Italian
We are in an era of change. And the changes we experience are not “fast.” They are “rapid.” The Church has never shown concern for the speed of phenomena. Instead, it has emphasized their “rapidity.” It was John Paul II who spoke of the “rapid development of technologies.” In the adjective “rapid” we find the root of “rapire,” which means to grab, to drag away. The train is fast: it moves undisturbed on its tracks without overwhelming anything. “The century of motorization has imposed speed as a measurable value, whose records mark the history of the progress of machines and men,” notes Italo Calvino in his American Lessons.
“Rapidus” instead of being what runs, is what kidnaps, drags, overwhelms. It is also capable of involving attitudes, lifestyles, cognitive patterns, understandings of reality. The invention of electric light has “kidnapped” the pace of our days. And if social networks have overwhelmed our ability to relate, artificial intelligence is disorienting our way of thinking.
But what does it mean to live in fast times without being carried away by hope?
First of all, as Pope Francis teaches us and the works of the synod, it means not to stop at “preaching from the shore”, but rather to have the courage to “stay in the boat”, even with all the difficulties of managing the waves and the rough sea: between those who see (and shout) “land” everywhere and those who would instead like to return safely to port.
“Things” have happened. There has been a long pandemic experience in which relationships have remained suspended and confined to homes, generating a discontinuity in socialization that many still bear the signs of. We must take note of an ecclesial culture that has multiple and often contradictory dimensions. Some reveal a dangerous tendency towards a collective indifference to values and behaviors along with a propensity to postpone, neglect, and omit ecclesial and sacramental life. As De Rita asserts, a sort of “gray zone” of “absent believers” has been created. In recent decades, there has been an imperative of the primacy of the subject, authorized to judge what is sin and what is not; after all, Spinoza already said that man does not desire good, but calls good what he desires. And there are those who, on the contrary, shut themselves off and cling to their certainties brandishing the club of true faith and true doctrine.
We are facing phenomena under which a great historical process operates: a subjectivity both quantitative (modern society is made up of many countless subjects, and consequently of a segmented pluralism of behaviors and values); and qualitative (modern society is dangerously marked by the primacy of subjectivism, even ethical). And it is on these two different faces of an “unheard of” and never experienced primacy of subjectivity, that the Church with its intelligence of faith “fast and slow” must work.
Fidelity to history teaches us that the challenge is to change together, aware that only great collective processes are capable of moving the various social and ecclesial components. We need a life of faith capable of passion. We must be able to go beyond the “I”, starting from the strength of the self, riding the conatus essendi of each of us, not to tame it, but to help it grow in a healthier way, in knowing how to do, in doing well, in wanting to do seriously, building a good life, not vague and lonely, but unique and therefore fraternal.
