church
milan

“God Needs Us”
On September 25th, Cardinal Angelo Scola was welcomed by 25,000 faithful as the new Pastor of the one of the biggest dioceses in the world. He invited everyone to come to terms with “the real crisis–the separation between faith and life.”

by Andrea Tornielli

“Christ is someone unknown, forgotten, absent for a large part of contemporary culture.” This dramatic diagnosis, set down in writing in 1934 by Giovanni Battista Montini, 20 years before becoming Archbishop of Milan, was re-echoed on Sunday, September 25th, by his fourth successor, Angelo Scola, on the day of his official entrance as Pastor of the great diocese of St. Ambrose.
Greeted in the Cathedral Square by over 25,000 faithful, welcomed by regional and city authorities, Scola received from the hands of his predecessor, Dionigi Tettamanzi, the “heavy” pastoral staff that once belonged to St. Charles Borromeo. In his first homily, he indicated, in the “lucid and prophetic diagnosis of the state of the Christian life of the Baptized,” pronounced by Montini in the 1930s, the main challenge for Milanese Christians. “The young Montini had a very clear conviction,” Scola explained: “A Christianity that does not invest all forms of daily human life, in other words, that does not become culture, is no longer capable of communicating itself. Hence, the process that was to lead inexorably to separation between faith and life,” and “was to lead inexorably to mass abandonment of Christian practice, to the great detriment of personal and communitarian life in the Church and in civil society.”

Cool and distant. Scola recalled that in the 20 years of his experience as bishop, he had had “painful and growing confirmation of how up-to-date this diagnosis remains, above all, for men and women of intermediate generations,” who seem weighed down with what Cesare Pavese called “the art of living.” Normally, “they are not against the Christian meaning of existence, but they cannot see the use of it for their daily lives and for that of their dear ones.”
Hence, the urgent need to go back to the announcement of Christ “unknown” and “forgotten,” the need that Benedict XVI in particular notes, and that represents one of the key points of his pontificate, so much so that he has created a department of the Roman Curia dedicated to the New Evangelization. Scola’s first homily as Archbishop of Milan makes it clear that it will be one of the priorities of his episcopate. There are no excuses, he explained, not even that of the “disconcerting transition we are immersed in,” for not facing up to the real crisis, the separation between faith and life, faith reduced to a habit, incapable of transforming itself into culture and incarnating in all aspects of concrete personal life.
Half a century ago, Montini, to the cool, distant Milanese, belonging to that world of culture, fashion, and finance, and to part of that working class world that seemed to have become impermeable to the Gospel, said, “Come and listen.” “All the same,” Scola explained, “this ‘come and listen’ presupposes on the part of Christians a coming close to men and women in all ambits of their lives.” As Jesus “went toward concrete man, so as to share his condition and his need in all things, our only intention is to make Christ, light of the world, shine forth on the face of the Church.” This is therefore an invitation to focus upon announcement and witness to everyone, in every circumstance and environment, overcoming “every temptation of adaptation to the mentality of this world,” and accepting the Cross that humiliated Jesus. “Our condition is that of not having a fixed abode here below.”

“He wanted witnesses.” In order to communicate with men, Scola went on, “Christ wanted to have need of man, of witnesses. He decided to have need of me, of you, of each one of us. Here lies the wonder of Christ’s grace which exalts human freedom.”
At the end of the celebration, in the concluding remarks, the new Archbishop, after paying homage to the Pope, wished to recall his parents (the day had begun in Malgrate, the town of his birth, in the cemetery, where they are buried along with his elder brother); the priests he knew during his infancy and youth; Fr. Giussani, “a true genius of Christian education;” Hans Urs von Balthasar; and Blessed John Paul II. Finally, his wish “for our Milan, enlightened metropolis, hard-working and hospitable,” was: “Don’t lose sight of God!”