2001: The Real Odyssey

On the Solemnity of the Epiphany this year, Pope John Paul II published the Apostolic Letter Novo Millennio Ineunte (At the Beginning of the New Millennium), with his evaluation of the significance of the Jubilee Year just concluded and his hopes about the mission of the Church in the new century. Looking ahead into the future, the Pope recalls the words of Christ to Peter: “Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for the catch” (Lk 5:4). Even though the apostles had caught nothing by themselves, they followed the command of the Lord and caught an enormous amount of fish. The impossible had happened because of their obedience, not because of their efforts. Although this letter, like most documents of this type, covers a wide range of topics (everyone wants his or her concerns mentioned!), its basic purpose is to encourage us not to be intimidated by our misery and incapacity, but to face the future with the confidence that all we need for our mission to be fruitful is to be obedient to the Lord’s command to “launch out into the deep.” The letter repeatedly insists that the point of departure for a successful mission is the encounter with Christ. This always comes first. Without this event of encounter, all our efforts and plans will be of no avail. The encounter with the attraction of Christ puts us in an interior posture of amazement and wonder, and this wonder is expressed as praise. It is this desire to praise the Lord that motivates the mission of the Church. It is praise that characterizes the authentic response of faith to the revelation of God in Christ. “Christianity is grace,” the Pope insists. It is the “surprise” at a God who enters into human history itself through an event. This event remains a present factor throughout history, as an ongoing “today” in which our limitations are surpassed and our sins overcome by this grace. John Paul II goes over the most important experiences and events of this year, as occasions of encounters with Christ that will now shape the mission of the Church in the new “today.” The permanence of the encounter as the “energy generator,” so to speak, of the mission, is seen as the enduring contemplation of the “face of Christ.” That is, the experience of the real presence of Christ in history, accessible to our consciousness, is the absolutely essential factor in the design of pastoral plans to guide the mission of the Church. Without this, pastoral plans degenerate into useless projects of empty activism. And so he writes: the new dynamism that should characterize the Church’s mission is based on the “contemplation of the face of Christ; contemplated in its historical coordinates and in its mystery, welcomed in its multiple presence in the Church and in the world, acknowledged as the sense of history and light of our way.” The world today doesn’t need more words. It needs to see Christ, and we should present ourselves as those who have seen him, who have seen his face, his real and concrete presence in specific moments and events (its “historical coordinates”). Contemplating the face of Christ means returning to the event of encounter by what Fr. Giussani calls “memory,” which is not an intellectual recalling, but the experience of his presence in the concrete circumstances of the moment. The Pope in fact quotes one of Fr. Giussani’s favorite hymns: “After two thousand years of these events (in the life of Jesus) the Church lives them as if they had taken place today. In the face of Christ, she his spouse contemplates her treasure and joy. Jesu dulcis memoria, dans vera cordis gaudia: how sweet is the memory of Jesus, source of true joy in the heart!” The goal of all pastoral programs that are truly based on the encounter with Christ and the experience of wonder and praise in the contemplation of the attraction of his face is sanctity. The Pope sees sanctity as a share in the reality of the mystery of the Church herself in all its dimensions, and for this reason, the path of sanctity cannot be separated from the reality of communion grasped, above all, through prayer. Sanctity is learned through a “pedagogy of prayer,” “of life as prayer,” and “our Christian communities must become authentic “schools of prayer,” where the encounter with Christ is expressed in communion and sustained by the Eucharist and the sacraments. In the school of prayer we learn the “primacy of grace,” namely, living the truth that without Christ we can do absolutely nothing. It is only because of Christ’s command that we “launch out into the deep.” The path to the future, insists the Pope, requires a “spirituality of communion.” Those of us in Communion and Liberation find in the Pope’s words a stunning confirmation of the profound correspondence between Father Giussani’s charism–our way of living the mission of the Church launched by the event of the encounter with Christ in our companionship–and the needs of the Church as grasped by the Holy Father. We understand and rejoice when he writes, “To make of the Church the house and the school of community is the great challenge before us in the millennium that begins if we wish to be faithful to the designs of God and respond also to the profound hopes of the world.” We thank God for this letter of our Holy Father, and pledge to him and our bishops our ardent desire to help the Church in this, the real odyssey of 2001.