S TRENNA 2008

by Pascual Chávez Villanueva

EDUCATING WITH THE HEART OF DB

EVANGELISING EDUCATING

“Don Bosco’s pastoral approach was never reduced simply to religious instruction or the liturgy but took in all the educational and cultural aspects of youth. (…) It was an evangelical charity that took practical steps to liberate and promote young people abandoned and gone astray.”¹

_Last month we made it clear that educating and evangelising are different, but that in the Salesian way of doing things they cannot be separated: they need to complement and enrich each other. Everyone knows the state of European culture and the difficulties met by the Church in evangelising the new generations. To speak about religion/s in today’s Europe is something quite complicated. As well as the official figures for those belonging to various churches, there is personal religious practice and social religious practice (baptisms, weddings), some with deeply held beliefs, the whole range of religious experience that goes from the convinced practising believer to the out and out atheist. Clearly surveys and statistics don’t have the final word when it comes to the religious way of life of our contemporaries, but we cannot ignore them. The traffic lights in Europe are on red. There have been many articles and reports published in these years about the state of religion. In general they are pessimistic.

 The Synod for Europe – in October 1999 – declared that “pluralism has taken the place of Marxism in cultural dominance, a pluralism which is undifferentiated and tending towards scepticism and nihilism. (..) There is a great risk of a progressive and radical deChristianisation and paganisation of the continent, a situation hypothetically described as a kind of “European apostasy”². It is clear that religious practice and religious belief are weaker among young people who are living further and further removed from the faith. “It is a question of a whole strata of the population… more effected by the surrounding secularisation.”³ Evangelisation is becoming more and more difficult because of this secularisation. Religious ignorance and the prejudices that young people absorb every day from some of the media have fed them with the impression of a conservative Church/ institution that is opposed to modern culture, especially in the field of sexual morality, and therefore everything that religion has to offer is automatically devalued and, relativised. The tragedy is the present break in the chain of the transmission of the faith. The natural and traditional places (family, school and parish) don’t work any more; religious ignorance increases in the new generations, and… “the silent exodus from the Church” continues.

 Religious ignorance is almost absolute. It is not easy to say what image young people have of God, but certainly the Christian God has lost the central place compared with the God of the media which makes Gods out of people from the worlds of sport, music and the cinema. Young people have a passion for freedom and are not queueing up at the doors of the church: they think that the Church is an obstacle to their freedom. In the face of this situation, what sort of education do the state and church institutions have to offer? Why has the issue of religion been eliminated from young peoples’ horizons? John Paul II called the Church to a new evangelisation to be carried out with new zeal, new methods, and in new forms. Adolescents and young people are generous by nature and become very enthusiastic about causes they consider important. Why has Christ ceased to matter to them? The Church needs to learn the languages of the people of each generation, every ethnic background and in all places... She clearly has a “serious language problem” that prevents her from presenting, in an appropriate way, the salvation that Christ offers. Basically it is a question of the communication, of the inculturation of the Gospel and of education to the faith. Salesian education starts from where people are, from their human and religious experience, from their griefs and anxieties, joys and hopes, giving special importance to the role of personal witness in the transmission of the faith and of values.

 ‘Evangelising by educating’ means knowing how to present the best news (Jesus Himself) adapting it to and respecting the stage of development of those to whom it is addressed. A young person is looking for happiness and the joy of life, and is capable of making sacrifices to achieve them if we show him a convincing way, and if we offer ourselves to him as skilled companions on the journey. The boys were convinced that Don Bosco loved them, wanted their happiness here and in the next world. And so they accepted the path he put before them: friendship with Christ. Don Bosco teaches us to be, at one and the same time, educators and evangelisers. As evangelisers we know and set ourselves the task: to bring the young to Christ; as educators we need to know how to start from the actual situation of the young and succeed in finding the right way to accompany them on their way towards maturity.