Skip to content

Generati mediante il Vangelo

Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, June 18 2024

Author and perfector of faith is Jesus Christ: no one can give himself faith, because faith is received. It is not a matter of consistency or commitment but a work of God. Faith must then be accepted, and church-membership must be free to evolve towards a mature state. Finally, belonging to the one Church is the natural evolution that leads sonship to fraternity. Life Christianity is therefore received, assimilated and shared: this is what Fr. Fabio Rosini calls the “Bermuda triangle of Christian education”. The art of educating faith moves in balance in the middle of this metaphorical space; any imbalance towards one of the three poles leads to different drifts: authoritarianism, relativism, unanimity.

Fr. Fabio Rosini, director of the Vocations Service of the Vicariate of Rome, in May 2024 published with Lipa Generati mediante il Vangelo. Le sacre scritture e la trasmissione della fede, a text that reproduces in a separate work the handouts of the first course he taught at the Pontificial University of the Holy Cross at the invitation of Professor Giulio Maspero. On 18 June discussed its salient contents in dialogue with Maspero himself, with Fr. Andrea Cavallini, Director of the catechetical office of Diocese of Rome, and with Maria Cappatelli as Lipa’s role of publisher.

The question underlying the text and the entire course is how to transmit Revelation and educate people to a mature faith. Theological education is not enough, as the unsuccessful outcome of many efforts in the area of traditio fidei shows us. The main causes of the failure are mainly improvisation and the flattening of the proclamation on moral exhortation. Scriptures cannot be manipulated but must be respected and read as the “Word that generates life”, immersed in the joy and beauty of the Gospel. The absence of the kerigmatic and didactic phase has delivered to us, instead, a Christianity informed from utopian oppression, burdened, demanding. A Christianity of “spiritual hernia” as Rosini ironically puts it. Often, instead of proclaiming the Gospel, we proclaim “works”, “things done”. The time has therefore come to admit frankly that we have stopped proclaiming the Gospel: but have we ever taught how to do this?

The precious vademecum represented by the text generously opens the curtain on the backstage of an author, who was able to conceive important books and itineraries of Christian initiation, illustrating his approach, showing  paradigms, and providing students and readers with the keys to a method that for the purposes of the health of the traditio offers an effective cue to “open the minds of the faithful to the intelligence of the Scriptures” (Lk 24,45). In the Emmaus narrative, the disciples possessed the data but were unable to proclaim the kerygma. The Lord offered them another synthesis, the “living” proclamation. So it was that the disciples changed course and went straight back to Jerusalem without the need for warnings or “ethical hammering”, as Fr. Fabio uses to sarcastically recall to his students during the course.

To educate in the faith we have Scripture and Tradition. In addition to these two pillars there are various paradigms. For example, the rite of baptism is rich in them and can be a source of inspiration. It is therefore not the case of giving into discouragement: after all man, at the core of his being, is made for the Gospel.

Poster