Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, October 28, 2022
The research group in relational ontology organised an afternoon of study on charisms in dialogue with Luigino Bruni starting from his book La comunità fragile (Città Nuova, 2022).
Speakers: Fabrizio Ficco (Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome), Paola Beffa Negrini (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Brescia), Maurizio Botta (Santa Maria in Vallicella, Rome), Ilaria Vigorelli (Pontifical University of the Holy Cross).
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One cannot make community without starting from the relationship, which in charisms has its fulcrum around the person of the founder, but the relationship, as such, is fragile. This vulnerability often manifests itself at the death of the founder, a moment when the first nuclear and fiduciary organisation is likely to have to be questioned in order to guarantee the life of the charism itself.
Luigino Bruni connects an important structural change to this delicate phase: the community loses its resemblance to the ‘animal’ model, in which the beating heart of the founder is at the centre, to move to the ‘plant’ model, which lives through its roots. These roots do not represent the past and yet, without ever betraying the original charism, they send diverse messages to the whole plant, providing the lifeblood and thus projecting the charism into the future. The substance of the charism remains the same, it is the life of the community that is structured in a different system!
Bruni’s vision reveals great lucidity but above all a special attention to human competence in relationships and, consequently, in reading and recognising crises within communities: many of them could have been avoided precisely by starting from relationships.
Its reading also reveals a great openness of heart, it is evidence of a spiritual and personal journey of faith that does not recognise a break between the human and the spiritual. The point then is to rethink a theology of the charisma-founder relation.
Luigino Bruni’s proposal starts from the binomial heart-roots: an interesting proposal also for declining the dialogue between charisma and institutions in a new way. Relational Ontology Research (ROR) group accepts the challenge of rethinking the relation between charismatic gifts and hierarchical gifts, between charism and institution; between juridical forms that can hinder or favor its vital action. Yet, when accepting Bruni’s dialectical intuition “heart-roots”, a challenge remains, in the “unity in the multiplicity of relations”. The latter, in fact, can never be separated from a source, which remains the source principle, even in the sense of a certain order and/or hierarchy.
There are dark moments in the spiritual and faith journey: an inability to perceive God. The point, then, is not to get lost in the dark: because the passage may take only a moment!
