What is really new about the New Forms as we have come to know them in our Order?
With input from our Minister General Br Massimo Fusarelli and Br Miran Spelič of the Holy Cross Province in Slovenia, a certain “inquietudine sana” to answer this question emerged as nineteen friars from Slovenia, Czech republic, Poland, Italy, France, Austria, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Holland and Hungary came together for a third time in the General Curia from November 3th-7th to share experiences and discern how to move forward together in living of New Forms of Presence, Life and Evangelization.
Last year the theme of “Fraternitas” was used as a guide to our discussions and this year we chose the theme of “Minoritas” and Br Miran to lead us on this theme in the afternoon of day one. He pointed out that St Francis chose “Minoritas”, a descent in his relatively high-born status, and allowed the subsequent movement he inspired to be subsumed by the hierarchical institutional church: this was a gift for the Church at the time. Br Miran suggested to us to look inwards to the admonitions and outwards to the signs of the times to see how to be minors in the Church of today through our New Forms of Presence, Life and Evangelization. He invited us to be concrete, looking at our relationships with “things”, or how to be minors in areas that we find ourselves such media (are we influencers, and if so what kind?) or minors in economy, education, science, art….in the Church.
These points were also taken up the following day in Br Massimo’s talk. Admitting that the New Forms often imply different things to different fraternities, and embracing the fact that we represented quite multiform fraternities, he invited us to resist the temptation not to move, but rather to look to the signs of the times and then discern together how we might incarnate our call to live new forms in spreading the Gospel in the Church and the World of today! Quoting our late beloved Minister General, Br Giacomo Bini, that used to say that our time is a “time of signs”, Br Massimo invited us to see how the New Forms of Franciscan Presence, Life and Evangelisation can be signs for our time: for our Order, for the Church and for larger society.
Naturally this evoked many responses and discussions from the friars gathered. Do we look again at simplicity; at making concrete uniform decisions about things such as the employment of staff or our relationship with money? Do we look seriously at the buildings we inhabit; is there a specific type of building that is more suited to new forms of life? Do we for example take the form of Torre Angela, a small community living very simply in a rented accommodation in a deprived part of Rome, where we had a magnificent and very illuminating visit to on day three? Or of El Palancar, the small self-sustaining Alcantarine friary in Spain focusing on providing space for prayer? Or of Hertogenbosch, in The Netherlands, Pupping in Austria, Nazarje in Slovenia, big traditional friaries, where the diminishing number of friars decided to live together with lay people and religious sisters also dedicated to a simple Franciscan way of life and from this a New Form of Presence and Evangelization emerge? Or of the many other equally diverse fraternities mentioned above?
In the end it was difficult to narrow down shared expectations and visions. We decided we will continue to meet annually - next year in Pupping in Austria - and to endeavour to become more and more connected to each other through social media groups chats and also through fraternal visits to each other throughout the year. As one friar said as the final deliberations dragged on, we are forms of life and we can only really understand each of the forms of life by living them together, by sharing our lived experiences with each other. From here we may actually move closer to discerning what New Forms can be in our Order in relation to the traditional forms of life and how we wish to incarnate them in a common concrete way.
Br Ronan Sharpley, OFM
Read the message of the Minister General
