My study on this subject does not intend to delineate a comprehensive presentation of the history of our Institute, not even a short one for that matter. For such a purpose, there are lots of writings already. My intention is to capture what this history says to the "heart" of this institution. This word is impregnated with a mysterious meaning that is easily absorbed by insight but never entirely understood. Applying this word to our theme, it expresses a meta-historical dimension of our events, a dimension that imprints on them a meaning and a value that can be understood only as we grasp its multi-faceted correlations in the light of a spiritual identity that links them together and sustains their very being and existence.
Historians know that their discipline is a humble science. It does not take upon itself a complete understanding of the reality studied, even when there is an excellent documentation: No archive can fully contain the tensions and the reasons that carry a person to give his or her life totally to a cause.
The long gestation of an "ideal"... 
January 29, 2001 is the anniversary of the foundation of the Consolata Missionary Institute. It is at the same time the first centenary of life of that institute, since it was founded on that same day in 1901.
The Institute began in Turin and was given birth by Fr. Joseph Allamano. Allamano had been born himself on January 21, 1851 at Castelnuovo d’Asti. His father was Joseph Allamano and his mother was Maria Anna Cafasso. Joseph Allamano died near the Consolata Shrine on February 16, 1926. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II on October 7, 1990.
During 64 years, that is, from his entering the seminary in 1886 until his death, Allamano was deeply influenced by the social and ecclesial events of the city where he lived. Joseph Tuninetti recently made an illuminating analysis of the impact that events had on the person and the work of Allamano. He says: "The deep cultural changes that took place in Turin during the lifetime of Allamano refer especially to two periods: the last thirty years of the 1800s, as the positivist hegemony implanted itself; and the immediate follow-up of the war, which was characterized by the tyrannical irruption of the marxist politics of Gramsci on one side, and by the putting forward of the tension-generating Gobettian theses on the other.
Both the of ore-mentioned cultures were totalitarian in the sense that they proclaimed science and politics as absolute powers through which religion should be marginalized and abolished"’.
In this context, five archbishops exercised their ministry during the lifetime of Joseph Allamano: Lorenzo Gastaldi (1871-83), Gaetano Alimonda (1883-1891), Davide Ricardi (1892-1897), Agostino Richelmi (1897-1923), Giuseppe Gamba (1923-1926). Each had his own personality and his own ideological sense of direction. All of them exercised their pastoral care among many difficulties. In this historical context, deep changes were needed in the religious orientation of the times. But often this religious feeling tended to shut itself off from the historical environment it lived in, and ignored the social and cultural transformations taking place. At times, however, it did detect the need to meaningfully open itself up to the realities that would necessarily determine the future.
The scanty data concerning the times and the spaces where Allamano lived shows us that he did exercise an incredible amount of pastoral and social activity, that he was endowed with balance and wisdom, and that he was broadly open to the values of the spirit and to the universal dimension of the proclamation of the Gospel.
Several authors wrote about him2. However, the most exhaustive and complete work is the biography written by Fr. Igino TUBALDO 3 and the extraordinary publication of his correspondence which Fr. Candido BONA directed4.
In this analysis, however, I want simply to show the role of Allamano in the foundation and in the formation of the identity of the Consolata Missionaries - although he also founded the Institute of the Consolata Missionary Sisters ten years later.
This event of the foundation was prepared by a slow formal incubation consisting in active moments in which he wrote several sets of rules for his future missionaries, and silent moments of disillusion and suffering, and even a serious sickness.
His first attempt at founding the missionaries dates back to 1885-1886, but nothing came out of it. The "Rules for the Missionary Institute", about which he wrote to Propaganda Fide on September 30, 1891, fared better. This is a project that Allamano composed as he was in his full physical and psychological maturity. He left us a good amount of documentation on this project, which allows us to see the scope that Allamano wanted for his institution. The motivation for such a foundation was the availability that Allamano saw in the clergy and seminarians in the Province of Piedmont, and his desire to continue the work of Card. Massaia in Ethiopia. Allamano envisaged the institution to be a "Pious Society" for diocesan priests who felt the desire to consecrate themselves to the missions for a certain period of their lives, or for the rest of their lives.
These priests were to engage themselves "in the manner religious do", and this in order to guarantee more stability and assurance. The Institute was supposed to have a regional character, so as to promote in an easy way the union of the members and the esprit de corps. Rome approved the project, which had already been sent to the Prefect of Propaganda Fide, Card. John Simeoni, in a letter of April 6, 1891. Upon receiving the favorable answer from Rome, Allamano decided to inform the archbishop of Turin by writing to him in April of the same year. Card. Alimonda, who was sick at the time, did not answer right away: he died two months later, on May 21, 1891.
Mons. Davide Kiccarcfi Oecame Oisnop or rurin arter Afimonoa ^t&?Z-1897). During this time, Card. Ledochowski became prefect of Propaganda Fide. No word on the foundation was exchanged during these five years.
The conviction Allamano had as a youngster that he had to serve the missions had not diminished. To him, the foundation would be a good way to concretize it.
Riccardi was followed in the cathedra of St. Maximus by a classmate of Allamano, Card. Agostino Richelmy (1987-1923). A new climate favorable to the foundation had begun.
From all this, we deduce clearly that the Institute is first of all an idea that abides in the mind of the Founder as a perception of a content that must yet be defined and as a value that must be pursued. It is the abstract intuition of a reality entailing the need to transform it into total obligation. It is knowledge that generates life. Allamano experiences for many years this soul of the "Institute", which has yet to materialize. His heart is filled with this dream which he feels is a gift and a privilege. It leads him to believe that others could concretize the foundation. He searches for assurance in the words of his archbishop, whom he hopes will give the formal order to begin the foundation. His emotional world is full of this idea, but he at times feels terrified by the responsibility of actualizing it. He senses that his own faith is being tried just as was the faith of Abraham and the Prophets.
The content of the idea of Institute that fills the mind of Allamano is the evangelization of non-Christians. He often expresses the idea to the point of it becoming a slogan: "We are for the Pagans". We cannot deny that there has been an evolution in the theology and practice of Christian mission. Likewise we cannot deny that Allamano’s ways of expressing mission contain culturally conditioned elements that have been theologically transcended. Nevertheless, the Institute as he envisions it is identified with the concept of evangelization, that is to say, love for those who do not know the Gospel. Everything else comes afterwards, chronologically and theologically. The only reason to enter and to stay in the Institute is that one, strictly and forever. As a matter of fact, if the cycle of the mission could be hypothetically concluded, the mission will always have a new beginning, a new point of departure because the concept of announcing the Gospel will never come to an end. Allamano’s Institute is born for the mission, must identify itself with the mission and cannot be placed outside the mission.
To use one of his expressions, a person is missionary in the head, in the mouth and in the heart if a person is able to feel something deeply engaging towards those to whom one wants to announce the Gospel. Already in 1903, he wrote: "You must have a merciful heart (viscera charitatis)": it is not easy to translate this into a present-day expression. Intuition alone can understand it, more than any disillusion or uncertainty about the future. If one loves, one experiences that love is not strength but weakness, that it is made up of all those times that one has refused to say "no!" and all those times one has unconditionally said "yes!" It is reason without argument, which does not require any justification whatsoever. For Allamano, the foundation of evangelization as love for people is even prior to passion for the Gospel. It is for the good of the people that one departs for the missions. One leaves for the missions in order to support their dignity, and only afterwards to make them Christian.
The Institute is the fruit of this interior activity felt by Allamano. It is the concrete experience of this attraction of the mind and of the heart. He is not able to evade it. He cannot understand how one could be member of the Institute without experiencing it personally. Just as it was for him, the members of the Institute cannot be true members if they are ignorant of such an experience.
Since he was open to the missions, Card. Richelmy read into the feeling of Allamano and soon approved the project of this person that he esteemed and loved. Other people encouraged Allamano, such as the future cardinal Giovanni Bonzano. On June 23, 1900, Allamano wrote again to Propaganda Fide with the proposal that the following territory be assigned as mission to the soon-to-be-born Consolata Missionaries: the eastern part of Africa bordered on the south by the River Tana, on the north by Mount Kenya, on the west by a line crossing the Lakes Baringo and Rodolf and on to the sources of the River Omo; on the north by the basins of the Rivers Omo and Juba, on the east by the right margin of the River Wabe Scebele up to the coast of Benadir, which was under the Italian Protectorate.
The assent of Propaganda Fide was given under the condition that both the bishop of Turin and the Apostolic Vicar of that mission area would also agree. This agreement came quickly. Card. Richelmy and the whole subalpine Episcopal conference, which met at the Consolata Shrine on Sept. 12 and 13 1900, both approved the project, which the archbishop had recommended himself. On January 29, 1901, Richelmy erected the "Consolata Institute for Foreign Missions".
Something however came up that was much in contrast with this event that certainly gave so much joy to Allamano: he had to change the destination of his first missionaries leaving for the missions. In fact, the first destination was the Apostolic Vicariate of the Galla people (the Oromo) in Ethiopia. Mons. Andrew Jarosseau, in charge of the Vicariate, was willing to accept the missionaries. But this soon became impossible because of a series of political and religious objections by the local and the European authorities, the Italian Government included.
On May 8, 1902, the first four Consolata missionaries left for English East Africa. Allamano was able to obtain permission to send his first missionaries to that territory thanks to the mediation of the Italian consul in Zanzibar, Mr. Giulio Pestalozza, and thanks also to the availability of Mons. Emile Allgeyer of the Holy Ghost Missionaries5. One year later, and in the sending of other missionaries during the following years, the Cottolengo Sisters accompanied the Consolata missionaries, for it immediately became obvious that the presence of the Sisters in the missions was absolutely necessary.
The foundation of the Institute and the departure of the first missionaries would have been impossible without the collaboration and the friendship of Canon James Camisassa. Born in Caramagna Piemonte on September 27, 1850 of Gabriele and Agnese Perlo, Camisassa was for forty years, that is, up to his death on August 18, 1922, the man without whom Allamano would not have been able to carry the Institute. He was the right arm and the concretizer of all the material works of Allamano. When he asked Rome for the "Decretum Laudis" for the Institute of his Consolata missionary priests and brothers, Allamano gave to Camisassa the title of "Founder", with him, of the Consolata Missionaries.
The Ideal Becomes Flesh
The Institute appeared as "logos made flesh", story, story of love. Becoming history, it necessarily becomes configured and assumes a definition. It also appoints itself to assume limits and conditions of the real and of the possible. In order to understand how crude and demanding were the origins, it is enough to think about the labors and the "failures" of Allamano as he tried to find a place for his first sons to mission: from the attempts to tread on Card. Massaia’s steps in Ethiopia to the vicissitudes to obtain an independent Mission in Kenya in 1905.
In these events, we can already foresee the difficulty in translating the idea of Institute into an operative project. It is even more difficult to detect and concretize the attitudes that express the moral value of the project. In order to concretize it, the need is felt to refer to the usual parameters, to the preexisting models of mission, to have recourse to the teachings of the masters. Allamano humbly submits to this almost universal law, but he does not allow himself to be determined by it. He lives the foundation of the Institute in a state of search until the physiognomy of its specific characteristic is suddenly born. A good book about him defines him as Father and Teacher of Missionaries, but he is also a disciple of the events, of the peoples and of his missionaries6.
This primordial personal intuition of self and of his work as disciples of the mission renders Allamano receptive to the unfolding of history with which he will know how to walk and to grow. Few institutes more or less contemporary to the one he founded have received as much from the personal experience he acquired through the times. The Constitutions, which showed that the Institute was becoming mature, were analyzed during the Institute’s First General Chapter celebrated in 1922, and approved only in 1923, three years before Allamano’s death. Although Allamano had worked on them for many years, he was not completely satisfied with them at the moment of their approval. Anyhow, they are not only the expression of an institute which was founded by the Allamano with the efficient collaboration of the Camisassa. More than that, they contain an essential dimension that has its roots in the sense of mission lived by the missionaries at whose school Allamano formed himself.
He never set foot in Africa, but he accepted as component of the identity of his work the ideal and the methodology of those who were working in the missions. Thus, he was transforming into charism the mission that was being lived, in perfect harmony with his vocation of placing himself at the service of those who wanted to do mission work. That’s why he enacted a system of constant correspondence, and the obligation for his missionaries of daily recording on paper the happenings of each day: these diaries became for him a source of knowledge for his formation of his missionaries7.
The first lesson that he fashioned into the charism was that the mission is never a human choice, but also that it is determined strictly by human initiative. The Spirit precedes it, just as in the Acts of the Apostles. The Kikuyu of Kenya, and not the Oromo of Ethiopia, are the people chosen by God for the Institute. The "signs" point to and lead to them. Allamano obeys God, rather than man. Almost immediately, the mission reveals itself to be unforeseeable. It upsets the protections set up during the preparations made in Turin. Rather than dying because of hot weather, which everyone associated with Africa, the first four missionaries, who left in 1902, risked dying because of the cold weather during their first installation towards the end of June of that first year.
They were confronted with a reality that had no parameters for comparison. Three times foreigners as they were (in mentality, language and the color of their skin), they immediately understood that the best way was to plunge forth into whatever appeared new and astonishing. Allamano was not the only one who had to learn: the mission made disciples of them all.
One thing stayed clear in such an indefinite horizon: the clear and biding objective for them was to be able to announce the Gospel.
From the center of the Institute, a continuous call will go out to do just that, to announce the Gospel as the converging, concordant and enlightened action everyone must accomplish8.
Feeble, however, was the voice of the Founder when it was question of suggesting means and methods of evangelizing. Consequently, the missionaries themselves decided to develop their own apostolic methodology.
The Annual Conferences
Towards the end of 1903, the Consola^ Missionaries were present in seven Kikuyu mission stations, in a school for catechists, in a sawmill, and in the running of a rural livestock estate.
This arrangement had demanded an enormous effort in material work. It had also contributed to evangelization only in an indirect way, through irregular and occasional contacts with the local population.
The beginning of 1904 marked a brief pause in the construction work. In 1903, Fr. Filippo Perlo succeeded Fr. Tommaso Gays as superior. The requests for land that he made to the British Government guaranteed the possibility of development for a certain time in the future. It also prevented the "Protestant danger" from asserting itself, meaning the penetration of certain confessions into the territory that the missionaries considered their own exclusive territory. It was in this climate that the idea matured of a meeting of all the missionary priests for Spiritual Exercises, and a series of Conferences during which they were to trace common orientations as part of their missionary methodology. These annual meetings took place also in the following years. Regulations and directives that contained the decisions made on these occasions were sent to all the missionaries in circular letters, even by local bishops 9.
It seems that Allamano did not fully understand the extent of the meaning of each decision made, but he had some idea of what was happening: that in order to do mission, the missionaries had to close ranks. They had to stay together and courageously make decisions. They also had to seriously engage themselves in putting into practice the decisions made together.
In this kind of action, he saw "I’esprit de corps" on which he had many times insisted. To decide in freedom and to faithfully put into practice what had been decided - that was the path he wanted his missionaries to tread.
In this way, the work choices adopted by his missionaries in their meetings, which became the basis for the pastoral methodology of the Consolata Missionaries, became also Allamano’s way of perceiving the mission, and the way he wanted his missionaries to identify with the mission.
Identity Traits
A kind of dualism emerges strongly during the period between the foundation of the Institute and the death of Allamano. On one hand we have the attempt to have the Institute assume the reassuring face of an ecclesiastical institution that faithfully follows a model easily recognizable to the eyes of good people and of the constituted authority. On the other hand the Institute is seen as intent upon becoming something that no one as yet knows. With this in mind, it doesn’t shock us to learn that many missionaries, when asked their opinion on the institutional changes that the Founder had in mind for the Institute, such as its transformation into a truly religious congregation, these missionaries simply delegated the Founder to make the decision in their name too.
The evolution of the Institute was not simply a continuous process from minus to plus. What was being processed was, no doubt, considered as something good in itself. The reality of the Kikuyu, met first in 1902, showed that a lengthy work needed to be done. The limited number of missionaries, the astounding daily "discoveries" in order to draw near to the Africans, took away the possibility of thinking about anything that was not seen in the present.
The real mission showed a wide horizon, but a static horizon. And yet, in that horizon is revealed the other face of the announced dualism. Allamano leads the Institute to an involvement in the new things that come their way. He himself knows from personal experience that the foundation of the Institute itself is a new idea built upon a static reality.
That is why he wanted his work to survive and to identify itself with newly emerging ideas, new understandings, that is to say, with a new capacity of reading the present and of interpreting the simple facts. He understands that the "usual", the habitual, the certainty of the past, even the certainty of what will be when one views matters only from the perspective of the present, all these aspects are destined to change, perhaps even to disappear.
As it often happens in the case of champions of new ideas, Allamano did not see the complete realization of his plans. However, the ability to grasp the "newness" that he launched will make it possible for the Institute to be born and to continue.
The narrative and the understanding of these one hundred years of history of the Consolata Institute will show itself to be enthralling precisely because of this surprising openness.
Mission with a Soul
In the beginning, everything was new: the spirit that Allamano, under pressure from the Spirit, passed on to his missionaries; the calm and deep style of life that he demanded from them; the deep sense of belonging; the solid relations of brotherhood that could be breathed in the Institute; the simple and austere ascetic living that sustained the ideal of searching for God; the intense emotion that accompanied those preparing to leave for the missions. Urged by this continuous onrush of the new, life in the Institute was permanently pervaded by a strong dynamism. Allamano spurred people on the ways of zeal and of passion. The actual mission was marked by an enormously efficient vigor. If we read the diaries of the missionaries and the statistics relative to the missions, and pay no attention to others who have tried to discredit the authenticity of the writings, we might think that there were exaggerations. The opening of new missions and the hardships thereof move at a frantic rhythm and with short delays. Up to 1924, the direction of these activities rests solely in the hands of a strategist, Bishop Filippo Perlo, a man who doesn’t care much for limitations. And all this was wrapped up within the word "zeal", and the sense of urgency that justified focusing on temporary things. All pain and suffering was considered relative, and there wasn’t much room for mistakes either.
The results were looked at as a guarantee that good work was being done. And conscience said we were sailing in the right direction. Besides, even the geographical setting was beautiful. The Kikuyu were always described in a poetic and charming terminology. Because of this attraction we ran the risk of denying to the mission what for Allamano was an essential dimension: the willingness to continually "leave and go beyond".
Just as the foundation of the Institute had asked him to go beyond the immobility of the Church of Turin and to have the courage to look at the whole world as the arena for his performance, he now looked at the "immobility" of the Kikuyu, and he showed his missionaries a "beyond" that they had to reach, whose first stage could not be other than Ethiopia.
To wish to reach there appears to be the most meaningful example of the tension between the idea and its concretization, between facts and the search for the values inherent in Allamano’s vocation as a founder. Ethiopia remained in him as a call from the Spirit, and the footprints of the Massaia were the tracks of a spiritual identity that he would have liked to see on the faces and in the hearts of his missionaries. In 1911, during the visit of Fr. James Camisassa to the missions in Kenya, Project Kaffa came up again. In his usual Sunday talk to the missionaries on April 2, 1911, he communicated to them its objectives. On January 28, 1913, Propaganda Fide issued the decree of erection of the Apostolic Prefecture of Southern Kaffa, and shortly afterwards it named Fr. Gaudenzio Barlassina as its head.
In 1998, Fr. Giovanni Crippa published a thoughtful book on the presence of the Consolata Missionaries in Ethiopia, which covers the time from their arrival to their ejection from the country after the colonial events of Italy in that land. These events in Ethiopia became the concrete application of what Allamano considered to be a necessary element of identity of our Institute’°.
After Ethiopia came Tanganyika, Somalia, and Mozambique in the last days of the life of Allamano. Every new opening is a logos become flesh, that consequently limits itself. But it is also proof of the foremost principle that generates the mission and the being of the Institute. Every new opening emphasizes that we are to be "Ad Gentes". History tells us that the Consolata Missionaries know that they cannot ignore this, which is why it was once again proposed by the last General Chapter of the Institute.
It cannot but be this way, since, for the Institute, the "going beyond" that Allamano wanted is not the consequence of a completed task, of a work that has been fully done. Among the openings done by Allamano there was never one that did not follow these criteria. The going out to meet the new is the sign/sacrament of the nature of the Institute. If we look at the historical experience of the founder, although strictly connected with it, the situation and the environment in which the Institute installed itself have changed and will continuously change: Europe, North and South America, and Asia, the new Areopagus mentioned by Redemptoris Missio, the reality of a world that considers God as non-existent, and that has produced a culture centered on so many gods as alternatives to the mystery of the transcendent.
It is question of a legitimate journey, not easy and never completed. It is a journey as vast as the world, addressed to all those who do not know the Gospel. That’s why, even when it needs to reduce itself to a concrete situation, if it sets itself in one place rather than in another, it will not find, nor will it ever be able to find, its final destination. This capacity for opening up is a criterion which serves to measure the authenticity of the Institute. From its own history, the Institute has learned how to question itself on the worth of what it is doing, as well as how to contemplate the "beyond" towards which it must project itself. The point at which the Consolata Missionaries have arrived in the realities and contexts in which they work cannot be considered a model to which they must always return, so as to continually repeat the same things. Rather it must be simply the point of departure towards something new that goes beyond the geographical and ideological arenas.
As we have tried to see, the date of the 100 years of life of the Consolata Institute celebrates the memory of a joyful history, made up of joys and sorrows, of anguish and hope, of successes and failures, of misery and greatness - in a word, a history made up of real life. But in no sense was it ever a habituation to death. Rather it was a continuous education towards not succumbing to the present, a continual formation in the capacity of viewing things that change with honest realism.
The Principle of Transformation?
Using this faculty, Allamano began listening to the mission at work and understood that it fed on another essential element: the engagement to "transform the welcoming environment" and "to let oneself be transformed by it."
The choices of the missionaries in the beginning, adopted by them in order to attain the first goal, could all be reduced to a common denominator: to stay with the people. Healing the sick, the schools, teaching catechism, and especially the visits to the villages, eliminated even the need of mission understood as residence of the missionaries.
To those who looked at them from somewhat far away, from some point in Africa, this novelty appeared at least extravagant. The centers from which the missionaries irradiated their presence on the "poor Blacks" were considered the real missions.
However, these newly-arrived decided, as their normal course of action, to live with the local people in such a way that the mission stations could be considered their procurement houses and places to take refuge for the night, something that was unconceivable according to the prevailing customs.
The priests, sisters and brothers walked so much through the Kikuyu land that they learned how to take a close look at those they met and became totally involved in deep human relations with them. They were often laughed at and fingers were pointed at them because they only spoke Kikuyu, because they didn’t know how to instill submission, because they debased the prestige of the Whites by living a way of life that was lower than that of the more developed Africans.
In 1948, the British Government gave Mons. Cavallera the order to raise his missionaries to the rank of "Whites". Other people often asked them to respect their own "priestly dignity", meaning that they should live in a more "civilized" manner.
The Africans began refering to the missionaries for help, and the missionaries considered this as the people’s right. No center was considered a mission if it didn’t have many concrete answers to the needs of the people: to the people belonged the time, the money, the hard work and the personal qualities.
Up to his death, Allamano often asked the missionaries in his letters to "transform the environment" in this way. The missionaries in Kenya made this slogan the headline of their work at Murang’a in 1904.
The Allamano presented it in his Conferences at the Motherhouse, and he mentioned it again as he blessed those who were leaving for the missions. Transmitted and shared by mouth or written on paper, this slogan sometimes sounded like a utopic admonition. When pronounced by the founder, it had the value of a paradigm. Incarnated by his missionaries, it bore much fruit, and it also produced much suffering. Some of the best minds of the group understood it best: Filippo Perlo, Francesco Cagliero, Gaudenzio Barlassina, Antonio Borda Bossana and some others. The transformation of the environment implies the transformation of the missionary himself, head and heart included. The natural tendency of those who were leaving for the missions was always to stick to the certainties of what they had and what they were. The Kikuyu hills in 1902 recalled those of the Monferrato, the chapels being built were called by the names of familiar Madonnas. Concepts and categories let you think that the ideal was to reproduce in the missions a corner of one’s own identity. The mission was thus understood as a well-known reality.
The transformation however was a process that destructured everything and everyone, even the most sacred things. Joining this process had only one sure element: reality. For the missionaries it was always a question of an unknown reality, because there were no studies or textbooks that gave a reliable understanding of that reality, and even more because such a knowledge could not happen without the total personal engagement of the missionary.
The first thing that the reality imposed on the missionary was to begin learning: to learn how to speak the language, how to eat, how to manage, how to dress, and how to work hard in an unusual manner. Put this way, this seems logical, but it caused many tragedies: missionaries who quit or looked for scapegoats upon which to unload their misfortunes. But, in the end, there it was, a true triumph: the value of everyday life, that is to say, the small things that comprise our human existence.
In order to transform the environment, they had to become part of it, to accept its values and risks and irrationalities, its poverty and its deformities caused by the diversity of persons. This initial process is well seen especially in the first hours of the mission: we meet "poor Blacks, "barbarian usages"; once in a while there is talk about "savages" to whom civilization must be brought. Not only because these are the ways of expression of the times: these are categories that arise out of feelings. It is the affirmation of one’s own superiority at being different that separates one from the others. All this changes when the missionary begins relishing the taste of asking for something and receiving it from the people: their language, their joy, their faith, their unselfish hospitality, their sense of sincere trust. The missionaries discover that their names are sung in endless caravan sing-songs; they learn that each one has a nickname just as in one’s family; that their presence arouses questions; that their way of living is understood as different from others. More important than what they say is what they are. They feel that they are the object of infinite patience.
A symbiosis is born. As one begins to learn the native language, sometimes it becomes natural even to speak it at home. The customs reveal a deep wisdom. Requests are not seen as signs of begging but rather as signs of sharing. Filippo Perlo realizes that the catechism must be preceded by the gift of knowledge and by the means that he can offer for the betterment of the life of the people. Therefore he aims at teaching "arts and crafts" that are easily learned.
Work is Mission
The authenticity of the transformation and of the new spirit that pervades the missionaries finds its confirmation in the enormous amount of work accomplished in the missions. By his free intuition, Allamano annexed work to the charism of his Institute. Not the elegant work of symbolic gestures, but the hard work and fatigue that is imposed on whoever must earn his own living. Whoever entered the Institute had to learn how to work; and the laboriousness of Camisassa succeeded very well in having this principle put into practice.
In Turin, such novelty, institutionalized not only for the brothers (for whom manual work was a tradition) but also for the seminarians, sisters and priests, roused smiles and astonishment according to one’s own point of view. Allamano had his own view: sustained by the common sense that animated him, he kept moving ahead; he even prepared a precise schedule for manual activities.
Trained this way, the missionaries left for Africa. Manual work was the only thing that everyone could do here as soon as they arrived. For a long time, it was the most intense operation of all. It created a new style of doing mission. Nothing could be more opposed to Allamano’s view than the idea that the life of a priest is a life of comfort "sine euro ". As a matter of fact, he even joked about himself saying that he could have lived a comfortable life, but instead he had always loaded upon himself numerous tasks, not the least being the one of founding the Institute.
For him, work was not some kind of ornate trait in the missionary. Work was mission. That’s why he wanted the sisters to be somewhat "macho", "woman in dungarees", able "to work with grit".
Our first farm in Kenya, tilled by the Consolata missionaries, was bought with Allamano’s personal money, with the explicit intention that it help finance the expenses of the missions. It was understood that the missionaries had to do the work. The missionaries however counted also on the cooperation of the Africans. It was a good way of sharing an important dimension of life.
The Allamano wanted his missionaries to mission with this kind of attitude.
Among the reasons that he presented to Rome in order to get the separation of the Kikuyu from the Apostolic Vicariate of Zanzibar, he underlined the economic weight and the work done in that territory: "Very hard work was done during those months... Before the end of 1903, three new mission stations were opened and three new houses made of stone were ready...! Thanks to the cooperation of an industrial post founded during those same months near Tusu, which had an hydraulic saw and labs for blacksmith and carpenter, almost all the mission stations had the most urgenly needed furniture, such as altars, benches for the chapels, shutters and frames for doors and windows — things that were important to the security of the houses... In the missions in Africa a lot of land has been acquired and destined to various usages. One of these plots measures 2,964 acres and is under the protection of Fort Niere... In the acquired or applied plots of land near the mission stations, the missionaries cultivate vegetables, cereals, coffee and other plants, which, according to the experiments done in the name of the government, allow us to hope for a very remunerating production... This way, some of the mission stations of the Consolata Missionaries are well on their way to becoming self-sufficient." n
This is a text that was deeply meditated on and several times corrected. Dry numbers and precise figures exclude mysticism. Work is mission. That means that work is an instrument of the Kingdom. That’s how Allamano understood it when the decree of approval of the Institute confirmed the value of the work of his missionaries and the purpose with which they did it: to offer to the Kikuyu the possibility of making for themselves a more decent kind of human life onto which to graft Christian life.
In this way, the value that the Institute wanted to apply to labor, work and the economy was set forever: they were worthy because they gave credibility to the announcement of the Kingdom and contributed to make man grow in human dignity.
In this way a reciprocal relationship that leads to the reduction of differences spontaneously comes to life. Friendship becomes reason to overcome diversity. Following from this the missionary presence takes on a sense of absolute novelty: Instead of lofty works and powerful abodes that become "lighthouses of attraction" for the Africans, very simple structures are erected (sometimes too simple) that do not manifest power but rather lead one to stay with the people. This was the basic intuition of the apostolic methodology of the Institute, which became a charismatic component of it. When a Consolata missionary runs away from this form of being he shows himself to be a stranger to the group, wherever he is in the world. Only the mark that imprints the sharing of our lot, of our life, of our thoughts in the context in which we work makes the missionary recognizable as part of unity of the Institute. You know them by the way they feel and speak of the environment in which they live. As they become part of this, they consider themselves as elements that are integrated in the ways of understanding and of feeling of the local people with whom they share the gift of existence. To know in order to love, to share in order to transform: this is the synthesis of the mission as understood by our Institute.
The Ripples Radiate out to the Whole Institute
From this mode of being certain consequences spring forth which have marked the history of our Institute. First of all, the "myth" of the Motherhouse. It was the affective center of the Institute, its point of reference, its aesthetic dimension, its spiritual dream. But the true heart of each missionary beat with the heart of the mission where he worked. The transformation of the missionaries, produced by their staying with the people, involved even the very center of the Institute which thus became more open to understanding even the most remote realitites. This growth process of the Institute had been desired and cultivated by Allamano himself. In 1913 he obtained the foundation of the Prefecture of Kaffa, in Ethiopia; in 1922, the Prefecture of Iringa in what is today Tanzania; in 1924, Somalia; and in 1925 he saw some of his missionaries leave for Mozambique. However, we must say that the real developer of the Institute was Bishop Filippo Perlo, whom the General Chapter of 1922 had elected to be Vice Superior General as well as Allamano’s successor in the event of his death.
In 1926, the inheritance of the guidance of the Institute passed on to a man very different from Allamano, a man who also had much love for the missions, although he looked at them as the object of continuous conquest in an unstoppable work of expansion.
With the death of Allamano, Bishop Perlo applied to the Institute in Italy the methods he had adopted in Africa in order to increase the number of missions. The need to develop some of the structures of the Institute in its country of origin was shared by all the missionaries, and, at least in part, had been programmed by the Founder. This gave to the Superior General the chance to pool all his energies in a field that was innate to him: within two years he enlarged the Motherhouse, and he opened several vocation promotion centers for boys. This he did following a plan of grandiose proportions that had a double scope: to multiply the number of the missionaries, and to obtain abundant means to maintain and develop the Institute. While he was superior, there were in Africa 167 missionary priests and brothers and 164 sisters. In Italy there were 220 priests, brothers and major seminarians, and 320 sisters. To these we must add 510 minor seminarians, for a grand total of 1,372.
Besides these realities which characterized the governing of Bishop Perlo, realities that everyone could easily see, there also were hidden ones: All these things were being done at the cost of great sacrifices and of misunderstandings: the whole institution guided by him went into crisis.
And so it was that on January 2, 1929, Capuchin Bishop Ermenegildo Pasetto arrived at the Motherhouse in Turin. He gathered the superiors and read to them a decree in which Propaganda Fide suspended them all from their functions and he assumed those functions himself. This act gave birth to the long process of the Apostolic Visitation to the Institute. This Visitation came to an end only in 1933. On June 28 of that year, Propaganda Fide named Fr. Gau-denzio Barlassina, Apostolic Prefect of Kaffa, Superior General of the Institute.
These stormy events showed the strict relationship between the missions and the center of the Institute. We can even state that this relationship enabled the Institute to live these difficult times in deep suffering and with many dismissals of members, but it also gave it the capacity of facing unsuspected changes.
The nomination of Father Barlassina to Superior General produced a consensus in the Institute, and it also became for its members a center of unity and identity that brought many to define Barlassina as the ideal continuation of Allamano. His program centered on recuperating the "religious" dimension of the Institute. In order to do this, he listened to every member, although he did not follow the wishes of everybody. In fact, he deliberately avoided falling under the influence of anyone other than the influence of the Holy Spirit, as he wrote in his first circular letter.12
He was not much different from Perlo in his dynamism, his love for the missions, his sense of the Institute; but he was shrewder, more prudent, an expert in human relations and a specialist in knowing people. He had told everybody that he was going to be a superior in the complete sense of the word as it was understood in those days, and he never backed off from such practice. His first governing actions were directed at bringing back family spirit and simplicity among the members of the Institute.
He too decided to expand the Institute outside of Africa, to areas not yet thought of.
Fr. Barlassina thought of America as a way for the Institute to find the sources for the economic needs of the Institute, the need to make it stronger financially. In fact, the development of the mission areas in Africa and the restructuring of the centers in Italy (although these centers had been reduced in number by the Apostolic Visitation) demanded enormous sums of money in order to be furnished in a decent way. Furthermore, it would give the Institute the opportunity of avoiding the concentration of the investments of the Institute in Italy and in Africa alone. These were some of the reasons to think about going West, beyond the Atlantic Ocean.
Besides these economic reasons, news from religious institutes in America, Latin America included, were spoken of as great sources of vocations. Fr. Barlassina understood that the Institute Allamano wanted could not be limited by geographical frontiers, since its scope was the Mission, and the Mission must be universal. By simply looking at the Institute’s mission territories, one understood the need for more workers for the Lord’s vineyard.
A new opening had to be in a country |Jiat answered two requirements: to offer economic aid, and to promise the recruitment of future missionaries. Before setting these lines of orientation in a written program, the Superior General inserted it in the mind of Fr. Giovanni Battista Bisio before the latter left for Brazil. Fr. Bisio thought about these directives often while treading on Brazilian soil.
This slow process of insertion of the Institute in America in 1937 was developed later (1946-1948).
At the end of World War II, the map of the sites where the Consolata Missionaries worked was completely changed. Some of the missionary priests and brothers had been repatriated from Africa; Ethiopia had been completely abandoned. The higher numbers of our missionaries in Italy provoked the realization of an old project of adding to our presence in America. On February 22, 1946, Fr. Giovanni Battista Bisio was called to the presence of the General Council of the Institute and asked to present new possibilities of openings for the Institute.
The countries that seemed to offer the best opportunity were Canada and the United States. Forgetting any distinction between North and South America, Argentina too was mentioned as a prospective area for us. At the end, both areas were chosen, even if, in time, Argentina received the first contingent of missionaries. The purpose was analogous to that of our presence in Brazil13. Two years after, it was the turn for Colombia. Here, however, it was clear from the beginning that we were not going there for economic purposes nor hoping for a great number of vocations; we were engaging ourselves in typical missionary activities along the Magdalena River.
The data presented here on the expansion of the areas of work of the Consolata Missionaries has been scanty. But is enough to show how our understanding of our role as missionaries in a world so different from the world at the time of our beginning, was a slow and painful process.
It was only during the General Chapter of 1949 that we achieved this new understanding of our mission, and this was done especially through the mediation of Fr. Domenico Fiorina, who was elected Superior General in that Chapter.
The Chapter began on September 1, 1949. On the September 10, Fr. Fiorina was elected Superior. He was there in the assembly as the delegate from Brazil.
Up until October 22, the date of the closing of the Chapter, the capitular members analyzed the life of the Institute and elaborated a statute for the missions. Keeping in mind our development in various countries, they decided to establish "Delegations". Although united to the center of the Institute, the Delegations would enjoy a certain autonomy, and each one of them would assume a special characteristic according to the country in which they were and the kind of work its missionaries did.
Furthermore, that assembly understood the specific meaning of the new openings. It perceived in a conscious manner the transformation that this would bring about in the Institute. In exchange, Turin guaranteed to the missions the continuity of personnel and the means to carry on the work they were engaged in. From the privileged viewpoint of the Chapter it was easier to understand the need of not reducing the world to our own existential experience. Consequently, the Chapter tried to convince the missionaries to acquire a deeper sense of the Institute as a global reality.
In order to deeply transform the environment, the missionary had to think and feel himself as communion. Isolation would not let ideas grow; rather, it would bring death in a quicker way.
These orientations of the Chapter soon proved to be very wise. The moment soon arrived in the history of the Institute in which the process of transformation showed itself to be an essential moment of missionary activity, the times of difficult work for the independence of the African countries. In order to analyze this event, we could consider the Ethiopian War of 1936. Consolatas lived it with various attitudes: the dignified attitude of Bishop Santa, the equilibrium of Fr. Barlassina, and the Fascist politicalization of Fr. M. Borello. These attitudes reemerged in the 1960s when Africa was assuming its new political identity. In the end, what was really left in the mind and in the heart of the missionaries was the understanding of this new reality.
A process of identification with the changing reality was now transforming the missionaries and the people: they were both becoming center actors that accepted the changes in progress. The evolution of the situations and of the persons was the same evolution that was taking place in the missionaries, the same one which they had felt, sometimes unconsciously, or even unwillingly, but that they now saw as a necessary road of their human and missionary experience.
The process of transformation of the environment and of the Institute in Latin America was even deeper, although at times less evident. When the Consolata missionaries arrived in Brazil and Argentina, they looked for Italian communities, groups of people that came from places known to them in Italy. They found them and immersed themselves in these communities. But then, after a short period of time, the idea of their ministering as European priests to displaced Italians left them with an unsatisfied feeling.
Men like Fr. M. Borello and Giovanni Battista Bisio felt that they were being forced to be what they were not. Even though obedience in those days was considered to have miraculous power, they nevertheless did not hesitate to follow a way that was not very much accepted in Turin. They soon understood that, although these Italian groups in Brazil«and Argentina tried to keep their Italian identity, they would eventually become Brazilians in Brazil and Argentineans in Argentina. Beginning with the change of climate (in Rio de Janeiro, Christmas was celebrated in a 40° [ 104 F] temperature), and continuing with the multiculturalism of interrelationships, of economic transactions and of political interests, the new situation produced very precise and diversified cultural identities.
When in the 1970s the Consolata Missionaries opened their new missions in Venezuela and Ecuador, their way of looking at the reality of the countries where they were trying to insert themselves was totally different.
We could say that this process was characterized by a sort of "intellectual disobedience" that prompted the missionaries to make use of the existing structures while creating new ones, and to listen to what was told about their world of origin and the parameters of that world that still guided their actions. This was done, however, without believing in such parameters, without feeling that world to be vitally necessary, but rather, dreaming about a reality that would sever them from the past in order to produce something different. This new reality, which has still not been completely concretized, produced, for example, during 1980-87 in Brazil the "utopic movement". This movement was a search for a total Brazilian identity in the formation of the Consolata missionaries, an identity in which the missionaries felt themselves to be partners in giving and receiving.
They contributed to the authenticity of a Latin American culture by siding always more deeply with the poor, the marginalized, the indigenous and Afro-American minorities, in order to promote their specific diversities, their cultural values and their social importance. At the same time their meaningful involvement in these diverse cultural areas created a new consciousness in the missionaries themselves.
The Sign of an Acquired Maturity: Visibility
For an institution such as the Consolata Missionaries, one hundred years of life can be considered a time long enough to look at the past.
The geographical expanse, the evangelization accomplished, the numerous activities in which the mission expressed itself, all these things have made the Institute visible to the world. This visibility becomes even clearer in those places that the Institute has passed on to others. This was the most visible sign of the work accomplished, of a concretized purpose. This was the most authentic yearning of every missionary.
This desire for visibility, although clad in discretion and modesty, filled the mind*of Allamano: his was the Motherhouse, by him were approved all that was being done in the missions.
No doubt, this idea dominated the life of Bishop Perlo: his main ideal Seemed to be to make the Institute become a visible and working reality through the constant "conquest" of new mission territories. This craving for the visibility of the Institute will bring him to send an expedition to India in 1928, which ended in failure, and to continually open new centers in Italy, to the point of dreaming about a Consolata presence in all and each Italian diocese.
His example engaged many missionaries and misson territories. To the Mathari of Nyeri were added, with no guarantee of continuity, the great colleges of Latin America.
’When these structures were set up, they responded to the needs of the times, and they always publicized the icon of the Consolata and the name of the Institute. To spread the name was a duty. To show a visible presence was considered a necessity.
This visibility, which we can call "horizontal", was accompanied by another one, which we can call "vertical": the one in the sphere of the spirit. Difficult as it may be to present its contours, or to enclose it in statistics, the moral visibility of the Institute was always the value that it pursued with greater continuity. "Few, but good": this was the refrain that everyone heard Allamano repeat continually. They say that Allamano used to say: ’A little door to enter the Institute, and a big wide door to leave’. This explains how he wanted an Institute of high quality and profile.
Maybe the methods of "exceptional quality" advocated by the Founder are no longer proposable today, but the need for quality is: a quality that renders visible in the right way the missionary service that must be given by both the individual and the community. This need is witnessed to by the entire tradition of the Institute.
Next to this demanding vision of the Institute, Allamano instilled at the same time the need of a deep sense of humanness, which was most visibly manifested by the way in which he always encouraged the missionaries.
Allamano would always encourage the missionaries in one thing: to love the mission. The Founder never needed advice regarding this one purpose that he always wanted. Nor was it merely an ideal. From the very beginning it constituted a radical dimension of their collective identity. For example, it did not seem very much according to human common sense that 50% of the members of the first Consolata Missionaries sent to Africa were in their teens: Brother Luigi Falda was 19, Brother Celeste Lussso, 18.
To be sent was always considered a privilege. To stay back was a frustration. Allamano knew that the Mission was, first and foremost, to feel, and afterwards, to do, and for him, the feeling of the Institute had to be mission.
This reality became part of the identity of the Institute. Without it ho one would know how to express what the Institute is. Quite often the missionaries see it from their own perspective, and they search for a concept of mission that is not very clearly defined.
The Church of God lives constantly in tension between the "already" and the "not yet". The mission anticipates its expectation concerning its own future identity. The Institute likewise lives off this dynamism, and for this reason cannot always have sure parameters for its own ways of operating. This explains the reason for the Institute’s continuous search and for the multiplicity of possible answers to its mode of doing mission.
Important is the fact that the mission becomes partner, identity and heart for those that make up this institution. Thus the missionaries become persons of straightforward and penetrating insight, persons of clear and precise words, and yet persons whose entire being is expressive of mission.
The sequence of events that make up the story of the Institute constitutes a chain of alternating successes and failures. The balance is not always on the positive side. But the basic feeling is that, notwithstanding all the negatives, the ideal remains clear. The Institute still lives today the "spirit of mission", as Allamano would call it.
For him, this kind of "spirit of, was the dimension that transcends everything. It invades, rules and gives nobility to everything. The spirit of mission has sustained the Institute throughout its one hundred years of life, and it continues to keep it in tension towards something more that unsettles the present, confronting it with what it ought to be and the beautiful reality that it might become.
The Source of the "spirit of
For Allamano, the spirit of the mission is nourished precisely in living the contemplative dimension of the mission itself. Yes, he prayed, a lot. Many people remember him as a man of much prayer, strong and merciful. He was familiar with the things of God, and it was natural for him to speak of those things, especially to his missionaries14.
This confidence expressed itself in his personal conversations and made it easy for him to teach. He spoke many times to the missionaries about his own prayer and of the devotions that he so much loved. These conversations became ordinary teachings, given with careful explanation, sometimes with formulas that seemed to focus on insignificant details. They became "doctrine" because of the way in which they were told, a way that showed a world in which continuous reflection fed a life of fervent prayer.
The missionaries that approached him, even for a short time, understood that Allamano wanted them to be prayerful people, especially in the missions. In fact, Allamano would speak with the strongest emotion whenever he would present them with the sign of the Crucifix while recommending prayer to them.
On those occasions, he no longer spoke of the practices of prayer, or of the times of prayer. He knew that the daily schedule regulated the rhythm and the moments of prayer. But to those who were leaving for the mission, the discourse went beyond the initiation to prayer. It became contemplation of their transformation in prayer.
On April 13, 1902, he said goodbye to the first ones leaving for Africa. He called them "holocausts", and he prayed in the words of the Canon of the Mass that they might become a sacrifice offered and blessed by God. On his lips the mission was transformed into worship, and the life of the apostle became rooted in the Eucharist, discovering its full meaning only in the Liturgy.
The Mission-Eucharist became mystery of faith believed with all one’s-strength and energy and lived with humble intensity. Thus the activity of the missionary was to be a prolonged celebration of the mass that would create in him a state of participation in the mystery of God in which the missionary asks, offers, intercedes and rereads the events of his day in the light of the God who accompanies him. This goes beyond all the scheduled moments of prayer and becomes an "abiding in the Lord".
In the words of Allamano: "The Lord will be with you in the holy tabernacle, Jesus Christ alive as he is in heaven; he will be with you in that crucifix that you carry on you. Not all the mission stations have the fortune of having Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, but the crucifix you will always have. When you cannot stay in the presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, such as during a trip or because of this or that engagement... it is enough for you to look at the crucifix and all is understood." 15
That look is communion, mutual presence to the one we know, intimacy that helps one to look in the same direction in order to witness the beauty of the same things. The head of the missionary leaves and comes back to the face of the Lord through everything that he says and does. From this certainty of faith springs the contemplative dimension of the missionary, the spirit of prayer that Allamano wanted as an essential component for his missionaries who announce the Kingdom of God.
The ten general chapters have become privileged moments to deepen these convictions of our Founder which had the purpose of maintaining in the Institute the teaching of Allamano concerning the vertical depth of the missionary.
In his book La Missione Racconta (The Mission Tells the Story)16, referring to Consecration and Mission, IMQfPost-Conciliar Reflections, Rome 1997, pg 1005, Fr. Giovanni Tebaldi gives to each chapter a title that expresses its basic value. Each person’s search has one purpose: to find the road that leads to "depth", to develop a visibility that is born from the inside, even when the themes are about organizational programs.
The chapters seem to know that what will make the Institute highly visible is not the concretization of a special program, nor the elimination of the individual members’ constant faults, but the capacity of expressing one’s authentic depth in the perception of values and in the promotion of new ideas that will form and renew the missionary’s identity.
The Weariness of Changing
The 1949 General Chapter must be remembered in this context of renewal of identity of the Institute because it affirmed a principle which, when put into practice, produced a deep transformation.
Profile of the Consolata Missionary Institute at their Centennial Year of Existence 35
The Consolata Missionaries in Latin America directed their attention to make the number of candidates grow. In the delegations of Africa, however, no formative house had been founded by the Consolatas, in deference to the dispositions of Propaganda Fide, which invited missionary provinces to provide for themselves members from the local clergy.
But the Chapter of 1949 was in favor of accepting in the Institute candidates from the mission territories. It was the conviction of Fr. Fiorina that the difficulties that up to then were against such recruiting had now been overcome. He thought it necessary to begin in the missions the organization of an activity proper to the Institute which was to be composed of local members, in order to sustain the ever increasing work of the local clergy, and to spread the missionary dimension that was a component of the charism of the Institute.
The maturity reached by the mission territories of Nyeri, Meru and Iringa, which were made dioceses in 1953, and the foreboding of the social and political upheavals that a few years later would carry many African nations to independence, brought forth the need of starting the formation of African personnel in order to guarantee the presence of the Institute under any circumstances. The arguments had a utilitarian character, but they had the advantage of being easily understood and therefore enabled the recruitment of missionary vocations even in Africa, because the development of apostolic works always needed more and more workers.
This was the plan of Fr. Domenico Fiorina as he finished his 10-year term in office as Superior General in 1959. He felt a bit of sadness that he had not seen the Opening of any house of formation in Africa. The new General Chapter began on May 4, 1959. On May 15, after a rather quick vote, he was reelected Superior General. After a ten-year term of calm development of the Institute, the capitular members reasserted the validity of the choices and of the method of the government of the Superior General to whom they renamed as "Allamano’s successor".
No big problem troubled the horizon at that time, but things would soon change. A revolution in the ways of seeing things was coming up, a revolution that had visible consequences even in the structures. The event in which a new image of the Church was born was the Ecumenical Council Vatican II. The idea that the church is missionary by nature would be rediscovered and deepened.
Fr. Fiorina participated in the Council by right. Interiorly, he developed an evolution which he wanted to pass on to the Institute.
First, he was involved in all the initiatives of ecclesial dimension that had been elaborated by theological research on the mission in recent past years.
He also thought that an ever increasing presence of members of the Insitute in the context of the universal Church and in the initiatives of the local Church was necessary. He wanted the meaning of the mission in the Institute to be deepened, and its theological reasons as well, so that it would go beyond the territorial environment with which the missionaries often identified themselves.
The work of the Institute was to blend itself with the work of the local Churches by not considering them as rivals but rather as a reality to which we bring our own missionary style and our own experience.
Considering the celebration of the Council, the development of theology, the renewal and the new mentality that ensued, the Institute tried to intensify the value of its missionary engagement. It rediscovered the validity of its own charism, and it earned a greater ecclesial sense - things that the new Superior General highly favored.
Coinciding with this exceptional period of the life of the Church in the last centuries, there arose the vocational crisis, which was also experienced in the Institute.
At the beginning of the second term of Fr. Domenico Fiorina, a vast program of development was prepared, a program of recruitment of vocations and formation of candidates. This program foresaw the opening of several centers for young people in all the provinces of the Institute and the erection of regional novitiates and major seminaries. For a few years, things went well. Then, different social and cultural situations arose. There were new demands by the candidates and protests against the structures of the centers themselves. All this greatly diminished the number of foundations, and provoked the reduction of the number of minor seminarief.
The crisis soon attained the theological seminaries too. Many candidates abandoned the Institute. They decried a non-existent maturity caused by a depersonalized formation. They manifested doubts about the values of spiritual life of the priesthood. They demanded more responsibility and self-determination. They also proposed radical changes in the structures so as to favor a new style of life integrated into the human values of society and open to social engagement so as to be, in the Church and in the world, credible prophets and witnesses to a return to the Gospel.
Fr. Fiorina, sincerely convinced that formation methods and structures had to change, imparted directives and allowed experiments that were not exempt from error, trying to find a new way.
This was the evolution towards a future for which an expensive price had to be paid.
In the last years of his government, from 1966 to 1969, he witnessed the decline of the recruiting and formation centers that he had supported and desired.
He also saw the crises of many of the structures that he had created during twenty years as governor of the Institute. But he also saw the formation of a new conscience in front of the problems of the world and of the missions. He finally saw the time when the Africans would be members of the Institute.
In the story of the Consolata Missionary Institute, a special place has to be assigned to the General Chapter of 1969, since it gave a truly special contribution to the project of vertical visibility of the Institute.
The text of the discussions of the Chapter shows the intense kind of thinking of Fr. Mario Bianchi, who was then elected Superior General, and of the happy hand of Fr. Giacobbe who transmitted into the documents the significance of a graced moment. The text also shows the contribution of many other members of that chapter who really felt that they had been summoned to a very special assembly.
All the chapters were important moments in the history of the Institute, but the Chapter of 1969 transformed it. It did this through its comprehension of the changing reality in which it was inserted, through its proposal of a loving gaze rather than a look of defiance or fear towards a changing world, and through the courage with which it proposed the need for renewal and of doing mission in a new way, based on the force of the Gospel and on the courage of incarnation.
It warned the missionaries against the temptation of doing mission to satisfy themselves, to feel useful, for this would divorce their work from a new humanity walking the face of the earth. Yes, it was possible to continue adding up statistics on all they did. But it was always more difficult to formulate the reasons £pr their believing and their thinking. The antidote to this latent disease was to have recourse to the basic teaching of Allamano who had made the mission a question of love. Every missionary was called to express the evangelical restlessness of this era with an accurate and passionate study of the changing times, and to do this with calm and courageous reflection.
Here are the main components of this renewal propsed and desired by the Institute: Strong affirmation of the exclusive missionary nature of the Institute; a call to interior renewal along the lines and tradition proposed by the Founder; setting the religious life in the missionary perspective; renewal of community life; insistence on the international character of the Institute in accord with the missionary characteristics of the foundation; decision to continue and to increase the missionary activity in a spirit of service to the local Churches; insertion into the human communities with full solidarity towards the development of peoples; availability to cooperate with all the missionary forces* of the Church, especially with other missionary institutes and with the local clergy; putting into place new forms of collaboration with the lay people; giving special attention and care to the problems of formation as something vital for the Institute; sense of optimism and hope as distinctive characteristics of the missionary. (Acts, pgs. 18-19)
In order to reinforce these orientations, the chapter exhorted the whole Institute to a deep renewal to be based on a continuous search and on trustful experimentation. This demanded from everyone a great sense of broad-mindedness, a strong desire to search in order to find new ways and the courage of abandoning solutions and formulas that no longer worked. This experimentation would require the necessary agreement and collaboration of everyone.
The complexity of the situations, especially in the field of formation, demanded that all missionaries put their capacities and intuition at the service of the common good.
The first part of the Acts of the Chapter is made up of highly poetic texts. The call for humanness is written in deep mystical terms. This is the only way for the chapter to concretize the human warmth with which Allamano surrounded his missionaries and which he also taught them to have.
In the spirit of Allamano, the Chapter wrote a paragraph that we can consider prophetic. No. 160 says: "The misionary task of the Church extends also into the field of re-evangelization of the Christian communities which find themselves regressing because of superficial evangelization - or - a lack of religious assistance...No. 162: Pastoral activity should be oriented to the formation of a personal, adult, operative, and constantly updated faith. It should guide individuals and communities to work for the improvement of the present conditions of life by sustaining the values of justice and fraternity through Christian testimony. (General Chapter Documents, 1969)
The steps taken by this Chapter hajte been followed by successive chapters. Its best intuitions have been set in the new text of the Constitutions. Its spiritual inspiration is echoed in so many of the letters of Fr. Mario Bianchi and Fr. Giuseppe Inverardi. The richness of the magisterium for the Institute was collected in the more than one thousand pages of the volume "Consecration and Mission". In those pages we are continuously told that every question on the mission that the Insittute can ask needs to be studied in great depth.
This is really the new way of setting the mission of the Institute within the reality of the world, and it makes us realize that there always is a "more" to discover, a "beyond’ that we must follow.
Political tensions, social difficulties, wars and guerrila warfare, threats and calumny and physical suffering that brought death to some missionaries, all that has marked the life of the Institute in Mozambique, Ethiopia, Congo, Roraima and Colombia. However, it was not fear that conquered, but love for the people to whom are given courage and hope, and with whom life’s risks are shared.
Profile of the Consolata Missionary Institute at their Centennial Year of Existence 39
Notwithstanding this dimension of martyrdom, the Institute desired to explain that the mission is a continuous going beyond. That is why it projected openings in Asia. Prepared beforehand and decided by the Chapter of 1987, it became a reality in January of 1988 with the sending of four missionaries of four different nationalities.
This opening was desired and programmed keeping in mind the missionary aspects that qualify Asia: Two thirds of humanity live there. Yet it has only a small percentage of Christians. It is the continent of the great religions and cultures with which we are can open dialogue, and it has immense areas of poverty.
Looking at this reality, the Institute was thinking about a new and complementary style of doing mission. K>.-
The choice fell on Korea. As we arrived there, we received the impression of a myth being shattered. With the spreading of the phenomenon of globalization, which carried also the secularization of society, Korea did not show much of the religious and contemplative mysticism that we associated with her life.
What was very evident was its technological and industrial dynamism. It no longer presented a clear religious and cultural identity, although the Confucian substratum continues shaping Korea’s society. To the few missionaries who arrived there, one certitude alone seemed clear: Korea, and all of Asia with it, demanded missionary attitudes that were totally new in relation to the ones that were traditional in the work of the Institute.
This experience, although very recent and done by just a few of our missionaries, had an effect on the whole Institute since it showed everyone that the realities in which the mission is presently being done require the Institute all the more to undergo a process of change.
In his report to the General Chapter of 1993, the General Superior, Fr. Joseph Inverardi, who was finishing his second mandate, presented in the following words the important aspects of the reality the Institute was to live: "Before we make choices, we must know the historical moment we live in and the changes taking place and those that can be foreseen. It is not wise to ignore the interrelations among diverse geographical areas and among the various dimensions of the complex texture of society. The Intsitute must know the context in which it lives and operates... Here are the conclusions arrived at by two sociologists who made a ’provisional study for the Consolata Missionary Institute’: There is a growing chasm between the aging of the population in the countries of Europe and North America, and the increase of the young in the population of Latin America and Africa. There is a phenomenon of the migrations: from many countries into the United States and Canada, and from Africa to Europe. The presence of Refugees and urbanization are on the rapid increase in developing countries, and this precedes industrialization. Two of its consequences are slums or favelas, and street children. Some countries find it hard to access advanced technologies; mass information still is the monopoly of a few countries and of the multinationals. There is a shift of economic power from the countries on the Atlantic, North America and Europe towards the Pacific: Japan and the four tigers. There is the ecological question: cutting down of forests, expansion of deserts, loss of arable land, raising of the temperature, droughts. In the crises of democracies, the governments are becoming party-ruled. There is the fall and/or transformation of ideologies, such as Marxism and Capitalism. They are no longer catalysts or an ideal. Politics has disenchanted many people. There are trends towards a stronger world authority, political instability, foreign debts, economic crises, unemployment, tribalism, ethnic-cultural entities, downgrading of schooling and of health, the scourge of AIDS, drugs, violent conflicts and hunger. There is religious fundamentalism in Protestant sects and in Islam. In the feminine world there the difficult fight for equality." (Report, pg 13){1.
This report has no intention of discouraging anyone among the missionaries, rather, it is intended to spur the Institute on to catch the spirit coming out of several Continental Synods of Episcopal Conferences so as to renew the zeal and the heart of the missionaries themselves. To the missionaries belongs the task of living a missionary presence that is stripped of old structures, a presence that is clearly capable of giving hope and of fighting for human, moral and spiritual values, including solidarity with the poor.
As the Institute prepared to celebrate the "’centennial of its existence, we wanted it to be fully understood that it is called to a deep transformation.
The afore-mentioned external reality demanded it; the internal statistics show the same need. The desired numeric proportion between the continents had not been maintained in the past years, and it wasn’t even thinkable for the immediate future. As far as numbers of missionaries were concerned, Africa sustained the Insitute with a growing number. Europe and North America were becoming poorer and poorer. Latin America became very uncertain and Korea was still a mystery.
The origins of the missionaries had future consequences: the new vocational geography would condition choices, jobs, activities, values, means and the style of missionary life of the Insitute.
Yes, the Institute was called to examine the style of the new missionaries. But the diversity of the missionaries and the growing of the mission was to be i
considered a value. *
We can honestly say that Fr. Inverardi’s vision is gone in its problematic and in its signs of hope for the whole Institute. Today the Institute looks at its history and recognizes that the missionary activity has been done mostly in isolated areas, far from the civilized centers, areas that have been difficult to penetrate because of the difficulties of communication, language and climate.
But today the reality of the mission ad gentes is changing. The big cities are becoming its privileged places, where new usages, different life models, new forms of culture and communication are emerging, things that will in turn influence the lifestyle of the entire population.
It is true that choices must not neglect the most isolated and marginalized human groups. But it is also true that we cannot evangelize individuals and small groups while neglecting the centers where a new humanity is being born, characterized by new models of development.
In this context, it is enough to read No. 37 of Redemptoris Missio in order to feel the taste, the value, the weight and the joy of continuing a mission that is only at its beginning.
Conclusion
What its history teaches the Institute is reason for hope. The surprising changes that confront us today are not an anticipation of the end, or signs of death, rather, they belong to the dynamics of the mission. Changes are only a guarantee for the continuation of the Institute. From change comes forth the transformation which renders it alive and effective in the present. It will not die because it changes, but it will die if it doesn’t. This is the sure teaching that histoty and the present show.
The identity of our Institute today can be clearly seen only in the inclusion of the African presence: We can already breathe a new thought, an African thought that will become the future of the vital stage of the Institute. This reality will take us to some structural changes that will include suffering, just as the real mission is structurally different than what is considered normal in the formative years. No one, however would want to eliminate the mission or to consider the need of change as the end of the spirit of the Institute.
Considerations of this kind would be against history. They would empty the future of the Institute of any meaning. Such considerations would compel the Institute to pass on to the younger members, and to those who look at the mission with a vision of love, a heredity for which it is not even worth struggling or giving one’s life. Those who have gone before us teach us that, as the mission is being done, one must always allow oneself to look towards what is beyond.
Briefly, everything that the mission has been from the beginning of the preaching of the Gospel seems to be present in the history of the Institute. In it, the words of Bishop Ambrose are concretized: "We always speak of Him. When we speak of wisdom, we speak of Him, as when we speak of the virtues, or of justice, or of peace, of truth, of life, or of redemption: it is of Him that we speak." (Comm. on Psalm 36:65-66)18
So many Consolata missionaries have done mission and are still doing mission in this way, and they know that for them too it has been merely a beginning, notwithstanding the 100 years of history.
NOTES
1 G. TUNINETTI, Cittd di lotto e di cuore, in Missioni Consolata (2-2000), pg 9.
2 See bibliography.
3 See bibliography.
4 See bibliography.
5 They were: Fr. Tommaso Gays, Fr. Filippo Perlo, Bro. Luigi Falda, and Bro. Celeste Lusso.
6 AUOUSTO CASTRO QUIROGA, Padre e Maestro di apostoli, Bologna 1981 1 AIMC, VIII-2, various Nos. 1-19.
8 See bibliography.
9 AIMC, IC-1, 1903, No. 7.
10 See GIOVANNI CRIPPA, / missionari della Consolata in Etiopia (1913-1942), Edizioni Missioni Consolata, Rome 1998.
1’ See Le Conferenze spirituali del Servo di Dio Giuseppe Allamano, in 4 volumes.
12 Ibidem, Vol. Ill, pg. 672.
13 See bibliography.
14 Acts of the General Chapter, 1969, pgs. 18-1*. ,
15 Ibidem, pg 76.
16 See GIOVANNI TEBALDI, La missione racconta. I missionari della Consolata in cammino con i popoli, Bologna, 1999.
17 GIUSEPPE INVERARDI, Report to the General Chapter 1993.
18 St. AMBROSE, Com al Sal. 36,65-66.
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