(Also posted over at Peguy)
In an earlier post on Peguy ("Being Led") about how I found myself led by God to CL, I made the following comment:
"More than once I have had some difficulty getting across to others in CL the fact that I knew Christ outside of CL, that fact being foreign to their experience. (In fact, this is a subject I intend to write on later because I think my story necessarily impacts my understanding of CL and why I'm troubled at times by how some use "the movement" and "the road" phrases.)"
Given that I'm "hosting" this week at Peguy, I thought I would expand on the thought.
Although it has barely been four months since Pope Benedict XVI was elected, I already sense that he is a wondrous gift to the Church. One area in which that is being displayed, in my opinion, is in the understanding our new Pope brings to the ecclesial movements. Much has been made of the then-Cardinal Ratzinger's references to "creative minorities" that he believes will be a source of renewal in the Church. The lay ecclesial movements are a clear example of a "creative minority" whose life is what attracts others to Christ. I think the election of Pope Benedict is an opportunity for those of us involved with the movements to re-examine our movements. For us in CL, this task has an even greater significance given the recent death of our founder, Monsignor Giussani. As Fr. Giussani has told us (and Fr. Carron repeated during the Spiritual Exercises this year):
"Each one has the responsibility of the charism; each one is the cause of the decline or the increase of the charism’s effectiveness; everyone is either a stretch of land in which the charism wastes away or a stretch of land in which it bears fruit. So we have reached a very serious moment, which urgently requires everyone, as a matter of loyalty and fidelity, to become aware of his own responsibility. It is the moment for each of us to take up his own responsibility for the charism."
As much as Pope Benedict is supportive of the ecclesial movements and other new expressions of the faith, he has offered some words of caution. In an interview with EWTN, Cardinal Ratzinger :
"Yes, on the on hand, I am really a friend of movements – Communione e Liberazione, Focolare, and the Charismatic Renewal. I think this is a sign of the Springtime and of the presence of the Holy Spirit, today will give new charisms and so on. This is for me really a great hope that not with organization from authorities, but really it is the force of the Holy Spirit present in the people. We have movements and new beginnings of the faith, new forms of the faith. On the other hand, I think it is important that these movements are not closed in themselves and absolutized; but have to understand that even if I’m convinced this is the way, I have to accept we are one way and not the way, and we have to be open for the others, in communion with the others. And essentially we have to be really present and even obedient to the common Church in presence with the bishops and the Pope. Only with this openness to not be absolutized with its ideas and to be in service of the common Church, of the Universal Church, can be really a way for tomorrow."
It is this dimension -- the risk of absolutizing our Catholic "accent", as if it were the only one -- that has often concerned me about the various ecclesial movements. Consider the language. The Movement. The Work. The Way. For CL, there is that oft-repeated quote of Pope John Paul II: "The Movement, therefore, has chosen and chooses to indicate not a road, but the road toward a solution to this existential drama.” Many understand this quotation correctly, but I have encountered some who have fallen prey to the danger Pope Benedict has highlighted. For CL isn't "the road" because everyone must follow the charism God gave us through the person of Fr. Giussani, but because we so desperately cling to Christ and the Church. In fact, an extended version of the quote from Pope John Paul II, makes this clear:
"The road, as you have affirmed so many times, is Christ. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, who reaches the person in his day-to-day existence. The discovery of this road normally comes about through the mediation of other human beings. Marked through the gift of faith by the encounter with the Redeemer, believers are called to become an echo of the event of Christ, to become themselves an 'event'."
Similarly, I recall a moment during this year's Spiritual Exercises where someone during one of the group work sessions began asking where is our hope now that Fr. Giussani is gone. It was said in a way that a few of us were moved to speak up. Our hope is not in Fr. Giussani, but in Christ. I follow Fr. Giussani because he has been an instrument by which Christ makes Himself present to me. But for Christ, I would not follow this man.
I mention all of this not to emphasize our flaws or to suggest that these problems are rampant within the movements, or CL in particular. Actually, I think it is the opposite. That said, I think the combination of our youth and the fact that many came to first know Christ within the context of CL makes this a temptation that we must continuously stand guard against. And to do so by clinging to the larger CL community, our local bishop and ultimately the Pope. A concrete way in which I try to do this for myself is to avoid referring to CL as "The Movement". Properly understood, I don't think there is anything wrong with the phrase. But I have come to see too many commonalities amongst all of the ecclesial movements (despite the diversity of their charisms) to think of this phrase as anything but a reference to the larger Movement of the Holy Spirit that we are seeing within the life of the Church today, indeed throughout all of the Church's history. Fr. Giussani made a similar point in one of his last addresses:
"Thus the word "movement" is not a problem that touches me particularly because we constitute a movement recognized by the Church, but is rather something that indicates a permanent mode in the Church's history through which the faith becomes persuasive, educationally effective and constructive, and brings a change in life. ... So the word "movement" describes the existential historical way in which the Church becomes a living Church. I believe that a priest who has a parish, or a priest who has a community of a movement, and doesn't pray the Spirit and doesn't tend to arouse some reality of "movement," will leave the Church like a tomb. The only thing that will be left of his parish will be the office, and the only thing that will be left of the community will be a group with a purely psychological or sociological value. If a parish is alive, it is a movement, in the sense spoken of by John Paul II: "The Church herself is 'a movement'" [to the participants in the Convention "Movements in the Church," Castel Gandolfo, Sept. 27, 1981]. So, the theme of movement is in no sense an alternative to the institution, but indicates the way in which the institution becomes alive and missionary, because the faith is not given us in order that we preserve it, but in order that we communicate it. If we don't have the passion to communicate it, we don't preserve it."
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See also: Communio, Theological Locus of the Ecclesial Movements.
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