Movements

ECCLESIAL MOVEMENTS
AND NEW COMMUNITIES
IN THE CHURCH’S MISSION:
PRIORITIES AND PROSPECTS
Cardinal Angelo Scola, Patriarch of Venice

1. Sent by the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Every realization of ecclesial life–as the two-thousand-year history of the People of God testifies–is characterized by the on-going re-proposal of the personal and communitarian event of the encounter with Jesus Christ.
A fundamental element of John Paul II’s magisterium concerning the movements bears out this affirmation: “I have had many occasions to stress that in the Church there is no contrast or opposition between the institutional dimension and the charismatic dimension. Both are co-essential to the divine constitution of the Church founded by Jesus, because they operate together to make present the mystery of Christ and His salvific work in the world.”
The institutional and the charismatic are dimensions of every realization of the Church, both the Universal Church and the local Church: the diocese and the parishes, the classical aggregations of the faithful and the ecclesial movements and new communities. Each one of these realities, according to its own specific nature, lives in these two dimensions. It is therefore misleading, and in the end mistaken, to reduce the movements to the ambit of the purely charismatic dimension and to relegate dioceses, parishes and classical aggregations to the institutional sphere.
Two pastoral corollaries
> Following a charism enables a person to rediscover the objectivity of his own Baptism, which incorporates us into Christ and makes us members of each other. If the charismatic dimension is co-essential, then objectively whoever encounters an authentically ecclesial movement has an integral experience of the Church. At the same time, the always-contingent nature of the charism of the founder, and even more of the movement arising from it, must put people on guard against the risk, albeit indirect, to impose them as models for the life of the Church as a whole. A harmful expression of this risk can arise from the apparently generous attempt to create, either de facto or de iure, a general organization for coordinating the new movements, as if the problem of ecclesial maturity, of which John Paul II spoke, could be solved by organizing the new movements centrally through operative plans in order to then dialogue with the dioceses, the parishes and the classic aggregations of the faithful.
> No “pastoral strategy” can of itself generate the holy People of God. Pastors must resist particularly the temptation, understandably induced by urgent pastoral necessities, of conceiving the movements as “work forces.” They should refrain from imposing plans and pastoral programs so rigid as to be mortifying for the various charisms. On the other hand, the movements themselves must be keen to take up the pastoral proposals of the bishops according to their own specific nature.

2. The mission in the Third Millennium. Essential conditions to which the movements and new communities must remain faithful if they want the original gratuitousness of their experiences to become permanent sources of the free adherence of all their members to the encounter with the Lord and an appropriate way for the mission to our fellow men.
> The first of these conditions, by far the most urgent one, is the actual presence of the personal and communitarian “ecclesial subject,” as a place alive with the fascination of Jesus Christ for every man. The first thing needed is people and communities intent on witnessing the relevance of the encounter with Christ for every person’s elementary experience. This “care” for the subject makes it possible to recuperate concretely the elementary fact, today often forgotten, that life, in itself, is a vocation. Every Christian community is required to promote an ongoing education in the faith understood as the vital criterion with which to approach the whole of reality. In the life of a Christian, the Pauline expression, “Examine everything, and keep what is good” (1 Thess 5:21) because “everything is yours, but you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s” (1 Cor 3:22-23) cannot be something automatic, but requires an organic work of education. In Christian education it is impossible to separate “what” Jesus teaches from “how” He teaches it.
> The Christian subject is called to witness to the event encountered, in other words to stand up and be seen in his following of Jesus Christ in the footsteps of the charism in which he shares and which is objectively guaranteed by authority. This witness, an essential condition for the authenticity of every charism, is demanded in a radical way by the inevitable death of the founders of movements and new communities. In the risk of personal witness, members become more and more “children” and therefore faithful to the grace received: children and not merely imitators.
> In the mission of the movements and new communities, there is no single road that all these realities must follow. This demands courage and patience in looking for new forms. In some of these realities develops the awareness that following the charism means simply to express in a persuasive way the normal belonging to the Church. Movements of this kind wish to educate in the “sacramental logic” proper of Christian existence as such. This makes it possible for people to take up the conditions of life common to all the faithful, without emphasizing specific forms and organisms of commitment, of witness and of organization. This kind of orientation favors a conception and practice of movement understood as a place of Christian fraternity and friendship, having the flexibility to adapt and work effectively in all times and places.
> The mission is not first and foremost a specific activity, above and beyond day-to-day life. The person himself, fascinated by the beauty of the encounter with Christ in virtue of a persuasive charism, communicates this beauty joyfully in the concrete factors of daily existence–affection, work, and rest. The Church’s mission, as we know, has no other boundaries than those of the world itself. This mission must reach the point of showing the anthropological and social implications of the newness generated by Baptism and made fascinating by the following of the charism shared in the Church’s life.
The debate over what is meant by “religion” and “secularism,” at least in Europe and the United States, is significant in this regard. On one hand, there are those who absolutize the relationship between the citizen and the state, restricting every religious or cultural belonging or identity to the private sphere. On the other hand, we are witnessing an emphasis on cultural, religious and ethnical “differences” to an extent that makes communication impossible. The anthropology that is born of the encounter with the Risen Christ, precisely because it respects the specific nature of the elementary experience, makes it possible to avoid being trapped in these positions. Man is constitutionally religious and is able to welcome the whole of reality that, in its turn, is knowable in its essential outlines. Movements and new communities are called therefore to give integral witness that reaches these implications. Only in this way will they be faithful to the essentially missionary nature of Christianity.