The RYVM of Italy on the theme
“Crazy for Love”

The leaders of Redemptorist Youth Ministry in Italy met together in Pagani (SA), from August 28-30, 2006, to plan their pastoral ministry for the coming year.

The theme chosen for the European youth meeting, ‘Pazzo per Amore’ (Crazy for Love), will guide our plans and activities until the encounter in Limerick, Ireland, from August 8–13, 2007.

We are convinced that, in order to speak of the craziness of love, which St. Alphonsus indicates as the only true redemption, it is necessary to start from two experiential words that express typical human experience: redemption and relationship. We believe that the two words are very closely related. This relationship can be further developed by another concept, well known to us: scandal. That’s right, scandal. What we are writing here, when speaking about redemption, may seem absurd, but experience shows the opposite. One often finds redemption in scandal and in the journey back to rediscovering our dignity.

Very often we tend to be scandalized by the errors of our neighbor and justify ourselves, saying: I’m not like that.

Redemption, however, must pass through the experience of relationships with other people and this means that we must reveal ourselves as we truly are. We must go back and take ownership of our personal history, to find fulfillment in the world today. Thus, redemption begins by embracing our miserable humanity. There is no real redemption until we understand and accept our limitations and our need for help.

In this context we have developed a journey that unfolds in five stages: acceptance, craziness, love, redemption and hope.

The human experience of feeling ourselves accepted for who we are, embraced by others and welcomed without self-interest enables us to open ourselves to a world of affective relations that border on foolish trust. It is in this type of trust and confidence that we encounter love. However, this can be essentially of two types: exclusive and inclusive.

Who among us has never experienced the exclusive love of a person? It is, however, only when we can overcome exclusive love, including the love we believe we have for God, that we encounter the inclusive love that opens our heart to all people. When the heart has Christ at the center, it may be broken into a thousand pieces, so to speak, so as to always have a place for welcoming others and caring for them. This love opens us to that redemption which asks us not to die, but to become incarnate in a specific historical context, expending all our energy in giving hope to those who no longer have any hope.

Is our plan crazy! Perhaps!!! But we are convinced that this is a key for accurately reading reality, which comes from our history and our spirituality. Only when redemption is incarnate in us can it be projected beyond ourselves.

Experience, in fact, shows us that in the desert of life, there is always a movement of the sand caused by the wind, even when it is not felt. But when, however, we return by the same path, we no longer see the footprints we left when going and the way back seems new to us. This newness itself is redemptive and permits us to establish healthy relationships and plan a life in communion with God.

Together with St. Paul we want to proclaim that which he wrote to the community of Corinth: “we preach Christ crucified, a scandal for the Jews, foolishness for the pagans” (1Cor.1, 23).

We entrust ourselves to the Lord, to our Father, Saint Alphonsus and to our Mother of Perpetual Help in the hope that what we have sown may bear abundant fruit for our Congregation and the Church of God.