RECTOR MAJOR'S MEETING
WITH THE SALESIAN FAMILY
ON THE 150th ANNIVERSARY OF FOUNDATION
The grace and duty of this jubilee, which urges us on to continue preparation for the celebration of the bicentenary of Don Bosco's birth.
Returning to Don Bosco today
The commitment to loving him, studying him, imitating him, invoking him, and making him known in order to start out afresh from him, rediscovering his most important intuitions, his deepest motivations, his essential beliefs, making our own his apostolic passion which comes from the heart of Christ.
This is not nostalgia for the past but seeking the way to the future! He is our criterion for discernment and the goal of our identification.
What we marvel at so much in his tireless activity is precisely his formidable integration: the grace of unity, the result of having but one single reason for living: the young, their happiness, their salvation (cf. Testimony of Don Rua's).
It meant understanding his life as vocation and mission, called by God and sent by him, and in fact becoming holy by giving himself completely for the young, living in their midst, loving them as perhaps no other saint had ever loved them. Here is the secret of his holiness and his success as an educator, priest, founder: God, his life's centre of gravity, source of his theological existence.
Returning to Don Bosco is the criterion of spiritual renewal and Salesian holiness (cf. SDB C. 21).
Returning to the young
Returning to Don Bosco means returning to the young, with a universal love which excludes nobody but does not privilege everyone, except for those who are “poor, needy, at risk”.
It is about going to meet them, their needs, their aspirations, meeting up with them gladly in their daily life, being attentive to their appeals, ready to know their world, give life to their activity and involvement, awakening their sense of God, proposing to them ways to holiness according to Salesian spirituality (cf GC 26).
We are all challenged by the young today, and by their challenges (life, freedom, love), by the difficulties in understanding their language. But there is no other alternative than that of going to meet them, like Don Bosco taking the first step, listening to them and welcoming their expectations and aspirations, things which are fundamental choices for us. All this speaks of unconditional acceptance as a principle of educational rapport which is effective for them.
We should never forget that young people are not a pastime for us nor a work to be done as quickly as possible and in any old way. Young people are our mission, they are our raison d'etre, our ‘theological place’ (cf SDB C. 95), they are our way of experiencing God and our sanctification, since they are part of our inheritance.
The renewal of our Congregation depends on our fidelity to the mission of being with and for the young. We are consecrated by the Lord to be apostles of the young.
Don Bosco with God
With a view to overcoming spiritual mediocrity, which deprives us of the gift of having an attitude and outlook of faith, it is absolutely necessary to know, understand and live Don Bosco's spirituality. Knowledge of the external aspects of Don Bosco's life, activities and educational method is not enough. At the basis of everything, as source of the fruitfulness of his work and relevance, there is something which often escapes us: his profound spiritual experience, one we can call familiarity with God.
However this is not possible without a familiarity with the word of God and the Eucharist, the essential centre of the life of an apostle and a community of apostles.
We should not wonder that Don Bosco's spirituality is defined as that of ‘continuous union with God”, tireless activity sanctified by prayer and union with God.
Without this we can easily slip into activism which only produces physical tiredness and exhaustion (‘burnout’), psychological stress and spiritual superficiality. Activism can rightly be called the new heresy, making us think that everything depends on us, our activity, that we can do without God, forgetting what Jesus said: “Without me you can do nothing”.
The time has come to give back to the Spirit the role that is his and recover the primacy of grace. Only thus is an experience of God possible, without which there is no Salesian mission, since this exists not in doing things but in being “signs of God's love”.
We therefore have to take care of our calling to intimacy with the Lord, which makes us beloved disciples and enthusiastic apostles.
It is obvious therefore that we need to pray and transform our activity in prayer, to the point where we become contemplatives in action, taking account of the fact that what we are pursuing is not only human development and creating a culture filled with values, but the salvation of the young.
Contemplating the heart of Christ
All this is in line with what I wrote in one of my first circular letters when I said that “the real challenge for consecrated life today is that of restoring Christ to religious life and religious life to Christ, without taking him for granted” (AGC 382, 20, 2003).
Today more than our Christian identity and in the case of consecrated persons, our vocation to be the “living memory of the way of being and acting of the obedient, poor and chaste Christ” (VC, 22) must be clear.
For us the passion of the “Da mihi animas, cetera tolle” necessarily passes by way of contemplation of Christ, which means knowing him more deeply, loving him more dearly, following him more radically. He must be – as for St Paul – our highest knowledge (cf. SDB C. 34).
It is not by accident that the icon which best represents the Salesian is the one of the Good Shepherd, as Don Bosco contemplated him and found in Him the basic elements of his mission, summed up in pastoral love to the point of giving his life for his own.
In the Eucharistic Jesus Don Bosco discovers the ineffable mystery of love.
In Jesus Don Bosco sees the Redeemer who brings salvation.
In Jesus he contemplates the Master and Model to follow.
In Jesus he sees the Friend and Companion on the journey,
in short the Good Shepherd, always ready to give his life for the good of his sheep.
His concern for preaching, healing and saving stems from this.
Recovering the apostolic passion of “Da mihi animas”
Returning to Don Bosco and returning to the young expresses the roots and horizons of the Salesian mission and identity. Don Bosco was above all an apostle and his entire life was determined by the urgency of saving the poorest and most needy young people.
This apostolic impulse leads to spending all our energy for the young, which we call “pastoral charity”. Maybe it is the most faithful expression of the carrying out of the spiritual and apostolic program which Don Bosco experienced and gave to us in the motto “Da mihi animas, cetera tolle” (cf. SDB C. 4).
This focuses all the energy of one's love, all our charity, all our passion on the souls of the young.
For Don Bosco working for the salvation of souls was the holiest of works. It was all a consequence of his being a priest. This is why he became a priest and he wanted nothing else in life than to be a priest.
We are convinced that for us the motto which Don Bosco chose and lived is a summary of our spirituality, of Salesian mysticism and asceticism.
I am personally convinced that in this program of life of Don Bosco's we find the motivation and method to face up to, courageously and clearly, today's cultural challenges, since the “Da mihi animas” puts at the core of the Salesian's life the sense of God's fatherliness, the wealth of Christ's death and resurrection, the energy of the Spirit and, at the same time, stimulates an ardent yearning to make the young know and yearn for these possibilities as a way of achieving a happy life, enlightened by faith, and to succeed in enjoying eternal salvation.
This is why it is absolutely essential to warm the hearts of the Salesians by starting out afresh from Christ and Don Bosco. It is not about sentiment or passing enthusiasm, but an urgent commitment to conversion, encounter with the Lord, allowing him to speak to our hearts and helping us to rediscover our best energies. Really it is about seeing that the Lord penetrates our being and arrives at giving joy and enchantment to our lives, helping us to deepen our motivations, strengthen our beliefs, and urging us to walk in the sign of fidelity to the Covenant, ordering our personal, community and institutional lives according to the values of the Gospel and Don Bosco's charism.
The urgency of evangelisation
Returning to Don Bosco also means taking a look at our origins. Well then, we cannot forget that the Salesian Congregation “in its beginnings was a simple catechism lesson”. Like our founder and father we are called to be “educators to the faith” and like him we must walk with the young to lead them to an encounter with the Risen Lord. This is why evangelisation is at the centre of our mission and today more than ever we must sense the urgency of giving special privilege to an evangelising presence amongst the young.
The Salesian mission is carried out within the Church's mission, which consists precisely in the proclamation and handing on of the Gospel.
Concern for proclaiming the Gospel is not just one possible activity amongst others in the Church. This is its mission. The Church exists to evangelise and evangelisation makes up its deepest identity.
Evangelisation is urgent today not because society, especially in Western Europe, has become strongly secularised – this simple fact makes the urgency more pressing - but because that is its essential mission.
The Church presents this urgency to evangelise as a new evangelisation, thus transforming it into an authentic pastoral program for the third millennium. It is about proclaiming the person of Jesus and his fully human form of existence and thus leading the young to adhere to Him and become his followers.
The fact of needing to be attentive to new socio-cultural contexts, to the signs of the times, to challenges coming from the world and the young, instead of being a reason for not evangelising, urges us to give more quality to our evangelising activity. Globalisation, secularism, pluralism, relativism mark the scene in which today the good news must sound and give light and hope to mankind.
New evangelisation presupposes and demands new evangelisers, filled with enthusiasm, joy and the credibility of witness, courageous in proclaiming, trustful of modern humanity, humble and ready to serve, able to dialogue, open to pluralism, using a language that expresses the Gospel in today's cultural categories. We are talking of presenting the faith as adhesion to a person and his evangelising message Which means that we have to be evangelised first of all.
The urgency of evangelisation supposes a serious commitment to spiritual and pastoral renewal. Without this, evangelisation becomes proselytism and not the true creation of a community of believers united in faith in the person of Jesus, who act with the power of charity and know how to witness through their lives to what they profess by their lips and in their hearts.
The time has come to go beyond timidity and proclaim Jesus and his Gospel with conviction, joy and courage as the greatest gift the Father has given us and that we can give.
Certainly, we evangelise by educating and not just any kind of evangelisation educates and neither does any kind of education evangelise, precisely because evangelising and educating are two different activities, with their own ends and methods. While the former belongs to culture, the second belongs to faith, but both act on the unity of the person who is the beneficiary of evangelisation and education, both have this person as their aim, both seek the growth and development of this person.
That is why our praxis must keep evangelisation and education essentially linked, in order to form “upright citizens and good Christians”.
Mary did it all
Returning to Don Bosco brings us necessarily to discovering the role Mary played in his life. If his life revolves around God, we can also say that it revolves around Mary. The Madonna was always present in his life. She was the teacher and guide in his seeking and fulfilment of God's will.
We know well that Mama Margaret consecrated him to the Madonna as a baby and then taught him to call on her three times a day and that little by little Mary became a living experience for him, a true mother who accompanied him everywhere. In the dream at nine years of age Jesus gave him to her as his Teacher who would guide him in the mission entrusted to him. This is how he was convinced that Mary was guiding him t the point where he said that “She is the foundress of our work and it is She who supports it”.
If it is true that Don Bosco was the Saint of the Help of Christians, it is equally true that Mary Help of Christians is “Don Bosco's Virgin”.
I entrust each and everyone of you to Her, along with our Congregation, the entire Salesian Family, our collaborators and the youth of the world. May She continue to guide us over the next 150 years and help us to rewrite this brilliant story that we celebrate today.
19 December 2009
Fr Pascual Chávez V., SDB
Rector Major
