An editorial alliance in the sign of faith and solidarity. Among the Augustinians and Paolini a collaboration “in the common commitment of evangelization” is triggered, both congregations underline. “This new alliance, useful for everyone, has a profound meaning”, underlined the Prior General and President of the Agostinian Foundation in the world Father Alejandro Moral Antón, during the press conference to present the project. Which starts, first of all from the story of the missionary works that the Augustinians have in the world. “My feeling is always next to the poor,” he reiterates Father Moral. Which tells of how he had been commissioned by Pope Francis of Intersser eun dialogue both with Tel Aviv and with China and the Tibetan world. “The world is not always what we want, but the doctrine must motivate us and must make us move with the various realities of the world to try to change them”. Because, explains the journalist and essayist Marco Damilano, citing Sant’Agostino, “they are bad times, men say, but they live well and the times will be good. We are the times ». Starting from the speech 311 Damilano wonders about “what are the times, even compared to these first four months of Pope Leone’s pontificate. Agostino’s times were passing times, transition, but there were also times that contemporaries warned as terrible. A Christian era that had begun, which was supposed to seem a bright era of prosperity, of peace, was, instead, an era of war, an era of destruction, the fall of Rome. And Agostino says that in this story, in these times, the condition of the Christian is that of wandering, which is also the condition of the pilgrim, is the condition of the foreigner, is the condition of the missionary. We must know our captivity and our liberation. We have to meet Babylon and Jerusalem. Babylon, Agostino says, means confusion, Jerusalem means vision of peace and, he adds, they are not separate realities, they are mixed from the beginning to the end of the world ».
And to be better men, who can live well so that times can be good, there is a need to walk together, to be to the sequence of Christ, away, truth and life. Of alliances in the sign of solidarity, of the enhancement of mutual charisms, of peace. “Collaborating is possible when you live the same faith, the same reality is shared,” Don Roberto Ponti, provincial superior of Paolini, said, for his part. Retracing the stages of the dialogue between the two religious orders, he recalled the agreement with Father Franz Klein, a general economo of the Augustinians and a missionary time in the Congo, “where I also spent ten years of Amia Vita as a missionary”. In Kinshasa, he underlined, “I collaborated with the Augustinians, where I saw a school wanted by the Augustinian Foundation in the world”.
“I wonder why we did not start the collaboration first given the many points of contact,” questions Maurizio Misitano, executive director of the Augustinian Foundation in the world, remembering that today that school has 2,500 pupils. They put it underlines the importance of talking about the work of the missionaries, of what the Church does in emerging countries. Communication becomes a “instrument of proximity and testimony. The missionaries “, he continues,” every day live terrifying, very difficult realities, alongside the poorest. And in many contexts they are the only institution that can give voice, social response, determination and professionalism ». Recalling the work in the Congo with the recovery of the Child soldier, but also the commitment in other sectors asks not to forget the attention to the needs of the most fragile. «When a mother arrives with a child in her arms that has a swollen belly for the worms and needs a tablet that saves life we know that behind it there is all a reporting job, budgets, projects. But we must never lose life of the importance of that pad otherwise we become a project. ” And in order not to lose sight of the concrete, real relationships are needed. “From friendship and fraternity are born beautiful things, in the Church and beyond”, concluded Don Stefano Stimamiglio, director of the Christian family and author of the volume “Let’s start from Christ. Pope Leone: the balance of a new beginning”. Speaking of the new pope who will be given not only of the first copy of the volume, but also of the thousands of wishes that the readers of the newspaper sent for his next birthday of September 14 together with the support for the pediatric dispensary of Santa Marta, Don Stefano stressed that Leo XIV, like Pope Francis, indicates the heart as the fulcrum of the Magisterium: “It is in the heart of the man who beats peace. If the heart is not pacified, peace cannot exist neither in the person nor in relationships ». It is also a pontiff in the sense of the one who creates bridges between apparently different realities: «He physically put his feet in the missionary mud, but was a prior general, bishop, prefect. He is American, but has chosen Peruvian citizenship: a double identity that unites different worlds ». And it makes no sense to contrast it superficially to the predecessor: each Pope collects a witness and transforms it according to his own experience. We, like Paolini, have the vote of obedience to the Pope. Our alliance, then also has a deeper value. It wants to be a concrete sign of closeness and loyalty to the Pope’s magisterium ».
