All of this that I am sharing with you has been developed in the overflowing channel of hope of Vatican II, following upon its drive for renewal in continuity with Tradition.
CNA: The CLM has just concluded its third Plenary Assembly. What importance has the event had in the life of this spiritual family?
LFF: Yes, the Christian Life Movement has concluded a series of joyful and vibrant days of faith, prayer, reflection, sharing, discussing apostolic experiences of life in different places in the world, of forging bonds of fraternal friendship between 250 delegates from countries on all five continents…An event of such magnitude and characteristics certainly has important consequences…The Sodalite Family, which includes the CLM, is enriched by an experience of such magnitude. Whatever benefits the part, benefits the whole. Moreover, very positive feedback of the beautiful and intense experience in Guayaquil will reach the different countries where the Sodalite family exists.
CNA: The CLM is characterized by its evangelization of young people, the poor, the culture and families. What are the challenges it faces in these areas?
LFF: The apostolate of the members of the Christian Life Movement is above all open to that which is universal. Each member, as a baptized believer, is invited to participate in the mission of the Church in accord with their own characteristics and state of life. Within this broad horizon, the CLM brings the testimony of Jesus to young people, the poor, serving them through human promotion and addressing the needs of hunger, health care and the culture, seeking to get at its roots, and to families. Each one of these human groups—young people, the poor, families, which obviously overlap, as well as the wide field of the culture—offer challenges that are ever new. I could go on, but we would be here for hours.
Let me just mention a few examples.
Young people are receiving less and less education and formation, not only because of educational or family problems, deficiencies or biases in the curriculum or in the materials at their disposition, but also because of habits formed from playing video games and spending time on the internet. All of these things foster a lack of critical thinking, reading and non-lineal discussion, to which we must add the bombardment of violent and eroticized advertisement. Obviously, in pointing these things out I am speaking in general terms, since as in everything there are exceptions.
The world is advancing in so many things, but the misery of so many brothers and sisters of ours is there, questioning the squandering of riches and the increasingly more aggressive consumerist culture. The process of dehumanization also affects them in their dignity.
The CLM opens its arms to these brothers and sisters and a large portion of its services and works are intended to help them on their life’s journey with a brotherly hand, offering material and spiritual help in solidarity and human promotion.
The issue of the culture is vast, and our creativity cannot produce enough responses to all of the challenges it presents.
The family is also a priority that has grave challenges, not only those that stem from gender ideology, relativism, laws that are permissive and do not protect and promote the family. But also those that stem from an urgent need to educate people to be husbands and wives, as well as to be mothers and fathers who respectfully promote the comprehensive growth of their children, their upbringing in the faith, the passing on of values and the education in character strength and the proper use of freedom. The family, called to be a cenacle of love, “the domestic church,” also demands much help. CLM initiatives to provide that help through institutes and educational and family programs are numerous.
CNA: At the beginning of this recent CLM assembly, a new apostolic emphasis for the movement was announced: the promotion of the life, dignity and rights of the human person. Why this new emphasis?
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LFF: Today a process of dehumanization can be seen everywhere: life, human dignity and rights suffer mockery, manipulation and ferocious attacks. The revelation of God shows the scope of the reality of the human being. In the Lord Jesus the person finds his true identity. Not what he wants, what he likes or what he has been conditioned to believe by an avalanche of cognitive manipulation, but rather the truth about the human being which is discovered in the Eternal Word made man.
Jesus came to reveal to human beings our most profound identity, our dignity that stems from being created in the image and likeness of God. The rights that come from human nature and are not a concession or invention of the government or international associations.
There are many assaults on the human being, there is a lot of talk about the right to this or the right to that, but often these very formulations are assaults on the fundamental and inherent rights of the person. Before everything is the right to life, from conception to natural death. The arguments for canceling this right were exhausted with Nazism and the various forms of Communism. To say that a person has the right to take the life of another human being because he was born unwanted or was the result of some act of violence, is to fall to the level of backers of the ideas of Pol Pot, Lenin, Stalin or Hitler. So much could be said about these absurdities!
But also together with the flagrant violence against life are the relativistic and dehumanizing ideologies that are the vanguard of the absolutisms and totalitarianism that are reappearing today with new faces. Many other rights that have their source in human nature flow from the right to life and the dignity of the human person. Today there is an increasing urgency to promote and protect these rights. The CLM has done a lot in this area in the past, but today we want to show we are attentive to such an important issue by making it one of the emphases or main fields of the work of evangelization of the members of the Christian Life Movement.