. But,
on the other hand, “the religious and apostolic nature of the
Salesian calling dictates the specific direction our formation
must take, a direction necessary for the life and unity of the
Congregation.” (C 97)
Leaving aside the context of this article (which is about life as
formation), we are called to forge a synthesis or an underlying
unity between the concrete figure of Don Bosco and the nature
of our charism. Dispensing with the second element can lead
us to a nostalgic repetition of anecdotes about Don Bosco, and
he himself would be the first one to reprove us for this. But the
contrary position can lead us to concentrate on a collection of
ideas and concepts of a theological, pedagogical and spiritual
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nature, and forget that all this is part of a charism which God
gave to the Church and to humanity, above all to the young, in
a concrete person called John Bosco.
The synthesis we seek, I would make bold to say, is to be
found in Don Bosco himself: “If you have loved me in the past,
continue to love me in the future by the exact observance of
our Constitutions” (Constitutions: Foreword). “We willingly
accept the Constitutions as Don Bosco’s will and testament,
for us our book of life and for the poor and the little ones a
pledge of hope” (C 196).
4. CONCLUSION
As we approach the end of our Retreat, I would like to offer
you two concluding reflections.
If I were to describe Don Bosco’s personality in a few words,
I would say: by putting God and the following of Jesus Christ
at the centre of his life, and by spending his whole life for the
young for whom he had a passion by virtue of the charism
he had received, our Founder and Father showed himself to
be, simultaneously and inseparably, a holy and a happy man.
He united perfectly in himself the two aspects of his personal
fulfilment in Christ: the “objective” aspect = perfection,
holiness; and the “subjective” aspect = happiness. The old
adage, often applied to him (and also to St. Francis de Sales,
his patron and ours) was not just a play on words: “A sad saint
is a sorry saint”.
Our second reflection is, in a certain way, a closing synthesis.
In our various reflections, we sought to “put into practice” the
blending of nature and grace which is typical of Don Bosco
(cf. C 21). In a way, all we really did was to go deeper into nothing
else but … the Preventive System. In fact, for our “theme”
and main content we took loving-kindness, understood as
an expression and a manifestation of love, set between the two
poles of reason (human experience) and religion (theological
reflection). It was the shortest and most profound synthesis we
could make…
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Prayer
TO DON BOSCO
Don Bosco,
You were raised up by the Holy Spirit,
through the maternal intervention of Mary,
to contribute to the salvation of youth.
You were given to us by the Lord as Father and Teacher,
and have entrusted to us a fascinating program of life
in the maxim “Give me souls, take away the rest”.
You promised us, under God’s inspiration,
an original spirit of life and action,
whose core and synthesis is pastoral charity.
Inflame our heart
with ardent zeal and with an evangelizing impetus
that makes us credible signs of God’s love to the young.
Teach us to accept with serenity and joy
the daily tasks and renunciations of an apostolic life
for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.
As an Assembly that represents the Congregation throughout
the world,
We pray you:
Grant from God, our Father,
through the intercession of Mary, Mother and Teacher,
that this General Chapter may help us
to strengthen our charismatic identity
and reawaken our apostolic passion
so that we can take back to our Provinces, communities and works
a renewed breath of the Holy Spirit.
Through Christ, Good Shepherd and our Lord.
Amen.
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8. MARY, MOTHER AND TEACHER
1. INTRODUCTION
At the conclusion of the Instruction, Starting Afresh from
Christ, the Church invites us to “look upon Mary, Mother
and Teacher of all. She, the first consecrated person, lived
the fullness of charity. Fervent in the Spirit, she served the
Lord, joyful in hope, strong in trial, persevering in prayer; she
intercedes for us (cf. Rom 12:11-13). She reflects all the aspects
of the Gospel; all the charisms of consecrated life are mirrored
and renewed in her.”61
We shall use this text to organize our reflection. Obviously,
we have no intention of turning Mary Most Holy into the “first
religious” – that would be something totally anachronistic. But,
we do want to discover in her “all the charisms of consecrated
life”, not quantitatively (“all”), but in their “originating
nucleus”, viz. her living the fullness of charity or love. There is
a parallel example in St. Thomas Aquinas who shows how all
the perfections of creation are found in an absolutely simple
way in God.62
Yet another example is found in St. Therese of Lisieux who
reflects on the diversity of vocations she discovers in herself:
I sense other vocations in myself. I sense the vocation of
the soldier, the priest, the apostle, the doctor, the martyr;
in short, I feel the need, the desire to accomplish for you,
Jesus, all the most heroic deeds… I feel in my soul the
courage of a crusader, of a papal knight: I would like to die
on the battlefield in defence of the Church (…) How can I
recognize these contrasts? How can I realize the desires of
61CICLSAL, Starting afresh from Christ: A renewed commitment to
Consecrated Life in the third millenium, n. 46.
62Cf. S.Th., I, q. 4, a. 2, Utrum in Deo sint perfectiones omnium rerum.
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my poor little soul? (…) During prayer, my desires made me
suffer a true and proper martyrdom. I opened the Letter of
St. Paul to find some answers (…) I read… that not everyone
can be an apostle, prophet, doctor, etc.; that the Church is
made up of different members, and that the eye cannot
be the hand at one and the same time… The answer was
clear, but it did not assuage my desires, it did not give me
peace (…) Without becoming discouraged, I kept reading
and this sentence struck me: “You zealously seek the most
perfect gifts, but I will show you one more excellent still.”
And the apostle explains how all the most perfect gifts are
nothing compared with LOVE (…) Finally, I had found the
answer! (…) Charity gave me the key to my vocation (…)
I understood that only LOVE made the members of the
Church do what they do: that if Love should die out, the
apostles would no longer announce the Gospel, the martyrs
would refuse to spill their blood… I understood that LOVE
embraces all vocations, that Love was everything, that love
embraced all times and every place...In brief, that love is
eternal! Well then, in the fullness of my delirious joy I cried
out: Oh Jesus, my Love! I have finally found my vocation! ...
My vocation is LOVE!
In this our final meditation, let me to invite you to
“contemplate” Mary, the Immaculate Help of Christians, our
Mother and Teacher. In particular, let us fix our filial gaze on a
transcendental moment of our Salesian tradition: Don Bosco
praying together with Bartholomew Garelli. Borrowing a well-
known example from modern physics, we could say that that
“Hail Mary” was the “heavy and complex atom” which, in the
big bang of 8 December 1841 caused a “charismatic explosion”
which even today continues to expand throughout the world,
making God’s love present for the young, especially the poor
and abandoned.
Let us therefore meditate on what we say every day in the
Hail Mary to the Mother of God and our Mother…
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2. “... FULL OF GRACE”
The archangel Gabriel’s greeting to Mary is extraordinarily
loaded with meaning: no translation can exhaust the richness
of the original word: κεχαριτωµενη. To get a glimpse of the
depth of theological significance of this expression, we need
to emphasize in the first place its gratuitous character. “Full of
grace”, in this first sense, is the highest expression of gratuitous
giving. It manifests in an incomparable manner the gratuitous
nature of God’s love which precedes every human action,
which itself is always a response to God’s initiative. “In this is
love, not that we loved God but that he loved us first” (1 Jn 4,
10). This applies to each one of us, but it holds true of Mary in
the very first place.
Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit down the centuries,
the unanimous tradition of the Church and its interpretation
reached a culmination in the dogmatic declaration of Blessed
Pius IX in 1854 when he proclaimed Mary’s Immaculate
Conception. At times, however, we run the risk of forgetting
that this dogma of faith does not speak in the first place of what
Mary did, but of what God did in her for our sake. It is also
possible to misunderstand our Constitutions, if we fail to pay
attention to God’s initiative in Mary from the first moment of
her existence. “Mary Immaculate, Help of Christians, leads us
to the fullness of our offering to the Lord and gives us courage
for the service of our brethren” (C 92). We must not forget
that consecration is always God’s work, not ours; and so, when
we contemplate Mary Immaculate, we contemplate the most
perfect fruit of God’s “preventive system”.
In this sense, we can understand theology’s insistence,
reflected in the liturgy, on having recourse to the allegorical
meaning of Old Testament readings such as Proverbs 8, 22-
36 and Sirach 24, 3-22 in order to place in relief the “pre-
destination” of the Mother of God. But this must not separate
her from the rest of humanity because the fact is that all of
us have been predestined by God “before the foundation of
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the world, to be holy and blameless before him in love. He
destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ”
(Eph 1, 4-5). Mary was the predestined one par excellence, but
not exclusively so.
3. “THE LORD IS WITH YOU…”
This simple phrase, which forms part of the angel’s greeting,
is the most compact summary of the Covenant that we can find.
It is a statement of what the Lord guarantees to those whom
he calls to His service. (Let us call to mind, in a particular
way, the case of Jeremiah). In the deepest sense of the word,
“full of grace” means “full of GOD”. Grace, in fact, is not
“something” but “Someone” – the One and Triune God, the
God who, being love, gives himself to us freely in Christ, in a
total and irreversible (eschatological) manner. It is well to point
out that, in various texts of the Old Testament, this presence
of God in the midst of His people elicits joy in the very first
place. Unfortunately, in almost all languages, this nuance of St.
Luke’s text, χαιρε, Rejoice! has been lost. Let us recall one text
among many others, viz. that of Zephaniah:
Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel!
Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem!
The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst;
you shall fear disaster no more.
On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem:
“Do not fear, O Zion; do not let your hands grow weak!
The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives
victory;
he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in
his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival”
(Zeph 3, 14-18).
This unique presence of God in Mary is the fundamental
basis of her being-consecrated, since it is not brought about
by any creature but by “God who sets his dwelling-place in
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her”. Here lies a radical difference in the concept of holiness:
whereas in other cultures and religions, the Sacred consists
in a separate, “untouchable” and inaccessible reality, for us,
the thrice-holy God makes sharing in His holiness possible
by Himself drawing near to us out of love, a nearness which,
in Mary, because of the Incarnation, becomes full, even on
the “physical” plane. For this reason, we can proclaim her, in
this sense too, the “Consecrated one” par excellence, without
forgetting that this does not separate her from us but, on the
contrary, is an invitation to follow her example.
Finally, there is a third meaning of the greeting “full of
grace” that we would like to point out, and it concerns God’s
total presence in her, making her “the Graced One” beyond
compare (in Spanish: “Agraciada”), the All-beautiful One
(Tota Pulchra), the One who will say in the canticle of the
Magnificat: “From now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is His
name” (Lk 1, 48-49).
4. “LET IT BE DONE TO ME ACCORDING TO YOUR
WORD”
The emphasis on God’s free and gratuitous initiative and
on consecration as a divine action ought not to make us
forget that He wanted a human response. This can be seen
in the biblical models of the Old and New Testaments, and
it could not be otherwise in the supreme example of human
collaboration with God, viz. Mary’s divine motherhood. As
St. Augustine says, she “conceived the Son of God first in her
heart through her free obedience before conceiving Him in
her virginal womb”.
Nonetheless, a doubt could arise at this point: can we really
speak of Mary’s freedom prior to all these events? What sense
would it make to speak of the Immaculate Conception, of the
fullness of grace, etc. if everything depended on a human yes
after it had all taken place? On the other hand, if we were to
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deny the freedom of acceptance on the part of the young girl
of Nazareth, we would not only separate her completely from
the rest of humanity, but we would end up with an absurdity:
we would be maintaining that the human collaboration with
God at its peak moment was not really human, i.e., it lacked
awareness and freedom.
I think we can find a marvellous answer to this question
if we care to go deeper into a typical aspect of our charism.
When Don Bosco spoke of placing his boys “in the moral
impossibility of committing sin”, he did not mean to restrict
their freedom – which, after all, would have been impossible –
but he sought to strengthen their faith-motivations and their
love for the Lord by appealing not only to their rational and
logical intelligence (which the repressive system did as well),
but above all to their heart. For him, education at the human
level and also at the level of education to and in the faith “is a
matter of the heart”.
In other words, Don Bosco was convinced – and it is a
conviction that touches the very core of Christian anthropology
and morality – that the more we experience God’s love as the
greatest (and only) source of our authentic happiness, the
more difficult (“morally impossible”) will it be for us, without
sacrificing our freedom, to want to go away from Him. For
Don Bosco, this reinforcement called for personal contact, the
creation of a wholesome environment abounding in human
and Christian values, and an authentic Salesian assistance,
which, far from being that of a policeman who guarantees
“order” is instead a visible mediation of God’s love. This
“formative ecology”, as the Rector Major calls it, is one of the
fundamental elements of the Oratory as a Salesian criterion:
“As we carry out our mission today, the Valdocco experience is
still the lasting criterion for discernment and renewal in all our
activities and works” (C 40).
All this stems from the nature of love, at the human level
itself. With all the more reason, therefore, God’s love does
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not take freedom away from us or leave us “neutral”; on the
contrary, it reinvigorates us, making us capable of reciprocating
the love we receive with our own free response of love. Only
in this way can we understand the deep meaning of our
obedience, which “leads to maturity by extending the freedom
of the sons of God” (C 67).
Seen from this angle, Mary’s question, “How can this be,
since I am a virgin?”(Lk 1, 34), does not express a doubt or
place any conditions; rather, it is a question on the part of
someone who, because of her unconditional faith, wants to
collaborate in the freest and most conscious way possible. That
is why the angel’s reply is not a response: in actual fact, what
Gabriel says is: “I am talking of God and his plan… Are you
willing to trust Him?” Also the “proof ” that the angel gives
Mary, viz. Elizabeth’s pregnancy, which is something that Mary
cannot “verify” at the moment, is more of a motivation to visit
and help her, as we are immediately told in the Gospel. It is not
a “theoretical” proof, therefore, to satisfy Mary’s curiosity or
simply to inform her, but a “proof leading to action”, impelling
her to set out to keep company with and serve her cousin
Elizabeth.
And so, Mary’s faith is translated into unconditional
obedience. She accepts, paradoxically, with full freedom, to
become the slave of the Lord: “Let it be done to me according
to your Word”.
5. “BLESSED ARE YOU AMONG WOMEN…”
This fullness of consecration in Mary leads to her mission:
in the first place, that of being the Mother of the Son of God
made man; but then, inseparably too, that of giving Him up
for the salvation of the world, thus imitating in a human way,
so to say, what the Father did: “God so loved the world that He
gave His only Son…” (Jn 3, 16): and all this, “through the work
of the Holy Spirit”. By leading to God those to whom He sends
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us is the way we give concrete expression to our consecration,
following Mary’s example. She “leads us to the fullness of our
offering to the Lord and gives us courage for the service of our
brethren” (C 92).
For this reason, we cannot separate the Visitation from the
Annunciation: “Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean
town in the hill country” (Lk 1, 39). The presence of Mary, who
brings the Saviour with her, is the source of overwhelming joy,
the same joy with which the angel greeted her, and which she
now bestows on the baby John the Baptist, while he is still in
the womb of his mother! Elizabeth reiterates the promise of joy
to Mary, attributing it to her faith. “Blessed is she who believed
that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by
the Lord” (Lk 1, 45).
It is interesting to note that here we have the first “beatitude”
of the Gospel; the last beatitude, which will marvellously
dovetail with this one, will also revolve around the same theme
of faith: “…Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have
come to believe!” (Jn 20, 29) Without the perspective of faith, we
shall not be able to understand or accept the “other” beatitudes
presented by Jesus (Mt 5, 3-12; Lk 6, 20-23). However, there
is still something I would like to say on this point: prior to
the proclamation of the resurrection of her Son, Jesus, Mary
was among those who “without seeing, believed”. There is no
Gospel text that narrates an “apparition” of the risen Jesus to
his most holy Mother; and I think that, instead of inventing
apparitions or having recourse to apocryphal texts of the past
or the present (which are also there), it is far more inspiring
for us to take note of this consoling absence as it places Mary
by our side and invites us too to be “happy because we have
believed”.
Finally, Elizabeth “exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are
you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb’!”
(Lk 1, 42). How are we to understand this double benediction,
if not as proceeding from faith? We have to recognize that,
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humanly speaking, neither Mary’s election, vocation and
mission, nor the realization of her plans, made life any easier
for her. Quite the opposite… To accept God’s will in our life
does not mean that things automatically become easier or more
tolerable. As we see in the lives of Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah
and Mary, the Lord guarantees us only one thing: “I shall be
with you”. “Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of
God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8, 39).
The marvellous scene of the Visitation reaches its climax
in the Magnificat: Mary praises God for what he has done in
her life, “because he has looked with favour on the lowliness
of his servant” (Lk 1, 48). She sets God’s choice of her within
the context of his fidelity, and therefore, as the fulfilment of his
promises (cf. Lk 1, 54-55): he is a holy God, who receives the
humble, the poor and the hungry, but can do nothing when
confronted with the self-sufficiency of the rich, the powerful
and the proud! In the end, what we find here, in a beautiful
synthesis, is the core of the evangelical counsels: the primacy
of God and the desire for union with Him by fully carrying
out His Will (obedience), as an expression of love (chastity),
in a total emptying of oneself (poverty). Mary is truly the first
consecrated person!
6. MARY IMMACULATE, HELP OF CHRISTIANS IN
OUR SALESIAN CHARISM
Undoubtedly, this is a central theme of our charism, but one
that is impossible to deal with in all its aspects. I shall therefore
limit myself to underlining those texts of our Constitutions
which make explicit mention of Mary and our charism.
We are aware that there are two articles in our Constitutions
that are totally dedicated to Mary: article 8 (introduced for
the first time in the definitive text of 1984) and article 92.
The articles appear in very different contexts: the first, within
a description of our basic Salesian identity, and this makes
its content even more significant; the second, in the section
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concerning our life of prayer, which is presented as a “dialogue
with the Lord”.
In art. 8, Mary’s intervention in the life of our Father and
Founder is highlighted with the help of three verbs: “(she)
showed Don Bosco his field of labour among the young –
guided him constantly – supported his work, especially in
the foundation of our Society”. All this, evidently, was part of
God’s plan, as the first article of our Rule of Life says: “Through
the motherly intervention of Mary, the Holy Spirit raised up
St. John Bosco” (C 1).
In much the same way, “we believe that Mary is present
among us and continues her ‘mission as Mother of the Church
and Help of Christians’”. If we are fully convinced of this, we
have perhaps to ask our eyes and our hearts whether we too
allow Mary Most Holy to show us our field of labour, to guide
and support us.
Within the context of our Salesian mission, Mary educates
us through the three theological virtues. Clearly referring
to the Magnificat, “we entrust ourselves to her, the humble
servant in whom the Lord has done great things, that we may
become witnesses to the young of her Son’s boundless love”
(C 8); “we make her known and loved as the one who believed,
who helps and who infuses hope” (C 34).
Art. 92, instead, within the context of prayer, presents Mary
to us in the first place as a model to contemplate and imitate,
particularly in the offering of ourselves inseparably to God and
to the young: “Mary Immaculate, Help of Christians, leads us
to the fullness of our offering to the Lord and gives us courage
for the service of our brethren”.
Finally, in the context of the Salesian’s entire life understood
as a permanent formation experience and therefore as an
unending process, we come across a simple title bearing
within itself a tremendous depth of meaning: Mary, Mother
and Teacher (C 98). In the context of this article we are invited
to act like “sons in the Son”, allowing Mary to give each of us a
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body and a heart like that of Christ, so that, as we said before,
she might teach us to love, as she taught Don Bosco (cf. C 84),
or better still, as she taught and educated Jesus.
I would like to conclude by spelling out in concrete terms
the presence of Our Lady in our charism, starting from an
observation that has been implicit in all that has been said
above.
No doubt, the Mother of the Lord has a particular
importance in our charism; it is enough to recall Don Bosco’s
assertion: “She did everything”. But, does this importance – I
would almost make bold to say: does this central position [of
Mary], belong only to Don Bosco’s personal experience, and
therefore bound up with his time and situation, or is it an
integral part of our Salesian identity?
I think that all of us are convinced that it is not just a
fortuitous element or a simple vestige of our Father’s personal
devotion. Among the many possible elements of a response,
I would like to pick one which stems precisely from the very
source of our charism. Let us consider, first of all, those to
whom our mission is primarily directed, viz. to boys and
young men who are poor, abandoned and in danger. In other
words, it is aimed at those youngsters who, humanly speaking,
are of little or no “value”, and precisely for this reason God has
a predilection for them because – as we have seen these days –
his love is unconditional and always takes the initiative. God
does not love us because we are lovable, but we are lovable,
that is, we are worthy of being loved because He loves us. As
St. Augustine put it in his own genial way, “Quia amasti me,
Domine, fecisti me amabilem” (“Because you have loved me,
Lord, you have made me lovable”).
Well, isn’t it the typically feminine-maternal characteristic
of love to be unconditional in much the same way as the
corresponding male-fatherly characteristic is to be demanding
(properly understood)? The person who, even though he truly
loves those for whom he works as a priority in the Mission, does
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not begin to love them unconditionally, or better, maternally,
will not have grasped anything, and will not be able to share in
their situation. His failure to take this matter seriously would
be a sign that he has lost sight of our charismatic predilection.
Certainly, in our love and in our educative and pastoral work,
there are some young people with whom we do not need to
begin with a maternal, unconditional love. But that is just
the point: are these the ones for whom we ought to work as a
priority? It is especially with the “last ones” that we are to be
“maternal fathers”.
I think that it is at this juncture that we can situate the
theological significance of Mary Immaculate, Help of Christians
in our charism, viz. as “the maternal countenance of God’s
love”.
In the conclusion of his letter, “You are my God, my happiness
lies in You alone”, the Rector Major issues this invitation: “Let
us ask her [Mary] to teach us to be open to the transforming
and sanctifying action of the Spirit. Let us entrust to her our
Salesian vocation so that she may make of us ‘signs and bearers
of God’s love for the young’” (AGC 382, p. 28).
In this very special moment for our Congregation, we
entrust our General Chapter to her so that she may obtain
from God our Father for all of us and all our brothers in the
Congregation spread throughout the world, the grace of a
profound renewal in our Salesian identity and our apostolic
passion, for the salvation of all our dear young people!
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Prayer
MARY, MOTHER AND TEACHER
Holy and Immaculate Virgin Mary,
we look up to you, “full of Grace”,
and join you in thanking the Father
who has worked the marvels of His Love in you.
At this General Chapter
we want to renew our “yes” to His plan of salvation
for which He has consecrated us
with the Salesian vocation,
as signs and bearers of His love for the young,
especially the poorest, most abandoned and in danger.
You who were the Teacher of Don Bosco,
teach us to imitate his virtues:
particularly his union with God,
his life of chastity, humility and poverty,
his love for work and for temperance,
his kindness and his whole-hearted service of others,
his fidelity to the Pope and to the Bishops of the Church.
You indicated to Don Bosco his field of action,
you guided and sustained him always in his work.
We entrust ourselves to You, humble servant,
in whom the Lord has done great things,
that we might become among young people
witnesses of the boundless love of your Son.
Guide and sustain us too,
at this period of history and of our Congregation,
so that through this General Chapter,
we may grow in love and in fidelity
to the Lord and to the young people
that He wishes to entrust to us.
Amen.
***
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