What discipleship?

Ever since the days of the constitutive evangelization, the Church in Latin America has continued to press forward, overcoming numerous challenges and obstacles in order to proclaim Christ, Redeemer and Reconciler of humanity. The road traveled since the first Bishops' councils of South America and those of North America, respectively centered in Lima and Mexico, is truly remarkable. This feat of evangelization has reached millions of people on the soil of what, from the perspective of someone with faith, has come to be called the "Continent of Hope."

The changes taking place in these new times we live in have brought the Bishops of Latin America to gather on various occasions to share their faith, evangelical zeal, their analysis of the challenges and how to overcome them. It is thus, under the impulse of Pope Leo XIII during the time in which he reflected intensely upon the identity of Latin America, that the great meeting of the Latin American episcopacy, the Plenary Council of Latin America, took place in Rome. This was a decisive landmark that gathered up the living vitality of the faith that ran through Latin-American soil and shared it with the Universal Church. The awareness of being Latin America sunk deep in the consciousness of the Bishops. The sense of communion in the Church lived in that Council was such that its influence extended to everyone-for example through the influence of a number of its dispositions in the 1917 Code of Canon Law.

Moving ahead in time a different form of meeting was produced. They were called General Episcopal Conferences. Each one, from the first in Rio de Janeiro (1955), to the second in Medellin (1968), the third in Puebla de los Angeles (1979), and the fourth in Santo Domingo (1992) has had great riches and contributions to offer the Church in Latin America. In these beginnings of the third millennium a new conference is being prepared to take place in Aparecida, Brazil, in 2007. Pope Benedict XVI, concerned about the many and serious challenges hanging over the Church in these lands, has given his approbation so that the new meeting of Latin American Bishops can take place. With remarkable theological finesse and pastoral sensitivity the Holy Father has posited that the Fifth General Conference be dedicated to deepening in the theme "Disciples and missionaries of Christ, so that our peoples may, in Him, have life. 'I am the way, the Truth, and the Life (Jn 14:6).'" It all implies the centrality of the Lord Jesus and his teachings, as the source and summit of life.

A Title that Marks out a Horizon

The Document of Participation of the Latin American Bishops' Conference (CELAM) has sought to center upon the words of the theme chosen by the Pope. Alongside the central third chapter, "Disciples and Missionaries of Jesus Christ," the final chapter, even though short and although it "leaves the document open," accidentally or intentionally couples with the evocation of the "holy disciples and missionaries" in the first appendix. The unfinished character of the development of the theme "so that our peoples may in Him have life" in the Lord Jesus who is Life itself, extends to those who as disciples and missionaries adhered to Jesus with so much zeal that opening themselves up to grace, walking the ways of life set out by the Lord, attained the gift that their earthly existence serve as a stimulus for their brothers and sisters in the pilgrim Church. The goal of discipleship, which is following Jesus, progressing along the path of configuration with Him, living of His life, attaining holiness, is crowned in this way. The brief list of canonized saints speaks to the believer of the millions more who, without being canonized, are participating in the Communion of Love. Christian life and the goal of holiness appear vividly on the horizon.

Permanent Correctives

Aparecida will be the fourth conference since the Second Vatican Council. Medellin, the true one, not the invented one, explicitly followed up on the harvest of the Rio Conference, which in turn picked up on the developments of the Plenary Council at the close of the 19th century. Thus in Latin America was sealed a tradition of "renewal in continuity" which is otherwise typical in the life of the Church and which achieved magnificent expression in the Council convoked by the Blessed John XXIII. Pope Benedict XVI has recently recalled it with emphatic clarity, contrasting it with the "hermeneutic of discontinuity and of rupture." (1)

The language of Medellin was at times novel. But its meaning is very well understood in the globality of the Bishops' message. As a result of subordination to an ideological syncretism the authentic, historic, Medellin was forgotten and a false, widely publicized one was invented. A few paragraphs cited out of context and an audacious and organized propaganda reached the point of confusing many. Much work has been done to show the real Medellin, and the irreversible character of the progress achieved in showing its real face has not been slight.

It is therefore somewhat startling that on the vespers of Aparecida partisans of the liberationism that invented the false Medellin, despite the course of history and the enlightening clarifications of the Magisterium as well as those of Puebla and Santo Domingo, return to the same ideas. An important exponent of these currents of thought has posited the words "resist and rescue as words of order." (2) What is he talking about? The answer has already been given: "What interests us here is not the 'historical Medellin': what actually took place in the CELAM Assembly of 1968; but the 'kerigmatic Medellin': what it represents in historical terms." (3) The real Medellin doesn't matter, what the Bishops really put forwards doesn't matter, what matters is a subjective vision of what they call "kerigmatic Medellin." The written formulation itself reveals how far away one can get from realism and objectivity, and how easily, using words extrapolated from greater realities, an arbitrary reading can be enunciated. Is it falsification that they want to "rescue?" Another well known proponent of these erroneous views three years ago posited an opposition between Pope John Paul II and what he called "the spirit that impregnated Latin America in the sixties and seventies," (4) which in this case would be the spirit of the invented Medellin. From this perspective he today criticizes the Document of Participation and its presentation of discipleship. Others, from similar perspectives, criticize the missionary dimension. It is painfully evident that there are those who hold fast to a reductive vision even though it has been repeatedly corrected by the teachings of Popes and the General Conferences of the Latin American Episcopate, including that of the real Medellin.

Authentic Discipleship

Discipleship and mission must always proceed from the faith of the Church. They can in no way be legitimately centered in reductive intra-worldly commitments that are ruinous to the faith and to Christian life, escapist in the face of reality, and ideologically and syncretically militant. The idea is not to allow oneself to be trapped by a rhetoric which, behind a few acceptable affirmations, by means of a method of subtle evasion, transmits ideological contraband which ends up discrediting the missionary sense of the disciple and his very nature. The disciple is intrigued by who Jesus is and opens himself to Him in a dynamic of encounter which takes up his teachings vitally. "Convert and believe in the Gospel" (Mk. 1:15) is the key given by the Lord Himself. This conversion by way of the faith proceeds along the path of the "quadruple reconciliation" (5) brought by Jesus Christ towards the overcoming of the diverse ruptures besetting the human being. The transformative charity which nourishes and kindles this process should be shown in the good life and works of the disciples of the Lord Jesus as the sign which distinguishes them. From out of this being a disciple emerges the missionary commitment that gives expression to the missionary mandate of Jesus to go to all people evangelizing, proclaiming the Redeemer and Reconciler, and making them His disciples. (6)

Discipleship and the mission also run the risk of being threatened by other challenges which paradoxically also have an aversion to the real. The rationalism that is so widespread claims to be functionally agnostic and cold, and to eliminate all emotion. And sentimentalism, powered by subjectivism, takes vengeance by distancing itself from reason. These apparently opposed perspectives unite in posing false antimonies. Reason and emotion can indeed agree. It would perhaps be better to say: they must agree. And the fact is that from the unity of the human being, despite the ruptures that beset him (7), both aim at conciliation. The category of experience, correctly understood, assists to this end. Jesus, who invites us to discipleship, does so out of his mission and the fascination produced by His mystery. Whoever meets Him experiences the overwhelming value of the Truth and the meaning He radiates. Such an encounter with Him moves one to an affective adherence as much as to an adherence to the truth that his person reveals. In the presence of Jesus reason is alighted and feeling enlivened, overcoming the ruptures and tensions they may have since He, the Reconciler, offers the human being the reconciliatory answer to all his ruptures, in an especially clear way to the tension that reason and emotion may experience, and which a cultural climate has sought to exacerbate.

Discipleship is born out of the full acceptance of Jesus and what Jesus means. There is no opposition between Person and doctrine; He teaches with his whole being. His presence and his message become one; He is integral. Jesus, the Christ, appeals to the mind with the Truth, whose beauty awakens emotion and invites us to take his path seeking to do good "as He went about doing good." (Acts 10:38) The indispensable catechesis must be like this. There is no place for evasion or reductionism, nor for diplomacy or concealment. Authentic discipleship is an integral commitment with the Lord, an intimate communion that seeks to know his teachings and follow Him, carrying out the mission of preaching the Gospel, as Saint Paul used to say. And like him, it is to experience the drama he expressed when he said: "Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel!" (1Cor. 9:16)

"According to the Heart of God"

The Document of Participation thus refers to the discipleship of the Virgin Mary. She, disciple and missionary par excellence, throws light on how the men and women of Latin America should live these dimensions of Christian life in the face of the difficult times we have ahead of us. When she believes God and out of faith pronounces her Fiat ("Be it done") without limits in the Annunciation-Incarnation, the Immaculate Virgin initiates an exemplary discipleship. Her openness to the Word and her internalization of the real presence of the Eternal Word of God made man in the Lord Jesus become paradigmatic for the action of moving forward in communion with Jesus in missionary action and solidarity.

She who received the Good News doesn't keep it for herself. She quickly sets out for her cousin in need Elizabeth bearing the Eternal Light. Ardent torch of grace and mystery, she radiates this light and Elizabeth perceives the reality and makes a confession of faith: "And why is this granted me, that the Mother of my Lord should come to me?" The first great confession of faith! And the baby John jumps with joy in her womb, filled with the Holy Spirit. This is the process of discipleship, this is the dynamic of mission: to receive, to interiorize the Lord, to allow that his Life be expressed in all of our life, to allow that his light and warmth radiate to others, and to be cooperators in this radiance, to lend him the reality of our life, of our being, of our mind, of our heart, of our body so that He expresses and projects Himself into the concrete reality of human beings, spreading the proclamation and explanation of the Good News that the Church treasures and communicates to everyone as an expression of Her life and mission until the ends of the earth.

The loving obedience of the Virgin Mary to the Divine Plan is the key of discipleship, through which one enters the path of existential communion, living communion with Jesus, in Jesus, who is Life itself, and experiencing the mystery of His presence, proclaiming Him with life and word, to the impulse of the Holy Spirit which takes us to act according to the Plan of God and in doing so to cry out with this human action "Abba, Father" (Gal. 4:6), giving glory to God with what we do and even more so with our life itself.

Notes

1. See H.H. Benedict XVI, Speech to Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops, and Senior Prelates of the Roman Curia, 22/12/2005. [Back]

2. J.B. Libanio, Caminando hacia la V Conferencia de Aparecida, in Christus, July-August 2006, p.20; see also p.11. [Back]

3. Clodovis M. Boff, OSM, A Originalidade Histórica de Medellín, http;//www.sedos.org/spanish/boff.html/. [Back]

4. José Comblin, "Changes in the Latin American Church during the Pontificate of John Paul II", in the National Catholic Reporter, vol.1, n.15, 9/7/2003 [Back]

5. H.H. John Paul II, Reconciliation and Penance, 8. [Back]

6. See Mt 28:19-20, Mk 16:15, Jn 20:21. [Back]

7. See Gaudium et Spes, 10. [Back]