Prayer & Reflection
Apostles for Today
Monthly Reflection, October 2022
- Synodality in the Vision of the Pallottine Charism
Discernment and Decision
A fellow sister in Brazil sometimes says: "somos um grupo de almas vibrantes! (We are a group of vibrant souls!) I think she has hit on what Pallotti wanted the members of the Union of the Catholic Apostolate to be - journeying together alongside the mission of Jesus, moved by the love of God. How can we, the Pallottine Family, contribute today through our discernment processes and with our decisions to a fraternal communion in the Church journey?
The recently deceased Bishop Fr Seamus Freeman SAC and Fr Hubert Socha SAC both, in their specific function and competence, together with many others, elaborated the General Statutes of the Union of Catholic Apostolate, which had required much knowledge of Pallotti's intentions as well as many discernment processes that led to the result that our charism is now recognized in the Church and can contribute as a "synodal ferment". Let us thank them!
What criteria should guide us in our search processes and decisions today? - Although I am not an expert, I would like to respond to the question as I share my thoughts with you on this topic.
1. Pallotti's Yes to Synodality in the Church
The Church was of great concern to Pallotti - he saw it, ahead of the 2nd Vatican Council, as an instrument of God's love for people, continuing the mission of Jesus. All the baptised should recognize and actively participate in their apostolic vocation. "Shared responsibility for the Gospel!". Pallotti would certainly have participated wholeheartedly in the synodal preparatory process, out of conviction that the Church needs to convert, open up and, while doing so, always strive for unity, so that the message of Jesus be credible and contagious for the people. To this end, the signs and needs of the times in which people live must be recognised and responded to.
We are therefore called by our Founder to an active collaboration in the renewal process of the Church. Living our apostolic commitment, we should contribute in our places, family, community, at work with our abilities and possibilities, so that the Church becomes a togetherness of "almas vibrantes", moved by Jesus, moved by the Gospel. We are mission.
A few years ago, twelve young people in Germany joined the Union after having spent a year of volunteer missionary work in different countries. They chose a creative name for their group: "MitMission". In German it is a play on words with 2 meanings: Together in Mission and to be on it. They want to get involved in church and society as young Christians, and they also prepare other young people for voluntary missionary work in other countries.
2. Asking about people today
Technology, informatics, globalization have profoundly changed people and social coexistence. We are living in an epochal change in which the coordinates that have until now provided stability for common life no longer apply universally. Relativism, "fluid values", mixing fact and fiction can be just a few keywords. This demands from people they determine their own values, truth, and sense of life. Today many (at least in our part of the world) feel alone, despite media networking, and depression is spreading. The Corona pandemic has intensified this. However, the "Corona experience" has also made many people rethink, reconsider solidarity and the care for creation. In the last few months, the Russian attack on Ukraine and its consequences have cast a dark cloud over everyone. Fortunately, there is great openness and commitment to refugees on the one hand, but on the other hand there is increasing egocentrism, indifference/disinterest in the lives and suffering of others. One woman has put it this way: in the past, people used to apologise if - while watering flowers -they wet someone passing underneath their balcony. Today you can hear instead: Why do you have to pass below my balcony when I'm watering the flowers!
The cultural and social reality also affects people in the church. Many in our country are turning away in indifference or indignation at the inconceivable numbers of abuse scandals and at what they see as unsatisfactory answers on the part of the Church to questions regarding sexual morality. An unprecedented wave of church withdrawals is calling for a response - especially in Germany. Some Christians are switching to strict traditionalist circles. In many places, however, there are also parishes and groups that strive to keep the faith alive and reach out to others.
Pallotti encourages us not to close our eyes but to look for ways in which people, we as well, can find each other and experience the fraternal community of believers.
3. Breathing God in – reaching out to people
In his time Pallotti felt the need to encourage all the baptized to rekindle faith and love among themselves and to assume co-responsibility for the transmission of the faith and in works of charity. Apostles all! What can we do in our time, when God has become distant for many people and church life has become alien? Pallotti went among the people, met them on the streets, at the bedside of the sick, in their fraternities, and with the theology students at university. In him, people could feel the presence of God. Pallotti put his own person in the background, Jesus' in the center. " May my life be Jesus' life" In such a "quality of encounter" God can work. There may be someone in our own family, community who is alone and ultimately a stranger to us. There is much to do. "Make wide the space of your tent" says Isaiah (54:2) "stretch out your tent cloths without sparing!" Pallotti spoke of the friendly face with which we can "speak" of God to others. A nod on the street, a gesture on the bus can create community for a brief moment. - And here’s a short story of an encounter one day in Rome:
A common initiative for encounter was the weekly "Night of Nicodemus" at the church of San Salvatore in Onda in Rome. Some Pallottine priests and women would stand in front of the church on Friday evenings and try to make contact with the people passing by in the evening and also invite them for a short visit in the church. I remember a man who was walking his dog. Jokingly I said, "If you want to say a quick hello to the good Lord and you trust me, I'll stay outside with your dog in the meantime." He replied that he was an atheist, not interested. "That doesn't matter," I said. We got into dialogue talking about our different attitudes. I remember that during our conversation I asked God to "speak along" in His way. The man suddenly said, " Oh, you're in love with God!" I was, frankly, embarrassed. "I hoped it was so" I replied. The doors of the church had long been closed when we parted - just like friends.
4. Cooperating with others in Pallotti's style Pallotti was convinced that collaboration brings richer and more lasting results than "individual performance". He must have experienced, as we do, that cooperation is not always easier. However, he saw it as "the greatest gift": because it is God who invites us to cooperate in his work of salvation. The opening of the Pia Casa di Carità and especially the Octave of the Epiphany may serve as examples from Pallotti's time. Many were involved. Pallotti had a universal understanding of cooperation:
spiritually, the association should be linked to others through mutual membership. Financially, the various initiatives had to be supported by donors, nobles, well-to-do and simple private individuals and groups. In carrying out the works, a narrower circle of priests, religious and individual lay people was then involved in each case.
With the 2nd Vatican Council, many networks also began within the Church: Bishops' Conferences, lay associations, cooperation of religious and spiritual families like the Union, common commitment to ecumenism, care of creation, fight of human trafficking, etc. As the Union, we should see ourselves as a ferment in the Church and society. Our contribution to synodality is not to be focused on ourselves but on the common mission, unpretentiously offering "the color" of our charism together with the competences of others.
5. Recognizing the mission/intention of Jesus today Pallotti envisaged Jesus as the Apostle of the Father, and His "food was" to fulfil the will of his Father. Like Paul who said of himself "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" Gal 2:20, Pallotti aspired to a complete imitation of Jesus' life and mission: "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full" Jn 10:10b. In the Our Father, Jesus breaks down for us what life in fullness means: communion with God the Father and fraternal/solidarity communion with one another.
The Union of Catholic Apostolate, which Pallotti founded in response to the "Enlightenment" on 9 January 1835 with a small missionary group that existed at that time, was to become a universal apostolic community, "urged by the love of Christ" to make His mission its own. Pallotti therefore advises members to ask themselves again and again as a "daily practical memory": "What would Jesus feel, think, do in this situation?" - Ignatius of Loyola recommends to imagine the Gospel periscopes and enter into the scene. Pallotti gave us the Gospel as a basic rule for our decisions and actions. Looking at the life of Jesus in the Gospels helps us to know Jesus more deeply - so that we can hear his voice in our situations today, especially when it comes to important apostolic or other decisions.
In the disputes on difficult issues that divide different thinking groups even in the Church, in the face of human need that surrounds us - where is our "Pallottine place" - our contribution? We have to find it again and again from our continuous search for Jesus’ mission and intention, today.
Pope Francis has not shied away from admonishing Patriarch Cyril of Moscow: we must speak with the language of Jesus!
6. Love - the spirit that should animate all According to Pallotti, the love of Christ - Caritas - is the constitutive of the Union of Catholic Apostolate. The Apostle Paul, a master of Christian discernment, spells out love/charity for us in his hymn 1 Corinthians 13. This is how Jesus lived. He was the love of God Incarnate, meek and humble of heart. He came to seek what was lost and to heal what was wounded. We can also replace "love" in 1 Cor 13 with the name "Jesus". From what Paul lists, it follows per se what love cannot be and what Jesus is not: domineering and self-centered.
The "spirit of love" is not about us all having to like each other and be on the "same wavelength", as nice as that would be. However, Pallotti expects us in the Catholic apostolate to appreciate each other in our differences and to keep our eyes on Jesus, travelling together in His cause. Where there is a persistent poisoned atmosphere and mutual recrimination, without readiness for a new beginning, Pallotti says: Without love, the Catholic Apostolate does not exist! And here we are "out"!
The 1st reading of the liturgy on Pallotti’s feast day - Isaiah (58, 7-8. 10-11) -, describes the works of mercy as the "right fasting" - and says: your light will break forth like the dawn! To the extent that we engage together in the many needs of people, our charism shines forth in the Church. - We all certainly have good examples to tell, here is a small one from our community:
Near our guesthouse "Procura" in Rome is the children's hospital Bambino Gesù. While the children, often with serious illnesses, are being treated in the clinic, their parents need accommodation. Every year the requests increase at the Procura, also because the sisters offer them a special price that barely covers the costs of our house. Together with the General Administration, it was decided to give priority to these families. So the apostolate of the guesthouse has been extended. The sisters are there to share when the parents come home from the hospital, often in despair, and pray together for their children. Sometimes a Pallottine priest friend comes to say healing prayers and blesses the parents.... A Polish family with two children suffering from multiple sclerosis lived with the community for many months, sharing the kitchen with the sisters and becoming one family with them. This was possible because the sisters cooperated all together.
7. „Place“ of discernment and decision: the Cenacle The Cenacle is a place of crisis (Greek: krisis = decision, decisive turn). After the death and resurrection of the Lord, the disciples did not know how to move on. In the darkness of not seeing, the early church - the archetype of every Christian community - gathered in prayer. Certainly there were also confrontations, anxious struggles. With the gift of the Spirit, the apostles, disciples of Jesus could go and reach out to the people as missionary community. Pallotti understood the Cenacle as a universal, wide space in which the whole creation is groaning in labor pains, in crisis (Rom 8:22). Our questions and needs today are part of these travails. The Spirit is the protagonist of new life, of life in Christ, the power of our mission today. Just as Jesus was moved by the Spirit, one with the Father and able to stand firm in love even up to the cross, so today the Spirit gives us light in our discernment and steadfast love for our decisions and actions. Pallotti gave us as patroness and intercessor Mary, the "virgo potens", our Queen of the Apostles. Together with Pallotti and all the saints, she is our companion.
The Fathers and Brothers of the Society of the Catholic Apostolate, gathered in Poland in Assembly, have elected their new General Animation Team. With our prayers we support them and believe that where one part of the family is again thinking about its mission, we will all be enriched for a new departure. Questions for reflection In the Union we have many groups, communities, councils (organs of synodality). How do our discernment and decision-making processes work? What should we pay more attention to?
What should be at the center of our commitment/effort/outreach to realize our charism?
S. Maria Landsberger SAC
