A deep conviction of our Founder

“(Our Institute) has a primary purpose…, and a special and secondary purpose, which is the special characteristic and its reason for existing: the evangelization of pagans” (SL [The Spiritual Life], pg 5-6). “You must go to Africa… No! No! Our purpose is to go and covert the pagans: We must be very strict about this our purpose” (Conferenze Spirituali, III, 295).
All the life of Allamano, of the Institute and of each one of us carries the mark of this solemn proclamation. However, the understanding of it has never presented itself in an oversimplified way, and it cannot be condensed into narrow definitions. It consists rather in a long process, some important moments of which Allamano himself underlines:
a) It emerges from a personal intuitive background that helps the individual to discover himself as chosen by God and as having been “provided with the necessary talents to bring the Faith to pagan countries” (SL, pg 13).
b) A process that becomes clearer as it is concretized. Allamano says: “The evangelization of the pagans can and must include every kind of work, and use all means, necessary or useful, to achieve this purpose, according to the circumstances of time and place, and with the approval of the Holy See” (SL, pg 6).
c) It is continually exposed to bringing out the new. Right from the beginning, changes of the common regulations were requested: “We have received special approval for agricultural farms and industrial workshops, for schools and home visits, for orphanages, boarding schools, etc.” (SL, pg 6).
d) It is supported by a definite reason, a requirement that allows no evasions, because it stems from the gratitude that one must have for the faith received. Speaking about this gift, Allamano points to the duties it demands: 1) “To thank the Lord who gave it to us gratuitously, without any merit on our part” (The Spiritual Conferences…, Vol. III, pg 419). 2) “To value this gift of faith that we have. As an act of gratitude towards God for it, we have to try to share it with the ones who do not have it. We must make it sprout among the pagans. ‘Nisi quis…’” (Ibidem, pg 419).

The need of a continuous redefinition

In the writings of the founder, we can never find any other substantial element that would suggest to us that the “special purpose of the institute” is anything different. As always, Allamano is sober in his statements: he affirms that which is essential and sticks to it. He might expound on spiritual and moral exhortations, yes, in order to inspire people to live its content. However, the few texts about the purpose are filled with profound depth and a surprising sense of modernity.
The essence of the parameters that the Founder outlines continuously questions our present identity as Consolata Missionaries. It forces us not to take the past as a norm, but to look at the future in order to discover the meaning of he past. The virtuality of yesterday is present in tomorrow only inasmuch as it produces diversity. For example, continuity of a father is not revealed in the reproduction of himself in the son, but rather in all that the son has received from the father which the son has transformed in himself.
To base ourselves on Allamano only for the sake of prolonging the past in the present, to hold on merely out of habit to a fidelity to the “special purpose” of the institute – this would be to disprove the founding intuitions of his work.
Instead, we must take Allamano as a starting point in order to:
a) feel chosen by God today in order to evangelize;
b) see ourselves immersed in the process of change in which we are doing mission;
c) feel attracted to and happy for each and every trace of new life that we manage to perceive;
d) find a strong reason that will unite us permanently to the mission and to the Consolata Missionary Institute.
This does not mean to desire to refound the institute, but simply to actualise its special purpose. This we do in the company of Allamano, so that he may show us how to concretize the evangelization of the infidels, which is the reason for being of our institute. His perspective clearly shows us that the horizon in which the institute comes to life, is born and lives is the infidels. The geographical connotation that is implicit in this word infidels, as far as Allamano is concerned, is clear to us, and is our tradition. It coincides with the missions in which the Institute has worked in the past.
A bit more subtle, although equally part of our common sense, is the negative cultural implication annexed to the term “infidels”. What can we say about the discriminatory attitude that it implies? Allamano uses it. One text alone is enough to show what it was in the perspective of Allamano, although it does not show the love that it implied. In fact, the complete quotation of the text above continues like this: “They will not go to hell if they have not committed personal sins, but they will not be able to go into our Paradise, to the beatific vision of God, because they are not absorbed into the supernatural life. Where will they go? The Lord did not want to tell us: they will have a beatitude that is purely natural. Besides, for the adults it is so very difficult, since they do not have all the help that we have. It is difficult for them to abstain from committing sins against the natural law” (III, 419).

“Pagan”: a concept that comes from very far

It is not difficult to explain such texts as this one in the context of the theology of the times. Allamano himself knew that the term referred to a religious situation that had a particular historical interest for the Roman world at the time of the victory of Christianity. At that time the rustic inhabitant of the rural districts was called Paganus, because it was precisely in the pagi that the idolatric cults remained in existence, while in the cities Christianity had become the religion of state. The term “pagan”, already used by Tertullian (De Corona, XI, 5), became part of the language with the meaning of non-Christian, or “adorer of the idols”, a synoym of the Jewish word “gentile”.
Both the term and the idea were codified by law, first in an edict of Valentinian in 368,
and afterwards by the Theodosian code (XVI, 2, 18). Finally, they entered the liturgical and theological usage, especially with Augustine (Retractationes, II, 3) who “consecrated” them, annexing to them the traditional negative connotation (: “… Deorum falsorum multorumque cultores quos usitato nomine paganos vocamus” (Ibidem). He built all the De Civitate Dei on the triumph of Christianity against all the objections of the dying paganism. Meanwhile, the speculation of Augustine was corroborated by the anti-pagan pastoral activity of Ambrose of Milan. The migrations of the Germanic peoples, with their baggage of destruction of all that was Roman, strengthened the negative implication of the term “pagan” up to the extreme of connecting it with the idea of “non-person”. The Christian literary sources that describe the migrations of these peoples add the idea of “barbarian--non-civilized” to the term “non-Christian”, even to the point of disputing the human dimension of these populations. This idea was present to the medieval world to such a point that Pope Paul III had to intervene with a decree in order to affirm the total humanity of the indigenous of Latin America, which was doubted by some groups of Catholic colonizers.
It was an anti-Christian ideology, illuminism, that elaborated the myth of the “good savage” as man endowed only with human qualities, man in a pure state of being, capable of capturing the horizon of transcendence. Such a man is one who, obviously, must not be converted. Using as a point of departure the philanthropy of the spiritualistic movement of Protestantism, the European Romanticism of the 1800s developed an opposite line of thought: The superior benefits of Christianity (the Christian Genius) must be brought to all peoples in order to render them more human. A slogan that we must ourselves have repeated with holy pride is the one that says that the mission makes “men first and then Christians” out of people. We still feel today the influence of this mentality that appears to us as an evident value.
More difficult to understand is how the concept of “pagan” is still a dimension that we continue to produce. In fact, in the history of religions, several movements were born, separated, dialogued with one another sometimes, or even united themselves. There always arises an inalienable tension between unity and diversity, homogeneousness and heterogeneousness. This dialectic process always creates new pagans, or justifies the accusation of someone who judges the other as paganizing. The fact itself of being distinct, of separating, transforms us into somebody else’s pagans! The Jews became pagans for Christians, Christians became the pagans for Muslims, etc.
It is clear that, at first, pagan had a religious meaning. It is also clear to us that its geographical connotation has changed: in our days, and contrary to the times of its origin, Christianity lost a lot of followers in the cities, it became more developed among the “pagans” in the countryside than among city dwellers. Urban culture has become a challenge to any sort of religion. Urban dwellers are now the pagans for all religions.
As far as Christianity goes, the phenomenon has reached an impressive state. David Barret affirms that… “in the measure that cities grow, the percentage of Christians diminishes in them. In 1900, it was 68.8%. In 2000, it’s down to 46.3%. Practically, in the cities we have one more non-Christian per second. In Africa, we have 4,000 more Christians each day, in Europe we lose 7,000 every 24 hours…” That’s why the European scene is now presented as the place of the resurrection of paganism.

A reflection that must be developed… courageously

From the above data, it can easily be deduced that our understanding that “we are for the pagans”, and the consequent duty of “remaining firm in this purpose,” which the founder imposed on us, requires a profound rethinking of the way that we are to be missionaries today. This is not a question of ignoring the past, but of a willingness to live the present and to view the future as arising out of the limits of the past. It is not even a question of wanting to point to operative choices: the Chapters and the Government decisions are for that.
The challenge is played out in the heart of each one of us. Our way of thinking can produce a new and radically different kind of activity. The opposite can also be true. One can impoverish mission by relegating it to habitual, reassuring ideology, which delegates all responsibility, and yet produces good things such as zeal, charity, attention to needs, etc. Or on the other hand one may find the courage to take notice of the changes taking place among us and around us. Allamano saw it, and started something new. For us, he invented the sense of mission. To relive this attitude of his today has a normative value as we consider the transformation happening in the mission. We have often defined it as a going beyond frontiers, considering the pagans to be those who were beyond those frontiers -- understood, naturally, not only in the geographical and cultural sense, but also in the ideological and psychological sense.
Nothing is today more disputable than the idea of the frontier. Globalization does not warrant it, and the concept of frontier is arbitrary, made up by man to put order in the “ambiguity” of creation, to distinguish and separate according to a contingent historical and ideological perspective. It would be enough to think about the Africa of the great Lakes, or Europe after the fall of communism. It was easy to draw a new map of the continent, but not so easy to understand its identity. Some sociologists have even proposed a “conceptual” map stemming from the two axes that mark the two dimensions of the life of the European peoples. The first axis, East-West would describe the geopolitical and geoeconomic situation of the continent. The second, North-South, would deal with the geocultural dimension which, basically, is connected with the separation between the Mediterranean civilization and the barbarians, between the Roman Empire and the Germanic Empire. It would also be connected with the three linguistic groups: Romance, Germanic and Slav. Finally it would relate to the two great Christian confessions: Catholic and Protestant.
After the turn of 1989, the founding of the European Union and the beginning of the talks aiming at the extension of the Union towards the East, a type of integration never witnessed before came into existence, at least at the political, cultural and economic level. This integration warrants a new kind of configuration in which the religious element seems ever to be more marginal, and it warrants the consolidation of the principle of personal freedom. In this process of change in the cultural reality of Europe, we can see a chain of five fundamental values that influence the formation of a new cultural identity: power—religion—language—law—social communications.
It’s easy to see how this world is what it is because of the understanding of it that those who place themselves inside it profess; it is easy to see that this is also a form of classifying a frontier, even if it is produced by setting aside limitations that already existed before and adding some new dimensions. Men are always the ones who create new frontiers, who consequently create the new pagans (those who are outside, beyond). The pagan is always the one that I see beyond the frontier, that I see on the other side of what is acceptable according to the way I see things, who is beyond my world. Consequently, paganism is nothing else but a human creation.
Does this annul the vision of Allamano and, even more, the reason for the Christian mission? Not at all. Rather, it should render the missionary concern more important. It demands going beyond the triviality of accepting as a fact that the others need us because they are inferior to us at the social, cultural and religious level. Born in Asia, Christianity was not able to penetrate that world where the presupposition that the mission of the West was valuable to other cultural realities was absent.
The fact that the Institute and the Church look to Asia as the future of the mission forces us to embrace a new understanding of our being for the pagans. It clarifies for us the semantic definition of this word in relation to the call to conversion which is implicit in the proclamation of the gospel.

Christians and pagans: contraposition or conjunction?

The fundamental datum of the Mission is the adherence by faith to the fact that God did really reveal Himself in the primitive alliances with the people of Israel, and definitively in Jesus Christ in a New Alliance. In this perspective, “pagans” are the people who have not yet received this good news.
This seems logical to us, but further reflection is necessary. If a text is not completely understandable in its context, the question is which is the context of the Alliance of Jesus. The answer must be: the fist alliances with Israel.
However, in order to consider the first alliances with Israel, to what context must we refer? Here, the world widens to the whole Old Middle East context. The horizon widens: in order to understand the context of the Old Middle East and of its religions, we must situate them in yet a wider context… and so forth, until the conclusion is that it is not possible to be Christians without the pagans because the latter constitute the real context that enables me to understand the text of Christianity. Consequently, the meaning of Christianity is also found in paganism, and vice versa, in a continuous movement of tension and reciprocity.
The mission cannot be described only as the pure presentation of the Christian message to the pagans, because this message is not understandable by itself. This is done in an attitude of tension with paganism. The mission cannot be anything else but a dialogue between these two “texts” that throw light on each other, since one is always the context in which the other text allows itself to be understood.
This essential dialogical dimension of the mission is perceivable at various levels:
a) Personal: It constitutes the process by which we are initiated into faith and placed in a state of diversity relative to those who are not Christians – a diversity that we ourselves cannot understand without referring to what is proper to us and which the others do not have, or have in a different way.
In us, to the call to faith was added another call: the call to the Institute. Here, all was done that we might become missionaries in the head, the mouth, the heart; acquiring an identity that has similarities, for example, with the Combonians; an identity, however, that never allows us to lose our specificity. There remains the ideal of becoming what our name means. The whole “text” of being Consolata Missionaries needs an “other” context in order to define itself and to identify itself in a specific way.
b) Operative: It was enough to set foot out of the seminary and to arrive in the missions to experience how it was not enough to remain what we had become. Normally, a difficult adaptation to the mission is needed. The new context defines us and transforms us in such a way that often the idea of going back home becomes psychologically impossible. The mission stripped us of many things, gave us a new parlance and a new vision of reality. It reduced our theology to its essentials, it made us see the discord between a form of Christianity that is considered normative and its extremely reduced reception in a context that is different from ours.
This is one of the deepest human experiences to which we are personally called as missionaries: it is astonishing to be able to see the transformation that mission brings about: to witness the maturing of a person; to feel the rhythm of the individual’s human and spiritual voyage; to understand the various levels and diverse dimensions in which new needs sometime express themselves, albeit without words.
There is in this process an unshakable certitude: the fact that we are Christians and bearers of the Gospel. This is the reason for our leaving and going forth to others. But what is more difficult is to discover how much of them has become a part of us. Yes, we are for the pagans, but without them we would not be what we are.
This awareness changes the missionary context in which we are called to live our vocation and, even more, it changes our way of announcing the Good News. The pagans to whom we are sent are not an alternative to our faith, but a reality of communion, a meeting place for a reciprocal exchange. This statement does not mean that we should welcome in a servile way all that is evil and sin in our personal experience. That would mean that we accept as part of our faith the sins of the Church and of the terrible forms of Christianity that marked history. It is really a question of overcoming the attitude of dividing the world into two categories, we and the others; we have to feel part of a whole in which all and each need each and all. Even the Gospel that we announce is not an easy way, for sure. Around every corner lurks the danger of feeling superior, feeling that we are the chosen. Into this trap falls even an expert like Bishop Castro. In his teaching notes, he writes a list of ten pages to catalogue the pagans of our times. An interesting list, beautiful language as always, but, at the end there are the “evil ones”. And yet, I am sure that he too prayed these days in the words of the Breviary: “God the Father wanted to pour out the Gift of the Holy Spirit upon the infidels. Let us pray that in our times the prodigies of Pentecost may be repeated all over the world. (…). The missal in which the “lex orandi” is codified, a necessary complement to the “lex credendi”, celebrates the basic content of the Acts. In Acts the Spirit is shown to be working in advance stirring up disciples for the Risen Lord. The Spirit manifests itself among the pagans prior to the intervention of the apostles, and the Spirit’s work remains, because God’s works are eternal.

There are interpellations…

The gospels contain an explicit missionary commission to go to the ends of the earth, but they never present the Kingdom of God as a global reality. The images that describe it are yeast, grain of mustard, little flock. They seem to point to the fact that Christianity is a permanent minority. In understanding this reality, we have all eliminated the restrictive idea that salvation is for a few elect, as it was for Israel. God’s paternity is universal, and universal is the redemptive mystery of the cross of Jesus. In the call to existence and in the common destiny to death, which is also Jesus’ destiny, there are joined together the two fundamental moments of human solidarity with God’s mystery: we are sons in life, we are companions in death.

The pagan that is in us…
The relationship with the pagans starts from a fundamental unity, from the one and only relation with the love of the Father. They are our blood relatives, they are not different from us, they tread the same path of life, they are destined to the one and only love of God. They are not closer to hell than we are; they try to experience that truth, just as we do, even if sometimes without awareness or through the unfathomable denial of God. If we, who are the Institute that Allamano desired, exist for the pagans, then we must start from the fundamental path of access to them. The mission has already lost its geographical connotation which identified it for a long time. Now, it also sheds the new configurations it acquired recently. The mission is being looked at, more and more, as a reciprocal companionship of the believer with the non-believer as they try to focus on the face of God the Father, on the face of Christ the Savior.
The certitude of the faith of the Christian in itself is not enough to clarify the mystery for the pagan, nor can the pagans’ vision take the place of the gift received from the other. Both are on their way towards the truth that they do not yet possess completely, and which will be a gift of the Spirit.

Respect must always be there
The basic presupposition of the Christian truth remains the proclamation of the word. The “scientific proof” of its value becomes the witnessing of what it has done in the believer. If it did not transform his life, it cannot pretend to be authentic. If it did not change the heart, it remains a system. The pagan nowadays walks a different path to reach the truth: the path of science and of scientific knowledge. Long ago we stopped considering science as being capable of knowing everything and of replacing mystery with knowledge. But the fact remains that, even though we acept the limitations of scientific knowledge, for the pagans the road of reason remains an authentic possibility of access to the truth.
Every form of Christian reservation, all superficial lack of interest, every substitution of research by forms of easy spiritualism, all these destroy the possibility of dialogue and render hollow the substance of Christian truth. The proclamation of the gospel as a truth that cannot be mediated by the other truths existing in man reduces the credibility of the gospel. The minimum we can do at this level is to keep an open mind, have sensitivity and true respect and at least occasionally let ourselves be excited by the truth that comes our way from scientific research. Paul VI, when the first austronauts landed on the moon, sent them a telegram with these words: “Vidimus et admirati sumus”.

Charity is not enough…
Maybe more is demanded from us, Consolata missionaries. It is part of our glorious history to engage ourselves in human promotion. We still go on working in this sector in many a task. We are at war with every form of poverty. We must go on this way for a long time. But, forgive me if I give a personal example: a few days ago, I finished a seminar on continental synods. Seventeen people registered, including five Africans. Naturally, the latter busied themselves with the study of their own synod. I want to share with you the final text of their work in which the long-standing description of Africa’s problematic is refuted in vigorous fashion. The text reads: “We see ourselves also in a different way; you too have shadows, and we are not just shadows. We want to tell you that we have grown up. Maybe we have reached the point in which what we have is enough to let us become more, to be counted as more, to be able to think more by ourselves. Why is it that when we speak you are in a hurry to do something else? Why is it that only what you say is intelligent?” Yes, these are my student priests, but isn’t there an African world which we have failed to recognize that thinks the same way and for the same reasons?
Already Francis Xavier had noticed that in India Christianity was identified with the religion of the beggars because, when the works of charity were finished, which the poorest and least learned classes frequented, the missionaries did not know how to speak nor what to do with the great oriental cultures to which Christianity seemed barbarian.
In a pagan world like ours, a world that is searching, it becomes more engaging and more human to reach a bit of truth arrived at through suffering than to solve everything through fast theological explanations. Charity certainly translates into actions, but actions alone are not enough to prove one’s faith.
This is what the mission asks of us today. This is what the mission asks from the man who searches, and who, while searching, asks questions and points to moments of truth which in themselves are an approach to the divine. Yes! If only we could look for God in man, in order to help man be himself! We would then have found that harmony between faith and reason which was the object of an encyclical by John Paul II.

A confrontation on freedom
There is another element that bids us enter into dialogue with the pagans to whom we are sent: the concept of freedom. Truth will make you free, Jesus assured us. However, the truth that the world of today advocates does not have much to do with the truth incarnated in Christianity. As a matter of fact, it has established itself in an anti-Christian ideology, illuminism; it was formed by a revolutionary movement that persecuted the Church: The French Revolution. I believe that it is not enough for Christianity to ask for forgiveness for the violations of freedom wrought by Christians, even if done in the framework of the Great Jubilee of the year 2000. Such an effort even seems somewhat useless. Modern man has come to understand by himself that God cannot want a religion that damages man, since God too respects our personal freedom. Even if this maturing of modern thought about freedom has given way to abuses, we might commit still other abuses if we were to deny the very principle of freedom as the foundation of human dignity. At the same time we cannot deny that this “lay” manner of explaining the facts and the rational intuition of human behavior centered on values such as solidarity, justice, peace and ecology, have brought us to a deeper understanding of the gospel itself.

Knowing how to see and propose the essential
Coming into contact with this human way of feeling, we are now learning that only a deep faith and the intensity of the few values that we practice can become a way of communicating the message of Jesus Christ. We cannot but convince ourselves that it is senseless to have recourse to any form of intimidation as we talk about God. Faith can be proposed only as a deep bond with God, it springs from the heart and brings peace, love and joy and not a sense of fault and of narrow-mindedness. Adoration can only be an act of that individual freedom that is today considered sacred. To go to God with something less than this means trying to fool him and, in the short term, it can only serve to satisfy the demands of religious institutions. The demands of an experiential way in order to witness to the truth of Jesus, the only one that the pagan world understands and can feel, forces the missionary to make a synthesis of his doctrinal knowledge, to stick to what is essential, so that his message may help understand the sense of life and help find happiness. If religion appears as something that limits freedom in an arbitrary way, it contradicts human nature. It becomes a burden and not a source of consolation and joy. Any unreasonable restriction of freedom has damaged religion. God created human beings free, that they may enjoy the gift of life he gave to them. In exchange, he only asks to be loved, that they love one another, and that in this they may find joy.

New areas of social life for our faith
Finally, we all know that from the call to faith comes our insertion into the community of the believers. Christianity comprises a substantial communitary dimension. Everywhere it exists, it forms an “ekklesia”, an assembly that possesses an intrinsic vitality, because where two or three are united in the name of the Lord, he is present in their midst. Everywhere, it lives by an intrinsic universal dimension, and, because it is a sign and anticipation of the Kingdom, it is Catholic by nature. The social dimension of Christianity could have no greater expression. And yet, through the ages, it has become abstract. Sociability has been replaced by roles, participation by institutions. In the Church no reform has been able to reverse this tendency by drawing on the primitive experience of the community of the Acts.
Likewise we missionaries have done the same, making it one of our essential goals to implant the Church. Initially, the system worked, even when instead of implanting we transplanted our brand of Church. No doubt, we can and will continue. But the parameters within which we may apply this paradigm are becoming more limited, and where we thought we were implanting the Church we have come to discover emptiness.
And yet, while these social structures and assembly lines of Christianity are being shaken, there emerges in the pagan world interest in the “politician” to the point of making an idol out of him. Ideological groups assume power and control of the Media, and each day they become more agressive in their control of the city. Political passion develops out of a relativised vision of the common good. Principles are established whereby those in power claim rights over everything. The economy spirals out of control, and that becomes perhaps the most pagan dimension of the world that is in need of the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The world’s capital does not influence only the markets but also the culture, trying to make it ever more homogeneous, because it wants to prepare it to accept the one and only market. Globalization sells culture as a merchandise of capital (movies, art, music, ideas) and transforms it into a source of profit, raising the banners of materialism and consumerism as true values.
In all their complexity, social life, politics and economy fascinate the people of our times, even if the evils that are attributed to them are enormous, evils that fall on the shoulders of the ones in the lowest places of the life of society. And yet, this is the context that must be enlightened by the gospel, so that it may produce a new way of understanding it. This is the new context of the mission, the dialectic place for the Christian proposal and for the welcoming of all that is human. It could happen that the ambiguity which is implicit in every form of dialectic, or the structural complexity of the world around us, might induce us to create for ourselves a little world, the world of our mission where we are accepted more for our limitations than for the meaning we project. People know that we can only give them what they are used to, they accept us, but they look elsewhere for that extra that the complexity in which they live demands.

Conclusion
To be for the pagans means that today we must feel destined to live in the complexity of the world around us, wherever this complexity is present and seems not to leave any place for the gospel; where it reduces the “religious” to banality, to insufficiency, to something out of context. To run away, even unconsciously, from this reality would exile us from the complexity, and, justly so, would render our message not believable.
Really, it is question of rediscovering the primitive sense of our vocation: to exit from a limited context, the context of our family and of our environment in order to follow an ideal whose horizon is the world. Since this world has changed and imposes on us a new understanding of our own ideal, it also induces us to go beyond a missionary activity that is marked by the need of converting, of operating in order to convince, of presenting mission essentially as a dimension of thought or an emotion of existence with the hopes of achieving by human means that which only God can accomplish by the dialogue of his revelation.
The need to change becomes clear. It is not a question of going from one place to another, even though we are always doing that. What is needed rather is to at least allow change to happen around us.
The greatest evil we can do to ourselves and to the mission is to impose the paradigms of our experience which, as such, always belong to the past, or to the becoming of reality. It is an old saying that as the river continues to flow we never bathe in the same waters. Not even big bolders can resist forever the transformations that are produced by time.

I believe in gradual change, in the newness that matures as a seed. Only thus will the Institute grow, in this evangelical mode. I really believe that two, three, ten persons, while confronting themselves, searching for the truth, deepening the sense of the mission, helping one another to live in a new way -- are planting the seeds. It is like yeast that gradually ferments. To bring consciences to work is contagious. I’m learning the necessity of heroic patience, and the art of allowing time to produce its own changes. Time cures wounds. It makes plants ripen. Time is for life.



BIBLIOGRAFIA

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- Candido Bona, Il Servo di Dio Giuseppe Allamano e un secolo di movimento missionario in Piemonte, Torino 1960, pp. 28; La fede e le opere – Spigolature e ricerche su Giuseppe Allamano, Torino 1889, pp. 570; Quasi una vita - Lettere scritte e ricevute dal Beato Giuseppe Allamano con testi e documenti coevi (1965-1926), 9 voll., Torino 1990-2000.

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- V. Castronovo – A. D’Orsi, Torino, Bari 1987.

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- Alessandro Di Martino, Carteggio di un prestito per il regno (Tanganyika 1919-1935), Edizioni Missioni Consolata, Torino 1987; Quel tanto di lievito del regno, Edizioni Missioni Consolata, Roma 1995.

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- G. e G. P. Mina, La beatitudine di essere secondo – Giacomo Camisassa, confondatore dei missionari e delle missionarie della Consolata, Bologna 1982, pp. 142.

- G. Mina – L. Zamuner, Quando la missione invade la vita – Il servo di Dio Giuseppe Allamano. Fondatore dei missionari e delle missionarie della Consolata, Torino 1986, pp. 202.

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- Giovanni Tebaldi, La missione racconta. I missionari della Consolata in cammino con i popoli, Bologna 1999, pp. 398.

- Alberto Trevisiol, Uscirono a dissodare il campo (I missionari della Consolata in Kenya: 1902-1981), Edizioni Missioni Consolata, Roma 1989; Amarono una terra dagli orizzonti infiniti (I missionari della Consolata in Argentina: 1946-1978), Edizioni Missioni Consolata, Roma 1997; Innestati su un albero secolare (I missionari della Consolata in Brasile: 1937-1969), Edizioni Missioni Consolata, Roma 1991.

- Igino Tubaldo, Giuseppe Allamano. Il suo tempo - La sua vita - La sua opera, 3 voll., Torino 1982-1985; Le conferenze spirituali del Servo di Dio Giuseppe Allamano (1901-1925), 4 voll., Torino 1981; Dopo cento anni. L’Allamano e i suoi missionari, Torino 2001, pp. 200; Giuseppe Allamano. Il suo tempo – La sua opera, 4 voll., Torino 1982-1986.