“Free under Grace,” a book to get to know Prevost in dialogue with the world
Father Joseph Farrell, Prior General of the Augustinian Order worldwide, delivers intervention at presentation of the volume “Free under Grace' in Rome.
The thought and spirituality of Robert Francis Prevost are revealed in the pages of the volume Free under Grace, published by the Vatican Publishing House and presented this afternoon, 6 May, in Rome, in the Aula Magna of the Pontifical Patristic Institute Augustinianum.
The book, will be released in several languages in the coming months and is currently being translated in 30 countries around the world, was edited by the Augustinian Fathers Rocco Ronzani, Miguel Ángel Martín Juárez and Michael Di Gregorio.
The presentation began with the greetings of the Prior General of the Order of Saint Augustine, Fr. Joseph Farrell, and the Prefect of the Dicastery for Communication, Paolo Ruffini, followed by the interventions of Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin and the writer Maria Grazia Calandrone.
The meeting was moderated by the Editorial Director of Vatican Media, Andrea Tornielli.
Fr. Joseph Farrell, O.S.A.: pages from which to find inspiration
Father Farrell recounted that just one year ago Cardinal Prevost shared with his confreres of the General Curia his last lunch before the Conclave and explained that Free Under Grace “is the fruit of a true collaboration among many people who worked together,” Augustinian friars and lay people and the team of the Vatican Publishing House.
The leader of the Augustinian Order also explained that the title of the volume is taken from the Rule of Saint Augustine, in which the Bishop of Hippo, in the final chapter, exhorts his monks to “observe these norms with love, as lovers of spiritual beauty and exhaling from your holy way of life the good fragrance of Christ, not as servants under the law, but as men free under grace.”
Therefore, from these pages, Father Farrell suggested, everyone can “find inspiration.”
Ruffini: an “illuminating” text
Paolo Ruffini thanked the Order of Saint Augustine for entrusting the Vatican Publishing House with the publication of the volume, which he described as an opportunity to better know Prevost, his origins and his thought when he did not know he would become Pope.
The Prefect of the Dicastery for Communication called it a text that is “illuminating,” which recounts the Church, which can also be consulted by themes and “defined as central by the Italian press,” in which the concept of “authority” of the then Prior General Prevost stands out.
He said Prevost achieved this in a world “sick with authoritarianism and power helps us to understand the way in which the Pope is guiding and will guide the Church,” with a voice that is not shouted, with firmness and gentleness, building unity and communion.
Cardinal Parolin: a search for God who is truth
Meanwhile, of the twelve years in which Prevost was Prior General, from 2001 to 2013, Cardinal Parolin recalled, among the events that marked them, were the attacks on the Twin Towers, the resignation of Benedict XVI and the election of Pope Francis.
And from the pages of the book, the Cardinal pointed out the Augustinian traits of Prevost that emerge, that search for God and that longing of the human heart that lead the future Leo XIV always to begin “from the primacy of God, from the original relationship” between man and God.
Thus, for example, in an address in Australia in 2002, the Cardinal highlighted, he invited Christians “to be ‘professionals’ in the search for human meaning, bearing witness to the salvation and fullness that come from God,” but specified that believers are not “people who ‘possess’ the truth,” but rather “fellow travelers, brothers and sisters who journey together in the adventure of life.”
The Cardinal called the theme of the “possession of truth,” which, he recalled “was also very dear to Pope Francis, as being “the search for truth, for God who is truth, is not an exclusive possession nor an excluding path,” but “a journey” that makes us “brothers and sisters in the One.”
Rediscovering faith
Also prominent in the volume is Prevost’s concern to “find meaningful ways to invite people, in a deeply secularized society, to ‘rediscover’ the experience of faith, to touch the spiritual dimension of their lives.”
It also demonstrates the distinction between “secularization” and “secularism,” in an address in Peru in 2012, in which Prevost specified that the former “is not, in itself, a negative process,” while the latter “attempts to exclude or empty religious or spiritual values of meaning.”
The Secretary of State suggested there is “a consonance of thought with Joseph Ratzinger – Benedict XVI, about whom Prevost spoke words of great esteem as a theologian and of full adherence as Pontiff.”
Furthermore, he said in the pages of the work, there are “very precise, very clear and decidedly eloquent words on how the Church” must “be in the world,” and repeatedly echoes of the Second Vatican Council and its documents, “on which Pope Leo XIV is conducting a series of catecheses during the Wednesday general audiences.”
The experience of mission
Cardinal Parolin also noted Prevost’s reflections on the “position of the ecclesial community in the contemporary world.”
“It is necessary to move forward, to renew ourselves and to rediscover our personal call to holiness and to live our response in a manner that is intelligible to the world today,” he said in 2002, at the General Curia of the Order.
Moreover, the Prior General, the Cardinal recalled, insisted that “it is not sufficient to repeat the solutions of the past,” but rather it is necessary to be “capable of communicating the Gospel message in a language intelligible to contemporary culture.” To consecrated men and women in particular, he then asked how to “listen to the restless heart, listen in prayer,” to become “attentive to the Word of God and listen” to others.
For Cardinal Parolin, these are considerations that reveal “the experience of mission” of Prevost and the “firm choice of direction that looks to a ‘Church that goes forth’ rather than to the introversion of those who wish above all to preserve what already exists.”
The cry of the poor
Prevost also analyzes the correlation between evangelization and “the way in which Christians,” and “in particular the religious,” “relate to the economic dimension,” the Secretary of State continued.
He cited Prevost9;s 2006 address in Pavia in which it is emphasized that “the unjust poverty of today’s world, as well as the scandal of the ever-increasing accumulation of goods and the lack of solidarity of Christians, hinder the new evangelization,” for this reason “it is urgent to rediscover the sense of evangelical poverty, and to find current ways of living authentically” the “vow of poverty.”
The “choice of poverty as a style of life” and “the possibility of credibility of the Christian proclamation” in the speeches of the future Pontiff, for Cardinal Parolin, can easily be linked to Pope Francis’ idea of a Church “poor and for the poor.”
“It is no coincidence that the first official document of Leo XIV, Dilexi te, was dedicated precisely to love for the poor,” the Cardinal affirmed, pointing out resonances between the encyclical and Free under Grace, which “also make it possible to refute those preconceived and decidedly misleading readings of the first document of Pope Leo XIV, as if Dilexi te were a text deriving only from the legacy of Pope Francis.”
Cardinal Parolin observed that the words “poor,” “poverty” recur as many as 195 times in the book, suggesting that this “bears incontrovertible witness to the centrality of attention to the least,” as well as to migrants.
Toward them, in 2010, the then Prior Prevost asked, “Are we open, do we welcome them, do we recognize that they are sons and daughters of God? Or do we only want to close the borders, bar the doors and avoid all contact?”
These words are “significant especially today in Europe,” where there is talk of “remigration,” “which has very little that is Christian,” the Secretary of State observed, pointing to “the next Apostolic Journey to Lampedusa on 4 July” of the Pontiff as a “stage to counter that ‘globalization of indifference’” repeatedly denounced.
Diplomacy, multilateralism, dialogue
Finally, justice and peace, the “cry of the poor” and “the misery of millions of human beings” are further themes that Prevost addressed in an address in Australia in 2002.
The same year in a text written in Rome, Prevost, the Cardinal recalled, also affirmed that “justice is a fundamental part of the message of the Gospel” and that “serious, effective, organized efforts are needed to promote justice and achieve peace.”
For Cardinal Parolin, words that are “challenging for all, especially for those engaged in politics and society with roles of responsibility,” because “for peace not only pious and devout thoughts are needed, but a ‘serious, effective and organized’ commitment, which means concretely ‘diplomacy, multilateralism, dialogue’.”
Maria Grazia Calandrone: the right words in times of crisis
Passionate and imbued with contemporaneity, the address of Maria Grazia Calandrone—poet, writer, journalist, playwright—focused, starting from Prevost’s reflections contained in the book, on the problems of poverty, of language, of communication or, better, of incommunicability, in an age like the present one in which the most recurring phrase is “I have no time.”
The words of the future Pontiff address these issues and are, Calandrone suggests “the right words for a time of crisis and that exhort to dynamism, that is, to prophecy, which means a vision of the present time and of the future, in the perspective of a missionary spirit.”
The loneliness of the young
The poet also made a parallel between faith and poetry, a “language” that can have “a social function.” Not an “abstract refuge,” therefore, “in which to take shelter from the ugliness of the world,” but a help to “interiority” which, as the then Father Prevost affirmed, “enriches” in the face of a superficiality that “impoverishes.”
The word of faith, like poetry, “must be brought into real human history,” Calandrone said again. Above all for young people who, with the advent of social media such as TikTok, “live an eternal present” and in “immediate satisfaction without a future.”
“There is no longer patience, waiting, the capacity to fill boredom with an individual creative act. There is not, essentially, the time to know one’s own desires, to be alone with oneself. Young people are continually alone, but they are never alone,” the speaker said.
The faithful in this sense, she added, citing again a reflection of Prevost, “must be the demonstration of a different way of being in the world.” One solution is witness, then community life: a “concrete example of another possibility of life in the world, which is not isolation and struggle for one’s exclusive good.” “In a world sick with loneliness,” the writer emphasized, “a life of availability toward others can be a fascinating model.
Tiziana Campisi and Salvatore Cernuzio
Source: vaticannews.va/en