The fragility of belief

The Church, starting from Vatican II, has approached the study of the relationship between the evangelical message and cultures in a "new way". A particular contribution to the inculturation of faith comes from the discernment of its constitutive data with respect to the expressions or historical-existential conditioning that cultures imprint on it.
The same studies of biblical hermeneutics tell us that faith needs religious and cultural structures to express itself, because although it is not identified with them (a theme already present since the apostolic age), it does not exist independently of them.

In recent decades, theological speculation about the influence of the Word in the world, or "cosmic Christology", according to which everything was created by, in and for Christ, has opened the way to a theology of culture. The card. Duval, in Algeria during the delicate transition between the colonial and post-colonial era, stated that people cannot be considered as blank slates on which to write a completely new history. The mystery of the incarnation of the Word of God is the indisputable model of approaching the world and cultures. It is not an approach from the outside, with a certain sense of superiority, but an approach from the inside; not a movement of simple immersion but of assumption. Although the kingdom of God is not identified with cultures and its true growth cannot be confused with the progress of civilization, it begins already in the here and now, in dialogue with and in history. These very general premises are essential in the complex accompaniment of the catechumenate of adults, particularly in lands like Turkey, where the religious reference, at least culturally speaking, is to Islam and certainly not to Christianity, the religion of a tiny minority of people .

To those who, sometimes without knowing their extended family context, ask to meet us in order to begin a journey of discernment, with a view to embracing the Christian faith, we must, first of all, make it clear that a believer cannot be reduced to the religious dimension of his beliefs, but that the latter fits into a much broader human, psychological, social and, in a word, existential framework! Many Muslims (at least cultural) who knock on our doors entrust us with their dreams, often in the literal sense of the term: their first approach to Christianity is dreamlike (before turning up our noses, we must remember the importance of the dreamlike dimension in a scriptural context …).
It is here that we realize that we need a Church capable of new imagination and, therefore, also capable of rethinking itself within new cultural contexts. We must fight against the fatigue of feeling challenged to be a living part of the great transformations of history, even if it is easier to think of a world built on immutable codes and to flaunt the reasons for its immutability rather than its precariousness. He who does not change when everything changes eventually becomes mute. In the long run, obsolete patterns suffocate life. To overcome this, new spaces, new approaches, new languages are needed (and not only because we often have to communicate with languages that are materially devoid of a Christian vocabulary), which express practices of new humanity.

As card. Martini, in his prophetic speech to the city of Milan for the feast of Sant'Ambrogio on 6 December 1990, We and Islam: the problem is trying to understand what values a person really embodies in his life in order to consider them carefully and respect. This without forgetting that life is evolution, so in order to fulfill themselves humanly and spiritually, people must change and the changes can also be at the origin of fatal crises on the path of faith.
We have experienced this more than once, even in extremely advanced paths. If certain abandonments were also a cause of profound disappointment, let us not give up on believing that the exercise of leadership does not consist in "regulating" but in "inspiring"; is not primarily disciplinary, but offers meaning.

Claudio Monge
NP December 2023