EUROPE/ITALY - “New season of presence of lay Christian movements is opening in our country” Luigi Bobba, president of ACLI told Fides in a reflection on movements and their initiatives

Rome (Fides Service) - Luigi Bobba, president of ACLI sent Fides the following reflection on movements and their initiatives. “To say that the summer season of Catholic movements is a series of events dominated more by emotions than by thoughts and ideas, is not only ungenerous it is also mistaken with regard to what happened at the Meeting of Communion and Liberation, Catholic Action in Loreto and S. Egidio Community in Milan and the (Italian Catholic Workers Association) ACLI in Orvieto. On the contrary we see a new season of presence of lay Christian movements opening in our country. The statement might appear bold or even exaggerated but it is not difficult to find the characters of this new season to ensure that two old and reassuring schemas of the past are avoided.
Dialogues, bonds, thoughts must be read not with the lens of a new Catholic re-composition but as a response to a triple drifting: privatisation of the faith; weakening if not cancellation of intermediary corps; marketisation all ambits of life which “reduces ever more the areas available to the human community for public and voluntary action at all levels” (John Paul II, address to the Pontifical Academy of Science, 2001).
It is urgent to react to this drifting unless we want to find ourselves with a social Catholicism weakened in its identity, activity, unable to communicate to others, particularly the young, faith’s power to transform even in civil and political life. From here a possible path which could lead us to imagine with movements of an eminently ecclesial and pastoral nature, a common project to respond to the CEI (Italian Bishops’ Conference) challenge for a “missionary parish’: form together a laity which feels mission as the characteristic of these times. With organisations with a marked social or trade union profile we are not far from being able to draft an “agenda” of themes on which to act in co-ordination.
We should not fear old ghosts but rather our own laziness and the subtle risk, albeit opportunely dressed up, of resignation; in other words becoming insignificant. Salt which no longer salts and leaven which does not rise. This is why it is worth taking risks or meeting with some misunderstanding if we want to incarnate the characters of this new season of organised Christian laity, looking to a more demanding horizon: the ten year meeting of the Church in Italy to be held in Verona in the Autumn of 2006 with the them Witnesses of the Risen Lord Jesus Christ, hope of the world”. (Agenzia Fides 6/12/2004 - Righe 30; Parole 410)