1.         The Gospel dimension of religious life 

We know how one of the first names which designated religious life is “evangelical life”. It is

born of the Gospel, of the desire to live radically the teachings of Jesus, to share fully his life in communion of ideals and destiny.

                  Can we, then, once again let our Fathers tell us their experience in this regard?

                  The first is certainly Anthony of the Desert, father of Monasticism.  His story, and with it the story of every subsequent expression of religious life, therefore also our story, begins when one day, in Church, he listens to the word of Christ:  “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have; give to the poor and you will have a treasure in heaven; then come and follow me.” (Mt 19:21)  The adventure of Anthony the Great begins with obedience to the Scriptures, as he says expressly in one of his letters, speaking of the monks:  “When the word of God reached them, they had not the slightest hesitation, but followed it readily:” (Let 1.1) It is the word of God that motivates his choice.  The early pages of the Vita Antonii continue to affirm the centrality of the Word in his spiritual itinerary: “being attentive to the reading, he guarded within himself its copious fruit” (1.3); “he was so attentive to the reading of the Scriptures, that nothing of what is written there fell sterile in the soil of his mind” (3.7).  St. Jerome will say that Anthony “with his assiduous reading and long meditation had made his heart the library of Christ”. (Ep 60.10)

                  The Bible is, in every way, the monk’s book; it is that also materially.  According to Evagrio Pontico, the monk could own only “the cell, the mantle, the tunic and the Gospel”.¹

                  The early Rules are simple practical norms, without any pretense of spiritual contents. The only Rule of the monk, as for every Christian, is simply the Scripture.  “It is the Scriptures”, wrote Orsiesi, disciple and successor of Pacomio, “which lead us to eternal life, and our father (Pacomio) gave them to us and ordered us to meditate on them continually…” (Libro, 51)  Also for Basil the only Rule is the Scripture.  He never identified as Rule, that which is considered such up to now. His point of reference is rather another book of his, the Moralia, which consist simply in a collection of Biblical texts ordered according to topic: about 1500 verses of the New Testament.  This is his real rule: the Word of God!

                  Also later, the initiators of the different religious families will continue to be animated by a single yearning: to live the Gospel.

                  The entire Rule of Benedict is built around listening to the Word of God:  “Listen, son…” (RB Prologue 1);  “Let us listen to the voice of God which is addressed to us each day…” (RB Prologue 9);  “What can be sweeter for us, dearest brothers, than this voice of the Lord who calls us?” (RB Prologue 19). It is a question of becoming disciples of the Word, of listening to it, accepting it, putting it into practice: “The Lord waits for us each day to respond with deeds to his holy admonitions”. (RB Prologue 35) Benedict considers his Rule as a simple initiation for beginners, for the rest he sends them to Scripture as “the most correct rule for the life of man”. (RB Prologue 35)

                  In the Rule attributed to St. Bruno we find written:  “The Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, interpreted by the doctors of the Catholic Church, will serve as rule for all Carthusians.”² Also for Francis of Assisi, the Rule is “the life of the Gospel of Jesus Christ” (Regola non bollata, Titolo: FF 2.2.  The Regola bollata begins in the same tenor: “The Rule and the life of the brothers minor is this; that is, to observe the holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ…” (Testamento, 17:FF 116)

                  But let’s come to the last centuries, seeing that most of us belong to religious congregations. We enter a mined field.  It is known, as a matter of fact, that at the end of the Middle Ages a progressive separation was made between the spiritual life and the Word of God, to the point of speaking of “divorce”.³ “With the emergence of systematic theology in the scholastic age and then with the emancipation of a critical exegesis as an autonomous science, the unity of these disciplines was broken, to the extent of becoming radicalized with the advent of the modern age. With the Renaissance and Humanism, in fact, exegesis is separated from theology; theology is separated from exegesis, spirituality is separated from dogmatics and from exegesis, preaching often ignores exegesis and dogmatics, becoming moralizing; that is, we reach a progressive separation and rupture of the theological disciplines… .”⁴

                  For recent centuries we have been able to talk, at least for the Catholic Church, of “exile” of the Word of God, especially among the laity to whom access to the Sacred Scripture was very limited, when not completely precluded.  This is a harsh judgement, shared by many authors, among whom are H. de Lubac, H. Urs von Balthasar, S. Marsili, B. Calati, E. Bianchi.

                  Did founders and foundresses of this period also abandon the Scriptures?  Or, with the monastic and mendicant tradition, did they continue to seek in Them the source and constant nourishment of their inspiration and their work?

                  Certain summary judgements, even if they do indicate common tendencies, must be taken with reservation. And in this case the reservation is rich with positive testimonies. While some theologians like Melchior Cano stated that women should never have taken the Bible in hand because the Scripture was dangerous food for them, Teresa d’Avila drew abundantly from the font of the Word of God, convinced that “all the evil that is found in the world depends on not knowing the truth of Scripture with clear truth”. (Life 40.1) While on the one hand the Word of God goes in “exile”, leaving behind a great part of God’s people, on the other hand it finds full acceptance and places its dwelling in men like Ignatius of Loyola (1500), Francis de Sales (1600), Alphonsus of Liguori (1700).  Also in these centuries in which God’s Word seems to have been obscured, it continued to be source of ever new forms of evangelical life.  F. Barri, founder of the Sisters of the Child Jesus, in 1600 could write:  “My life is all lived Gospel”.

                  What, then, can we say about the 1800’s, the most productive period in terms of congregations? My wish would be to involve all of you in sharing the gifts of which we are heirs and custodians. Can I hope to receive what your founders and foundresses said and wrote about the Gospel inspiration of their foundation? I will limit myself to some significant examples.

                  Pier Giuliano Eymard, founder of a men’s and a women’s  congregations, when still a simple priest, states: “A priest who spends a day without reading Scripture has wasted his day.” Eymard did not waste his day.  At the end of a particular experience he had on 25 May 1845, he wrote:  “I asked Our Lord for the spirit of the Letters of St. Paul, this great lover of Jesus Christ.  From today on, I will begin to read them, at least two chapters a day.”  When he founds the congregation of the Most Blessed Sacrament, he maintains this attention for Scripture, so much so that in the Constitution he will put reading it and meditating it as a duty for the religious man; those engaged in preaching will have to be nourished by it, to be “full” of it; those who carry out the ministry of confession must be prepared with "“phrases of Sacred Scripture”. But it is specially his personal experience that counts.  On 24 February 1865, during the Retreat of Rome, Eymard makes a note of this meditation:  “Jesus is the word of the Father, the “Verbo del Padre”.  He repeats the divine word with respect: it is divine, it is holy. He repeats it with love: it is a grace, “I am spirit and life”. He repeats it with efficacy – because it must sanctify the world, recreate it in the light of truth, warm it with the fire of love, and one day judge it, “Did not our hearts burn inside us while He was  conversing with us along the journey?”. The word of Jesus is “spirit and life”, it is omnipotent, “if my words remain in you, ask what you will and it will be given you”.. “he speaks and all is done” – The words of Jesus Christ are the rays of this sun of truth “I am the light of the world” – they are the “light in midst of shadows.”  From this reflection, he draws a very interesting conclusion: “Now I must be for my brother and for the neighbor ‘the word of Christ’”. And here Eymard reveals himself for what he authentically is, a founder, or the “word of Christ” become life.

                  “Oh, Jesus,”  he prays during a retreat at the Handmaids of the Blessed Sacrament, “be my light, my cloud in the desert, my only Master. I wish nothing else!  Be my only learning; outside of You, everything is nothing for me.  Speak to me as to the disciples of Emmaus; let my heart be inflamed listening to you.”

                  The missionary inspiration of Antonio Maria Claret, founder of more Institutes, is rooted in an experience of the Word of God which we could define as mystical.  “The lives of the saints that we used to read at table, and spiritual reading, especially, helped me to this,” he recounts in his autobiography, referring to the understanding of his vocation, “But what moved me and incited me most was the reading of the Holy Bible, for which I have always had great affection.” An affection that was expressed concretely in the daily reading of two chapters of the Bible, four in Lent, and in always carrying it with him during his travels, in recommending its reading, in the publication of a bi-lingual edition.  But in this experience of the origins, there is something more.  It is not he who loves and wants to penetrate the Word of God; it is the Word of God who loves him and reveals Himself to him..  “There were passages,” continues his account, “that impressed me so vividly, that it seemed I heard a voice repeating to me what I was reading.” Then he reports a whole series of verses from the Old as well as the New Testament, which refer to the evangelizing mission and which inspire him in his vocation. He introduces them with phrases which indicate a self-manifestation of God  in his Word: “From these words I understood that the Lord had called me…. I knew… The Lord told me… With these words the Lord helped me know… The Lord made me understand… In a special way, the Lord made me understand those words: ‘Spiritus Domini super me et evangelizzare pauperibus misit me Dominus et sanare contritos corde…’ In many passages of Sacred Scripture I heard the voice of the Lord who called me to go and preach”. (Autobiografia, 113-120)  These are sentences that show the profound origin and Biblical motivation of a charism.

                  Different, but still profoundly Biblical is the itinerary of don Giovanni Bosco.  We cannot expect from him---it is not his nature---that he recount his mystical experience and contact with the Word of God.  Suffice it to see his vast engagement in the field of the education of youth to realize that, at the source, there is a constant diligence with the Scripture: an inspiration.  The Bible was one of the privileged sources of his educational organization (philosophy/methodology).. in preaching, in catechesis, in liturgy, in communication, in the Rules--and therefore of his foundations.  Talking about one of his discussions with his pastor on a Biblical passage, the biographer notes that “Don Bosco knew and had meditated on the entire New Testament”.⁵

                  The word of God is for him “light because it enlightens man and directs him in his believing, working and loving.  [Can we hear an echo of his personal experience here?] It is light because, broken and taught well it shows a person what road to take in order to reach eternal, happy life.  It is light because it calms people’s passions, which are the true shadows, shadows so dense and dangerous that they can be dissipated only by the Word of God. It is light, because, dutifully preached, it infuses lights of divine grace in the hearts of listeners to know the truth of faith.”⁶ It is therefore the Word that he draws upon for his catechetical-educational activity.  He knows in fact that “the Christian [the founder? We can ask ourselves] is one who has the Divine Word as guide”.   In his evangelizing and educational activity Don Bosco shows he is aware of this duty: to refer first to the Word of God. He wants inscriptions taken from Sacred Scripture to be printed in various ways on the porticos of Valdocco.  The first series of Biblical writings appears on the portico beside the church of St. Francis de Sales in 1856. The biographer comments: “Don Bosco was very happy when Enria had finished the painting of these Biblical maxims, describing them as articles of his code, which constitute, he said, the art of living well and dying well”. These are thirty Biblical quotations, written in Latin with their relative Italian translation. It would be necessary to add to the quotations written on the walls, the constant quotations in his writings and conversations: sometimes in Italian, sometimes in Latin; explicit or implicit quotations which can turn into a “con-flation” of multiple texts; quotations also mistaken or approximate, or even adapted.  “Don Bosco did not worry about fidelity to the wording of the Bible, when the ethical and pedagogical complexity and sensitivity of his interlocutors were at stake”.(Stella) His constant recourse to the Bible has a moral, educational, didactic purpose: it serves to direct and motivate the response of man to the action of God, which is as presupposed and taken for granted.  It could be expressed with his famous words in the preface to the first edition of Sacred History:  “Illumine the mind to make the heart good”.

                  We could follow through the whole twentieth century. Don Luigi Orione seems to anticipate the conciliar document Perfectae caritatis n. 2  when he writes: “Our first Rule and life must be to observe the Holy Gospel in great humility and the sweetest and most ardent love of God”.⁷ Don Giacomo Alberione states, without the shadow of a doubt, that the Pauline Family “aspires to live the gospel of Jesus Christ integrally”.⁸  And the Little Sister Magdaleine: “We must build a new thing. A new thing which is ancient, which is the authentic Christianity of the early disciples of Jesus.  It is necessary that we take up the Gospel again, word for word”.⁹

                  We can truly say with Vatican Council II, that following Christ as it is proposed in the Gospel is the “ultimate norm of religious life”, “the supreme rule” of all institutes. (Perfectae caritatis, n. 2)

                 Thus is also understood the teaching of Vita consecrata where it speaks of the presence and value of the Word of God. The papal document reads the story of the multiplicity of forms of consecrated life “like a plant with many branches which sinks its roots into the Gospel and brings forth abundant fruit in every season of the Church’s life”. (5) It therefore recognizes that founders and foundresses, in accepting the call and in discernment of the charism and mission of their Institute constantly referred to the Gospel texts and to other New Testament writings. (94)  And it is thanks to “familiarity with God’s word (that) they draw the light needed for that individual and communal discernment which helps them to seek the ways of the Lord in the signs of the times.” (94) Likewise, in the footsteps of founders and foundresses “many other people have sought by word and deed to embody the Gospel in their own lives…” (9)

Because religious life is born of the Gospel and lives on the Gospel, the Apostolic Exhortation recognizes for religious life the singular task of “remind(ing) the baptized of the fundamental values of the Gospel” (33), of being encouragement to other ecclesial components in the daily efforts of witnessing to the Gospel (53), to fulfill that sign function already mentioned by Vatican Council II, which “is expressed in prophetic witness to the primacy which God and the truths of the Gospel have in the Christian life.” (84). Quoting Paul VI, then, it recalls that “Without this concrete sign there would be a danger that the charity which animates the entire Church would grow cold, that the salvific paradox of the Gospel would be blunted, and that the ‘salt’ of faith would lose its savour in a world undergoing secularization”.  To conclude then that “The Church needs consecrated persons who, even before committing themselves to the service of this or that noble cause, allow themselves to be transformed by God’s grace and conform themselves fully to the Gospel.” (105)

Religious life is rooted, therefore, from its very beginning and all through history, in the Word of God and is one of Its expressions.  It is the clearest affirmation that not on bread alone does man live, but on the Word of God. (cf Mt 4:4)