Following the Pope’s visit, the Meeting continues amidst the return of Communio and the Sioux

Rimini, from our correspondent. The love that moves the sun and the other stars, at the Rimini trade fair, is still Leone XIV. Three days after his triumphant arrival – with the golf trolley serving as a modern gestatoria, greeted and hailed by thousands of CL members of all ages – he is the talk of the town everywhere: amongst the stands, in the queues to visit one of the exhibitions, and in the arenas before the various meetings. Even at Bar Alcamo, people are still talking about Bob Prevost, not to mention those queuing for a ‘Bacio’ ice-cream scoop. But just like life, the Meeting carries on and the events in the diaries pile up one after the other, satisfying the hearts and minds of visitors, keeping the step counter on the Health app happy and calling for an extension to the post-fair holiday. One of the most curious developments, especially in these times of crisis in the publishing industry, is the return of Communio, the magazine, in its Italian edition. “As we embark on this adventure, one question cannot be sidestepped: why start (or restart) today, 54 years after the magazine’s inception? Is this not a nostalgic – and therefore anachronistic – initiative? It is the question of all questions, the one that forms the backdrop to the editorial presenting the new Swiss edition in Italian of ‘Communio. International Catholic Journal’. Why revive something that is more than half a century old? Paolo Prosperi responds in the launch editorial: “Rereading Balthasar’s programmatic manifesto today, a first point of continuity between the present and the past immediately springs to mind, a continuity which in turn points to the status of the Church in its early days. Today, even more so than then, in fact, the analogy from which the Swiss theologian’s entire argument originally took its cue proves apt: just as the ship of the early Church, so too the Church of today, sailing on a vast sea, almost a wreck at the mercy of the waves of a world increasingly bereft of any anchorage in the faith and the Weltanschauung that derives from it, finds itself living out its universal mission from a position of growing marginalisation, at least in the Western world. For Balthasar, however – as for the other founding fathers – this fact should not only fail to frighten us; in principle, it should not even surprise us, since the tension between particularity and catholicity, between marginality and the aspiration to universality, on closer inspection, is fundamentally part of the paradox of the Church’s mission in the world. So it was in the beginning. And so it will be, in ways and to an extent that are always unforeseeable, until the end of history”. So said Monsignor Massimo Camisasca, who witnessed the birth of Communio in 1972 and who today, in a sense, blesses this new venture, born of a dream and a project by René Roux, rector of the Faculty of Theology in Lugano, who noted that “today, the ethics of the 1970s—when a duty-based interpretation of the proclamation was favoured—has vanished. It has been replaced by a secular ethic that is far more burdensome, heavier than the rules of the 19th and 20th centuries. At the same time, however, the proclamation has grown fainter, and the rift between ontology and aesthetics has widened. Sixty years ago, fragments of the Christian people still existed, but today the Christian people have been torn to shreds. Today there are small patches of new grass, defying any preconceived categorisation. Patches that thrive both within and outside post-conciliar lay movements. They are found in some parishes, where neither conservative nor progressive bureaucracy holds sway. They are found in some monasteries and convents, centred on Eucharistic adoration and meditation on Scripture. Do they have a future? We do not know, but they are certainly the fruit of the Spirit who seeks to break the cages made by men in order to create a purely horizontal Church. These small communities, on the other hand, have understood that the Church is born from on high to permeate history.”

Camisasca links the two papal pontificates, stating that “whilst John Paul II constantly told us who we were, Leo XIV told us who we will be. The younger generations are not interested in matters of ecclesiastical politics, parish boundaries or the female diaconate. They are not interested in pastoral care. What interests them is the fresh water of the person of Jesus and his call to personal and communal discipleship. Today, it is a matter of accompanying a new world that is emerging, rooted in the ancient yet seeking new historical forms of ecclesial expression. We must return to a way of thinking that springs from contemplation—the work of the Spirit—without confining it, whilst providing it with a foundation of truth. The magazine must place itself at the forefront of a renewed Church, that small remnant which bears the prophecy of Christ within itself”. In the halls of the Rimini Exhibition Centre, where a jubilant crowd was celebrating their sense of belonging without moralising, dogmatism or vacuous prescriptiveness, no one spoke of construction sites for the Church of the future, pastoral programmes, celibacy or the diaconate. That is material for synodal round-table discussions which concern, at best, a minority within the minority of the People of God. That group has remained a little too tied to the ideological quagmires abhorred even by Paul VI, described by Camisasca as “the martyr of the post-Council era”. Better to listen to the story of the Jesuits on the plains of South Dakota, where they encountered the world of the Sioux. Mission, culture and evangelisation. That is what will engage the Christians of tomorrow – and perhaps even those of today.