By Carmen Elena Villa
LIMA, Peru, MARCH 10, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Every person has the vocation to sanctity, the perfection of charity in everyday life, and it is accomplished by welcoming God’s transforming grace into oneself, affirms Luis Fernando Figari.
Figari is the founder of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, a society of apostolic life born in Peru in 1971 and approved by Pope John Paul II in 1997. Its members are laymen and priests who live with full availability for the apostolate.
He also founded the Christian Life Movement, the Marian Community of Reconciliation and the Servants of the Plan of God in addition to other associations that are part of what is called the Sodalit Family. He is a consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Laity.
Luis Fernando Figari spoke with ZENIT in this interview about the main points of his latest book, «Formation and Mission,» soon to be published in English.
Part 2 of this interview will appear Wednesday.
Q: Your book particularly emphasizes the role of the layperson in the mission of the Church without falling into an exaggerated laicism where the role of the hierarchy of the Church is undervalued. How do you believe this equilibrium can be attained?
Figari: The Church is fundamentally integrated by clergy and laypeople. All of them are the Church’s faithful from baptism. Upon receiving this sacrament the person is sealed in his interiority and invited to actively participate, according to his state of life, according to his vocation, in the mission that God bestows upon the Church.
The faithful layperson, exercising his Christian vocation in the world, is destined by God for the apostolate, to cooperate so that the divine message of reconciliation may be known and received by all men and women throughout the world.
Evangelizing and letting oneself be evangelized is an unavoidable responsibility. Each person, according to his own condition, is called to impregnate and perfect the temporal order with the Gospel spirit of justice and fraternity, and in all things be a witness of his effective adhesion to Christ and advance toward sanctity … whereas the cleric has his own identity and mission that respond to a particular vocation and are sealed by the sacrament of holy orders, which marks a specific character in the person who receives it.
A clear ecclesiology, such as the one that comes from the Second Vatican Council, helps comprehend that the two fundamental states of the faithful are that of clergy and that of the laity.
We know that priests and lay can consecrate themselves to God in a canonical way. The last mentioned are those who are called in usual terms, «religious,» however this is not the place to get into technical precisions.
This having been said I would like to emphasize that an exaggeration ought not to be presented in one sense or the other, that is to say, neither clericalisms nor laicisms. It is a question of understanding the mission each one has in the life of the Church: a mission that is always of harmony, of communion, and in no sense of antagonism or opposition.
If unfortunately a situation such as this arises, one would have to view it as a pathology whose healing comes from a right ecclesiology and from recuperating one’s own identity, whether it is of the clergy or of the lay. In order that such identity is not weakened an ongoing process of formation is needed within the diverse states, which should be concretized in the varied conditions of life.
I don’t believe, then, that it is a matter of balance, but rather of communion. It seems to me to be about consciousness of one’s own identity and state of life, of coherent practice with this identity, of a healthy theology, and of a horizon of life that aspires in every way toward sanctity. It is important to always remember that we all are called to participate, each from his own state, in the mission of the Church.
Q: On a number of occasions you refer in your book to the new ecclesial movements: What do you believe are the fruits of sanctity that can already be seen in this new ecclesial reality?
Figari: There are fruits of sanctity all around. Many times they remain hidden from the eyes, but they are there, illuminating and giving off a soft warmth in the midst of the People of God.
Every conscious faithful knows that he is called to sanctity. The faith teaches us this with clarity. The Second Vatican Council had the responsibility of highlighting the vocation to sanctity that every baptized person has.
Every baptized person is called to the perfection of charity, in his concrete existence, in his state of life. The universal vocation of Christ’s disciples is the vocation to sanctity and the mission to evangelize the world, as the Catechism points out.
Certainly the ecclesial movements that welcome the orientations of the Council and aspire to respond to the teachings of the magisterium become communities where there is a search to live and celebrate the faith in a spirit of intense encounter with the Lord, opening itself in awe to the beauty of the truth that he is, loving him, following his path, doing what he has told us and irradiating all from a committed existence that is like a luminous symphony that strives to live virtue and perfection in love, avoiding that the grace which God lovingly pours forth in our hearts is left sterile on account of a lack of docility to grace and its drive.
A recurring theme is that there is not only a sanctity of the extraordinary, but also one of what is common, a sanctity of everyday life. In this sense the ecclesial movements, on account of their emphasis in aspiring to be communities of faith, and on account of their organization in small communities of faith, help to comprehend that sanctity, to which all are called, is the result of welcoming the grace that God pours forth over our hearts, that it is nourished in the sacraments and prayer, and that it is forged in daily life following Jesus, the Eternal Word who incarnates in the womb of Most Holy Mary, model of all sanctity.
Who could deny that in the ecclesial movements, as in other realities of the Church, there are people that live intensely the baptismal unfurling with the gift that God continues to confer, living according to the love that comes from God and which continues leading us, with each person’s own cooperation, to the perfection of charity that he bestows upon us.
In this sense, the ecclesial movements are certainly making a contribution by which millions of their members, like small torches fueled with the oil of the Holy Spirit, set forth from their simplicity on the path of daily life contributing toward bringing light and heat to a world where darkness and cold threaten to expand.
[Translation by Adam Ureneck]
