VIII. What results can be expected from refounding?

These results should be noticed at three different levels. However, before beginning to describe each of them, it is important to recall that nothing is reaped where nothing has been sown, nor is there any growth unless something has first germinated; nor will anything mature unless it has first grown, not will it bear any more fruit once it has already reached maturity. This "little ditty" reminds us that refounding is a process and that it must be accompanied in order to bear fruit at the different stages. If you want a future, you must be willing to pay the price to have it.

1. In each person

In each religious of an institute who wants to live a refounding in a determined time it is necessary to sow elsewhere. It is right that everyone has the adequate time to receive the seed. A seed that will grow with the force of spring; that will suppose the great desire to return to the fervour of one’s first love and recall the power of the roots that are committed to being anchored in the ground in order to receive sand, water and good nourishment. The individuals must feel a great desire; this is fundamental.

What will grow from this "new springtime" (John XXIII) will be the desire for conversion and which will be translated into a search for simplicity, prayer, poverty, fraternity, apostolic zeal, nearness to persons and solidarity. Thus there will be new life given to the call that has been received and there will be a restoration of the personal vocation set in the charism of one’s own institute and in the heart of the Gospel charism. A consequence will be the necessary consistency for a religious’ personal fidelity and his personal life will begin to be credible. This first and personal awakening is followed with specific programmes of renewal that are an indispensable, albeit insufficient, step in refounding. When they do not go further only limited results can be expected. Therefore some people have spoken, as we have indicated, of a pending renewal. That which has been repolished and that which is revitalised needs to be made meaningful and affirmed in another context, in that of community. These years of the post-conciliar period allow us to draw up a balance and see what has renewed people and what has not borne fruit. People have been renewed, most of all by:

The personal rediscovery of the Bible Nearness to and service of the poor A return to the sources of one’s own institute The experiential process of inculturation Going to the missions A new ministry A fraternal and missionary community.

Around these renewed people at times authentic centres of an institute’s vitality have arisen, where it can be seen that the Spirit is at work and that God desires this form of life.

In community

The religious is a member of a community; thus he or she is planted in a certain place and where his vocation has shot forth and where this seed that has already sprouted must grow, this spirit that has already touched his heart and mind. A renewed person needs refounded communities; communities that in their environment and structure let the spirit that we have described shine forth. There have been religious who have taken the first step very well. They looked for a group in which they could live what they have rediscovered, but they could not find any. They found that they had to struggle too much to be able to pray, dialogue, welcome, share, be poor… and live the Rule of life. Sometimes they concluded that they might be the problem, asking too much from the community, and so they want back to the way things were before. They will lead to communities tat will kill this plant that has begun to germinate or stifle this fire that had already begun to give heat.

Renewed individuals who do not have communities to support them and give them consistency and meaning and, in a certain sense, a "public dimension" will only with great difficulty continue in this spirit. On the other hand, the institutes whose renewal has not been "corporate", community, public, give the impression that their charismatic power is limited and that the group will not succeed in moving nor will their option be made visible in the whole. In a certain way, refounding begins with the public, community dimension, with the missionary dimension and collective witness. What is a community like when it empowers individuals with the desire and sometimes even a nostalgia to live the Rule and the Gospel and with the desire to be happy? What is a community like in which individuals are reinforced in their religious spirit?

It is important to state that not all the communities of an institute or a province are at this level. However, we cannot fail to state that it must be assured that some of them are. In them the demands of personal fulfilment, solidarity fraternity and mission harmonise structurally and reconcile well with one another; the same holds true for hospitality and solitude. The interests of the individuals with those of the religious community’s life in common and those who come from the mission of each of the members with those of the community itself. It will be expressed in a community apostolic plan made to be lived by individuals who are infected by the virus of individualism and who want to be liberated from it. In some cases this model requires starting a process of refounding.

In each province or institute

There are revitalised communities within provinces or institutes which as a whole or as a group have not decided to take the path of refounding. These communities are like islands within the whole. This institute or province has nothing of the spirit that animates it and receives almost nothing from it. In some cases they begin to look for it outside; sometimes they manage to separate from the group and start a new group of the consecrated life. What is an institute in refoundation like? How is a province that responds to the strong aspirations for renewal of individuals and communities?

Let us start from the negative side. The institute that does not make this choice becomes obsessed with the past, puts its energy on buildings, concentrates its efforts on institutions and works, starts from documents and papers and not from life, keeps alive what should be dying, has opted for survival; it attempts to be like the rest of the world, without any originality or sense of family; it offers feeble responses to the great concerns.

However, in looking at an institute or province in the process of refounding, one notices that they are not concerned with survival; their interest is focused, most of all, on what is coming, and it is a source of life. They seriously choose the creative fidelity that recreates and reinforces and not to reject or destroy. In this way alone can they inspire the religious of the group to want and to be able to assume and sustain a form of life that wins back the radical nature of the experience of God and finds its mission in immersion in the joys and sufferings and hopes and sorrow of the people. Therefore, each religious member of a religious institute has to right to speak, live, , work, share his or her time with a group that is clearly seen to have Jesus at the centre of its life.

In these institutes there are three clear directions:

With simplicity they seek visibility. They try to make their choices corporate and that these require to be stimulated by the whole of the body, the group. They want them to be intentional. Intensity unites them in clarity in the direction that is offered to the group. There is a focus to the action and to their way of living the charism. The members of the group are able to make the require renunciation a to that we might call their "personal vocation" in order to serve the whole of the institute. They choose the proper means to strengthen the common motivation or mysticism of the group. They seek a cultural discernment and an adequate responses to the surrounding culture. This response neither begins nor remains at the socio-political level but reaches to the spiritual love where one finds a hunger and thirst for God, where people are seeking, sometimes eagerly, for the meaning of life, freedom, justice, fraternity and solidarity.

To the degree that we make continue in our reflection we see more clearly that refounding has something to do with conversion; however, with a conversion that passes beyond the personal and permeates the communal, structural, institutional and environmental. We could well say, as the religious of Brazil said in their most recent assembly, that genuine refounding requires evangelical mysticism, inculturated mission and solidarity presence.

And now we come to the point that is crucial and, in some cases, primordial, namely works. We are speaking of ministry and presence. The works must be reconverted and the mission, in some cases, as well. The institutional weight of the consecrated life can be excessive because of the number of its members and the exercise of its mission. It can lead to stifling the vigour of the charism. In the greater part of an institute, people are living under the impression of too few to do much.

The solution is a demanding one. It requires geographic changes, changes in the recipients of our mission, the style of our mission, the spirituality that nourishes it and the means that are employed. Revitalisation, at this level we must accept , as we stated before, that life comes from "frontier" areas, and only with the inspiration that comes to us from the whole and its various groups can we return to the rhythm of history. In order for the refounding to take place at the level of the mission, it is necessary that the poor are not only the preferred recipients of our work but the criteria of our mission, that is, that justice and charity should be at the origin of our decisions in our field of action. Without a real exodus from some places it will be difficult to begin anew. Another manner or way of refounding in this field is in sharing our mission with other members of the Church, and especially with the laity. Institutes were not founded to do things that nobody else was doing. There were already teachers when the educational religious groups arose. However, these groups came into being to be witnesses of the Gospel in the midst of a society that needed the sign of the Lord’s presence and action, an earthly sign of heavenly things. In the majority of cases it was not so much the works that motivated them but the reason for which they did things.