The importance of grafting the love of Christ into the hearts of the new generations

In the late eighties, one evening, returning from catechism class, my wife was dazed. He told me that several childrenof those who had begun the preparation for First Communion, they did not know the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and they did not even know how to make the sign of the cross. More than fifteen years passed, and the archbishop of Milan, Dionigi Tettamanzi, wrote in a pastoral letter that some of his priests had told him the same thing. Still more years, and the Synod of Bishops on the new evangelizationin the preparatory document, launched the alarm on that same phenomenonor.

In the meantime, however, after all that time had elapsed without the slightest measure being taken, it was progressively increased the “flight” of children from parishes; and if before it happened after Confirmation, now – a doubly worrying discovery – the removal began to register already after the First Communion. And today, albeit in another context, the same situation is repeated. The inability of so many of the clerical class reappears again, from the bottom to the top, of understand what happens in the folds of Christianity.

That is, to understand why the Church is going through a particularly critical moment, and therefore is risking, in the event that there are no reversals, of jeopardizing its own future. Started sixty years ago by the Second Vatican Council, it was set in motion a process of transformation, from a religiosity marked mostly by the norm, by rules imposed as a duty of behavior, with the function of disciplining the spirituality but in fact also the practical existence of the believer, to a religiosity that, refocusing on the person, gave or at least would have had to give space to the conscience, and, therefore, to the freedom and responsibility of the Christian. Thus favoring a maturation on the level of faith, to be translated into a new style of life, to be witnessed consistently in everyday life.

A process that began some time ago, but who has had, and continues to have, a very slow, highly contrasted evolution. On the one hand, despite its excesses and ambiguities, it is shaping a new generation of Christians; on the other hand, it carries with it all the risks, dangers, misunderstandings and resistances typical of the passing phases. And in the middle – because of this transitory, confused, and never resolutely faced situation – a group of Christians who tend to increase every day. Christians are only “registry”, their faith ended on the day of their baptism. They are Christians with a completely subjective religiosity, because they have adapted faith, and in particular morality, to their needs. They are – this is the most alarming aspect – Christians by now deeply immersed in the indifference that today’s society, more and more secularized, more and more materialistic, show towards God. In short, trying to explain it with the symbolism of an image, think of a person (the Catholic people) who tries to cross a mountain stream, low but impetuous water. It is exactly in the middle of the ford. He does not want to go back (to a formal, normative, preceptistic religiosity, which however still offers “certainties”), but neither does he manage to land on the shore in front of him (an adult, responsible religiosity, rooted in conscience, which however is often allergic to rules). If this remains so, there is the risk that that person will be overwhelmed by the current (a distorted religiosity, emptied of his values, and which now borders on agnosticism). Will the Catholic Church be able to cross the ford? To graft the knowledge and love of Christ into the hearts and lives of future generations?

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The importance of grafting the love of Christ into the hearts of the new generations