FOURTH CIRCULAR LETTER: PROPHECY
Dear confreres.
Having just closed the Christmas season and celebrated all provincial chapters, we continue our journey of reflection in preparation for the General Chapter.
Regarding the particular topics selected for the Chapter, it remains for our reflection the topic of the prophecy of our Guanellian religious life. I am confident that on this important issue also, you will continue to give your contributions, reflections and proposals in helping the General Council to prepare the Instrumentum Laboris of the chapter.
We would be very grateful if you can send us to mid-February the answers to the questions that we have formulated on the topic. This will give us the opportunity to prepare on time and submit to all the confreres at least the outline of the Instrumentum Laboris.
Certainly, on the subject of the prophecy of religious life you had a chance to read many sources, particularly on the occasion of the year of consecrated life, especially Pope Francis’ interventions and the three letters of the Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life, 'Rejoice!' 'Keep Watch!' and 'Contemplate'.
As an incentive for your reflection I propose also the following two texts:
Consecrated life: God's prophecy on the world, by Fr. Luigi Gaetani, President of CISM (Italian Council of Major Superiors).
A fruitful prophecy ad intra, by the Minister General of the Friars Minor, which can be read in various languages by doing these steps: - Go to Site ‘Vidimus Dominum’ – choose the language (top right) – check Documents and USG – Click the above text.
Confreres and communities are free to use other sources for their reflection.
What we ask is that everyone should answer the questionnaire present in the text that we offer…
Reflection on the theme of Prophecy
I repeat what I have said in the first circular letter when presenting the themes of our 20th CG about prophecy: “We accept with enthusiasm the invitation of Pope Francis who calls religious life to embrace prophecy as the significant element of our identification in the Church. This identification must be based on our being consecrated persons who live the Gospel by imitating Saint Louis Guanella.”
Then, we should ask ourselves which steps we need to take because, in our fidelity to the charism, we have to say 'new words’ from God to our changing world.
Certainly what we do for the poor is already prophetic. We carry out the charitable works of ours with dedication day by day being with the poor and in our apostolate. Perhaps, it is no longer enough our being recognized for our social services or for our personal resourcefulness in the apostolate, but we must make visible what most characterizes us and may attract others to embrace the Guanellian vocation
The Church today, especially through the Magisterium of Pope Francis, invites us to see in the PROPHECY the specific contribution that consecrated life must offer to the life and mission of the Church: "Never a religious must renounce his being a prophet."
In his Letter to the Religious, Pope Francis shakes us: “I expect you to create other opportunities to live Evangelical logic of gift, fraternity, acceptance of diversity, and mutual love. All those opportunities that charity and charismatic creativity offered must become more and more yeast to a society inspired by the Gospel.”
During our General Chapter we are going to question ourselves about how we should be prophetic and about the priorities we should respond among the many requests we receive.
QUESTIONNAIRE in preparation for the XX CG
1. Being prophecy by witnessing our consecrated life.
Prophecy is inviting us to justify and make more visible our identity not by what we offer and perform, but because of the source from which we draw our Apostolic and charitable commitment.
- Do you have concrete suggestions to propose regarding strengthening our choice of life so as to raise vocations to consecrated life?
- What should we do to ensure that our apostolic service is more balanced in regard to the required effort to grow spiritually and to take care of our spirituality while working in our apostolate?
-List the most common forms of worldly life that penetrated into our personal and community life, forms that prevent us from being true witnesses of the presence of God in our lives? How should we deal with these difficulties?
-Have we abandoned also the means of Christian asceticism in our personal and community life?
2. Being prophecy in the local Church.
- Can you describe your specific contributions, as Guanellian religious, you already offer to the local Church or you may give it in the future both on the part of religious engaged in parish Ministry and those who work in our charitable institutions?
- What are the most significant differences that people should be aware of to better understand our Guanellian religious identity?
- How should we ensure that our pastoral and charitable service may have a missionary expression, open to the whole world?
3. Being prophecy within the society in which we are inserted.
Today, financial values come before the values of self-giving and gratuitousness. Even our charitable services can run the risk of following the logic of business, and put at a second place the logic of our charism.
- Do you have suggestions we can take in consideration in order to recover the gratuity in our charitable work?
- If we desire that our ministry be a prophetic one within our society, it is necessary that the Guanellian charism be sufficiently shared by the lay staff. How can we improve this and avoid that our activities be reduced to mere social services?
- Another charismatic heritage we have received from the Founder is the specific commitment of ours toward the pastoral care of the dying, the Pious Union of St. Joseph. How can we raise more interest to this apostolate so prophetic for our society?
4. Being prophets through our educational project
On several occasions we have praised the excellence and timeliness of our educational project based on the preventive method. It commits us to sufficiently give 'Bread and Lord' and to promote the integral formation of people, with special attention to their religious and spiritual needs.
- What should we do to reaffirm and renew our educational choice?
- In what areas our educational project can be 'prophecy’ for the culture in which we operate?
5. Being prophets by our fraternal life
"Religious are called to be 'experts of communion'. I expect, therefore, that the spirituality of communion, indicated by Saint John Paul II, may become a reality and that you may be at the forefront in seizing the great challenge facing us in this new millennium: making the Church the home and the school of communion (Pope Francis).”
The difficulty to live fraternal life is listed as one of the major problems of our communities. We have to take action and consider such difficulty a challenge for us all. We have already given and gathered together our thoughts in dealing with the topic of interculturality. Here we would like to help the Confreres at the Chapter to envisage concrete lines of action for strengthening this fundamental commitment to religious life.
- Which mutual help among confreres or from superiors can help us to live our fraternal life more and more?
- Normally, our communities are formed by few confreres whose commitments are diversified. What can we suggest so that this fact may not diminish our spirit of communion?
6 . Being prophecy regarding financial management
Unfortunately the economy, being particularly globalized and transversal in today's society, overlaps and influences all other dimensions of human life. The dynamics of the market based on competition causes the fact that everything, including human relations, is assessed on the basis of values such as efficiency and productivity. Pope Francis, in his Apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium and Encyclical 'Laudato sii', leads us to consider another type of economy and organization. According to him, today we need to do to promote an economy of inclusion, starting precisely from the recovery of our human roots. Today the "Houses" and our activities are to be prophetic even in the field of economy and transparency. They should be able to visibly show the Gospel values of sobriety and sharing, together with the teachings of the Church's social doctrine about the communion and the universal destination of the goods of the Earth.
- In addition to the prophecy of personal poverty, how can we increase the visibility of our community poverty? (The Founder asks us to be poor members of a poorer Congregation! ...)
- In what kind of forms can we live our abandonment in Divine Providence?
- Are our organization and our services making our charism sufficiently clear? Do you have something to suggest in this regard?
Conclusion
I will leave this topic to your reflection, so that everyone, personally and with his own community, may deepen his reflection and become aware of the commitment that during the next General Chapter we want to reaffirm the Guanellian charism and to rekindle it with creativity fidelity.
Rome, 10 January 2018
Father Alfonso Crippa, SdC - Superior General
 La Vita Consacrata profezia di Dio sul mondo.pdf |