The Rector Major releases a first draft of the 2020 Strenna
RMG, 25 July 2019 -- In response to the Salesian Family’s request of the Rector Major that he provide at least an outline of the 2020 Strenna in time for the new pastoral year that begins in some parts of the world (Europe especially) in September, Fr Ángel Fernández Artime released a first draft, a broad outline of the traditional Salesian ‘Strenna’, a kind of New Year’s gift so familiar to the Valdocco Oratory in Don Bosco’s day. And this time, the Rector Major has sought to translate Don Bosco’s ‘politics of the Our Father’ through perhaps the most characteristic and best known of Don Bosco’s phrases: ‘Good Christians and upright citizens.’
“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt 6:10)
"Good Christians and upright citizens"
Fr Ángel explains that he has chosen these words of Don Bosco at a time when it is so difficult to be apostles and missionaries to the young, and we run the risk of not educating young people to ‘a strong sense of citizenship, social justice and gospel values that lead to them internalising such things as service of others, commitment to public life, personal honesty … sensitivity to the world of migration, creation and the "common home" that has been given to us, in the commitment to protect the defenceless, those without a voice, who are rejected.’ He says that this educational commitment of ours is an expression today of Jesus’ words: ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ (Mt 6:10).
The Rector Major points out that such a direct reference to Don Bosco and the Oratory means we need to go back to the sources to understand Don Bosco’s thinking and ways of acting with and among young people as he prepared them for life in the 19th century Italy of his day. We, too, need to ‘do politics’, but the way Don Bosco did it, in an innocuous way, but one that was to the advantage of governments anywhere in the world, wherever the ‘work of the Oratory’ was established and tended to ‘form good citizens’, and still does.
Taking the two main parts of Don Bosco’s saying: ‘good Christians’, ‘upright citizens’, the Rector Major unpacks the meaning of each. ‘Good Christians’ are those who listen to God, are guided by the Spirit. For us to be educators and evangelisers of the young today means telling them, from our own experience, how God loves them, and we do this with our Salesian spirituality of true friendship that opens heart. We do it, too, in non-Christian environments, through our personal witness, and here, the Rector Major cites the example of Fr Tom Uzhunnalil, a prisoner in Yemen for 557 days, but a witness through his silence. There have to be good Christians who face the challenge of post-believers in post.Christian environments. And of course, ours must be a faith lived together, but not inwardly. A faith that takes us out of ourselves.
This ‘going out of ourselves’ is further developed in the section on ‘Upright citizens’. Young people await us in real life, what the Rector Major calls the ‘house of life’. He refers to the Synod on young people and the kind of justice and citizenship of which young people are becoming prophets, and so we need to educate ourselves and young people ‘to commitment and political service.’ Thus, the social teaching of the Church, ‘the Cinderella of our educational and pastoral activity’, is in fact the magna carta of such commitment.
Uprightness and honesty are seen especially in terms of ‘keeping ourselves free from corruption’ or, put more positively, ‘creating a more visible culture of social ethics.’ The Rector Major also reminds us, quoting Laudato si’, of the need to care for our common home as young people today are asking us to do, not as an ‘extra commitment’ but as ‘a horizon that challenges the whole of our culture, faith, lifestyle, mission … education and evangelisation.’ And, naturally, the defence of human rights and the rights of minors must take centre stage for us.
We cannot achieve all these things alone. We have the presence of Our Lady Help of Christians: ‘from the perspective of an education that helps boys, girls, all young people, and all of us as educators and evangelisers in the Salesian Family, the presence of Mary has a dimension that is not only devotional, but also "political": she is the Mother who helps her children to fully live out their commitment to God and the created world. She is the "politics of the Our Father!”’
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