Extracts from Don Divo Barsotti, C.F.D,'s Meditations. Edition revised, corrected, 1994.

LA COMUNITÀ DEI FIGLI DI DIO

VADEMECUM DI DON DIVO BARSOTTI, C.F.D.

GUIDEBOOK OF THE COMMUNITY OF

GOD'S SONS AND DAUGHTERS

PART THREE

Chapter Seven

THE STRUCTURE OF THE C.F.D.

Contents:

THE STRUCTURE OF THE C.F.D.

The character of the 'Comunita dei figli di Dio', of the Community of God's Sons and Daughters, is revealed in its structure which more than just having a legal aspect has a spiritual value, recalling us to dimensions of Christian life, without which we would be tending to shame and dying.

The structure of the Community that has, therefore, primarily a spiritual character, ought to be lived in obedience to the quality of Christian life. If we think that the contemplative life implies an increasing abstraction from men, from the visible Church, we should consider this an expression of Platonism; it would be an evasion from the human world, from the world of the Church, to commune with God in solitude, a seeking of the 'one with the One' as Plotinus desired. Now all that is contrary to Christianity.

Christian life is perfect when charity is perfect, which implies at the same time a union with God and a union with the whole Church. Now, a soul independently of the legal state can realize this in whatever state of life it finds itself, because to no soul is denied the perfection of charity. It remains true that, if we wish to create a monastic family faithful to this concession of Christian life, which implies at the same time a dimension of verticality which unites us to God and a dimension of horizonality embracing all brothers, all sisters, it is required then that our religious, monastic family have at the same time in its structure the two dimensions: verticality and horizonality. The one can't exist without the other, because you open the others to love only in as much as God lives in you; in fact to open yourself to the love of the others indicates the overcoming of egoism, which is achieved through the presence of God in the human heart.

There is no love of neighbour where there is no love of God, just as where there is no love of God there there is no love neighbour. The love of one's neighbour - Jesus said - is the sign of God's love.

But other than the structure, what distinguishes us is also our particular spirituality.

We have always said that we wish to live through witnessing the primacy of the contemplative values. This is true for those who live in the First Branch, as it is for all those who in the strength of their Consecration make a part of our family; it requires a witnessing of these values.

When we define the character of our life as monastic, referring particularly to the orders of the religious life that have their origin in the Church we wish to distinguish ourselves from those who have an apostolic charge as their paramount value. For us the one purpose of life remains that of tending towards the perfection of charity, that is to sanctity, to the importance of the contemplative values.

It is not so much a service, a ministry that is required of us as much as that of witnessing to the world, which today no longer knows God, the witnessing that God is in the midst of the world because we are there.

TO MAKE GOD PRESENT AMIDST US

This ought to be the function of the Community: to make God present amidst us and this is the character of our Community's monastic life.

The C.F.D. would be in the Church not as a contemplative community, not as an order of the active life, but the presence itself of Christ.

We insist particularly on the unity of these two aspects so that the active life not take anything away from the task of pure praise to the Father, nor the life of praise abstract us from our brothers and sisters. For this the structure of the Community does not refuse those who live in matrimony nor those who have active responsibilities; however it wishes that in its bosom be souls totally dedicated to divine praise. The C.F.D. does not close the doors to anyone, but directs all the souls who enter it to a life that is first one of praise, but which cannot be separated from a precise relationship to brothers and sisters, a relationship lived even by a hermit, even in universal intercession, realized by each one.

What distinguishes the C.F.D. is the unity of these relationships, as in Christ. Christ lives His relationship to the Father even when he stoops to wash the feet of the disciples: He lives His relationship to humanity even when praying to His Father, because the Lord's Prayer is always about humankind; it is not pure and simple praise which detaches us from the world, which separates us from humanity, that only leads us to the inaccessible bosom of God.

He could never have returned alone to God's bosom; even when he would ascend to the skies, he would lead with himself all saved humanity.

This we ought to live: the unity of this relationship in a love which unites heaven and earth, all humanity to God.

ECUMENICAL OPENNESS

Another essential element of our vocation is the element of ecumenism.

We ought to feel that we are united to all humanity, as much as we wish to respond to God so much we ought to feel bound to realize a true fraternity with all humanity and in union with them, wishing to bring back into the bosom of the Church all those who possess religious values, traditions, and experiences.

This ecumenism requires us to realize a Christianity that, while conscious of specific differences of religious mentalities, traditions and experiences between East and West, would always be a witness to their unity.

Not for nothing are we called to live certain prayers which realize the true religious experince of Eastern Christianity.

The first thing therefore to realize, if we wish to respond to God, is precisely the sense of this unity which transcends the limits of a culture and of a purely Western mentality. These presuppositions ought certainly to be sustained in Christianity which incarnates them through assuming their human values and therefore cannot suppress the mentalities and the values of Western culture; but it transcends these values and assumes also the values of the East.

And that is not enough. Our ecumenical vocation requires us also to assume the authentic values of the Reformation: the soberness, recalling the Coming, the study of the Word of God, the insistence upon the foundations of our faith.

And that is not enough. As did the first Fathers, we realize the continuity between the old and the new Israel. The first prayer which we say each day, 'Hear, O Israel' is, so to say, the symbol of Judaism, but it is also the affirmation of his faithfulness to the Word of God manifested by our Lord Himself; the Gospel of St Mark puts the 'Shema' upon Jesus' lips. Now this recalls us to live our relation with Israel.

We must consider what thing we would say when we have the Bible in our hands; it is not only nourishing us with the Word of God, but it is as well accepting a culture, a tradition that is not Greco-Roman, but the religious experience, the culture of the Semitic peoples.

Thus our ecumenism implies that we realise our union also with the religions outside of Christianity and Judaism. This unity is based upon two facts:

1) There is a primitive revelation, fundamental to all human religous experience. Through this cosmic, primitive, universal religion, we can from the beginning be brothers and sisters to all.

2) Also as its final goal the Church should assume all the values, of culture, of experience, of each people.

The divine principle of Christianity assures me that Christianity has the capacity to assmiliate all, assume all, remaining equal to itself.

If God revealed and communicated Himself through all life, the Christian on principle can refuse nothing. As Christ did not refuse anything except sin, so ought you in Him to assume all except sin, ought to enter into contact with all to live your communion with God.

Through living the spirit of the Community, we ought to feel profoundly that our vocation to the Community calls us also to sense now the signs of the times.

The greatest manifestation (as the Second Vatican Council said) of the action of the Holy Spirit in modern times is this aspiration to the unity that God has raised up in all hearts and not only in the Catholic Church, but first even in the separated communities.

The Holy Spirit has moved even the Community to make us sense, even before the Church expressed it, this need to feel ourselves truly one with others.

Through being truly Christian we ought to sense the need to embrace all brothers and sisters to give them what they do not have and to receive from them what I lack. The Church, yes, potentially, has all the riches of the world, but I am not the Church; I do not love like Seraphim of Sarov; I cannot contemplate like Silvanus of Mount Athos, I do not live the Passion of Christ as do certain Protestant pastors; I ought to receive even from them. On the other hand I receive from them what they have inasmuch as they are invisibly enfolded in the Church and live in the grace of Christ. To be Catholic I ought to feel the need that is in me to express even their life; that in me is made present even their experience.

Others in the Church will feel themse lves particularly bound to convert them but our action is not directed at converting individuals, but rather to make it so that the need can mature for those who are outside to enter the Church, so that the values of all can enter the Church, and not be suppressed. We ought to desire the maturation of a conversion in mass of a single religious community outside of Christianity. We ought to desire for instance that India, converted to Christianity, could bring to the Catholic Church its precious inheritance of riches and religions traditions. Such could so enrich our interior life.

We should avoid all polemical language, what is purely defensive. There should not be, for us, any other defense for our Christianity than the testimony of our lives and the pure proclamation of the truth. If the truth is not enough to defend us by itself, then it is no longer a truth that is of service.

God manifests Himself, makes Himself present, and the presence of God overcomes evil. This is of Christian truth. The only defense for Christianity would be His true presence, whether it be in the testimony of our lives, whether it be the proclamation of our faith.

No defensive or polemical language therefore, but a true, living prayer, which maintains us in unity with all. Our prayer would be a prayer which begins a communion in love, with Christ who is Love.

This is the first way to live our ecumenism.

Then we can seek to understand better, with an understanding that implies sympathy and loving contact. A knowledge that is purely learned, made up of notions, does not unite us; rather it would maintain us at a greater distance, make us feel our differences more greatly. Ours should desire to be a knowledge gained through a contact, a communion with the traditions, with the religious movements outside of the visible Church, above all with the great religious personalities, who are revealed in this community: saints, theologians, great souls who are witnesses of Christ and of God even if they have not known Him; but they have sought Him truly with all their soul and could not be able to seek for Him if they did not love Him nor be able to love Him if already they did not possess Him.

A sincere seeking for God always implies that God lives in the human heart. It is precisely this presence of God in one's heart that gives us the power to journey on the path, to direct ourselves, to orient ourselves towards God, to seek Him with sincerity.

And finally all of us (not the Church) are pilgrimaging in a quest to God, and we ought to feel ourselves united to all the souls with the same passion that in the Gospel proclaims the Beatitude of those who are hungry and thirsty for justice, because to this thirst and this hunger is promised the satiety which is Love.

And finally our Community has a universal ecumenical character because it turns to all, because each of us feels responsibile for all and in solidarity with all.

SIGNS OF A TRUE VOCATION

The C.F.D. does not exclude any condition of life, any age, any state and leaves its members where it finds them: in the shop, at school, in the family; thus each continues to do what they were doing before entering the Community; otherwise how could the Community turn to all?

But it is necessary that there be manifest signs of a true vocation, the unique vocation of being Christian, God's sons and daughters, to realize that baptism called us to be sons and daughters ('Ut sitis filii Patris vestri') and that to this vocation the soul should wish to respond humbly. Thus the requirements of God grow and also the possibility grows through the soul, the possibility of an always greater, more full, and more perfect response.

The vocation in the absolute sense is that of being sons and daughters, a vocation that is already there in the baptismal grace which we receive at the beginning of our road, when with us at baptism is planted the seed - the mustard seed - which can then grow into a great tree that can reach the sky at its top. Because we can recognize this unique vocation, we can call all into the Community, men and women, who live in the world and who live in the common life, who live the cares of a human profession and who live instead in the solitude of perpetual prayer; in this there is no opposition, but only one call to which gradually you respond while it calls you the more.

It would be a grave error to wish to give to the Community a purpose different from that which has caused it to come into being: our humble answer to the Lord, that is for each one a sincere desire to follow Him, to go to Him who calls us, that we may be one. A divine vocation cannot be asked that is other than for what we are called. If therefore our answer has made the Comunity come into being, how much more ought we to follow the Lord with generous will since we are bound amongst ourselves with such bonds of love. The task of perfection in the Lord Jesus is that, as it has united us to Him, so it unites us amongst ourselves, so that it will make of us one heart and one soul, so much more should we love the Lord until He transforms us in Himself. No other reason or purpose unites us; and just for this we wish to hold ourselves brothers and sisters of all.

The divine vocation is the vocation of love.

ASPIRANCY: ENTRANCE AND PREPARATION PERIOD

From the Statutes:

From a soul who enters the Aspirancy a certain willingness to know the Community and a minimum of good will to belong to it tomorrow, is asked, this being what the aspirancy of the Aspirant will answer.

The task of the Aspirant is in the promise to follow the proper norms of Aspirancy, discretion, faithfulness and obedience, promises made in the act of entering the Aspirancy. Discretion regarding the others (not telling outsiders what one comes to know of the Community or of the persons belonging to it); Faithfulness regarding above all the personal contact of the Aspirant with the Responsible or delegated person; Docility requires a certain attitude of humility to those who ought to teach, guide, counsel and correct one. In the Superior the Aspirant ought to see God and the first first duty is to follow his teaching with humility. Faithfulness regarding the external act (faithfulness to the introductory study of the Bible and liturgy and the Community's own spirituality); Docility regarding the spirit in which this contact is established with the assigned person.

But there are tasks for determining the content of their relation with the Aspirants, because they ought to account for the formation, the preparation, the maturity of those entering Aspirancy and what particular needs they might have; all this should be the object of the relationship which the assigned person would present to the Responsible.

The meaning of the gift of the Manual is in the words which the Father, turning to the Aspirant, says when giving it: 'Receive the Manual and may it be a help in your daily conversation with God, because He illumines you and gives you strength to fulfil His will'. The Aspirant will find in this little book the fundamental norms of the life of the Community of God's Sons and Daughters, the prayers and whatever can make one conscious of what shall be the life of the Consecrated soul.

CONSECRATION

It is necessary to clarify, for one who has been Consecrated, a very important point, the formula of Consecration: 'Consecrated to the Word of God in the 'Community of God's Sons and Daughters'. It is evident that if one, for whatever reason, came to believe that one ought to leave the Community, 'ipso facto', the Consecration itself would also lapse. The Community is not an accessory element to the Consecration itself. As we cannot leave the Church without separating ourselves from God, so one cannot separate oneself from the Community without the Consecration at the same time lapsing. As with love and the brotherly union it is the sign which guarantees our union with God, just as Consecration binds us especially to God, so does it also unite and bind us especially to the brothers and sisters who have made the same Consecration with us.

Consecration in the Community is the conscious taking up of our vocation to fulfil the great dignity received at baptism, that it has placed in us, becoming God's Sons and Daughters, the power of living the same life of God. It is a gigantic task, but if we abandon ourselves to the power of the Spirit, certainly the Spirit will work in us to lead us toward holiness fulfilling ever more profoundly our divine childhood, our divine relationship.

As Jesus in his baptism at the Jordan received the anointing which consecrates him king, prophet and priest, so do we with the Consecration in the Community acquire the knowledge of the power that baptism has placed in each of us, anointed like Christ, king, prophet and priest.

Our royalty is exercised in the struggle against evil, against Satan, who, though conquered by Jesus, continues to tempt us. Consecration in the Community is a supernatural means that God has given us for the salvation of the world and for conquering the evil which awaits our spirit. We, anointed kings, like Jesus are on the edge of the desert with the 'armour of God' as wrote St Paul to the Ephesians (6.13-17) - 'girding ourself with truth and with the sword of the Spirit, with the word of God'.

Our prophetic function, deriving from the Consecration, is the witnessing that we ought to give of the presence of God in the world of today with all our life, letting the divine Word be imprinted upon us, listening to it, gathering it, meditating on it.

The priestly function makes us participate in that of Christ through praise, prayer and the offering of oneself, in sacrifice. And our lay priesthood is very much greater and more serious than that priesthood which is not for all. Living in continuous intimacy with God, hidden but efficacious and through a variety of states, which the Community gathers to itself (virgins, spouses, priests). we ought to pour out into Him all the reality which surrounds us and redeem what is profane, what is sin. The Second Vatican Council has recognized the consecration of the world on the part of the laity who find ourselves bound to work on a vaster scale than the entire world, as we noted, with all that we do and are, there where God has placed us and where our Consecration in the Community leaves us to work as kings, prophets and priests.

THE THREEFOLD CONSECRATION

First of all the Threefold Consecration wishes to be a recognition of the ties which the soul has with Christ, with the Virgin, with the Church. It requires nothing more than what is required of our Christian profession, but wishes to give us a greater awareness, an assistance in making us live our Christianity in a more intimate and living way, and to make us fulfil the tasks which we have as God's Sons and Daughters and as belonging to the Church.

The same Christian profession Consecrates us to the Christ, to the Virgin, the the Church. We are Christians in our union to Christ, the Christian life is the life of Christ in us, it is the extension of His Incarnation in us. Each soul who lives our baptism lives in union with Christ and in dependence on Him.

Our Consecration ought to be the total gift of ourselves to Christ, because He assumes all our being and lives and moves in us, dies in us and is riseneborn through the glory of the Father. We can take nothing away from the dominion of Christ, because all our being ought to give ourself to Him, recognising Him as Head and King who rules all the movements of our soul.

We wish to live as God's Sons and Daughters in the Only Begotten Son. The Consecration brings us to be assumed into the Divine Word inasmuch as He assumes all humanity in his human nature.

All in us is reserved to Him, because all that He possesses of us and does in us is assumed into His dominion of all our being. Consecration is therefore the most tender friendship, a communion of life and love with Jesus, an immersion of all our being into His infinite mystery.

In being Christian there is also the tie to the Virgin. The mystery of Christ is worked through the Virgin, in Mary's womb, and even we, in Christ, are conceived in Mary's womb. Mediatrix of all grace, She unites us to Jesus, becoming our Mother.

If Christianity is the extension of the Incarnation of the Word, this requires the extension of Mary's Motherhood. We are assumed by Christ through Mary, we are Christ being Mary's sons and daughters. We love her with a most intimate love!

But there is also an ontological tie with the Church. As Christians we ought to feel devotion to the Church; in fact to live our Christianity to the measure that we immerse ourselves in the mystery of the Church. We are not saved one by one, but through an organism, a body made of various members. We are assumed by Christ in the total incarnation of the Word of the Church. We are Christians in the Church; we have the duty to share in its life, in its problems, in its liturgy.

The 'Our Father' is for all souls, it is never a selfish prayer: each Christian ought to pray for all and represent all our brothers and sisters.

Liturgical piety, therefore, stripped of all forms which dessicate our soul, is the act of adoration, thanking, restoring and supplicating in the divine sacrifice. Even our ascetic and apostolical life should never be selfish because the victory of Christ over the demons is the salvation of all humanity.

Mysticism is in the sacramental life. We ought to return to the pure greatness of the Primitive Church which made its own the mystery of Christ, the mystery of a greatness that surpasses all greatness. We need to make our own the life of the Church. We ought each one to realize all the Church, the life of all, in charity.

We should not detach ourselves from anything but embrace all.

The union with the Pope and the union of all humanity in Christ.

And now we take upon ourselves this universal salvation: adoring, thanking for all, supplicating through all the misery of humanity, atoning for all. What an immensity is opened for us by Consecration!

The gift of the icon of the Nicopeja.

After the Consecration, at the end of the Mass, the icon of the Nicopeja is blessed and given by the Father to the newly Consecrated members.

In giving it Father says these words:

From among all the icons of the Virgin we have chosen as our patron the Nicopeja from Venice, first of all because she recalls us to an ecumenical vocation. Through feeling ourselves brothers and sisters of all we have chosen an image that comes from the East and is venerated in Venice, in that harbour opening onto Eastern Christianity.

The Nicopeja is a sign that East and West shall become again one, in as much as East and West recognize themselves as Mary's sons and daughters. Venice is only the harbour of the place in which Mary is ready to gather her sons and daughters in whatever land they come from, to offer them anew.

Certainly, first of all in this icon we recognise the piety, the devotion, the filial veneration of all our Christian brothers and sisters of the East towards Mary; but we wish to say more; in the Nicopeja we should see the icon of the Mother Goddess, which towards the Far East is so venerated, as if a symbol of Mary. We turn as do all people, even in the Far East, instinctively seeking Mary, and it is right that to the measure that we find her we would also find Christ.

Also in Islam Mary Most Holy is venerated as always Virgin, as the one who, shadowily, invested with the Holy Spirit, is assumed into heaven, who is the first and the greatest of women. It is Mary Most Holy who could lead all Islam to recognize Christ. We feel rather like brothers and sisters of Islam's sons and daughters, of Muslims, at least in venerating Mary Most Holy. And we hope that they will arrive at a perfect consciousness of the truth, gathering in most pure hands the Son as their Son of God, not Mahomet, but Christ, seal of all prophecy; cornerstone upon which is built the Temple of God the Saviour, in whose name only all humankind can be saved.

It seems that even the devotions to the Great Mother, whether in India, whether in China, whether in Japan, are as if a distant prophecy, a recalling to the Church, to Christ. The Nicopeja would be somewhat of all this.

Certainly, she is nothing like the goddesses of eastern religions, but we feel that in Her all there is of humanity can recognise the Christ. As in Her, humankind has given a human body to Jesus, so from Her, humanity can receive it. If we would feel ourselves brothers and sisters of all humankind on the religious and spiritual level, so would humanity be saved by Christ, and it is in Her name, and through Her power as Mother that this could come about.

The ecumenical vocation, therefore, concerns first of all separated Christians directly, and then extends mysteriously even to all those who do not yet know Christ, but at least have the presentiment of the greatness of Mary, in venerating an image of a woman who is Mother, from which derives all salvation.

We have thus chosen the icon of the Nicopeja because it has in itself a character, so to say, that is dogmatic, that pleases us in showing, not only for our teaching, but also for our devotion.

The Nicopeja is a Mother who recalls us to a maternity that remains interior. The Child is still within Her, more than outside of Her: she does not carry Him in her arms, she has Him in her bosom as a sign of the permanence of Jesus within Her, as we recall that maternity in meeting the Christ that all of us ought to live. In us, all that ought to remain present is Jesus, all that we ought to carry within us; all of us ought to be the monstrance of Christ.

Mary Most Holy is the Mother of all Christians and in this sense we are her children, but there is also the exemplary cause of our holiness, that is the divine maternity which recalls for us one of the fundamental themes of our spiritual life: to feel that all our being ought to give life to Jesus. As She with her milk, with her blood, gave life to the Son of God in her human nature, so for whatever we may be, we ought to make living in ourselves Christ the Lord.

The dogma of Mary's divine maternity implies a recall to our own spiritual life, because from the first Christian centuries Christian life is conceived as a birth of the Word in the human soul, as the birth of Jesus within each one of us.

But even before this secret maternity, seen through the icon of the Nicopeja with the Consecration to the Virgin, we manifest a fundamental motive of our vocation in Christ even as we wish to be revealers of the Father.

To be the monstrance of God, we ought to disappear in humility, because, as St John the Baptist said; He grows in us and in us He only is revealed: we are not any more than Him, we say nothing more than Him, we reveal nothing more than Him, we are not more than an icon of Christ.

The icon of Mary that we prefer is what her holiness says, which consists in its contact - the most intimate that has ever been lived - between Herself and the Son of God. After the closeness that the Son has with the heavenly Father, there is no other contact so intimate, so great, so sacred as that which unites Jesus to Mary and Mary to Jesus. The Nicopeja expresses this relation.

Also we ought to live this closeness. Christ lives in us, we ought to feel that we are sacred and have the consciousness that here is no chalice, here is no paten, here is no monstrance more sacred than our body, than our soul: not only of our soul, note well, but even of our selfsame body, that Christ lives in our hearts.

But there is another reason that has made us choose the Nicopeja, and the reason has a character that is eminently apostolic. 'Nicopeja' means 'Victory Worker'. Today especially it seems that the world has lost God. Or at least, faith. We ought to have the consciousness of being called not only to a defense but also a propagation of our message and to make it so that Christ wins and triumphs.

So that all this can come about, the Virgin now wishes of us that all heresies be weakened, all errors conquered.

The Church perhaps ought always to fight: this is a Church militant, here below: even though in every way to us who live today it seems to be living in an extremely tragic era. We feel there is the need to cooperate in Christ's victory as the Virgin teaches us; we can always overcome if we know how to imitate Mary. Most Holy Mary has conquered all heresies living always in her silence, in her humility. This should also be our fundamental task. Our most true and most effective apostolate is precisely in remaining silent at the feet of the Lord, in our humility and in our peace, all being of God.

THE BRANCHES OF THE COMMUNITY

Our religious family, the Community, born of the unique response to the vocations of many, presents itself, lives and grows in Four Branches which draw from the same trunk while finding themselves in different positions. In fact each branch realizes the unique vocation of all, bound to one spirituality regarding the task of the soul to tend to the perfection of charity, but a branch is distinguished from the others regarding the conditions of life of each one in it in whom the perfection of charity is sought. The branches, therefore do not mean a greater or lesser belonging to our religious Family; they are only the recognizing of an objective fact. God calls each of us to live for Him in prayer, in humility, in peace, while leaving the means to humankind; some He even calls to live the same life in solitude, in effective distance from all. The separation from the world, the essential condition for monastic spirituality, is in order to achieve a charity in our more intimate union not only with God, but also with all brothers and sisters, all our neighbours. This is true even for the hermit: the true monk is the perfect Christian.

Justly it is said that monasticism anticipates the heavenly life: all of us tend to the vision of God and, though in the Community one is consecrated to the quasi-eremitic life to live uniquely for God, always the contemplative life is proposed as the ideal even for those who live in the world: the ultimate means, yes, but which orients each single act and gives a precise direction even to the way of those who live in marriage and exercise a profession in the world. The union between those who live in solitude and those who remain in the world is assured of the unity of the monastic Family and, as much as possible, of obedience to the Community's norms, of the use of the identical means, because God calls all to the same thing: with all our heart, all our mind, all our strength, all our life, that is the perfection of charity.

One can read in Article 8 of the Statute that no lawful condition of life, no state, no age can exclude one by itself from this divine vocation. The Community is open to whoever wishes to take on this task sincerely and seriously. The unique requirement requested is the vocation to a responsibility of love of God and neighbour. Neither the lack of education nor advanced age can be an obstacle. There are very few amongst the religious institutes who would open the door to old people. Instead the Community accepts even these to give them the possibility of an interior renewal. This alone is enough to show the greatness, the newness of the Community: so many souls, deluded in life, discouraged, have found in our Family a new youth, a new lease on life, new motives for hope. It is never too late to reply to love and even if it is difficult to renew a spiritual formation at a certain age, the grace of God, which renews nature, works miracles even in the old. Who is more adapted to the contemplative life than the older person, detached now from all, stripped even of the self, no longer questing earthly ambitions and vague dreams? The Community offers God to this soul, God who through them can be now at the door, and who alone can refill their emptiness.

Even monks and nuns feel they live in spiritual communion with those who tend to God through matrimony, the professions, work: solitude would not be a pretext for forgetting this, but a means for living for them. Thus one who lives in the world does not find conditions to be different from those of monks, because even for one in the world poverty, chastity, obedience, simplicity, humility are the unique ways that lead to the Lord. The programme of the Beatitudes is valid for all , and is even consigned to us in the act itself of our Consecration; it does not treat only of being poor, but of finding in poverty - not only material, but even spiritual - our joy.

Those belonging to the First Branch are those who have been Consecrated in the Community.

Those found in the Second Branch are those who wish to tend toward God through matrimony with the help of the Vows (see articles 16, 17, 18, 19).

The Third Branch includes those who wish to reach the perfection of charity outside of marriage and to continue to live in the world, including those who find themselves in the state of widowhood. Of these is required the affective detachment from earthly goods in chastity and in obedience.

To the Fourth Branch belong those who wish to achieve the perfection of charity in the effective detachment of earthly goods with the three religious vows, living in silence, in solitude, in prayer, in the men's and women's houses of the common life.

Not the subjective task, therefore, but the will of the Lord has placed us in one Branch or another so that the distinction depends upon an objective state, upon a condition of life, desired for us through the design of God.

We have always wished to distinguish Consecration from the making of the Vows to show how Consecration is the fully conscious and free renewing of the Baptismal Consecration, while the Vows are only a help for the married and an effective and almost necessary means for those who are not married.

It is, therefore, a very delicate thing to determine for all the objective of the Vows in each state of life, each concrete situation in which a soul comes to find itself requiring a different form of life and of holiness. So that the Vows do not become rather an impediment instead of a help, it is necessary to recognize the concrete will of God that is for all the perfection of charity. We ought to be conscious, therefore, that the religious task in the Community does not have its foundation in the Vows as much as in the Consecration: the Vows are the explication of this obligation. Thus, if the Consecration is equal for all, requiring of all the same obligation towards Gospel perfection, the object of the Vows is quite different for each Branch.

When the time period of the temporary Vows is ended, each continues to belong to the Community in the First Branch. Only if the Consecrated person is to have lived positively the time of testing, can they renew them or make them in perpetuity, being placed into the Second, or Third, or Fourth Branch. From this is understood the solemnity which the Community confers to the rite of a perpetual profession on the day in which it is celebrated.

THE TASK OF PRAYER

There are four obligatory prayers for all: Hear, O Israel, the Lord's Prayer, St Francis' Lauds, and the Beatitudes. They are few because our Christian life, contemplative and active, consists of always living in the presence of God. One does not count, therefore, the quantity but the quality of our prayers and devotional practices: what is specifically noted that distinguishes us is living always in the presence of God, and this is what is to be done in whatever state and whatever situation. Even if there is lacking a sense of the presence of God, faith should always be kept alive. The highest prayer is the pure silence of adoration and of praise, the soul sees, contemplates, adores and loves. As prayer becomes more simple so much less need is there for formulae and words.

The four obligatory prayers are the norm for each Branch because they indicate to us and revive in us each day our programme for the religious life. With them can come no other than the realization of what is required of humanity. (These are presented and commented on in the third chapter).

Certainly in the Fourth Branch the contemplative life requires prayer as the sole content of life, while in the other Branches it ought to transfigure our relation with others, our work, the world in which we come in contact. But in the Fourth Branch contemplative life ought to be sustained for those who cannot live it with absolute detachment; it ought to be for the others a help in overcoming in patience and conquering with love all the difficulties that the world brings to an exercise of perfect charity. The union with the others frees, stimulates, gives an ever new content to the life of prayer.

Also required of those vowed to the Second, Third and Fourth Branches of the Community is the recital of the Morning of the Resurrection at Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Holy Trinity, Transfiguration, Exaltation of the Cross.

The same obligation for the three Branches is required of the reciting of the Acathistos Hymn at the celebrations and feasts of Our Lady, the Immaculate Conception, Mary the Most Holy Mother of God, the Annunciation of the Lord, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. (See the presentation and commentary on this hymn in the third chapter).

The Litany, recited every day in the houses of the common life of the Community, is recommended even for the others on the days of the Seasons.

Finally, each year we ought to renew the Promises to the Virgin in a Marian shrine which each Family is accustomed to visit. And this is best done at the end of a retreat, with the greatest participation of the members of the Family, and through the initiative of the Family Assistant if there is no priest of the Community present. For we gain so much from Our Lady Most Holy, thus we ought to renew personally each day the entrusting of our task to her (our Consecration already binding us to her), and each year all the Community ought to solemnly renew its Promises to the Virgin.

SCRIPTURE READING AND THE LITURGY OF THE HOURS

They are closely bound together: the one is the indispensable nourishment for our religious life (it is the Word of God to which we listen and gather); the other is the praise we raise to God in response to the divine Word, uniting our voice with that of the Church.

The quantity of reading is different in the various Branches: in the First it is not determined what ought to be read of Holy Scripture, but it would be good to read a part of what has been required of the others, remaining thus in union with all. Nor ouhgt we discourage the study and reading of spiritual words, even if they remain difficult. To those who persevere, soon the Word of God will open its secrets and recompense the initial fatigue. At the beginning what is needed is good will. For the rest Holy Scripture ought to take the first place in every moment where it is the foundation: in the divine sacraments, and in particular the Eucharist, which are its incarnation.

In the Second and Third Branches all Holy Scripture shall all be read in the space of four years, according to the distribution proposed by the Community. But daily reading is not required. In the Fourth Branch, instead, it shall be read each day and all of it in the space of a year according to a scheme proposed by the Community.

Thus for the recital of the Liturgy: this should be partial in the First Branch. One could begin with the principal Offices (Lauds/Morning Prayer, and Vespers/Evening Prayer), and then add some of the other Hours as would be practical in acquiring the spirit of prayer in that form, respecting individual needs and the liturgical celebration.

In the Second Branch, reciting Lauds and Vespers is required. In the Third Branch Lauds and Vespers ought to be joined to the Office of Readings and Compline.

In the Fourth Branch instead the recital is complete with all the Little Hours as well.

Participation in the daily Mass is recommended to the utmost possible limits of each one. We ought to remember that the true participation is in listening, a gathering into oneself of the Word, letting oneself be modelled by it, an abandoning of oneself to its divine force. The Liturgical mystery is not a spectacle nor is it a school: it is the Act in which the life of the world is consumed and our destiny realized.

But through participating in the weekday Mass we ought not to evade our own family or professional tasks and work but reconcile these with our Mass, otherwise our testimony becomes negative.

For everyone participation in the annual spiritual exercises which the Community organizes in various parts of Italy for the benefit of all are recommended. These are days of grace for each individual and for the Community, for those present and those absent,: they are as if new born, a profound renewing, an extraordinary help for following one's own pilgrimage or for initiation on the part of those intending Consecration or professing their Vows. These are days which leave their mark in the soul because God has communicated to us even and especially across human contact.

Each month, then, those who have professed their Vows and who are in the Second, Third or Fourth Branches need to make the monthly spiritual retreat possibly with the Family to which they belong: otherwise it can be made in isolation and then giving notice to the Family Assistant in the monthly account.

These ought to present each month to the Family Assistant the account of the fulfilling of the religious obligations (of prayers and of the Vows) and those of the community (monthly gathering and weekly group meetings).

The financial account is an obligation for the Third Branch: while of the Second it concerns only personal spending.

The profession of Vows requires of the members of the Third Branch the compilation of a Rule of Life indicating how much time is dedicated to prayer. It ought to be approved by the Superiors each year or simply reconfirmed where there are no changes.

With the Vow of Poverty, in the affective detachment from one's goods, the members of the Third Branch renounce what they possess: they do not lose their possessions, but they place their use under the consensus of the Superiors. In the same spirit they rewrite their Will and Testament to avoid doubtful or unjust situations that could result after their deaths.

All Consecrated persons in the Community ought to turn in a quota each month: this is a duty and even the need for manifesting in some way their own attachment to the Family which loves them. Because our offering is not only an economic help for all the Community's activity (printing, postage, travel, etc.) but above all a religious act so much is required as to be a certain sacrifice by those who are in the Third Branch. But God loves who gives with joy.

COMMUNITY TASKS

Nothing is more important than the weekly encounter; it is a religious duty that is to take place regularly. It is a meeting with God in listening to His Word and at the same time a meeting with the brothers and sisters in neighbourly love which makes each one precious and efficacious. Because it involves a few members, it determine a relation in friendship and favours an intimate union in charity. In fact in these all can feel they can participate actively whether with a comment or with a suggestion; and opening themselves one to the other with the sharing of joy and of suffering, they can confront each other in a neighbourly way and realize a certain revision of life. The encounters serve to make the Community understood better across the faces of brothers and sisters and to love them more. The group Assistant ought to prepare the encounter with care and set up a regular monthly distribution of topics to discuss and study.

The monthly gathering is organized by the Family Assistant. For this all the groups that make up the Family meet and have the same end as do the group encounters, but with a larger participation. As well as prayer, in these planned activities take place and topics are presented having the character of religious study and - if it occurs - of catechesis.

The monthly retreat is a meeting in which there is no brotherly sharing or didactic function, but we come together for prayer. Here, therefore, there should be a space dedicated to the Community's prayer and a larger space for personal prayer and for silence. The Family Assistant or whoever organizes the retreat will give some current passages or points for the personal meditation. Periodically the retreat shall be given by a priest in the Community.

THE TRINITARIAN LIFE IN THE BRANCHES

The Trinitarian life is a continuous relation of love from the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, a relation which unites all in One and all from the One remains in the Three. Thus in the Community all tends to the unity of the contemplative life which is spread out into the life of the whole Church and finally embraces everything.

The life of the Community is like the lymph which circulates incessantly in its Four Branches, following the two dimensions of the cross: absolute verticality: from the base of human life, from the depths to the heights in a loving search of God to which God responds descending with His grace even to meeting with each and everyone of us.

The other dimension is the absolute horizontality during which, across each one of us, the grace of God is poured out on all humankind.

Chapter Eight

THE SAINTS

Contents

OUR COMMUNION WITH THE SAINTS

We ought to live in Communion with the Saints, here and now. There is no tomorrow for the Church of God through the liturgical mystery.

'Societatem donare digneris cum sanctis tuis, apostolis et martyribus'. 'You deign to give society saints, apostles and martyrs'. What thing is being said in these words? For us the Beatitude of Heaven consists now in a communion of love with them. The greatness of Christianity is not distant, but near. God who is infinite love is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. And after God the Virgin. Who could be greater than She and who closer to us? And after the Virgin, the apostles, the martyrs, the saints.

What a marvellous society the Church is! The contrary to what we have here below; there those the poorest in love in the Kingdom of God are those least alive, those least close to each one of us; to the measure instead that they are great, they are my brother, my sister, I live with them and they live with me, their love draws us closer, makes them my neighbours, puts them at my service.

They love, and love for nothing. And on the other hand this love of God and of the saints through humankind is humanity's experiment to the measure in which each feels loved freely.

We experiment with our own sinning, our own unworthiness, we experiment even with the ineffable condescension of God who calls us to participate in all divine goodness; and at the same time we experiment with the ineffable condescension of the saints who want us to be their brothers and sisters, even living with us still below, through being what we are. Not because we are of the saints can we live the communion of saints, but because they are saints and offer us this communion of love. It is fitting that for this we should live now this communion, otherwise the heavens would not be any more God's heaven, Christ's heaven, the heaven of love; if we were to live in society with the saints only tomorrow, when would we be pure, it is now that they would love us only because we would be saints like them. Today they love us because they live with us and wish to feel themselves our brothers and sisters here and now.

This is because the communion establishes itself here below amongst us sinner and those who are in Heaven. We all live the same life that descends from God, flows out, spills over, submerging everything, all the created abysses, all the abysses of human misery and of human sin, if we open this abyss and gather the light and the joy of God.

God asks nothing else, the saints ask nothing else: that we let them love us, that we permit them to be able to give themselves to us, to live with us our same life.

We should live in the Communion of the saints: when walking in the streets, when going to the shops, when washing dishes . . . always. The saints are with us, playing with us, living with us their same life, even their same glory. It is not glory that separates them from us: their glory is even in being closer to us. They surround us with love, gather us in their arms, carry us to God. This is their life. We ought to experience this. We should not merely believe it, we should live it.

The saints are not only those to whom we can turn because they can obtain grace for us. First we should to see in them models for our spiritual lives, to use theirs as if a reserve of energy and of strength for our very life, we ought to consider what they are to us. The simplest, poorest thing, it could be said, is the most profound and highest truth. They exist eternally. Even independently of our memory they are and remain eternally inasmuch as they are established for ever in God, and in the love in which they can participate, they can enter into contact with each one of us.

We are to the measure that we love; to the measure that we do not love we are not. Thus, because of all who have lived, particularly the saints have lived.

Holiness is the perfection of charity; so much more, then, ought we to tend to holiness, as we seek to live in a communion of love not only with God, but with our neighbour. Now a communion with one's neighbour first of all requires a communion with the saints, because no one is closer to us than those who have already reached the perfection of love. These are close to us: there is no brother or sister closer to us than the one who has reached the sanctity of the perfection of love.

All the divine world surrounds me: this is the Christian life.

We should not be afraid of turning to the saints, because the love which they bring is infinitely greater than that which we can ask. Even while we can never exhaust the infinite riches of love of all Paradise that bends towards us.

OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE SAINTS

We know how important the knowledge of the saints is for Christian spiritual life. This comes from the simplest fact: Christian life is not the conforming to a rule but the the realizing of a mystery of love. Not only as much as regards our contact with the saints, but even as regards our contact with God, placing upon Christian living not so much the knowledge of doctrine as our knowing that God has chosen us to realize this mystery of love in his Church.

While in other religions the sacred books are books of doctrine, in Christianity the inspired books are fundamentally books of stories that put us in contact with people who have shaped all of Christian spirituality: Abraham and Moses, Elijah and John the Baptist, David and Samuel and all the prophets . . . And also in the New Testament the most sacred books are not doctrinal books, but books with stories: the Gospels.

Certainly St Paul is most important, but more important than St Paul are the Gospels, because St Paul essentially cannot tell us the meaning, the value that we have through certain events of the sacred story, the Incarnation of Christ, the death on the Cross, the Resurrection from the Tomb.

To say it in other words, our Christian life is not so much a fulfilling of a law as it is the the entering into contact with persons. The fact that this rapport is ontological, created by the Sacraments, takes away nothing from the fact that essentially Christian life is the rapport with persons; fundamentally and principally with Christ, but not exclusively with Him because I ought to have a rapport with all those who in whatever way have made me present and have illuminated me in the mystery of this divine Person. And these are the prophets, the patriarchs, but also the Apostles, also Mary Most Holy and all the saints of the New Testament.

Our union with God is never solitary; it will be more intimate while being more spacious; so much that it rises up and spreads out to embrace everything; but this expansion of the soul implies not only a knowledge, but a relation of love with all those who are our brothers and sisters; a contact that would be so much more living and true where they are saints and we are saints.

This intimate relationship implies that the experiential knowledge of one person and the mystery of the human personilty is revealed only in love. Christian life is a relation in love, which requires and renders knowledge more profound even through those whom we do not consider to be saintly and who in some way acquire the same characters, the same appearance because these become always more our brothers and sisters.

It is true that one cannot know a person except to in the measure that they are loved, but it is also true that that knowledge can be stimulated by love. And it is also true that in loving springs up in us the need for more intimate knowing; the proof of our love would be the desire that we have to know those better whom we love. For these two motives it is required that we study the lives of the saints.

That we should know the saints! Now our piety shall no longer be abstract, anonymous; because they love us as brothers and sissters, knowing how to understand themselves what is happening to us and we have no need to ask their help, and where we might beg alms of a stranger, to a brother we do not beg.

So much more my relation with them would be disinterested as much as it would be a relation of love; and the saints would come to our aid without our asking it, just because we are of the same family, and what is mine is yours.

We ought to know the saints therefore as Scripture presents them and as we ought also to know God: an experimental knowledge more or less analogous to the knowledge which we have of our parents. The saints have now been born to an incorruptible life, which is not transistory as is human life on earth: it is the life of God himself.

THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS

Up until even just a few decades ago the knowledge of saints' lives was one of the fundamental instruments of Christian spirituality.

Today this is less so, but this is wrong: if we lose sight of these means, there is the danger that our Christian life will only seek to incarnate a certain abstract ideal, instead of establishing itself upon a living contact. So there is the risk of living and conceiving Christian life as the realization of a certain ideal of perfection, of a morality, of an ethics, not of a religion, least of all the Christian religion.

We read the lives of the saints. How could we live in their company if we were not to know them? Living with them in a communion of love implies knowing them.

Nor should the saints be distanced from us, as we have distanced them placing them in Paradise, raising them up into an atmosphere to which we cannot come and we see them from far beneath them. They are not in the clouds. Holiness is not distant, but nearby.

We do not need to distance from us what we love in order to see it as an intangible and inaccessible glory: the contrary comes about in Christianity. Our Lord has always tied sanctity to those who are truly our brothers, our sisters, are human like ourselves, fragile, poor, unknown, forgotten, thrust aside, who like us have known illness, misunderstandings, difficulties and misery.

The new and legitimate need for a knowledge of the saints is that their lives be true and that they are not the fruit of human fabling where one has died and who always seems different from those who are alive to such a point that when one speaks of them they are already given halos.

The communion of love implies the communion of two persons: we ought to know the saint in physical shape, in aspect, in the character of temperament, in learning and in human deficiency. Then we can penetrate even the intimate sacredness of the soul, through which we can learn to know God, who is incarnate in each saint, if they are truly like ourselves: weak, imperfect, subject to faults.

In Christian spiritual life and in Consecrated souls saints' lives have always been very important, which is testified in the ways the words of God are incarnated in situations, in different temperaments, in each century, across missions that are different for each one.

What a teaching to inspire us, from interior strength! What power in recalling each one of us to their imitation!

It is true, each one of us responds to God in his own way; each saint is original. But if the incarnation of the divine word is original in the life of each one of us, the real task ought to be equal, the task of love, not words, regardless of suffering, weakness, fatigue.

Their example teaches us more than can be taught us by a theological or ascetic treatise. In fact the treatise on asceticism remains there on the shelf, it is already something dead, that we cannot change into blood and life.

The saints are those who ought to help us begin the life of perfection. If they nourish our lives with their words already digested in their very lives, this word will be even more digested for us.

Let us read the lives of the saints!

But we need to make good choices and not waste our time, but with humble and sincere adhesion to these companions along the way, to whichever one might be with us on the road, teaching us by their example, helping us with their words and sustaining us with their love.

In the love that the soul can instinctively try out through certain saints rather than through others, who knows what might not be expressed as a certain divine calling? Perhaps this instinctive love is given us by God so that they can teach us what thing the Lord asks of us; first to teach us to respond, then to teach us to understand.

We ought, therefore, to feel even more the need to read the good lives of the saints; not the old hagiography, but the testimony of those who had seen them, who had lived with them; the great books of the Franciscan epoch: the 'Legend of the Three Companions', the Speculum Perfectionis, Celano's First and Second Lives, St Bonaventure's 'Legenda Maior' and 'Legenda Minor', and then the Autobiography of St Teresa of Avila, the autobiographical writings of St Therese of Liseiux, the writings of Charles de Foucauld, the Life of St Antony written by St Athanasius, the writings of St Augustine . . . .

We need to pay heed to the importance that reading of the lives of the Saints can have in the life of a soul tending to the Lord when we consider that the life of St Antony caused the conversion of St Augustine, even if remotely. So was it the reading of Saints' lives that caused St Ignatius of Loyola's conversion in modern times.

A relation with God which refuses the mediation of all mankind could never be a true relation in Catholicism. The truest contact amongst humankind, that which is the most intimate, would always be the contact of the saints through their writings.

The Writings of the Saints

Of all the rich production of Catholic spirituality, in its vast, centuries-old tradition, we prefer to form ourselves on certain books written by the great masters of holiness, from the first century of Christianity up to today.

The books which we love amongst all the others are:

Other texts which we can add to these are: The Retreat of Charles de Foucauld, 'Eight Days at Ephraim'; Thomas More's Letters; the Letters of St Antony of Thebes; the works of Pseudo-Dionysius and above all St Augustine's Confessions. We can trust ourselves to these masters affirming our love of the tradition. We are a new movement, inasmuch as we are raised up from a traditiion of the first centuries of Christianity and which continues through these great figures to whom we feel very close ourselves.

We give importance to these books and we would study the doctrine which they can present attentively; but these books are also important for us because they recall the saint to us: in the Community the presence of Ignatius, of Benedict, of Francis, of John, of Teresa, are living presences and we ought to feel them as living presences: they are our masters. There are of course others, but we cannot ever put these great saints in the shadows, because through them we feel in a particular way that we have received from them clear direction.

St Ignatius is for us a continuous reminder to live in union with the hierarchical Church a living contact with Jesus Christ; from St Benedict we receive above all the sense of Community, the unity of the whole family about the one who through a fatherly charism reunited it in the name of Christ. From St Francis we learn the evangelical sense of life, in detachment from all to live uniquely of God.

From St John of the Cross we can learn the unique search for God. He does not have the freshness, the youthfulness of St Francis, but on the positive level he speaks of a thirsting impetus of the spirit which drives him to an absolute search for God, much more than amongst the other saints that we have chosen as masters and fathers. He teaches us above all to despise all the ways we traverse, the will to ascend directionly to Him whom we have chosen,

St Therese of Lisieux, of the Child Jesus, shows us the breadth of her love. Even our prayer ought to be, like hers, first of all divine praise, but also universal intercession in the sense of a universal solidarity towards sinners.

THE CANONIZATION OF THE SAINTS

Canonization in the Catholic Church is very important not only for dogmatic teaching, but also for Christian spirituality.

One of the fundamental points of Christian doctrine is the absolute value of the human person: we are worth more than the components that make up our lives, that form the story of a people, of a civilization. In fact the monastic life tends to the free us so that salvation, instead of determining an eclipse of the human person, on the contrary affirms us, saves us and establishes us for ever.

What distinguishes Christianity, the revealed religion, is that we have all in plain relief; all is truly for me, all is for everyone.

Not one of us was ever created to be a dunghill for the future; the whole universe, all history, is designed for me, because God Himself is designed for me and lives and dies for me.

Christian charity implies the recognition of the absolute value that each one of us has on the divine level and this is immensely great and beautiful, and is even the thing which distinguishes Christianity from other religions or at least Christian civilization from all other civilizations.

Revelation has made it so that our instinctive need to contemplate certain human figures, to keep alive their memory, receives from their teaching its solid and lasting foundation.

The death of Christ is not for the salvation of humanity in general, but the salvation of each one of us: 'Propter nos et propter nostram salutem descendit' 'He came down to us and for our salvation'. It does not speak of a redemption of the cosmos; the cosmos is saved in terms of humankind. The final outcome of all God's action: I am, you are, being single individuals, being persons. This is a very great thing.

Now, nothing more than Canonization in the Catholic Church confirms this vision.

Our greatness is not measured by how much is done by us in history, but in how much history is transcended to enter into contact with God who is above history, inasmuch as he is eternal. The human being can itself acquire an aspect of eternity: and this is Canonization.

A happening like the Canonization of Saints speaks to us of the absolute value of the human person; the Canonization is the most adequate event for expressing the greatness of a human being.

With the passage of years, of centuries, of millenia, no person will last through greatness.

Thus after millenia we shall still celebrate the feasts of certain saints; and each saint is a person who remains alive, because you can pray to them.

Canonization says that human beings can be truly eternal.

Is not that a marvellous thing?

Canonization establishes the saints for ever to be above all fluctuations of time; not living any longer in history, because they have touched God. They demonstrate eternity, not someone who ceases to be what he is. He loves me even with all the limitations of my nature: intelligence, will, moral perfection. God loves me and I remain: the act which counts in this moment, if in Him I live my communion with God, if God enters in communion with me, this act remains.

This is because the saints are like the icon of God, the monstrance, the sign of a divine presence. Without the saints God would not be anymore the Christian God, but would become the God of mystery, the God of absolute loneliness. He would remain pure silence, far from this creation. If God truly gives himself to creation, if he truly communicates to the world, it is because he lives in the heart of the saint, and because the saint lives in the heart of God.

In the saints we see the effectiveness of Christ's work in the redemption truly applied, in the grace truly granted and poured into the heart of humankind.

Canonization is a very great thing that needs to be valued even more like essential nourishment for the Christian life, but also for teaching. Canonization fixes for ever the man, the woman, as they are.

Today, insisting so much on the communal character and history of Christianity, we too often lose sight of the absolute value of each single person as such, loved by God's final love: His act of love is truly concluded in the person of the one whom He loves.

The Canonization of Saints assures us of the continuity of the mystery of the Incarnation. God united Himself for ever to humankind and thus our finality is found, one could say, in some way embraced by God's infinity, saved in the abyss of this divine immensity. You are not lost, but the divine immensity is added for ever to your littleness, as if your life in time comes to be gathered into the eternity of God.

Ours would not be salvation of this our little 'I', if this our little life were not in some way gathered, guided, fixed by God in His own womb.

The saints are our friends, and our brothers and sisters.

We have patron saints, chosen from the saints of all the nations, because we are Catholic, that is, universal, and we wish to live sanctity in the particular styles of the whole world.

We ask of saints an integral humanity, a human perfection that only supernatural perfection realizes and adds.

From all our saints we can draw out certain things to arrive at a new sanctity that includes all the styles and all the forms of sanctity and the proper characteristics of all peoples, in such a way as to incarnate in us all humanity: Catholicity.

And the Church, an immense community, does not imply only for us contact with all the Catholic saints, but also with all those who belong thus to God's Kingdom. This is because we love the saints of Orthodoxy, St Seraphim of Sarov, St Tichon of Sora, St Sergius of Radonez, the greatest Hindu and Islamic mystics. We wish to think they are in Heaven, that they live in sight of God, that they already make a part of the mystic Body of Christ.

Our heart ought to be so large as to embrace all the life of the world. This is the Community of God's Sons and Daughters.

But how to achieve in us this sanctity which is so varied and multiform? Not only through prayer that turns us to our saints, but also with their assuming in the greatness of their spirit.

We should unite ourselves to the saints participating in their same life, in their love. For this, more than praying to the saints, we pray with their same prayers and we are with them in adoring God.

The spirit of the Community is the spirit of the saints: the contemplation of divine perfection.

Chapter Nine

THE DEAD

Contents

THE DEAD

OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE DEAD

What is the contact of people who are still living in the present life with the souls that live beyond us?

The 'beyond' implies a going outside of time, into eternity, but Purgatory forms a part of this world; the future world knows only Hell and Paradise. Purgatory is as an appendix to the earth, a vestibule to heaven; in the ancient basilicas the vestibule was always open to the plain air.

Yet through certain aspects Purgatorio belongs to the future world. In fact in it is the absolute certainty of the beatific vision, of not sinning ever again and of not losing divine grace further; even if there is there a purification that ought to end and therefore a time for the souls, there is still a just regime for those of the souls who still live in the present life an economy of faith and hope.

The theological virtue of hope is not commonly what we expect, but it is the absolute certainty of a good that you do not yet possess, but which no one can take from you, other than your sin.

There is therefore something in the souls of Purgatory that make it live on the selfsame plane as ours and something that makes it live on a different one. So much so that one can say that Purgatory is not a part of heaven, but rather of earth.

What therefore is the relationship that we have with them?

Effectively, not having a body any more, on the natural plane their communion with us seems very difficult, because it is through the body that we communicate amongst ourselves and with the world. To the measure that they belong to this world and in which way they can communicate with us and we with them is extremely difficult to say.

One thing remains certain, outside of all guesswork: for us Christians contact with the dead is assured not only by the teaching, but by the life itself of the Church that asks for prayers for them and applies itself, independently even of our particular intention in the prayers for the dead, the fruit of its own prayer, of its own adoration.

On the other hand the Church teaches us that some saints and some particular souls have had a communion with these souls that is extremely intense and great, that perhaps may not reveal a participation in the life of Heaven, but the sense that would more or less continue, on a plane of grace, a relationship like that which was lived by them when they were here on earth.

For the rest, that the experience of the purging souls be similar to ours, is shown also in the best treatise on Purgatory, written by St Catherine of Genoa which is a transcription of her interior experience here below. She has the pure, clearest perception of what is the life of the souls after death, in what she suffers in her purification, which is in their life here on earth: it is still an experience of joy, of torment, and experience of faith and of hope, of humility and of peace, of abandonment.

But what differentiates the life of the purging soul from ours, and which our interior life cannot bring itself to continuous concern, to continuous enriching or impoverishing of a contact, of an impression that adds to the soul, mediating the body, from the exterior world. The soul instead, losing the body, is now closed in its interior life: in memories, in all that the soul had received through the body, But it has only this life, no other. To the measure that we can live an interior life, we can live the life that even these souls live.

Their interior life - as with those who die in the grace of God - now is preserved from further falling, so that essentially their life remains a life of grace because they cannot commit other sins. Nothing exterior can change their interior life. But it could be that their interior life is quite poor in faith, that those at the beginning have a faith weaker than mine: this is not to say they ought to have a pure and perfect faith and hope and that with the loss of the body of itself the virtues ought to grow: they remain as they are at the moment of death; but only, not having outside help, grace slowly makes that little faith and that little hope be purified. And the hope does not remain uncertain because that uncertainty depends upon our sin of incredulity.

This faith, through the fact that now the soul has no body, cannot become more luminous, cannot see God more clearly but could have its purification in the sense that you would be drawn to a wrong judgement regarding the object of your faith: but faith in its positive element, in the perception of God, remains what it is, nothing more. And at that grade, purifying itself, could then carry the soul to the beatific vision, which would be a vision to bleary eyes for a soul that has possessed little faith and little love. And it could never grow in charity: it would add nothing, just be a purification. Grace has the capacity of possessing the soul in such a way that, as in a chemical change, all that is imperfect, impure, sinful, gradually falls away and what remains are the virtues proper to the Christian in their positive sense, in that grade which the soul has achieved in the present life. Catholic theology tells us that with death the soul remains fixed for ever at that positive level to which grace has brought it. We must pay attention, therefore, to the importance our present life has!

Undoubtedly our life can be truly a great communion of love with the purging souls, but this does not imply in itself that the purging soul could be raised a grade by us, but that they could obtain the stability of a certain positive grade of virtue, of justice, of grace, of love.

We would live a in contact with the dead only on the level of grace: instead all contact from a living person and one who has passed to the other life in mortal sin is broken. Those who go to Hell break with us all contact of solidarity, even human.

Between the world here below and the world of God there is only the relation of a supernatural charity: the contact then with the souls of the dead means the participation of all of us in one sole mystery, theirs is a totally interior life, in which we are present, of which we are a part. In our interior life, in fact, does not all humanity already live that we have met, is there not the presence of so many people whom we have loved, whom we love, of so many persons who have made us suffer or to whom we have brought some punishment?

There is no doubt, therefore, that the life of those who have passed beyond means a presence of ourselves in their soul. The life of those who have passed is not only a faith and a hope, it is also a presence of this world, not in direct contact, but in the memory of a passed experience that always now is the content of their actual life.

We remain always present to them, more now that they are dead than when they were alive. In fact, living, I can, in my experience, conserve the memory of each of my contacts with people, of my relation with them: yet there are distractions which give rise to making new acquaintances so that these previous memories in some way are muted, no longer rising up into the first place, are not the immediate content of my experience. For them instead, not being to us more than distractions, the presence of the past is alive, is all the content of life. This does not favour a neighbourly relation with them, yet it is a primary point that we ought to consider.

We can think or not think about our dead; we can let ourselves forget them, they cannot instead forget us because for them it would be not to live any more; not being immortal they would lose the memory of themselves, because their life does not grow with new experiences. With the mind the soul remains fixed in that realization of its own power which it so used during its earthly live, when the soul was in 'form corporis', the form of the body.

We need to consider instead the greatest fact of our presence in the world of the dead, rather than how much they could be present to us.

Given this aspect the life of the dead is much higher than our present life on the natural plane: this we can ourselves understand, not speaking yet of grace. The positive side of our state is that we are always creating new experiences, the negative side is that, as these increase, in some way they mutilate or put aside other experiences, other presences.To them instead we are always present. The act of death makes it so that all human experience, all life, is gathered into the sole presence of all humanity that the soul has loved, of all memories, of all that it has lived and still lives, free in whatever way from danger of a succession that could enrich it more, but which, in enriching it, could also distance it, in the present life, from the past. There is no longer here for them the past. All this is a thing that we ought to consider.

But if we are present to their spirit through their past experience, what rapport could be now lived with us who live in time, in a succession of experiences, in our progress and continuous decline that could not make us more equal to those who were here yesterday, who no longer themselves do what at one time had made them known, loved and for what they suffered?

This contact is extremely difficult to determine. It could be that God, through some kind of action, puts them in communication with us in the present moment. Can we think that our prayer and our affection could put us in communion with them despite our inability to make an impression on their soul, of entering into their consciousness?

The separated soul no longer has the organ for entering in communion with the world or with myself or with God: it remains closed. It cannot now enter directly into communion with God: a direct communion with God is the beatific vision, is Paradise; it is always through this organ of the body that I can have a revelation of God, whether He comes through Creation or through history or through my internal sentiments.

Can this contact truly begin between us and them? It is a difficult contact to define, but it is a contact. Is there truly something in the greatest depths of ourselves that remains unchangeable with the increase of the years? Are we are only an accumulation of discontinuous experiences, only a continuous passing and phantasmagorical imaginings, of impressions, without any unchangeable content? Was what you were twenty years ago something completely different, absolutely and essentially different, from what you are now? In the depths of the soul one meets oneself, in a profondity but which flees from our consciousness because we instead are conscious of a fluctuation of exterior images. The union comes precisely in such intimacy that is it impossible for us, who live in time, to have a clear, determined conscience. If ever we do, it is very vague. We feel, despite this, that our dead are with us: more we cannot say.

It is a bond that cannot be expressed. in fact, in an experience: it is the love that is born of a soul for a soul independently of time, of space, of the conditions placed on it in the present life, of the impression which arise from stable contacts through things, and which has its only foundation in the 'quid' , the 'whatness' that in each one of us remains unchangeable.

But is this all the communion of the dead with us, the contact of those who have passed over with the living? That there is some contact between us and them that truly can establish a communion of life, if not fully consciously at least more richly, more livingly than in some metaphysical way?

But if we speak of those who have passed over and of our communion with them, we mean always to refer here to the level of grace in which they are established for ever and which gives them the capacity to enter into communion with us just as we with them through Christ.

Christ is truly a mediator not only between the soul and God, but also between soul and soul. Are we not made all part of the same body? In the one Church, which unites the saints of Heaven, the souls of Purgatory and the militant souls here below on Earth through the one body of Christ, all the souls live the one communion of love through prayer, through the Requiem, through the Mass, which is the Christian mystery.

All prayers finally centre upon the Mass: they are neither a preparation for it, nor a derivation from it; and all Christian life is the Mass, it is the centre of life, not only of the sensible universe, but also of the spiritual universe and this also for the purging souls.

The Mass that comes to be celebrated here on earth is the central nucleus to which all souls are gathered, in which all are refound, and from which derives every grace. The centre is Christ, the circumference is the whole world, visible and invisible. Only the damned are excluded from it.

The Church thus offers to the purging soul the possibility of a mediation for entering in communion with humankind. Humankind cannot use this mediation, nor ever pray for the souls, even if living in the Church perhaps they could not be prayed for: but that would not take from the purging soul a supernatural charity that maintains contact with God, but also with us, because charity has no limits in itself. It could be minimized in intensity, but even the least amount of charity renders each soul one to all the Church purging and militant and one to God. This is enough for the purging soul to be able to enter in communion with us and pray for each one of us.

This communion with us is realized through the prayer in which we ought continually to invoke the charity of the souls, a charity which becomes ever more pure. In fact those in charity become now more pure; even if not greater, they are readier to us.

Those in Christ know our needs and come through us. We enter through Christ into contact with them! Now they can help us according to their own grade of charity.

And we need to take account of another fact: how our life would be populated, would be grand, immense. I live in a relation of continual love, pure, also with the dead who have not been part of the visible Church, but we have all the reasons to hope that they may be saved in Purgatory, and that they were saved belonging to the Church.

In the Kingdom of Christ we enter in communication with the purging souls through prayer, explicitly, but also implicitly: remembering them.

What clarity, what continuity of life, how marvellously united in the life universal, in Christ! Through the mystery of Christ all there is of creation becomes interior to me. In charity I can live a oneness of love and life with all beings: angels, saints, purging souls, those living here below on earth.

Let us live this communion of love!

On the part of Christ, mediator of this communion of love, there is no limit; therefore our communion with the saints, with the dead can be each day more perfect to the measure that our love in Christ becomes more perfect.

OUR DEAD

In the Introduction to the List of the Dead of the C.F.D.'s first twenty years we read these words of Father's:

The true Church is that of Heaven and also the true Community is that of Heaven.

We do not only write of remembering our dead, but of feeling them present, of living in communion with them. But they are still so present in the Community while they are now living in Heaven in perfect charity and it is their presence which assures the Church.

God makes Himself present to us in those who are closer to us, because they are more proportioned to our littleness and because they are also the sacrament of God.

Our dead ought to be remembered each one, because all have told us something and assured us that God is with us because they are with God. One who dies only binds with this chain of brotherliness what the Community has established between us, assuring even us.

To remember our dead would be to say to be sure of our salvation; it is the memory of a grace already received, because we have received it in them. Don't wait for something tomorrow that would have been and is not because of your sins, but rather think thus: 'If God has given something to Vittoria Pacchioni, or whoever, He has given it also to me: how can I be separated from her and she be separated from me?

The bonds which unite us to our dead depend on Consecration; just as we would wish it to be of the Community, the gift made to one is made to each of us.

We read the book remembering the dead. These will speak to us of their lives, of their contribution to the Community; being for us examples, inciting us and establishing a more living bond not only with those whom we have known, but even with those whom we have not known in this life.

We will not forget the dead that God has given us for ever. these teach us how to respond to God and above all how God is generous to them who are Consecrated to Him. It is marvellous to remember the deaths of each one: all have loved the Community and the Community has become their last greeting, their last breath of love and recognition.

We cannot be afraid; in Paradise this is not forgetten. Their love is now more perfect and efficacious.

We pray for them, but we ask prayers of them also. We ought to imitate them in their love for the Community, in their fidelity, in their humility; we ought to live with them to merit dying like them; in serenity, in joy, in love.

To the measure that we maintain a bond with those who have preceded us, the gate is open even for us, because the Community has already taken possesion even of Heaven.

We ought to feel our dead present and living through us, not so much as a presence which depends only on a fragile, weak memory, dulled from what we had possessed of them, so much as the certainty of a mysterious presence, sacramental, assured of the presence of Christ Himself.

When we speak of Christ we do not speak so much of Jesus of Nazareth; the real presence is that of the 'Christus totus', the whole Christ; there where Christ is present, there are also Mary, the Apostles, all the Saints, all our dead. In the Communion with Christ I live my total communion with the saints and with the dead. These are here with us, are the world of the spirit in which and through which we live.

Truly one has evermore the impression that the truly alive are those who are dead. Their sin is cancelled: of them remains only what is positive, true, indestructible, that is the grace that they have possessed, the Communion with God that they have realized.

Now we see in them all that makes them truly lovable and for ever truly neighbouring us. Our Communion with them is not made difficult by their defects of temperament, by their lack or imperfections of charity; nothing more separates us from them, they are close to us, we are united to them in a perfect Communion.

They now live in pure charity and we cannot live with them ourselves unless we cross over to that divine world of perfect charity, in which only love lives.

The Community has always had a particular care for the brothers and sisters who have passed to the other life. From the beginning was felt the need to pray for their souls and with the living memory, through the readings of the orbituaries published in the Notiziario. From our Constitution we read, 'On the occasion of the death of each member of the Community a Mass shall be celebrated under the care of the Centre, one of the Family and one of the group to which they belonged. It is required that each member participate in the Requiem Mass on the occasion of the death of each member of the Family (if they cannot be present, they should fulfill this personally when possible).

On the anniversary of the date of death then, the Family should celebrate a Requiem Mass and all the Community unite on that day in prayer during the celebrations of Lauds and of Vespers, with the specific record written on the booklets of the dead, which each Consecrated person must have. We seek to follow our brothers and sisters in life, and shall we not do so in death, when there is now the greatest need of our help? Death does not interrupt our Communion with them; rather it makes it more true. Our relationship to the purging souls, to brothers and sisters who now can do nothing for themselves, but only receive the spiritual benefit of the Eucharistic Sacrifice and of the indulgences which the Church concedes, not least of our prayers, is an act of necessary and fundamental charity.

And if now we pray for them, also if personally we have not known all of them, what consolation it ought to be for us to know that fifty, a hundred years from now there shall be those who - while our grandchildren and the grandchildren of our grandchildren have forgotten our memory - will pray the Lord for our souls' requiem!

Chapter Ten

THE ECCLESIAL SPIRIT OF THE C.F.D. AND THE RAPPORT WITH

THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL

a) The biblico-liturgical spirituality of the C.F.D. and its ecumenical spirit manifested the necessity for a return to the original sources of Christianity even before the Second Vatican Council in which the Church became conscious of the fundamental orientation of the Spirit in its womb. From the derives one of the most important principles for the Community.

On the one hand the religious movements of recent years provoked the Council, on the other they received from the Council not only a canonization, but a new form for expressing themselves, a new force of vitality for action in the Church.

Now the first thing that is required for us of the Community seems to be this: to be attentive to all that the Council has said and what it wishes to do in the Church of God, aware of all the arrangements, of the decrees and of the Spirit which has animated the Council itself and which has given to Christians a more living sense of the Church. If there has been in this a complementary Church doctrine, as could be said about the doctrine expressed in the First Vatican Council, not only because it spoke of the Pope and here it speaks of Bishops, but because there the Church was seen as on high, as if dropping from the sky, as an authority imposed upon us; here instead, other than its Bishops, it is insisting on the laity and on the importance that we have in the teaching of the Church, the concept of the people of God. The Church is seen, one could say, from below. This seems to us very important. It is the true sense of the Church that the Christian has acquired and which ought to flourish always.

The Church is not a hierarchy which imposes itself, it is the Church to which each of us belongs. Whoever is in the Church ought to live the life of the Church. No one is purely passive, no one only dependent, but each one ought to express in themself the mystery of the Church to which mystery they belong and of which they are a part.

Therefore each one of the Community ought to consider the relationship that they have with the Church, in such a way as to live the spiritual life no longer as only a search of their own individual perfection (devotionalism, pietism) but as needing the integration of the organism itself of the Church of God, as needing the contact with brothers and sisters, as the sacramental function in the Body of Christ: to live the spiritual life as the life of the Church.

It seems to us that the Council ought to say also to us that the Church should be always more living in our lives, that we should feel ourselves always more bound to a relations with it, not only of dependence, but bound to live a relation also of love through which I can identify myself to the Church. I ought to live its mystery, to live in the Church, to live of the Church.

Love and obedience express themselves in but one sole form, in the freedom itself of the Christian, because in Christianity obedience is the opposite of being against freedom, it is the expression of the freedom of love.

But from the Council we could have understood something more: not only what the Church expressed from on high as authority, but as the mystery of a God who wishes the salvation of all: thus on the one hand it is easy to define the boundaries of the Church, but on the other it is extremely difficult, even, impossible, to define them, because it embraces all things not only in the first act but, mysteriously perhaps, even in the second act.

And this is the ecumenical character which we have discovered in the Church of today.

From a new knowledge of the Church has come not only a rigid defense of its confines but also a new opening in meeting with all the religious values of the world, an ecumenical consciousness of the world.

And from the Council we have learned even the necessity of a return to the Gospel.

The freeing of legal structuring and of too rigid conceptual formulations has given to the life of the Church a quality of greater obedience to the action of the Spirit, and that asks of the Church and of Christians a more conscious return.

Each reform of the Church always brings a return to the origins, to evangelism, to the 'unglossed' Gospel for the needy out of poverty and out of simplicity.

These ought to be essential aspects of our spirituality.

We ought therefore to have the sense, not only of a dependence upon, but of a greater union with the Church, the need to realize its mystery.

Whatever thing we do, we exercize an ecclesial function, because in each of our activities we participate and continue the mystery itself of Christ in His revealing function, as king and priest. And this is done not only by bishops, by priests, but even by the laity: to a greater or less extent and in the proper place, each exercises this function.

But that is not enough. Through a new conception of the Church a relation is also required with the universe, an ecumenical character. And this derives from the fact that the Church is not defined only in the legal aspect in which we are accustomed to recognize it: the Church is already the entire universe, called to be part in the first act, but also in the second act, mysteriously.

We know that this is extended from here to there in its visible confines; it can already penetrate the world, raising it, the leaven in the midst.

This we ought to feel, live and seek to realize in our spirituality.

The Community would root itself in the tradition - for this we often refer to monastic spirituality - and to be at the same time also a new movement, living, listening to the needs of a new soul and obedient to the action of the Spirit which today leads the Church towards new ways.

The monastic movements rising up today ought to interpret the signs of the times; to seek those which give to souls the possibility of realizing what are the fundamental aspirations of the religious life.

These seem the fundamental directives of a spiritual action in the womb of the monastic movements that rise up today: continuity with the tradition and a moving ahead in faithfulness to the evangelical virtues, in a certain evangelism, in an eschatological Christianity, detached in some way from the world, in hope, in poverty, in simplicity above all.

Ours is a monastic spirituality inasmuch as we return to the greatest masters of ancient spirituality, but we do not wish with this to renounce renewal; also we feel greatly bound to be obedient and docile to the action of the Spirit which leads us ahead. The continuity with the tradition of the past assures us also of the continuity of a procedure in advance, a progress but which requires of us faithfulness to that fundamental directive that we have recognised in the action of the Spirit in the Church and which always implies greater fidelity, a greater spirit of poverty, of simplicity, and of humility.

The Community lives the ecumenical spirit in embracing all people, all states, all conditions of life, giving to all a monastic spirituality: ordering our religious life for God, but recognising true brotherliness binding us to all.

We wish to live brotherly charity in a real way, without the defense that the religous life places on a concrete communion with people of all human conditions. But the fundamental task of monastic spirituality cannot ever be just of service to one's brothers, to the sick, the poor, the old, but rather the testimony to a perfect life, the waiting for the celestial life, continuous prayer.

The task of monastic spirituality should be eschatological; should be the task of continual prayer, should be the task of the Beatitudes. In fact the Community suggests all this even in the formulae of prayer that it requires, most of all in the programme of our spiritual life: The Beatitudes. These have an eminently eschatological character and require an uprooting of people from the condition of worldly life to testify to the presence of the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth.

Our Community implies rather a more profound theological conception of the Church as mystery, in such a way that each one of us feels ourself truly the hert of the universe, in identifying ourself with all the Church. Not to live any longer our spiritual life like a solitary seeking individual perfection. Each one of us feels ourself truly members of one Body, inserted and living in this Body and through this Body, in such a way as to identify ourselves, to the extreme limit, with the whole body: one only is the spouse and each of us is the only bride to the measure in which is realized one's own Christian vocation.

But to live this would be to say that through this is realized the evangelical spirituality as son of the Father, even, that each one of us is the Only Begotten Son.

To live this life what must happen? Fidelity to the spiritual tradition, that is first of all fidelity to study and to meditation of sacred books that are the foundation of all spiritual traditions and most of all of those texts which are distinguished for striking most the contemplative note. Then, as regards the spiritual tradition, must come about the knowledge and love of the great masters of ancient spirituality more than of the modern: Benedict, Cassian, Bernard, the Fathers of the Desert. . . .

b) We who are consecrated to God in the Community ought always to be more aware that, as all are born of God in the Church, so all in the Church tend to God. All human and Church doctrines end in God's teaching. All roads, all human activity and of the Church towards humankind, has only as its goal that of divine praise. All end in God as all find in God their beginning.

Also the Second Vatican Council ought to tell us how we can live a contemplative vocation while living in the world, in history, because we do not wish to live a contemplative life far away from humanity. In fact we have declared that our vocation is to testify to that of God without separating ourselves from the world; but truly living this human vocation, integrally, we realize that which the Council had seen so clearly as the earthly tasks of the Christian.

Here is the teaching that the Church gives us at this time: 1) Remain faithful to the unchangeable truth; 2) Incarnate according to the needs of the times this Christian truth, realizing that which the Council indicates to us as needs not only of the times but also of God.

How can we turn away from Sacred Scripture, if we wish to remain Christians? What we cannot do, if we wish to respond to the needs of the times, is to turn away from the documents of the Magisterium of the Church which the Church places in our hands. Certainly, the Magisterium does not stop these shifting dogmas which imply a continuous enrichment for speculative theology, but it is also true that this changing cannot happen except according to the directives and in an explication of this doctrine that more or less implicitly is already contained in these documents.

We, whom God has made come about in this time, we, whom God has wished to be spectators and to a great part, actors in the ecclesial event, feel ourselves greatly bound to do just what the unchangeable truth makes present in these documents, if it be truly the truth which is even the content of our teaching, the light that guides our religious life, through that Christian testimony that we ought to bring today to the world.

c) Each member of the C.F.D., through living like the leaven in the lump of the renewal of the Church, ought to tend to the loving and humble renunciation in a daily 'conversio morum', a changing of habit.

'To live in the world like yeast in the bread'.

This expression was the argument of one of our retreats of perhaps twenty years ago and was then the expression of an unknown woman who had initiated a religious movement, the movement of the Little Sisters.

Today we find this same expression canonized in the ecclesiastical Magisterium for defining the religious vocation proper for the lay person in the bosom of the Church.

This is to say that our vocation implies for us a remaining in the world, a living the life of the other brothers and sisters, a solidarity with all through the transfiguring of all human conditions, of all earthly values, through the reconsecration for God of all these things.

We hold, as the Church has always held in its historical tradition, that monasticism cannot be separated from the Christian assembly, that is of the laity. Monks and nuns, as monastics, are lay persons who live to the end their own Christian vocation: they are not as a half 'clericus'. The monk and nun is a witness, that we are those who live the vocation of the layperson, right to the final consequence, right to the needs of a full holiness.

Today it cannot be said that monks and nuns, commonly understood, are laypeople. They are considered to belong to the religious and thus not to be any more simply laypeople. But we instead live like laypeople the fullness of the Christian life, the vocation of holiness, the proper mission of the layperson, which is that of bringing back into the bosom of the Church all human values.

The function of the lay person today is extremely important. If we want the liturgy to have anew all its sanctifying power for the formation to holiness of all the Christian people, it is necessary that the lay participation know how to lead back to Christ all the human values and that the liturgy become as if a spontaneous natural mode of expressing itself, the supreme flower, the supreme fruit of this human life that in Christianity cannot to be other than supernatural, that life of grace.

Christian life is not other than charity, than love, a love that requires a progressive purificaiton. One cannot love with all one's heart while the heart is divided: therefore the need to acquire that purity of heart which alone can allow responding to the needs of divine love which wants of us all our heart, all our soul, all our strength.

Ours is the conversion from a relationship with things, with ideas, with the truth, with the impersonal goodness, to a personal relationship with Him who loves you and communicates Himself to you, Jesus the Lord.

Today, here, God has entrusted the world to me: I ought to guard over it; through me this wave of youthfulness, this freshness of love, ought to invade the world, shake all the souls. My conversion ought to operate upon others and through this conversion I and the others ought to reacquire a youthfulness, to live the renewal of the intimacy of our hearts.

And now therfore the conversion of Christianity is not a fact tied only to time. Our Lord began his own preaching with these words: 'Change yourselves!' St Paul, as at the end of his apostolic journeying, repeated the exhortation made by Jesus. It has not altered because humanity has need of living always in the hearing of the same word: 'Change yourselves. Renew yourselves in the intimacy of your heart'.

Change yourself! It is the word which begins the New Testament and it is also the word which closes it.

And from this conversion is born the renewal, and it is clear what this is, because if we were to live such an inheritance, we would not speak further of a renewing.

Christianity, to the measure that we may realize it, does not make us live a story which tends towards death, but a life which tends towards the original purity, towards the everlasting newness, the eternal youthfulness of God.

This is the renewal which we ought to live in an everlasting conversion to God: and it is in this renewal that the soul no longer knows the passing of the years, but rather, slowly as the conversion becomes more true, more intimate and more profound, it lives a youthfulness always more full, a richness because of life, but simply, but purely, always more luminously and grandly.

This is the Christian life.

If we wish to live the apostolic message we ought, therefore, to welcome the divine messenger, turning ourselves to God in a conversion of being through feeling ourselves renewed by Him. We can ourselves be renewed in fact to the measure that we welcome the invitation: it is the invitaiton to the wedding feast, the union with Him. We turn ourselves to Him who calls us, we unite ourselves to Him in a way that day by day draws us always closer to His divine presence. To the measure that we would live this renewal, we would live also the immersion of all being in a youthfulness always more pure, more joyous, always more luminous and more living.

UT SITIS FILII PATRIS VESTRI

Become Your Father's Sons and Daughters

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