The 12 Theses

“If you knew the gift of God … (Jn 4:10): Faced with Samaritan woman’s thirst, which is a figure of human desire, Jesus recalls the primacy of God’s gift. Both truth and love refer to an origin that precedes us, whose ultimate source is found in God the Creator. To speak of God as Creator means to confess him as one who, in the freedom of his love, opens and sustains the space of the world, ordering it so that human beings can dwell in it and cultivate a fullness that goes beyond our human measure. To accept the Creator means, therefore, to accept the fact that in their unity truth and love are the key to understanding oneself, the world and history. Precisely this reference of love to transcendence also opens to reason a way that, starting from the experience of the truth of love, leads to the discovery of God the Creator.

“If you knew … who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (Jn 4:10). The Redeemer of human beings has revealed to us the Father’s love, rich in mercy, who generates us as his sons and daughters. He also provokes in us a question that enables us to receive this love. The Holy Spirit, the living water given by Jesus, converts our hearts so that Christ may be our life. In this way Christ becomes in us the source of a fraternity that brings a new meaning to history.

“He told me everything I have ever done,” says the Samaritan woman after her encounter with him (Jn 4:39). Human beings are called to accept the original love offered by their Creator, a love which in turn demands the gift of themselves to God, and that manifests itself in their relationships with others. Only from this relational vision of the human being can we understand that freedom – so central a concern for the modern age – does not consist in an empty autonomy, but that it is a reality that springs from a gift and is called to fulfill itself in a gift: the gift of self.

This truth gives rise to the family, founded on the indissoluble marriage between a man and a woman, which is open to welcoming and educating children. The family provides the background that allows human beings to understand in their own flesh and blood that their identity is in relationships: they have received their life as a son or daughter, to give themselves as a spouse and to transmit this life to others as a parent. Respecting this grammar of family relationships, one can find the proper declensions for the difference between generations. The denial of sexual difference and of its openness to the transmission of life encloses human beings in an individualism that makes it impossible to build up society.

In the sacraments, in fact, we enter the environment of relationships inaugurated by Christ, thus participating in the language of Christ’s body, in order to live as Christ lived and taught us to live. The sacraments contain the unity between a true word that opens a way for us, and a love that touches our flesh and transforms us. In this way, the sacraments are the events in which Christ acts with his Spirit of love, accompanying all of human history toward its maturation. In this way one overcomes the various reductive visions of the sacraments, which respectively see them as external rites without any link to the experience and the journey of human beings, as emotional comfort, or, finally, as mere signs of recognition of belonging to a community.

The truth of love implies a truth of the affections inasmuch as the affections are not self-referential sentiments. An affection is, instead, the first reaction to a love that precedes us and in that in itself already anticipates the union with the beloved, allowing us to move toward this goal. In its rationalist version the paradigm opposing the law to conscience ignores the affections or considers them as obstacles to freedom. The same paradigm also has an emotivist version, in which the affections are absolutized and thus lose their reference to truth. On the contrary, from the point of view of the truth of love, it is possible to recognize that in the affection there is an initial truth, which, however is not yet complete and sufficient. The importance of education thus becomes obvious as the field in which personal bonds allow for the affections to mature into virtues.

This type of pastoral care begins with conversion and aims at the realization of our vocation to holiness. Taking its bearings from Jesus’ dialogue with the Samaritan woman, it is a pastoral ministry of the spring, and not of the well, inasmuch as it is based on the original gift of the vocation that God entrusts to human beings (spring), seeking to make them flourish, and not on the isolated forces of the individual, which soon run dry (well). In this way, one overcomes the poverty of a pastoral approach that solicits emotions so as to console, but does not form people to act, or that gets fragmented in the attempt to solve problems, neglecting the greatness of the Christian vocation.