WITH TRUSTING HOPE Writings by Don Luigi Caburlotto Analysis of his educational method ANNA BALDUIT – BRUNA BIANCHIN MARIA TERSA STEFANI – TANIA DA RIOS Introduction by GIUSEPPE GOISIS INSTITUTE “DAUGHTERS OF ST. JOSEPH” VENETIAN CATHOLIC STUDIUM 1 PREFACE Luigi Caburlotto (1817-1897) was a priest of action in the diocese of Venice, he had been a parish priest in S. Giacomo dell’Orio for twenty-two years, but for a longer period he was engaged in an educational work of assistance and redemption of the young ones,, mainly of those who were more exposed to the sad consequences of poverty and to the dangers of an inadequate moral formation. He founded the institute of the Daughters of St. Joseph to set up his undertaking and to ensure its continuity; after the necessary adaptations to the new social and cultural situations today this institute is still continuing with tenaciousness, intelligence and generous dedication along the furrow that he traced. A priest of action but inspired from above: the texts and the notes of his meditations and of his sermons, although with the limits of the biblical and theological culture of the time, show the evidence of his careful listening to the Word of God. Besides he was solicitous in the study and reflection on the problems that a wise education would put to those who meant to contribute to the maturation of the young consciences. His writings that have a pedagogical mark are gathered in the present volume in order to put them first of all, at the disposal of the religious Sisters and of the teachers of the schools where the Institute of S. Giuseppe has given life and is continuing to direct, getting its inspiration from the charisma of the Founder. These are speeches from where his educational preoccupations and aspirations appear; they are texts of regulations that he dictated in order to translate into reality his educational projects in the institutes that the civil authorities asked him to direct or in those that he was able to open by himself. The volume is enriched by a preliminary essay by professor Giuseppe Goisis, teacher of political Philosophy in the University of Venice, and by some important studies of some spiritual daughters of Caburlotto, who obtained a degree in the Università Cattolica of Milan – sister Anna Roberta Balduit, sister Bruna Ivana Bianchin, 2 sister Maria Teresa Ancilla Stefani – and doctor Tania Da Rios who disputed her thesis in the faculty of Pedagogy in the University of Padua with professor MirellaChiaranda Zanchetta; her thesis was on the female education in the nineteenth century under the light of Caburlotto’ s work. During the proceedings for his beatification that at present are in progress, Luigi Caburlotto was defined a priest of heroic virtues and a man of concord and dialogue, in the second half of the nineteenth century, a historical moment like that in Venice and in Venetia was deeply divided by some ideological and political contrapositions. The present volume proposes to continue the work of the Servant of God, contributing to urge the educators to study and act in order to be equal to the difficult task of forming young people with a right and honest conscience, capable to dialogue and to be diffusers of peace. Bruno Bertoli President of the Venetian Catholic Studium 3 Giuseppe Goisis INTRODUCTION 1. A meaningful book I greet the publication of the present volume by various Authors, dedicated to Luigi Caburlotto as a little but indeed a meaningful event of within our Italian culture particularly, of Christian inspiration. The Authors put at the disposal of the scholars an almost complete and for different reasons, interesting text, through an editorial initiative of great engagement and value that comes after a long work. I will try to enucleate mainly some questions that I consider as decisive and that the lived teaching of Luigi Caburlotto contributes to focus with efficacy. The first matter, faced not only theoretically but showed through a constant engagement, refers to the importance of being saint. “How important it is to become saint, against our merit the Lord offers us the very beautiful means of the exercises in order to make me saint, so I want to do well these exercises in order not to make myself unworthy of the grace of the saint final perseverance. Lord let me institute a new life, in order to let me meet a good death!”1. This first quotation that refers – like a bare starting point – to the proposals connected to the spiritual exercises, leads us to the core of the interior experience of Luigi Caburlotto: until inside his soul, ardent for the love of God and for the neighbour’s. If we do not take deeply the root of this existence, and of some similar ones, if we do not perceive the first pillar placed on the basis of God’ s love, everything vanishes into a run of engagements, 1 Quoted from S. TRAMONTIN, Luigi caburlotto apostolo dell’educazione, Cinisello Balsamo 1990, page 301: the work of Tramontin is still today a decisive point of reference for the understanding of the figure and work of L. Caburlotto. 4 although of an extraordinary quality, everything fades (and is thwarted) into a restless activeness … The common pre comprehension, characteristic of the spirit of our time, although it makes us understand the disappointing aridity of our way of life and the persistent thirst of God alive, does not always permit us to recognize in a linear way the nature of sanctity, the drama and the agony of the nature of sanctity that, for a deficient theological sensibility, is too often reduced to stereotypes of looseness and conformism. In my opinion we are not able to understand sanctity in a decisive point: sanctity is not tension and effort that essentially come from us: at its origin, in its first movement, sanctity is a gift, something that pushes us to a path and then along a path, often along some dizzy paths, with the necessity of letting ourselves go, of accepting completely a life that is crying inside of us, with a voice that is stronger than the imperatives of our same life. Among a few, Saint Giovanni della Croce has expressed with an authentic efficacy the new dialectic passivity/activity that is established at the same roots of the experience of sanctity. The core constituted by the problem of sanctity surely refers to taking decisions, but to taking decisions inside an already constituted current of love, inside a movement of grace that is given, drawing us ahead, in the darkness, step by step, leading us from light to light … The dialectic passivity/activity, in a picture that is substantially so renewed, is very clear in the personality and in the works of Caburlotto; like the nebiim, the prophets of the Old Testament, Caburlotto is a “called”, a man that breaks with the routine, a man that provokes – with his words and even more with his example - a genuine theophany, a renewed manifestation of the spirit of Justice in the world. Not only do similar figures listen to the divine call, not only do they speak of God and, even more, in the name of God; something much more meaningful happens, something decisive happens: they speak by God, letting themselves crossed by his word, becoming conductors, vehicles of his prodigious love. 5 In the present thirst of the absolutes, that characterizes our post- modern conditions, there is rather the aching – and implacable - melancholy for the” absolutely Other” (Sehnsucht des Ganz Anderes), but the alternative appears just outlined, just sensed; we know what we must not, or rather what we should not tolerate any more. We know the pain of existence, and the hundreds of dilemmas of the human condition: it is much more difficult to recognize the face of Good, letting us be fixed in that light that, in this shore of exile, we sense with difficulty. Someone call that long-desired and just sensed alternative “sanctity”, but it is rather a sort of bitter wisdom, a name to attribute to an arduous, non-plausible perfection. That burning “amor ulterioris ripae” is well expressed in the intense statement by L. Bloy: “There is only one sadness in the world … that of not being saints”2. Meditating on the present volume dedicated to Caburlotto, I was considering the spiritual situation of our time; I see it is arrived at a point of no return: the nineteenth-century prometheism, with its self exalting and substituting formulas, does not nourish the pride of the western mankind any more. Several manifestations of that pride, although able to erect some Cyclopean works, much bigger than the Egyptian Pyramids, appear to us while the second millennium is passing, as foreboding of results that are enemy of the human being; the spiritual and cultural climate has become depressive, and the man, reflecting on himself, appears like a mortal enemy, a tormentor and a punisher of himself. The religious anxiety cannot stop and be repressed along the borders of a disconsolate ascertainment of the finitudine (imperfection, limitation editor’ s note) and of the limit. The pre Christian man knew his finitudine in his mortality; but the Christian feels his finitudine in the framework of creation. Now, if also the post Christian western mankind does not accept explicitly the Christian soteriologia (the doctrine of the man’s 2 L. BLOY , La donna povera, by F. MAZZARIOL, Reggio Emilia 1978, page 375. 6 salvation from evil editor’ s note), and it denies it in many cases, at the same time it knows about the other reason of finitudine, and in the alternative between the two ways, it struggles with a tragic consciousness, but with more and more feeble energies, lying itself open to the cruel thorn of nihilism that is the son of a weaker and weaker Christianity and of the secularism that is menacing it.