The volume by the Archbishop of Marseille, entitled “The dialogue of salvation. Small theology of mission” has been published by the Libreria Editrice Vaticana
by Charles de Pechpeyrou
A dialogue with all religions and cultures on the model of what God has woven with humanity through the history of the Covenant: this is the appeal that Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline, Archbishop of Marseille, addresses to the faithful in his book entitled The dialogue of salvation. Small theology of mission (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2024, 128 pages, 14 euros) also calling to deepen the sense of the catholicity of the Church. The cardinal was present on May 2 in Rome at the presentation of the volume at the headquarters of the Community of Sant’Egidio, which was attended by Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, Lorenzo Fazzini, editorial director of Lev, and Sister Lucia Bortolomasi , superior general of the Missionary Sisters of the Consolata.
Your Eminence, could you explain in a few words the link between dialogue and mission that you develop in your book?
The work presents itself as a small theology of mission. I have collected a number of things that I have understood better about the mission starting from my ministry, focused in particular on issues related to interreligious dialogue. Above all, I understood that we cannot contrast dialogue and mission: dialogue is precisely part of the evangelizing mission of the Church. In the encyclical Ecclesiam suam, whose 60th anniversary will be celebrated next August 6, Paul VI states that we confess that God, in order to reveal himself, made the choice to enter into dialogue with humanity, a dialogue that the Bible tells in the form of a story of alliance. It is because we confess this, which is not at all obvious, that we understand that the mission of the Church also consists in dialogue with humanity by adapting to God’s attitude.
You are very committed to dialogue with Islam and Judaism. Is it possible to combine mission and interreligious dialogue?
The mission of the Church begins with the creation of this climate of dialogue. Always in Ecclesiam suam, Paul VI states that «the climate of dialogue is friendship. Or rather the service.” This is what Charles de Foucauld, Pierre Claverie and many others understood: the need for a climate that brings us together by the same fundamental existential questions. And it is then that the announcement of the Gospel can be made but not as a mere slogan that does not take into account the existential questions of the other. If we consider the mission without taking into account the concrete existence of the other, the concrete questions he asks himself, we risk making it a simple word, but not a reality.
How to avoid any confusion between missionary expansion and cultural imperialism?
It is not easy, because throughout history missionaries have often accompanied those who were about to colonize a particular country or who traveled for commercial reasons. But this did not prevent missionaries from having their own ideas, sometimes even from not corresponding to what could be expected of them in terms of commercial or political interests. So the word that allows us to avoid this confusion is freedom. The Church must maintain her freedom, must resist the temptation to simply merge with colonizing economic and social interests. But when we look at history, even that of missiology, we realize that we owe a lot to missionaries, especially in the 19th century, in the ethnological, anthropological knowledge of the cultures in which they found themselves. And because they often represented for the mission countries the beginning of autonomy and ever greater independence with respect to the interests of the nations from where these missionaries had departed.
You state that «it is often because our theology is not Trinitarian enough that our missionary action lacks its dialogical dimension». How to solve this problem?
There is much to be done on this because Western Christianity has less developed the theology of the Holy Spirit than Eastern Christianity; with us it is rather the notion of grace that has prevailed. We need to develop a theology of the Holy Spirit capable of avoiding two too frequent pitfalls: that of a “de-Christologized” pneumatology, which forgets that the Spirit present and operating in the world is the Spirit of the Son, and that of a “de-historicized” pneumatology that it neglects the concreteness of the Incarnation in favor of an esoteric gnosis that makes the Son an “avatar” of the Spirit.
You also remember that the Holy Spirit blows where he wants, and not only within the ecclesial institution.
I will quote here John Paul II who, in his encyclical Redemptoris missior of 7 December 1990, states that «the presence and activity of the Spirit does not only affect individuals but society and history, peoples, cultures, religions». Words that the Pope confirmed with gestures such as the meeting in Assisi in 1984 or the visit to the synagogue in Rome in 1986. When he kissed the ground upon his arrival in the countries visited, this meant that the Holy Spirit had already inhabited these lands even before that the missionaries arrived there. In the thought of John Paul II this learning of cooperation with the Holy Spirit is fundamental, because the latter is present everywhere. There is nothing human that is not foreign to the presence and action of the Spirit.
In the book he also delves into the theme of the catholicity of the Church. Is this a concept that needs to be rethought?
In the past we tended too much to make the word catholicity just a label that distinguished us from the Protestants, the Orthodox, etc., while it is one of the four notes of I believe to define the Church and like the others it has an eschatological dimension. Therefore we are called to think about catholicity in a dynamic and not static way: a catholicity in fieri, in progress, I would say. In the book I also make the hypothesis that, by living its vocation of catholicity, the Church, already the sacrament of unity and the leaven of brotherhood, takes part in the work of recapitulation, receiving within itself the paschal mystery, through which God wanted, through the death of his Son, gather together all his scattered children.
