HISTORICAL FRAMEWORK: DON
ALBERIONE AND HIS TIME
The world in which Don Giacomo Alberione found himself
living was certainly the most excited and frenzied that history has ever known:
two world wars (the only one fought so far), a chain reaction of red and black
revolutions, the rise and the fall of colonialism, the birth of the third and
fourth world, the spread of the industrial revolution in almost every country
on Earth, the invention and exploitation of entirely new energy sources such as
electrical and atomic, of communication media such as the car, the plane, the
satellite, and above all the cinema, the radio, the television, social
upheavals of wide and long range as the emancipation of the proletariat and of
the woman, the crisis of the family and of the traditional values, the advent
of the 'atheism of state and the renewal of religions, especially of the
Catholic Church.
And all in little more than eighty years, just how many
lived the founder of the Pauline Family, from 1884 to 1971.
DON ALBERIONE AND THE "BELLE ÉPOQUE"
(1884-1913)
When Giacomo Alberione was born, the great powers of the
old continent have been bones for about twenty years. Now they are going to get
their hands on the rest of the world. Constituted the German Empire with the
victories of 1870, it opened in / 11 /
Europe a long period, up to the First World War of 1914,
characterized by the so-called "armed peace". Conflicts have become
sectoral and occur between individual countries or within them or in colonial
territories.
In any case, the scene is totally dominated by
capitalism, increasingly based, however, not on individualist liberalism and
the principle of competition, but on protectionism and imperialism: each state
is concerned with protecting its agricultural and industrial economies and
together to constitute a colonial empire, as a hunting reserve both for the
placement of capital and labor.
And all in little more than eighty years, just how many
lived the founder of the Pauline Family, from 1884 to 1971.
The European dynamism is easily explained if one takes
into account the great technical achievements obtained then by science. Thus
the first "multinationals" appear. In Germany, the seventies and
eighties go down in history as the "years of the founders", for the
tumultuous rise of a good eight hundred economic and financial societies.
Economic crises certainly do not stop the capitalist march; in any case, they
serve to accentuate protectionist measures and make imperialism more crude.
On the other hand, diplomacy is there to silence the bad
conscience of the people, combining a dense network of treaties linking friends
and enemies in a cross-interests game: there is an alliance between Austria and
Germany (1879), but also a another between Austria, Germany and Italy (1882);
there is no secret agreement between Austria, Germany and Russia (1881) but not
even one, even more secret, between Russia and Germany (1887). The great
European powers wink at each other, holding the right to the ally and together
the left to the non-ally. In practice, all of Europe is at the same time an
ally and an enemy.
England, for inveterate secular habit, is a little
secluded: with one eye it looks at the colonies, with the other it keeps the
turn of the Napoleon at bay, which is now called Bismark. On the other hand, it
too has its own fish-to-peel: the economic-social crises with the first major
agitations of the «Trade Unions»; the political crisis with the passage of
powers from conservatives to liberals; the irredentist crisis of the Irish.
Even more isolated, Russia appears, considered the bulwark of the most sinister
/ 12 / reaction. But one extreme calls the other, and therefore, in the
autocratic country par excellence, the most anarchic and nihilist tendencies
and movements are raging.
In the decades leading up to the First World War, the
chronic disease of Europe is found, however, in the very body of the old
continent, and is called the "Eastern question". At the bedside of
the Ottoman Empire are all the great Powers, aimed at securing, directly or
indirectly, the most conspicuous slice of the Balkans and the Near East. At the
Berlin Congress of 1878, Bismark's direction managed to avoid the worst, but
the final banquet was only postponed. Also in Berlin, in 1884-1885, an
international conference succeeds in fixing the principle that the European
Powers can boast rights in Africa (and, in general, in the colonial world) only
on the territories actually occupied. It is a real incitement to share the
cake, and England will take advantage of it more than any other.
Beyond the Atlantic, after the colonialism of the various
motherlands, the race to the west is developing, at the expense of the
indigenous peoples, particularly in the United States. Farms, roads, bridges,
railways, cities, skyscrapers are born (the first one was built in Chicago in
1883). In short, in the mid-eighties, the world started to become, for the
first time in history, a single large market, one large industry.
Italy, unfortunately, is in tow, a bit 'as the taillight
in the row of world powers, and we still do not know how to consider it, if first
among the last or last among the first. Formed with the wars of 1848-1849 and
1859-1860, Italy essentially completed its geographical unit, doing, as usual,
a whole series of "waltz tours": in 1866, it became part of the
rivalry between Prussia and Austria, and obtained the Veneto; in 1870, it was
wedged in the struggle between Prussia and France, and gathered the last shreds
of the Papal State.
The task of making Italy and Italians, after Cavour's
death (6 June 1861) fell on the shoulders of the so-called "historical
right". The difficulty of the company is not cheap; so much so that during
the course of about nine years (June 1861 December 1869) eight governments
succeeded each other. / 13 /
Faced with the rest of Europe, the new nation is
certainly not just a "geographical expression", but appears little
more than a provincial country. Political participation is based on 12% of the
population (the one in possession of active and passive electoral rights), a
percentage that is almost always reduced to half, given the strong abstention.
The economic physiognomy remains for a long time that of an underdeveloped
country, especially since the policy of the "economy up to the bone"
pursued in the first decades by Quintino Sella and all his "travet"
has provoked a strong stagnation, especially in the south, and many people had
to pack their bags, going to look for bread and work outside Italy.
The advent of the "historical Left" in 1876,
with Agostino Depretis, has the effect of a real revolution. Something certainly
changes but, in the end, with almost bankrupt results. It is precisely the
"revolutions" to which Giacomo Alberione is assisted, consciously or
unconsciously, as a young man.
The first is the political-parliamentary one, especially
after the new electoral law of 1882, which brings voters from 2% to 7% of the
total population. The result is such a situation that it is necessary to resort
more and more to the tactics of the so-called "transformism".
Maintaining the same policy but constantly changing allies, Depretis
"transforms" the physiognomy of parliamentary forces and currents,
cooking them in its own way. The political class thus remains the mafia
consortium of the former, increasingly widening the gap between "legal
country" and "real country".
The second revolution is the economic one. In reality,
this is a different financial orientation. Whereas fierce economies were
practiced earlier to obtain a balanced budget at any cost, a period of great
public spending (or "cheerful finance", as the opponents call it) has
now begun. The deficit is growing, industrialization is growing, and Italy
moves from predominantly business to capitalism to modern industrial
capitalism. But to achieve this take-off and protect the nascent industry, the
policy of protectionism is adopted, domestic prices are kept high and the
standard of living of poor people is kept low. The most striking result is / 14
/
that one must emigrate as before and more than before,
especially from the usual south (on average, 200,000 people a year, in the
period 1886-1890).
The third revolution, the one in international politics,
is the most eloquent demonstration of how to create incendiaries and then
finish firemen. The currents of the historical Left sympathize, initially, for
democratic, republican and anticlerical France, and for England equally
democratic and parliamentary, and are instead very hostile to the empire
conservatives such as Austria, Germany, Russia. But the original attitude
changes very soon, and it is precisely the Left that leads to perfecting the
politics of the Right. Not only was the "Triple Alliance" signed with
Austria and Germany in 1882, but the first Italian colony was also proclaimed
in Assab, Eritrea.
The results of the three pseudo-revolutions implemented
by the historic Left are very disturbing: in order not to spoil relations with
Allied Austria, irredentist movements must be stifled; in order to compete with
the other Powers, one must become increasingly bogged down in colonial wars,
ending up in the defeats of Dogali in 1887 and Adua in 1896. The betrayal of
the ideals of the Risorgimento could not be clearer and clearer.
This road was just a dead end. After all, unfortunately,
there will also be the protest of the socialist and Catholic masses, the
reaction to cannonades during the riot in Milan (1898) and finally the attack
by Gaetano Bresci that costs the life of King Umberto I (1900).
The "shock" of the ruling class and public
opinion is enormous. A palingenesis, a radical renewal, is invoked from all
sides, precisely at the moment of passage between the two centuries. Appeals
resound on both sides. In this atmosphere full of charismatic suggestions, the
young cleric Alberione lives the first fundamental experience of his life, and
is oriented towards social action, indeed towards the apostolate.
In fact, in Italy we try to turn the page and, in the
«belle époque», the era of Giovanni Giolitti begins. However, change is more
apparent than real, given that the basic choices made in previous decades
remain as they are: continue the "status quo". Not even the granting
of universal male suffrage in 1912 serves to truly renew the ruling class of
the state, since the great mass movements, the socialist and the Catholic,
remain foreign to the "room of buttons", hostile to institutions and
government.
But civil and cultural society is in rapid turmoil.
Industrialization, good or bad, puts the masses in motion, creating an
incipient consumer culture.
Social communication becomes journalistic, it throws
itself headlong into the world of images that are bouncing from one side and
the other through the new techniques of photography and cinema. We run not only
in carriage and train, but also by bicycle and car. The large transatlantic ships
begin to function, the first planes appear (immediately used in the 1911
Italian-Libyan war).
In particular, the years 1890-1910 are those of a
cultural turning point that really marks the overcoming of the "ancien
régime". Going to the search for "nature", "truth",
"reality", scientists, artists and thinkers end up finding, or
rediscovering, the "subject". For this reason, while in the period
1860-1890 the guiding sciences were natural and the guiding method was the
positivist one, now instead the philosophical-psychological sciences and
philosophical-epistemological method-guide emerge as guiding sciences. It seems
clear, in short, from various directions, that not everything can be traced to
decomposition, recomposition and calculation; not everything can be
rationalized through the natural science method.
The awareness of the "irrational" emerges (in
these years Freud invents psychoanalysis) and the path is sought to give it a
physiognomy. From empiricocriticism to "art nouveau", from symbolism
to futurism, from rampant imperialisms to increasingly excited nationalisms,
the dance of the "belle époque" becomes increasingly frenetic.
Catholicism lives the two pontificates of Leo XIII
(1878-1903) and Pius X (1903-1914). The first attempts an impressive operation
of renewal, through the recovery of tradition (it is the epoch of the
"neo": neo-scholastic, neo-Thomism, neo- / 16 // paleochristian,
neo-romanic, neo-gothic, neo -corporativism, etc.). The resulting forward
project is the modernist movement. Pius X blocks it on the doctrinal plane,
opening instead passages of reform on the practical-pastoral level.
Despite the proximity of Turin, which in recent years was
starting to become one of the most industrialized cities in Italy, the original
environment of the young Alberione, the Langhe, remains at the edge of the
great transformations underway, and the echoes of the events they come as
gagged and muffled. However, even in this small, predominantly peasant and
traditional world, something moves, and Giacomo Alberione, with the help of his
spiritual teacher, can. Francesco Chiesa, proves to be sensitive and ready to
grasp the new social, cultural, theological and pastoral ferments.
Alberione and Chiesa are both aligned with the
progressive and innovative traditionalism of Leo XIII, but also with the
ideological anti-modernism and the pastoral reformism of Pius X. Fruits of
these stimuli are, for Fr. Alberione, an intense social activity, catechetical,
liturgical and above all contributions of singular relevance and originality:
the manual Notes of Pastoral Theology, of 1912, and the monograph The woman
associated with priestly zeal, published in 1915, but already begun four years
earlier.
The "belle époque" has represented for all and
in every aspect, even if to a different extent, the gateway to the typical
lifestyle of the contemporary world. Those who lived those new, extraordinary,
exciting years, now handed over to the myth, learned to daydream. Even Fr.
Alberione, emerging from his youth, carried in his own way the torments, the
impulses and the intemperance of a world that ended up finding himself in the
trenches of the First World War.
DON ALBERIONE AND THE YEARS OF THE "GREAT
ILLUSION" (1914-1945)
The First World War (1914-1918) came like a bolt from the
blue, with the Serjevo bombing of June 28, 1914. No one really had prepared it,
but nobody wanted or stopped it, and the appeals were unheard - / 17 // sciosi
by Pius X. A wave of irrational emerged from the depths of the masses, provoked
by the various ruling classes, and the peoples were encouraged to hurl each
other. The triumph of Nietzsche's "superman" seemed to have taken the
turn of Wagner's "ride of the Valkyries". «Not for purchase, but for
conquest», emphatically proclaimed «vate» Gabriele D'Annunzio, summarizing in a
few words, in his own way, the ideal of «dangerously living» that was spreading
among thousands and thousands of excited people.
In the end, the new "sorcerer's apprentices"
had a sad and tremendous surprise: ten million dead, twenty million injured,
hundreds of billions of dollars consumed by the fire of war operations. But the
equally unforeseen "fall out" was also impressive, because the
conflict mobilizing millions of people on the front line or on the home front
suddenly created the first true mass society in history, making the proletariat
the protagonist of the events, putting in his hands instruments and techniques
of unprecedented scale, such as radiotelegraphy quickly transformed into
radiotelephony and finally into real radio.
The war, as Benedict XV had proclaimed, had indeed been a
"useless slaughter", but when it was over, the world was completely
changed, not so much because three empires had been swept away, as for the fact
that in Europe (and not only in Europe) every single man was no longer the same
as before. Thus the "great illusion" was born: that of mass
revolution, of mass truth, of mass man, of plebiscitary certainties, of total,
inevitable, absolute, universal renewal.
In Italy, the fantoccino, who was buried for months and
months in the mud of the trenches or sent to the assault on the
"spallate" against the Austrians, had changed: he had met
paradoxically a much better standard of life at the front than the one habitual
to his village, a more varied and richer diet, he could afford, often for the
first time, certain luxuries such as liqueur, chocolate, coffee. The
organization of the armed forces had given him a new dignity. Like the workers
in the factories, so the uniformed peasant was learning to feel like a citizen.
/ 18 /
The Italian masses in gray-green felt redeemed, closer to
their country, to Italy, but certainly not nationalist. The reasons for the
war, in fact, despite everything, had not been, nor really understood, nor
really shared. The rift between "legal country" and "real
country" was not only not filled, but deepened. The figures speak for
themselves: out of about five million Italians called to military service, as
many as 870,000 had to be reported to the judicial authorities for defaults of
various kinds, so that 15% of the mobilized citizens had to be prosecuted by
justice. And it was only the tip of the "iceberg" of what was called
and was increasingly the "ideology of dissent". The Italian masses no
longer felt willing to follow the old men, the old parties, the old ideas, the
old institutions.
Returned from the war front with the victory in the
pocket but with the ball at the foot of 680,000 dead, half a million mutilated
and one million injured, Italy worker and peasant understands, in short, that
we must turn the page. Thus, in the political elections of 1919, the former
with the proportional system, the two mass parties, the socialist and the
popular (Catholic) stravincono,
obtaining a large absolute majority. But socialists and
Catholics are far from each other for a multitude of reasons, and therefore
Italy is once again divided into three, the Italy of the three socialist,
Catholic and "secular" cultures.
Meanwhile, however, the most sensational novelty took
place in Russia, with the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and others seem to take
shape in the Europe of the former Central Empires (revolutionary attempts in
Germany, Austria, Hungary). The Italian socialists feel galvanized by the new
slogan: to do as in Russia, to build the «soviets». Too weak to go to the
assault of an unlikely Winter Palace, too strong not to pose the problem of the
conquest of power, occupy the "red biennium" (1919-1920) to make
plans and to fight, until they divide, in 1921, between socialists and communists,
giving way to the usual Giolitti to neutralize the immediate danger.
The fright of the big and small bourgeoisie, however, is
big, and the reaction, the "two-year black" (1921-1922), is not long
in coming. The right man at the right time for this hunt / 19 //
to witches is Benito Mussolini, already passed from
socialism to interventionism and from this to nationalism. The bourgeois and
capitalist state is saved, but it is no longer liberal, it is fascist, it has a
"leader" who "is always right", which requires everyone to
"believe, obey and fight". In Italy, the disheveled ferments of the
"belle époque" are truly finished, but the illusion of great
certainties has begun: "the twentieth century will be the century of
fascism".
In this political evolution, Italy is at the forefront
and serves as a model for the rest of Europe, in many parts of the world.
Fascism becomes the main export commodity. If it is true that another organized
fascism, openly totalitarian and dictatorial, the Nazi one, is affirmed only in
Germany since 1933, following the profound economic, moral and political crisis
of the Weimar Republic, it is also true that other fascisms more or less
watered down, variously disguised, they end up imposing themselves on the
Iberian peninsula, in Austria, in the Baltic countries, in the Balkans. And the
demon of the Bolshevik revolution seems to be exorcised.
In Russia, the Bolsheviks maintain that the real
proletarian revolution is theirs and that the illusion of communism is becoming
a reality. As Lenin said, the workers had the factories, the peasants the land,
the soldiers the peace, and the exploitation of man by man was to be considered
abolished. The internal and external difficulties for the construction of the
new society would not have been lacking, but now the redemption of the world
proletariat had begun. As we know, the events went very differently.
Even the capitalist world, on the other hand, lives its
contradictions dramatically. Prostrated by the war, Europe found itself not
only with its own resources scattered and looted, but also indebted to the bone
of the neck with the US intervened in 1917 to decide the dispute. The war
reparations make a real river of gold flow through the Atlantic: from Germany
and Austria, through England, France, the river flows into American banks. And
in the US the rush to investment, to the most unbridled speculation, is
unleashed, on the basis of another "great illusion", that of private
initiative abandoned to itself, that of the / 20 / wealth that must generate
ever greater wealth, that of infinite consumerism. But the financial world runs
empty, does not reflect the productive reality, does not express the level of
life and consumption of the masses, especially the agricultural ones. The
crisis is then inevitable, with the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange,
the "Black Friday" October 25, 1929.
The advent of Roosevelt and the "new deal"
certainly corrects the gap between finance and production, through large public
spending and social assistance works that encourage the resumption of
activities and consumption, but this does not mean that the prospects they
present less uncertain, since no planning can offer some "great
illusion" of security, nothing can presume to neutralize and resolve the
thousand contradictions of the economic and social world.
The recriminations of all time begin again. Against
France and England, Nazi Germany goes once again in search of its "living
space". Italy, hungry for a "place in the sun", poisoned by a
presumptuous autarkic policy, goes to disperse the last energies in the
colonial adventures of Ethiopia and Albania. Jewish finance, the world of
plutodemocracies, the Anglo-Saxon Powers become the demons to be exorcised and
defeated. The undisputed and indisputable dogma, first for Hitler, then for
Mussolini, is the racist one; the new "great illusion" is that, once
the Jew has disappeared, everything will be resolved by itself. In Italy, the
struggle is carried out more than anything else in words; in Germany, however,
Hitler opens the extermination camps and sharpens the weapons, making it the
general test in the Spanish war. But Jean Renoir perceives this in his 1937
film: the definitive collapse of each "great illusion" is being
prepared.
In September 1939, the new "sorcerer's
apprentices" called the masses to "die for Gdańsk". It was truly
a total war when even the US were pulled by the hair in the middle of the melee
following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941); it was a
science fiction war when the Germans, in the second half of 1944, began to
launch missiles V 1 and V 2 on England; it was the apocalypse when the first
atomic bombs rained on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Never a war had caused so much
destruction, reaped so many victims, caused so much suffering even among the
civilian populations: 55 // 21 / millions of dead, 35 million injured, 3
million missing, 1500 billion dollars milled from the war machine.
In the end, the budget may seem reassuring when the
champions of democracy manage to bring down the Axis Powers and their allies
(first Italy, then Germany, and finally Japan). It also seems that justice is
done when the most important war criminals, German and Japanese, are tried and
convicted according to certain principles of international law. Instead it is
the typical revenge of the victor, who leaves justice halfway, provided that
true justice can be spoken. Above all, however, it seems increasingly evident
that no one has achieved the true or presumed goals for which he had fought.
Mussolini and his fascism executed before the wall of a villa, Hitler and his
Nazism buried under the rubble of Berlin, Japanese imperialism burned in the
atomic pyre. But also England and France downgraded to Powers of the second
category, the United States and the Soviet Union facing, in the world split in
two, to wear out in a tug of war that, for now, sees no security outside the
atomic threat.
The "great illusion" experienced by European
and world history between 1914 and 1945 remains frozen in the "cold
war", blocked in front of the "iron curtain", and survival, as
Winston Churchill says, becomes "daughter of fear".
Driven by political and social events, culture also
experiences its "great illusion" during this period. It is the
triumph of Expressionist and Surrealist currents, first of all in the
figurative arts, then in literature, in music, in theater, in cinema and
especially in radio, which becomes the privileged instrument of regime
rhetoric, for manipulation and exaltation of the masses. Even the sciences,
from the humanistic to the legal, from the experimental to the most abstract,
seem to follow the chariot of great certainties, smuggled by the dictatorships
of the right and left and in the same democratic societies. In short,
mobilization becomes general, capillary, systematic. Everything is almost all
in uniform, all or almost becomes a barracks, political, committed, party. This
situation, already denounced in 1914 by Romain Rolland in Above the melee (Au-dessus
de la melee), returns to be described and harshly condemned in 1927 by Julien /
22 // Benda in The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (La trahison des clercs). It
will all be useless. The barkers like Goebbels [Nazi hierarchy] will have the
upper hand and will bring Europe to catastrophe.
In this historical conjuncture, the Church also feels the
duty to mobilize, and the Catholics are in fact close, first around Benedict XV
(1914-1922) and his work of pacification, then around Pius XI (1922-1939) and
to his program of apostolate for the affirmation of the kingship of Christ,
finally around Pius XII (1939-1958) and his action as universal magisterium.
Also for the Church it was then the moment of great certainties, the epoch of
strong testimonies, according to Christian realism, beyond the earthly
"illusions", small or large.
Fr Alberione himself lives in this period the moment of
the most radical, total, most decisive commitment. Right at the beginning of
the 1920s, some deep spiritual experiences definitely forged him for the
mission he had been daydreaming since he was young. From now on he will have no
more doubts: very demanding with himself, he will also be with others, asking
for a commitment in the measure of one hundred per one, without hesitation, without
hesitation. And the era of the "great illusion" was for him and for
his the era of great certainties, that is, of missionary expansion, of great
achievements in Italy and in the world.
DON ALBERIONE AND THE TIME
OF THE "GREAT PROBLEMS" (1945-1971)
The end of the Second World War completely changed the
cards on the table, much more radically than thirty years ago. In the shadow of
the atomic danger, humanity can avoid year after year, living a day, a third
world war. The "cold war" between the two superpowers is heated every
now and then in this or that part of the globe, but without leading to the
general conflagration.
The common danger imposes limits. But even the new
technologies, born mostly from the war, help to limit the risks: thousands of
satellites, placed in orbit from 1957 onwards, keep every corner of the world
under control; the descent of the first two men on the Moon, in 1969, has
served to better understand that the Earth, in the end, is only a planet, very
small, very delicate, very fragile, and the ecological problem is born
overwhelming. .
The political scene has been simplified at the top (the
superpowers are two and, at least for now, despite the great steps forward in
Japan and Europe, have no prospect of increasing in number), but it is
diversifying and complicating at lower levels . Already in the immediate
post-war period the area of the so-called "Third World" is outlined;
from the 60s the old colonialism crumbles and new nations of Africa and Asia
are crowded to fill a new world, the «Fourth».
The crises, inevitable in developments of this kind, are
traced back to the tracks of normality; the conflicts, even the most serious
ones (Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Near East) are many fires that flare up but then
run out of fuel deprivation, or even out of general disinterest, as in the case
of the fight between Iran and Iraq.
The two superpowers must allow, sometimes even favor, the
development of a multipolarity: in this way, Communist China can desert from
the Soviet camp, Gaullist France or Socialist Greece from that of the Atlantic
alliance; or it may happen that Cuba becomes the mercenary of Russia in the
Third and Fourth World, Israel the American outpost in the Near East.
In such a situation, the overlapping of the conjunctures
produces a progressive complication of problems that prevents the flagging of
any "great certainty", the effective use of any simplifying formula.
From 1945 onwards it became clearer and clearer that the complexity of the
contemporary world requires the courage not only to live under the atomic
threat but also to live with an infinite problem.
In the last years lived by Fr. Alberione, some mass
phenomena then contributed on their own to make the situation even more
complex. These are the youth movements, the women's emancipation movement, the
pacifist movements, the ecologist movements. By often combining with each other
and finding themselves in tune with other mass events (worker unrest in 1968 in
France, in 1969 in / 24 / Italy), the new trends emerging from civil society
have turned like a cyclone on political society, making blow up men and
programs.
Movements of this kind have contributed enormously to
hasten the end of the American military engagement in Vietnam, or to contest
the communist regimes in Czechoslovakia and Poland, or to provoke the fall of
local tyrants in the many "banana republics".
It happened very often, however, that, having risen
against violence in the name of pacifism and against capitalist consumerism in
the name of human dignity, these movements eventually ended up falling into
intolerance or into the "great illusion" of utopia . If in China such
a phenomenon was even maneuvered from above in the second half of the 60s
("cultural revolution"), in the West everything was born and everything
died in four and four years as a spontaneous eclipse of reason. And the return
to the "private" followed, that is, to the inevitable daily problem.
It is not for nothing that we speak of a "crisis of
ideologies". If until the mid-fifties it was possible to hear again
speeches inspired by the old rhetoric of the anti-communist or anti-capitalist
crusade, anti-laicist or anti-clerical, anti-this
or anti-that, then the oppositions have progressively
been afflicting.
A fundamental part in overcoming extremism was this time
supported by the world of culture. Abandoned the expressionistic excesses of
the previous era, culture has learned, much more humbly, to take the path of
research and experimentation, of multi-directional communication, of
structuring at the most varied levels, of the renunciation of the
all-encompassing systems, of respect for the individuality of the phenomena, of
the contestation towards every claim of totalitarianism and absolutism.
It is the style of "informal" that invades all
sectors of knowledge and life, simplifying, even trivializing fashions and
customs, social and human relationships.
Behind the corner there is certainly the danger of
indifference and skepticism, the crisis of values, the world of many consoling
drugs. But many idols have also been / 25 // broken, collapsing forever, and
therefore, to those who have eyes to see and ears to understand, the importance
of the only true faith, the religious one, may finally appear clear.
The Church, this faith, placed it before the whole world
as the true way of salvation, through the witness of popes like John XXIII
(1958-1963) and Paul VI (1963-1978) and above all through the teaching of the
Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). This message is an invitation to dialogue
first of all between men and God and then for all men and women.
Even Fr. Alberione, in the last period of his existence,
has tried to investigate the thousand problems of social communication in a
world like ours, and has tried to give an answer, developing a dense network of
pastoral dialogue and social penetration. based on ten religious institutions,
on a capillary structure of evangelical propaganda, a vast collaboration on the
part of the laity. Realizing in this way the ideal of one's own life (ideal
fully confirmed in its validity by the conciliar decree Inter mirifica on the
instruments of social communication), Fr. Alberione intended to serve God, the
Church and humanity. And it is this spirit of service that the world must
learn, if it really wants to be saved.
