Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - The realism to which frequentation of Christ and the Church has accustomed us, forces us to recognise that the path towards integrity, or maturity, or fulfilment, or balance of the person, is a journey with various laps and stages, not necessarily in crescendo and always dependent on fundamental human faculties such as intelligence, will and freedom and, not less on the various socio-cultural circumstances in which the person finds himself. Integrity is always to be conquered, a journey to start again and again, day after day, playing on the best of oneself and looking at those, who on this journey, have taken steps to be imitated with profit.
This awareness should not leave us dismayed at the frequent experience of human breakdown which, not rarely, presents itself in all its tragedy and not always finds spaces of listening, comparison and understanding in a socio-cultural environment founded mainly on an abstract idea of man, which censures the real man, perhaps imperfect and limited, but real. The intelligent gaze of the many testimonies of desperation lead us to deduce, with increasing substance, that they are due to a mistaken and partial concept of I. The habit of conceiving the various spheres of the person as “diverse sections” to which to give different replies, has produced, as a result, a human being unable to understand himself except as a “being who responds to some automatism”, who finds his realisation by filling his emptiness, or, responding in a mechanical way to the diverse impulses to which he is prey.
This manner of behaving, which has become a common mode and to which we are obliged to conform, can be satisfactory for the man who does not stop to look around himself, to consider with all the capacity for thinking which reason offers, the reality around him.
For the reasonable man, that is for the man who uses his reason to the full and without prejudice, a similar way of life can only be sad, unsatisfying, disrespectful of his dignity. Happiness as the experience of the person in his totality is only the result of a life which, at every moment, takes into account every one of man's needs, which are the same for each of us. To succeed in understanding I completely is the consequence of working on oneself, educating oneself, and it is a gift which makes us able to accept others, other human persons like us.
All these elements are wonderfully assumed and re-elaborated in the baptised Christian who is faithful to his baptismal promises and committed to imitating the One in whose name he is baptised. Imitation of Christ, poor, chaste and obedient is not only for those consecrated to a certain form of life, it is for every baptised Christian, consecrated and reborn from water and the Spirit and called to a life of chastity which reveals the uniqueness of his relationship with the Mystery, the authentic test of one's own humanity and that of others.
The virtue of chastity is intimately connected with that of temperance which dominates the passions and appetites of human senses. (Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church n. 2341). The Christian should strive to find the necessary means to learn to practice the virtue of chastity and especially, knowledge of self, obedience to God's commandment, exercise of moral virtues and fidelity to prayer, the principal place of self custody.
In his relationship with God the Christian is anchored to the certainty that chastity is a gift of grace (Cf. CCC n. 2345), a fruit of the Holy Spirit: it is the Holy Spirit who helps us imitate the purity of Christ, Lord and Master: there exists then a space between the will of the individual believer and the realisation of this will: this space is divine power which each of us is called to recognise with simplicity of heart. (Agenzia Fides 25/10/2007; righe 44, parole 641)
