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The good news of the gospel for families in times of uncertainty:

new pastoral approaches
Don Gino Rigoldi


Over 40 years of activity in Milan's juvenile prison as chaplain and commitment to carrying out inclusion
projects for young people in suburban neighbourhoods have led me above all to meet families in difficulty. I
meet mothers and fathers who request assistance for their child or, more often, I meet children in prison,
in communities for minors in custody and those for drug addicts, in schools and in church recreation
centres. Meetings with youngsters start off by listening to their stories, the main access for achieving true
awareness of the person you have in front of you. They are stories of difficulty and material poverty, but
almost always of cultural and spiritual poverty too. Stories that bring into question the family and housing
situation, as youngsters arriving in prison always come from exhausted families and from the same
neighbourhoods where, despite hardship being greater, investment of resources by public authorities and
also by religious institutions, is less.
Meeting with these families almost always reveal a widespread poverty of relations, which also becomes
educational poverty and an inability to build supportive bonds in the neighbourhood. The absence of a
father and of relative authoritative and positive adult figures is also frequent. Situations of serious hardship
are always accompanied by two other issues that afflict these families: employment and housing, two
fundamental rights for everyone, two essential conditions, even though they are insufficient to keep a
family together.
First of all I would like to deal with the material difficulties, dwelling in particularly on the housing issue. I
believe it's important to recognise that without fulfilling the material conditions any other debate regarding
the family risks becoming an academic exercise. Indeed, a family needs a specific place in which to grow.
Therefore, making efforts on behalf of families means first of all ensuring they have the right conditions to
grow.
Weve realised that very many engaged couples are unable to contemplate having children, even though
they would like to. Indeed, in Milan, as in other large Italian cities, there's a broad segment of young people
who are not poor enough to have access to social housing, but nor are they rich enough to be able to afford
market rents. So they stay at home with their parents or enter into improbable and temporary sharing
arrangements. When they find accommodation, they have to allocate all their financial resources to paying
the rent or, for the few who have permanent employment, the mortgage. Often they can only afford
accommodation that is far from the city and their workplace, so commuting time is added to their working
hours. Time spent together, which is so important in deepening a relationship, is reduced in terms of
quantity and quality. Today housing is not only an emergency for those without it, but also for those have
it. And it can no longer be called a mere material emergency when, in order to maintain it, one cannot
afford the "luxury" of having children.
In recent years I've been able to tackle this need in a more systematic way, thanks to the foresight of
certain institutional actors. We've tried to respond via various innovative social housing projects, especially
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Abit@giovani. We've met hundreds of young couples who expressed not only the need to have stable
accommodation that doesn't eat up all their resources, but also the desire to live in an environment with a
courtyard, share solutions to common problems, and build social and supportive relations. So far we've
managed to allocate almost 200 refurbished apartments with an average monthly rent of around 500, as
well as a future purchase agreement. In order to respond to need for social relations as well as the housing
need, the new residents are accompanied for more than a year by a training course aimed at building their
capacity for relations and social planning in their neighbourhood.
I believe it's now time for our Church to carry out prophetic actions aimed at involving not only the
Christian community but also the whole of civil society. Some dioceses own large real estate assets that can
be made available to concretely affirm the right to build a family, by planning social housing initiatives that
may also become inclusion, support and development projects for young families. I believe the Christian
community as a whole has the duty to affirm and sustain a "fundamental rights policy" housing,
employment, education and healthcare as these rights are part of our commitment to justice, but also
because they enable our young people to plan their futures. This is also a way to have ourselves recognised
as Christians.
I'd like to deal with another crucial aspect: the impoverishment of relations within the family, inadequate
educational capacity and lack of real dialogue between family members. As I said before, I constantly see
these difficulties in the families meet, which cut across faith, social and economic conditions, and country
of origin. We're familiar with many social studies, pastoral letters and encyclicals that analyse the causes of
this situation with great acuity. Now more than ever it seems like the right time to answer this question:
"What can we do?"
It's the most pressing issue of all, because it calls into question the very essence of Christ's teaching: he
invited us to be builders of relations, and he asked us to love and take care of each other. For this, he said,
we will be recognised as his disciples. We will be recognised by how we are able to be together, as relating
is the indispensable principle of faith.
In each family it should above all be the parents who are able to interpret and transmit this relational
capacity, but they are precisely the ones who are in difficulty. This is even more the case for families
experiencing more or less serious hardships: the situation, described by children, is one in which dialogue
and attention are lacking, of fathers who are absent or no longer play the necessary role of an authoritative
figure. Mothers who have been left alone have to take responsibility for all aspects of family life. A burden
that is almost always excessive.
Relational capacity isn't an innate aspect of character that some people have and others don't, just as it
isn't a quality that can automatically be associated with a place, such as a school or a church recreation
centre, or with a role, such as parent, teacher, educator or priest.
In fact, being able to build relations is a way of living that is learnt and should be constantly exercised and
improved. It should become a subject taught at school and be a core practice in our parishes. The Christian
relationship is intelligent love that always seeks the face of God, and as an image of this relationship builds
relations with other people. Therefore, it's important to understand which face of God we're looking for:
the one of rules or the one of charity? The God that punishes every transgression, even the most moderate,
or the one who mercifully welcomes and loves? I believe I can say that it's the God of love that Pope
Benedict XVI aimed to describe in his two encyclicals, Deus caritas est and Caritas in veritate, whom Pope
Francis urges us to follow on a daily basis.
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So above all the family needs to build relations, and to achieve this task it needs to be supported via
initiatives carried out with expertise. Can we take care of adequately training them ourselves? Are priests
experts on relations? Attending todays seminaries isn't enough to become expert in relations. Indeed, it
seems that relational skills are not particularly taken care of. Some parishes and church recreation centres
are especially lively and well attended, usually because they have an able, enthusiastic and creative priest.
But when such priests are replaced the parish may start to empty, even more so if the parish and the
church recreation centre are looked after, as is often the case, exclusively by the priest without any
involvement of the community. Can we leave our capacity to build communities up to the personal
qualities and propensities of a single priest? Therefore, we should look after relational training in order to
be able to provide continuous support to families and grow the community, as the relationship that
Christians have chosen is love that cannot do without intelligence and expertise.
We can and must do it for our devotion to the Gospel. It doesn't mean preparing ourselves to imitate, and
perhaps even improve, "personal services". There are various public, private and voluntary sector services,
both lay and religious, which respond to specific needs and emergencies. What we should do is equip
ourselves to help families, whether undergoing training or already trained, to base their lives on dialogue
and the relationship that always seeks the good of others.
We can do it, as experiences already exist that show which positive change leads to an increase in
awareness and attention to the relations we build. For example, I'm thinking about the courses regarding
mutual help between families I've seen starting up in Milan that produce really surprising results when they
are well structured and led by expert trainers, which help people to pool their experiences, share concerns
and plans, and compare life styles: families get back into the game and escape from isolation. These
courses aren't based on head-on lessons and notions and concepts that are only expressed verbally, but
rather on paths of common experience that call into question our way of "being together".
In Milan we've activated the "house of good relations" project, aimed at acquiring and offering residential
training opportunities primarily to school teachers, but also to parents, church recreation centre educators
and scouting groups. In this case too the training is primarily experiential. So, when an adult becomes skilful
in relations, the class or group changes, tensions confront each other and melt away, and the dynamics
become positive.
Anyone who performs an educational role should be able to competently prepare for this task. Of course
everyone should then receive specific training regarding their role and relevant subject, but for we
Christians underpinning everything is the ability to create and manage positive relations.
Today we should ask ourselves whether the people who've attended seminaries, Catholic schools,
catechism, and pre-marriage courses can be recognised as Christians due to the way they love their
neighbours, and how they take care of them. A "neighbour" who should primarily be recognised among the
people close to us: husband, wife, children, friends and acquaintances, those living near our homes and in
our neighbourhoods.
Unfortunately I have to say that in our training centres we manage to provide principles, ideas and more or
less in-depth theological culture, but generally we neglect experiential training processes which, by
awakening personal resources, put us to the test and transform the principles into concrete and everyday
experience. This is the task we have to accomplish.
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For this reason I believe another great prophetic action by our Church could be a pastoral programme for
families, but naturally also for young people and anyone close to the Christian community, which starts
from adequate training in relations aimed above all at trainers, as well as at priests and lay people who
have guidance functions in the community, so that they in turn can transmit to young people and adults the
characteristic that, as I said previously, marks them out as Christians.
It may seem paradoxical, but it's precisely because we follow the religion of Love that we need to attend a
school of love. Its not only an admirable task, but its also coherent and complies with the commandment
that Jesus asked us to obey.