A TRAVEL BAG FOR THE THIRD MILLENNIUM

They were happily defined «Dialogues in the Cathedral» and in fact they are cultural and spiritual encounters on themes of faith and in the search of God. The meeting place is the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, the protagonists are generally an authoritative exponent of the ecclesial world and a representative of contemporary culture. The cultural horizon is that of the end of the Millennium, with its expectations, hopes, but also its questions and the anxieties described in the Tertio Millennio Adveniente; the public then, always vast and attentive is made up of professionals, intellectuals, men and women of culture, politics; generally personalities who are careful to grasp, and possibly from different cultural corners, the «signs of the times».

After the happy beginning of 1996, Cardinal Camilo Ruini, the promoter of the initiative dealing with the citizens Mission initiated by the Pope in preparation for the Jubilee, convoked at Saint John on November 20 Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and President of the Central Committee for the Preparation of the Grand Jubilee of the Year 2,000, and Professor Giuliano Amato, university professor, had been Prime Minister and currently President of the Authority, guarantor of competition and of the market. The theme of their meeting, which was heard by a very attentive and participating public, «A Travel Bag for the Third Millennium». The upcoming encounters on the program call for a face to face between don Bruno Forte and the critic Peiro Citatie on «That Question, which is Death» (January 27, 1998), and a conversation on «The World, Science and God», by Professor Ugo Amaldi, from the Center of Nuclear Research in Geneva (April 28,1998). Already underway are other encounters of spirituality focused on specific professional categories: artists, economic and social workers, politicians and journalists.

Despite being from different positions, Cardinal Etchegaray and Professor Amato agreed on the fact that the «travel bag», that is the heredity with which men at the end of this century will face the threshold of the Third Millennim, should not be cumbersome. Cardinal Etchegaray, whose intervention we publish here almost in full, proposed in the first place the theme of the Beatitudes; the interlocutor, who recognized the «great role» of religion in this historic passage in safeguarding the moral order, underlined the attention given to the single, often torture of solitude; and indicated as an example John Paul II, who, in virtue of the faith which animates him «succeeds in speaking to each one of those who listen, not to the crowd».

Cardinal Roger Etchegaray

For this first encounter «Faith and Search for God», in the scope of the Great Citizens Mission, Cardinal Ruini limited himself to assigning to Professor Amato and to myself a travel bag, saying - with a little bit of malice - «fill it with whatever you want...and go towards the third millennium!». For my part, as a mountaineer, I'm used to putting as few things as possible in my knapsack, just the essentials to sustain me during the climb and to reach the summit with as light a load as possible. This evening, as an old wolf of the Mission (just recently I celebrated my 50 years as Priest), I will try to tell you what I think is essential for Christians and the Church to reach the Threshold of a new millennium, while some are already preoccupied with reserving - the culmination of futility - a table for the eve of that fascinating date!

Today we are provoked to find the essential of faith and hold it firm. In a period of crisis, in a situation which requires urgency, we put aside the necessary food as opposed to the china, we protect the motor of the car instead of the body, we save our son from burning flames instead of the painting of our grandmother! What then is the essentiallity of my faith? Very simply, it is Jesus Christ. I often think of what Pascal wrote, in one of those rare testimonies where one person is married to the human genius and the religious one, the genius and the mystic. He affirmed: «We do not just know God, solely through Jesus Christ, but we know ourselves solely through Jesus Christ».

Jesus Christ, «real God and real man», is the fundamental nature of my life. The more I think about it, the more this evidence becomes in me more concrete, more unearthed, more experienced. Jesus Christ is not an added presence, someone to love more than others, apart from others. Without Him, I remain confined to the superficiality of others... and of myself. Without Him, everything would become insignificant. Without Him, I would not be able to accept all the challenges of this world. If I could define our era, I would do it precisely with the word «challenge». Perhaps it is the most frequently used word in modern language. Today, everything has become, or is at least perceived as a challenge, expressing in this way the precariousness, uncertainty and even the anxiety of a human being who feels provoked, threatened, and sometimes even abused. Man has always had the vocation of the future, but today he is obsessed with it. Man, whose mission is that of building the future, no longer desires the future. Modern man is afraid to inhabit the future, his ancestral dwelling. If the future is a mirror, he no longer feels safe recognizing himself; if it is a scene, of being the director; if it is a message, of bearing the weight. The acceleration, the radicality of change causes him to fold into the ephemeral, they make him escape in the temporary. The explosion of the common systems of reference impoverish his speech, scatters his dialogue, exhausts even his monologues.

Hit on all sides, from the outside and from within, man from the end of this century is presented by some as that of «the end of history». Faced with the erasing of the traits which characterized man throughout the centuries, the times which are coming, risk taking on a 'millenniarist' aspect, in which the eschatological is substituted by the Genesis, instead of taking it on, in which man is identified with the changing instead of dominating it and interpreting it. That which defines man is not his capacity of breaking the sound barrier, but the certainty of breaking the wall of the senses. That is precisely the point where Pascal's Christ is placed, fundamentally, it is the Christ in which everything takes place; as Saint Paul presented him in his Letter to the Corinthians (Cor 1, 15-20) and as Saint Ireneo subsequently described him. I don't know anything that is more stimulating for us than of reaching up to the same level on which man's future is played out. Not by chance did Pope John Paul II want to make of the upcoming Jubilee a grand Advent.

I don't know if you've noticed that each Advent liturgically begins with the telling of the end of times. The Christian, man of Advent, is he who should read the great book of history, always starting with the end. It is the reason why the Christian is never afraid of the future, because the future appears to be magnetized by the same weight of the already-acquired salvation, stuck by a time already marked by the blood of Christ. «The Church - said the Patriarch of Atenagorato Paul VI - is she who remembers the future». Christ, which she presents as the second Adam, or better as the real Adam, allows us to summarize, to embrace with one glance, and without blinking all the centuries, all the past and future millennia. Even the name of Adam is extended to man and to he who, through man is made whole: the Savior precedes sin. Christ «summarizes» and condenses everything in him, all the things of God and man, to the point that outside him there exists nothing, no universe: he has always put history under the sign of the Resurrection.

The Grand Jubilee will come simply to witness, in front of all of humanity, two thousand years of sovereign and joyous freedom for Christians: on the threshold of the third millennium, this future, this horizon which polarizes and structures our existence, is still and always Christ: Christus heri, hodie et semper. Here I am then, in gear towards the third millennium with a travel bag. If all of my being (body and soul) is focused (and this is the right word) on that rising sun which is Christ, what do you think could be light and easily put into the travel bag that would give us strength? Only eight words, amongst the most fortifying pronounced by Christ: the eight Beatitudes. They are like a slow melody, or perhaps more like a piercing boomerang which pricks you eight times: Blessed! Blessed! A word that, in its primitive Jewish feel, is translated by Andre Chouraqui as «in gear!» «in gear!». After each Beatitude, the voice returns to its point of departure, it repeats the same happiness, it doubles the same speed to take off each time deep in exhalation. While it echoes, it hits common ground, it uncovers the old evidence, it moves the mountains and discovers new horizons. The Beatitudes ask us to go backwards, more than we are used to. Christ teaches me to see the world upside down and to find the good side of all things, the truth of life.

Listen to what stresses my path:
Blessed are the poor! Blessed the mighty! Blessed the needy!
Blessed are those who are hungry and thirsty for justice!
Blessed are the merciful!
Blessed the pure of heart! Blessed the makers of peace! Blessed the persecuted because of justice!

By the force of hammering the Beatitudes in, I see unwinding in front of me more than just one kind of man: I see appear a certain man, a certain face, the true figure of Christ, I accompany Him, and not just half of my walk. He did not speak for the others, but he addressed himself to that which he endured, that which He is. Everything is beautiful, enthralling, especially when the road becomes a steep rugged path. I will confess to you that I have some reservations about advancing like this with my travel bag, while we find ourselves in the citizens' Mission, an apostolic Mission. I have just re-read, in the Gospel of Matthew, the famous speech of the Mission, given by Jesus when «he went village to village...preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom...» (Matthew 9, 35).

Calling the Twelve to invite them on the Mission, he cautions: «Take no gold, nor silver, nor copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, nor two tunics, nor sandals, nor a staff...» (Matthew 10, 9). Francis of Assisi, hearing these words, threw down the staff which he had at home: he followed the Gospel to the letter, without comment. For myself, shouldn't I abandon the travel bag? Here, at the halfway point of my conference, I would like to study up close that which the Gospel asks of me and therefore I would like to stop at this point for a moment on the first Beatitude, which summarizes all the other ones, so much that the evangelical program which is the same Christ presented in the Synagogue at Nazareth, at the beginning of his Mission, it is focused on the poor (cfr. Luke 4, 16-21).

Even more, at the end of the mission entrusted to each Christian, in the final hour of Judgment (cfr. Matthew 25, 31-46), the poor man, in his most realistic steps, the crudest, will be the stone of comparison which will separate the good from the bad: «each time you do one of these things to my younger brothers, you do these things to me...». In this way, definitively, it is not the Lord who will judge us, but the poor man, identified by the Lord, who will be come the silent judge of each one of us. The presence in the midst of the poor, the solidarity with the poor, is the golden key which opens salvation for all of us. Now, I am not talking of the Church of the poor: an entire theology and practice were developed in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. The Church of Rome, with its charitable initiatives stimulated by prophets like don Luiggi di Liegro, clearly shows that the Church would not be the same without the poor. That which to me seems important this evening is to see why the relationship with the poor is such that it is called a «criteria of ecclesiality», that is the distinctive sign which derives from the same nature of the Church.

Therefore, how do you go from one Church of the poor to a Church which is entirely poor? It deals with a question that is rarely broached, at least squarely in the face, becuase it is one of the most provocative questions and one of the most mysterious: in fact, it deals with God who made himself not only Man, but also Poor. Only a poor Church can become a missionary Church and only a missionary Church needs a poor Church. He who does not know the bite of poverty on his own skin cannot sharpen his look to find the poor hidden in the recesses where they hide or can recognize them in new situations which today hide them.

The paradox of our age is that the world is sensitive to this drama of the poor with a mentality of the rich, while the Church comes closer with a heart of the poor. Where the gigantic equivocal exists between the economic poverty and that which is evangelical. How do you explain that we can reconcile a poverty of fighting with a poverty of embracing? How do you make it understandable that the spiritual search of this is without price in an economy which is ruled by the law of costs? How do you deal with gratuity in a society of mercantiles? In the society of consumption, the Beatitudes of poverty appear like a luxury or as an object of derision.

Nonetheless, the Gospel summarizes Christian life in the radical choice between two owners: «You cannot serve God and mammon» (Matthew 6, 24), where mammon is the word with which Christ uses to personify money, almost a kind of anti-God. It is more difficult identifying mammon than God, because it is presented in changing clothes, in fake materials. It is necessary to appear in order to have, that is why the falsehood dominates; and it is necessary to have in order to appear, that is why money reigns. A viscous circle with a double meaning of the word, aggravated today by corruption, these plagues of modern times. Christ proclaims: Blessed are the Poor; this Beatitude came to us in two versions: one which is more realistic («Blessed are you poor», according to Luke), the other more spiritual («Blessed the poor in Spirit», according to Matthew). We must not however, worry to much about the nuances before having understood Christ's thought in its tranquil fullness and in its terrible nudity, especially in an area in which the illusion of good faith is to be feared more than anything else. Everything goes well until it touches our convenience and only very little is needed to be rich! Only a nail is needed to understand the spirit of ownership!

There is not just one kind of poverty, one definitive style of poverty. We are not poor in a determined way, we are not poor once and for all, but there needs to be a disposition of the soul which makes us free in front of everything, even in front of poverty. It is more difficult to remain poor than to become poor. When I was in Marseilles, I had invited Mother Teresa to found a house of her Sisters of Charity. At the beginning, she left me a hand-written note (which I preciously guard) with a few simple words: «I only ask but one thing for my sisters: take care of their health and protect their poverty».

Of course, poverty does not need to be canonized, just like suffering; this is not a value in itself. I like remembering the words that Charles de Foucauld spoke to Christ: «You left poverty as a heredity to all those who want to be your disciples». Saint Paul had already said it clearly in the Second Letter to the Corinthians: «Know the grace of the Lord our Jesus Christ: as rich, he became poor for us, so that you could become rich through his poverty» (2 Cor 8, 9). Through the mystery of the poor Christ reveals to us something about the same poverty of God, whose Trinitary ring is an eternal vestment in an eternal gift, a total expropriation in the total communication of itself. God has nothing and that is why He has everything.

It is impossible to discover God except within the light of the Trinitary vestments, but it is impossible even understanding man except within the line of these vestments. The Trinitary life becomes the foundation, the exegesis and the finality of the full mystery of man. It establishes the life of love as a gift of itself, without folds. It establishes freedom as the perfect poverty, that as like a liberation from everything and from oneself. In this way we confirm that man corresponds to the gift. If man wants to fully realizes himself, it is necessary for him to read and liberate his destiny to the light of the Trinity which is poverty and to the light of Christ who is the visible icon. We have come very high, with or without the travel bag, and it is like this that we can better forge ahead with the citizens Mission, the mission of the Church, in Rome and anywhere in the world. The Church of tomorrow? The bundle is so full of things which do not belong, that when the Church rids itself some think, basing it merely on appearance, that it is about to die. In fact, it is then that she reaches the fullness of her being. A Church which is not a religious copy of the political power or economic one. A Church which does not tire to conform to its Lord, until the Spirit transforms it in that which it should never cease to be: the Sacrament of God made Poor. Pascal, in one of his Thoughts, exclaims: «Beautiful is the life of the Church when it is sustained only by God» (n.861).

The Church is the sign of salvation only if men see it always renewing by pure grace, in situations which humanely do not leave them any possibility, or future. The weight of its institution cannot be thicker than the little finger of John the Baptist who shows the Lamb of God and says: «he must grow and I will diminish». History has itself undertaken to prove that the Church, once it involves itself in power or in the terrestrial comforts, loses its apostolic audacity. The Church and the Gospel curve or remain standing together: but they must walk, progressing together towards the Year 2,000.

With or without the travel bag. That which counts is our fidelity to the Christ of the Beatitudes. However, more than our own fidelity, it is absolutely certain that which Christ manifests for his Church. It is for this reason that our Church, despite its poverty, is always full of hope, always stretched on the line of the horizon which surpasses the Year 2,000, pointing its slope towards the waiting and the Eucharistic return of Christ. A Franco-Uruguyan poet, Jules Supervielle, recalling the donkey which happily carried Mary to wards Bethlehem, has an interesting reflection: «She weighed very little, being occupied only be the future which she carried in her womb». It is even better than the travel bag, it is lighter, towards the Bethlehem of the Year 2,000. With the help of the Virgin Mary, I hope that it will be the same for the Church and for each one of us.