Apostolic exhortation Gaudete et exultate
by Angelo Forti
Pope Francis, as in a musical overture, constantly returns to the theme of the joy of being Christian. The three apostolic exhortations of his pontifical magisterium are sung to the melody of joy. He began the first exhortation with the Evangelii gaudium, in the second exhortation to joy joy was added as the flowering of love, Amoris laetitia and, now, in the third exhortation, the note of joy returns with the rejoicing that leads to 'Exultation Gaudete et exsultate.
These joyful notes become jubilant, running through the musical score of the Beatitudes, a evangelical page that the Indian poet Gandhi called: "The highest words of human thought".
The requirements, or living expressions, of a holy person are: being happy, joyful, peaceful and pacifying. Pope Francis proposes himself with this ideal musical score and confesses: «My humble objective is to make the call to holiness resonate once again, trying to embody it in the current context, with its risks, its challenges and its opportunities».
Holiness is not a "solo" climb to perfection like a climb to conquer a peak, but making oneself available like clay in the hands of a potter to allow the great Artist of life to model the physiognomy of our holiness with the elements essentials with which we have been equipped. The qualities are the reflection of the light of the evangelical talents with which divine grace has provided us.
The references of ordinary holiness are simple, close and popular": a "minuscule holiness", which starts from the bottom, from the humility of the soul which recognizes itself, in everything, as the fruit of divine grace. The flower of holiness emerges in the life of the baptized person, who has welcomed the spirit of God, received in baptism and cultivated in daily life.
John Paul II, during World Youth Day in Paris, proposed to the universal Church a young woman, Therese of Lisieux, who died at the age of 24, as a doctor, teacher of holiness. In her short life, this girl, despite having lived in a cloistered monastery since her adolescence, gained an extraordinary spiritual experience, tracing in her life diary a path of holiness called the "Little Way".
The venerable Aurelio Bacciarini, a contemporary of Saint Teresa, her great devotee, with extraordinary spiritual affinities, as bishop, had committed himself with a solemn purpose to living holiness in the bed of the "Little Way".
Pope Francis many times refers to Therese of Lisieux, recalling her "little path" to holiness. Not only does she have great devotion, but in the wake of her spirituality she canonized Saint Teresa's parents. Holiness is a fire that lights up and grows in every single person, but then spreads through a beneficial influence on the community of the baptized and pushes the members of the community to live their vocation as witnesses of the Holy Spirit on earth.
This vocation makes us vigilant and constantly on guard in discerning our own path, our own path of holiness, the one that will allow us to offer the best of ourselves to God, society and the Church.
One of the characteristics of the spirituality of Pope Francis, spiritual son of Saint Ignatius, is discernment, that is, grasping with plausible certainty God's desires for us. In fact, the director of La Civiltà Cattolica wrote that «In a context of continuous existential zapping, one could even experience a spiritual zapping», if one is not supported by discernment based on profound convictions and plausible certainties.
Jesus said that if the house of life is built on sand, there is the danger that when the winds blow and the rain pours it could collapse, so "zapping" becomes an unreliable teacher and makes us puppets. Our time is characterized by restlessness, by pilgrims of the void who take energy away from the Christian vocation to holiness.
Pope Francis recently also spoke about the "enemies" of holiness. Among these insidious and harmful adversaries there is the new current of Gnosticism, which nullifies the Incarnation of Jesus as "nonsense", and the other enemy is Pelagianism, that is, that current of thought which trusts and relies on the structures , organization and planning. The two enemies of sanctity, after all, on the one hand bring into play the presumption of not being able to know the spiritual sphere and on the other that of daring to be holy with the power of our means.
The daily dimension of holiness pleases Pope Francis when he sees «the holiness of the patient people of God: in the parents who raise their children with so much love, in the men and women who work to bring bread home, in the sick, in the elderly nuns who continue to smile." Father Spadaro, a Jesuit very close to the Pope, declared that the experience of a pastor immersed in the complex Argentine diocese makes us «understand that the exhortation is the mature fruit of a reflection that the Pontiff has been carrying forward for a long time, and expresses in a his vision of holiness intertwined with that of the mission of the Church in the contemporary world is organic".