Rome, 24 February 1986

The theme expressed in the Strenna for 1986 is deserving of careful consideration in the Congregation.

The vocation and mission of the lay person at the present day is one of the great fronts of renewal opened up by Vatican II. The Council’s action of analysis and re-launching has its repercussions also on our Family, which detects in the development of this vocation an enriching experience of returning to its origins. Don Bosco in fact always involved a large number of lay people in his mission for the young and the poor.

In putting forward this theme we are not prompted by an eagerness to feel up to date (which could be nothing more than a fleeting and short-lived attitude), but by docility to the Spirit of the Lord and fidelity to the apostolic project of our Founder.

Failure indeed to follow this line would mean that we had lost interest in our vocational identity. After a hundred years of life we need to rejuvenate our Salesian features, so that our authentic physiognomy may be more evident and attractive.

Little by little, in fact, a certain involution was taking place in this sector which would have converted us into self-sufficient administrators of the works already existing rather than animators of an apostolic movement in a Church which is on the move: more tutors of pupils than missionaries of the young.

Fortunately the Council produced a lot of fresh air which reached the lungs of our General Chapters, and in particular the Special one. Today we have available a rich and striking doctrine on the laity with practical and stimulating guidelines, and to some extent we have already committed ourselves to them in various provinces.

Something is certainly happening. We saw it, for example, a few months ago in the 2^nd World Congress of the Cooperators. It has been evident for some time in work with the Past Pupils. We watch with fresh attention the "Lay Collaborators" and the "Friends of Don Bosco". But in some provinces progress is very slow; they find it difficult to get going.

What is lacking? A renewed conciliar mentality? A greater sense of the Church as communion? A more objective social sensitivity? A more courageous and compelling vision of our commitment to the young and the poor? More drive from our spiritual batteries?

One thing is quite certain: if Don Bosco were alive at the present day, with the vast horizons of Vatican II available to him, he would immediately set about involving a multitude of the laity in his working plans.

And why should not we do the same, we who are his sons and who want to show, for the coming centenary celebrations of his death, that the charisma of the Oratory is still fully alive and up to date?

We want to foster the vocation of the laity involved with us in the service of the young, and we want to do this on the basis of the genuine spirit of the Council. But when we approach the matter from a different angle, and instead of speaking of the laity according to the Council we pass to a consideration of the lay people with whom we ourselves deal and work, we find that a strange difficulty arises from the elastic nature of the meanings given to this term. We seem to be on different levels, which obscure the true ecclesial concept of the lay person, and reduce our consideration to a generic kind of idea which seems to rule out the possibility of speaking explicitly of "vocation" and "mission".

The trouble is due to the many different meanings currently attached to the term "lay"; the variety is now so firmly rooted in our common way of speaking that if we are not careful we ourselves may become victims of mistaken ideas.

Let me give you some examples of the way in which this term is used (at least in the Italian environment). We speak of "lay collaborators" but what meaning do we attach to the expression? The newspapers often refer to the "lay" parties in politics, and what does it mean there? Or why is it that one can speak of a "‘lay’ State" but is suspicious of the term "‘lay’ morality". There is a real difference of meaning in the two cases.

What we are concerned with is the meaning of the term in the context of the Salesian Family: who are the "lay people" in it, the people referred to in the Strenna? The answer needs to be an exact one because it is intimately connected with our fidelity to the Council and to Don Bosco. Lack of precision here will lead to activities which are confused and not incisive, which lack concreteness as regards their vocational aspect and in consequence are superficial from a Salesian standpoint.

In replying to the question therefore, we must state with deliberate precision that by the term "laity" or "lay people" here we mean those Christians who are members of the Catholic Church and who, while remaining in the world according to their characteristic secular status, are disposed to live out their Baptism in the mission with us. In other words, as is obvious, we mean to apply to them and to make flourish in our Family the concrete description of the lay person as was given by Vatican II.

I consider it of vital importance to be exact about this; if we are not we shall never launch in the Church a real spiritual movement among people.¹

It is not a question of excluding from our consideration and from appropriate involvement at different levels so many other collaborators, past pupils and friends. We know that Don Bosco sought collaborators everywhere, so long as they had a bit of goodwill and did some good ("bene - factors"), even if they belonged to no religion at all. And this is a very valid trait which we have inherited, one which must be preserved in the Congregation and which at the present day has been endorsed by the Council’s opening to ecumenism, to dialogue with non-Christian religions and even with non-believers. But this year’s Strenna does not refer to this particular aspect, which in many of our communities is already functioning reasonably well.

What we have to do is eliminate the dangerous superficiality of which I spoke in my Report on the state of the Congregation to the 22^nd General Chapter; it goes with and characterizes the busybody jack of all trades who may seem the friend of many but is spiritual father to none.

In our Family we find lay people (in the conciliar sense), or we involve them in fact, among the Cooperators, among those Past Pupils who (according to GC21) "have made the choice of the gospel",² and among those external "collaborators" and "friends" who want to bear witness to their Catholic faith.

The concrete task to which we are called is a greater and better dedication of ourselves to promoting in the first place the Association of the Cooperators in its lay members, and to intensify our care of those who, without being ordained or consecrated, want to be active Catholics among the Past Pupils (in their local Associations and in the World Confederation), among the Collaborators and among the Friends.

These are the laity of our Family to whom we are referring. We must act in concert with the FMA and the other consecrated Groups in the Family to make these lay people feel the joy of living a wonderful vocation and of sharing with us in the work of the Church’s mission in the world in the spirit of Don Bosco.

The mature man must have wisdom and be open to the innovations of the Spirit. But in recent years we have seen for ourselves that there are people who on reaching a certain age can easily become skeptical; there is no longer anything new for them, they sit back, they have arrived, and they settle little by little into a comfortable middle-class life style. It is a sad experience to meet people who are mature in age but so lacking in spirit.

I said to you in my last letter that it has been said that the Council produced no unpublished definitions or condemnations, but this notwithstanding there emerged from it an extraordinarily new state of affairs: "nihil novi et omnia nova".

As regards the laity in the Church there is a great innovation that should be noticed, and whoever is unaware of it runs the risk of not being docile to the Spirit, and therefore of not being able to contribute effectively to renewal.

The vocation of the lay person, as presented by Vatican II, makes concrete demands which impose on all of us two simultaneous and complementary obligations: to have a sound knowledge of the Council’s doctrine in this regard, and in addition to take another and discerning look at the thought of Don Bosco and his initiatives. We can never separate these two aspects; if we did, we should fall into either fleeting caprice or static rigidity.

Now, with regard to Don Bosco’s thoughts and actions we can say (or at least I hope we can) that we have a sufficient bibliography and a living tradition which can facilitate a serious historical assessment of the presence of the lay person in our mission. We are all fully convinced that our Founder was always concerned to involve the greatest possible number of collaborators in the working out of his plan, from Mamma Margaret to employers, to ordinary good citizens, to theologians, to the nobility, and even to the politicians of the time; he thought, he planned, he sought the opinion of others, and finally he instituted as an organized expression of what was in his mind the Pious Union of Salesian Cooperators. "The Cooperators", he declared with conviction and hope, "will be the ones who will promote the Catholic spirit".³

But as far as our knowledge of Vatican II is concerned, there remains some doubt.

As I said in the previous letter, it is the sad opinion of the Pastors of the Church (and I think that unfortunately the opinion applies also to more than a few religious) that Vatican II is not sufficiently known, and still less has it been assimilated and put into practice; indeed interpretations have been more readily followed that are superficial, reductive, partial and even distorted.⁴ Hence the urgent need for all to go back to the Council texts and make an ordered study of them.⁵

It is necessary therefore, and the task falls particularly on provincials and rectors, to organize concrete initiatives in this regard. It is a duty for every province. Every house too must seek a practical means of acquiring a deeper and systematic knowledge of the Council’s doctrine. After the appeal of the Extraordinary Synod such an urgent task must find a place in our plan of life. For my own part I thought it opportune to do this even when I was recently preaching the Spiritual Exercises to the Holy Father and the Roman Curia.⁶

If the Council is a prophetic event, "a gift of God to the Church and to the world", "the great grace of the present century", "a new Pentecost", "the Magna Carta for the future"⁷ and "the great Catechism of modern times",⁸ our pastoral mentality must be adapted constantly and ever better to its great guiding contents. One of these is precisely the vocation and mission of the laity in the Church.

In his Message for the 1985 World Day of Peace, John Paul II declared that the passage of man through history is like a "pilgrimage of discovery".⁹

Certainly Vatican II is for believers a rich and fruitful source of discoveries.

One of them is the positive view of the World as an authentic religious value, despite the ruin caused by sin: the Father created it for man and loved it so much that he sent to it his only Son.

Such a vision brings with it an entirely new manner of looking at the Church in its overall relationship with the world. It lives for the latter’s service: in fact the entire People of God is inserted in human history as a sacrament of salvation.

This is the context in which the doctrine of the vocation and mission of the lay person finds its place. The Council gave a formidable response to the prevailing laicism; it stripped it of the banner of the lay or secular state, which it was proudly waving as a post-Christian conquest; it was purely and simply "laicism" which represents the backtracking of an illuminism which is reductive of reality.

The bearer of the banner for the re-assertion of the true secular or lay state in the world is, among the People of God, the lay person. In fact the rediscovery of the World as the creation of the Father, an expression of his omnipotent love; of the World as the story of humanity, in which Christ, the presence of liberating love, became incarnate; of the World moving forward to its final destiny as a plan in developing transformation through the work of the Holy Spirit, the bearer of sanctifying love, all leads to the emergence of the fascinating and inseparable double concept of "God and the World".

We do not know a God without the World, and a World without God is impossible.

The idea of "laity" does not mean thinking of the World as though God did not exist: that would be laicism; but thinking of it precisely as he created it, with its laws, its autonomous values, the consistency of the respective ends, the regality and protagonism of man, his tremendous task in history, his personal dignity, his work, knowledge, technical ability—everything harmonized in a return dialogue of love with which man must meet God’s initiative.¹⁰

The more one knows of the World and human history, the more does one realize that God can only be Love. The laicist who accepts the existence of God, but then thinks of him as having no interest in the World reduces him at the best to an unmoved mover but one without a heart, and that is a blasphemous caricature!

A similar rediscovery of the World creates for us an image of the Church which is no longer that of a pyramid, narrow at the top (the hierarchy) and broad at the base (the laity), but that of an immense circle expanding in history, which receives energy and stimulus from the center for continual extension.

And it is precisely the layman who is on the circumference, on the frontier of progress, of liberation and of transformation of the World. For this he needs Christ and his Spirit (the center!); he needs light and grace and the values of the Beatitudes which come to him through the service of the Ministry and the witness of consecrated life (close to the center); he needs communion with everyone so as to feel himself to be a living member of the Body of Christ in history (the Church of all, one and holy), but he is in the front line, he is truly a protagonist. While he receives he also gives; and the "ministers" and "consecrated" persons, while they help him, are also enriched by what his vocation gives to them.

Don Bosco had immediately understood these values of the World and felt himself called to work for the betterment of human society.¹¹ He dedicated himself to young people of the poorer classes, in need and lacking care, so as to make of them upright citizens. He was a realist and had a strong sense of history. His strategy was built on the conviction that religion (i.e. "Christian faith") was an indispensable value to be inserted at the center of culture (and in the heart of every young person) if society was going to be renewed in line with the dignity of the human person.

With his practical and industrious mentality he scrutinized the complex events and circumstances of the time, and in the light of history and faith came to the conclusion (so very clear today in "Gaudium et spes") that God really loves the World, and that he sends all Christians to it to save it. In particular he felt that he himself was sent with that purpose, with a mission to the young and the poor. This was the reason for his rich humanism, his appreciation of progress in science and technology, his flair for method and organization; this was why he was so concerned to discuss matters with civil authorities; for this reason he was so anxious to move so many people of good will to be active and share in responsibility, and to appeal to Catholics to be united in doing all the good they possibly could.

Without any doubt he was a holy Founder raised up by the Lord for a prophetic anticipation of what was to come in later times.

The Council invites us today to rediscover this ecclesial vision so as to give a clearer and more committed physiognomy to the Salesian dimension of service to the world’s youth.