To welcome to be ourselves (versione inglese di Accogliere per essere sé stessi)

 

A circa un mese dalla pubblicazione su L'Osservatore Romano, rilancio in versione inglese per gli amici anglofoni l'articolo uscito in italiano col titolo Accogliere per essere sé stessi (L’Osservatore Romano, 24 luglio 2021, p. 8)

Umberto Rosario Del Giudice 

The Church burns in Spirit; it is in exit; it is called to go beyond its doctrine; and the Universal Church lives of particular communities. Among these communities, the parishes are the ones which suffer the most the social changes: a destabilization which can be seen as a chance. To the changed contexts, is associated the new ecclesiastical model: from the societas to the communio. And new paradigms in front of which that communities been often unprepared, replacing the local agencies of assistance and solidarity. But the parishes are principally communities of faithful people (cf. Apostolicam Actuositatem 10) and between the benefits and the defects, there’s a certainty: The brotherhood is truly lived when the relationships become really humane, and we really live in community when welcome each other because we recognize all of us as subject forever involved in the life and in the feelings of Jesus Christ. Among the community the invitation of St. Paul echoes: “Welcome each other” (Rm 15,7). During an age in which a certain liberty both spiritual and existential comes out, the “opened relationships” facilitate the creation of some closed space, of a private religiosity. The open society risks to create closed spiritualities: the public freedom pushes through private contexts the religious experiences. In this context the parishes are called to welcome the experiences ang to guide them and being caretaker of the flame (As Mgr. Gianpiero Palmieri said on these pages). In the parishes, first looking glass of the Church, the deep relationships are built starting from the reciprocal hospitality (cf. Ef 4,1-6). Many times, the tendency to moralism, devotionist or to private religiosity, facilitate religious isolation, causing the avoid of comparison to run away from the competition with others from both the ethical point of view and from the doctrinal one. The religious isolation has got very deep roots: it is often the fruit of a religious membership which imposes strict conditions. It is necessary to bring constantly the parishes to their true being: being communities. We know that the author of The Acts of Apostles proposes constantly a summary of behaviors, more as an ideal that a real state of the things (cf. At 1,14; 2,1; 2,42-47; 4,32-35; 5,12-14.42). It is worth dwelling on the value of community as such. Before the “breaking of the bread” there is the “communion” (cf. At 2,42). The tradition as so long identified these two moments, to arrive to confuse them: “having communion” is “participating to the Eucharist”. But first, “having communion” is recognizing each other as caretaker one another, because everyone is precious the same. The parishes are the privileged places where everyone must feel welcome and accepted, beyond their conditions and their choices, following an intention of Christian religiosity even if it is anonymous. If in the Universal Church, there is the need the free each self from the temptation to impose each self with “the strength of the world rather than weakness which leaves place to God; free from a religious observance that bring us to inflexibility and rigidity, free from ambiguous knots to the power, and free from the fear to be misunderstood and attacked” (Francis, Unite and prophecy for a renewed Church, OR July 1^st 2020, p.10), so the parishes must free themselves from any kind of isolation and rigidity. This is possible recognizing of not conflicting with the world but always part of it: And the “world” for the parish communities coincides with everyone. We qualified them calling them “distant”, “practitioners” or “assiduous practitioners”. But the real warning for these categories is the isolation one. For all of them encouraging to share the life and the faith, means first, promoting the hospitality that we can define in a clear behavior:” to me, you are as a gift from God”. Is this way that we can break the walls of isolation, to favor the theological certainty that nobody is alone, because all of us are, in a way or in another one, “summoned in Christ”. To welcome is the certainty that we all live in the feelings of Christ (cf. Rm 15,5), it is making space for other ones without childish sentimentality (those one as “How beautiful, we’re together and don’t care about the other things) or naïve mechanicals (“The important is the shared moral”) and to not surrender to any extreme irenics (“avoiding each conflict”). To ward off the excess of communitarianism it needs to be careful as much as the self-referentiality as the observance; two limits of the same prejudice:” we are good together if we follow the rules”. A nostalgic point of view which limits both the parish communities and the entire Church. The communities will be such if they will live space to the identities and experiences of faith through which the Spirit acts. So, the faith is called to the shared kindness, to the hospitality to the diversity, to the utopic hope. The following life in the community is not the result of “what is done or not done” but the chance to face the risks and the beauty of the faith; and this is not just for who is welcome, but also for who welcomes. This one does not have to subtly hope that the other ones just find their way to live or their kind of faith. The ones who welcome in a Christian community, create the chance to live in a faith in which behaviors and model are not imposed. And this is true both for the priests and for the members and the groups belonging to parish: these last ones often do not conciliate unity and solidarity, opening and identity, particularity and diversity. But just in a living and true hospitality, the inclusion of experiences will become an immersion in faith in which everyone could be him or herself being welcome, welcoming in turn and giving themselves, in the common following of Christ.