The last task of this paper is therefore to pose the question about the criteria for discernment. To be able to answer this question well, we would first have to define a little more precisely the term «movement», perhaps even attempt a classification of movements. Clearly, all this is beyond the scope of the present paper.

We should also beware of too strict a definition, for the Holy Spirit always has surprises in store, and only in retrospect do we recognise that, despite their great diversity, the movements do have a common essence.

However, as a preliminary contribution to the clarification of terminology, I would like very briefly to distinguish three different types of movement, that can be observed at least in more recent history. I would call them movements, currents and actions. The Liturgical movement of the first half of this century, or the Marian movement that has been gaining increasing prominence in the Church since the nineteenth century, I would not characterise as movements, but as currents. These currents may subsequently have taken on concrete form in specific movements such as the Marian Congregation or the various associations of Catholic youth, but they clearly extended beyond them. Petitions, or campaigns for the collection of signatures, pressing for a change in the teaching or practice of the Church, that are becoming the custom today, cannot be described as movements, but as actions. The Franciscan awakening in the thirteenth century probably provides the clearest instance of what a movement is: movements generally derive their origin from a charismatic leader and take shape in concrete communities, inspired by the life of their founder; they attempt to live the Gospel anew, in its totality, and recognise the Church without hesitation as the ground of their life without which they could not exist [22].

This attempt to find some kind of definition of what constitutes an ecclesial movement is no doubt very unsatisfactory. But it does help us to isolate a number of criteria that may, so to say, take the place of a definition. The essential criterion has already spontaneously emerged: it is the being rooted in the faith of the Church. Whoever does not share the apostolic faith, cannot lay claim to apostolic activity. Since there is only one faith for the whole Church, and since this faith is indeed the cause of her unity, it follows that the apostolic faith is inseparable from the wish for unity, the wish to be incorporated in the living community of the whole Church, the wish, quite concretely, to stand at the side of the successors of the apostles and the successor of Peter, who bears responsibility for the harmonious interaction between local Church and universal Church as the one people of God. If the «apostolic» dimension is that in which the movements find their place in the Church, it follows that the wish to lead the apostolic life must be fundamental for them in every period. Renunciation of property, celibacy, the abandonment of any attempt to impose their own image of the Church, in short, obedience in the following of Christ, have been regarded throughout the ages as the essential ingredients of the apostolic life. To be sure, these cannot be indiscriminately applied to all the participants of a movement, but they do form, though in different ways, points of orientation for each of their lives. The apostolic life, in turn, is not an end in itself, but creates freedom for service. Apostolic life calls for apostolic activity. Pride of place is given —again in different ways— to the proclamation of the Gospel as the missionary element par excellence. In the following of Christ evangelization is always primarily evangelizare pauperibus, preaching of the Gospel to the poor. But this never happens by word alone; charity, which is its inner source, at once the mainspring of its truth and its action, has to be lived and so become proclamation itself. That is why social service, in whatever form, is always linked with evangelization. All this presupposes —mainly thanks to the power and inspiration of the original charism— a deep, personal encounter with Christ. The becoming a community, and the building up of the community, does not exclude the personal dimension, indeed it demands it. Only when the person is struck and penetrated by Christ to the depths of his or her being, can others too be touched in their innermost being; only then can there be reconciliation in the Holy Spirit; only then can true community grow. Within this basic christological-pneumatological and existential structure, a great variety of accentuations and emphases can exist, in which Christianity is perpetually renewed and the spirit of the Church continually rejuvenated «like the youth of the eagle» (cf. Ps 103:5).

The dangers, but also the ways of overcoming them, that exist in the movements may at this point be glimpsed. One-sidedness is threatened by the over-accentuation of the specific mission that emerges in one particular period or through one particular charism. That the spiritual awakening  that  gives rise  to a movement  is experienced not as one of the many forms of Christian life, but as a response to what is perceived as the Gospel in its entirety, can lead to the movement being absolutised. It comes to be identified with the Church herself. It comes to be understood as the one way for everyone, though this one way can take and communicate itself in a variety of forms.

It is almost inevitable, therefore, that the vitality and totality of the original charismatic experience should time and again give rise to conflicts with the local community, a conflict in which both sides may be at fault, and both may be spiritually challenged. The local Churches may have entered into a kind of conformist modus vivendi with the world; the salt can lose its flavour, a situation that Kierkegaard described with mordant acuity in his critique of Christianity. Even if the departure from the radical demands of the Gospel has not reached the point that provoked Kierkegaard's denunciation, the irruption of the new is nonetheless experienced as a disruption, especially when it is accompanied, as is not seldom the case, by infantile fads and misguided absolutizations of all kinds.

Both sides must let themselves be educated by the Holy Spirit and also by their ecclesiastical superiors. Both must learn selflessness, without which no inner assent to the multiplicity of forms in which the faith is lived is possible. Both sides must learn from each other, allow themselves to be purified by each other, put up with each other, and discover how to attain those spiritual gifts of which Paul speaks in his great Hymn to Love (cf. 1 Cor 13:4-7). The movements thus need to be reminded that —even if they have found and transmitted the totality of the faith in their way— they are a gift to the Church as a whole, and must submit to the demands of this totality, in order to be true to their own essence [23]. But the local Churches, too, even the bishops, must be reminded that they must avoid any uniformity of pastoral organizations and programmes. They must not turn their own pastoral plans into the criterion of what the Holy Spirit is allowed to do: an obsession with planning could render the Churches impervious to the action of the Holy Spirit, to the power of God by which they live [24]. Not everything should be fitted into the straight jacket of a single uniform organization; what is needed is less organization and more spirit!

Above all, a concept of communion, in which the highest pastoral value is attached to the avoidance of conflict, should be rejected. Faith remains a sword and may demand conflict for the sake of truth and love (cf. Mt 10:34). A concept of Church unity in which conflicts are dismissed a priori as polarization, and in which internal peace is bought at the price of the renunciation of the totality of witness, would quickly prove to be illusory. What, in the last analysis, needs to be established is not a blasé attitude of intellectual superiority that immediately brands the zeal of those seized by the Holy Spirit and their uninhibited faith with the anathema of fundamentalism, and only authorises a faith in which the ifs and buts are more important than the substance of what is believed. In the last analysis everyone must let himself be measured by the unity of the one Church, which remains one in all the local Churches and as such appears again and again in the apostolic movements. Local Churches and apostolic movements must constantly recognise and accept the simultaneous truth of two propositions: ubi Petrus, ibi ecclesia - ubi episcopus, ibi ecclesia. Primacy and episcopacy, the local ecclesial system and the apostolic movements, need each other. Primacy can only live with and through a living episcopacy, episcopacy can only preserve its dynamic and apostolic unity in subservience to primacy. Where one of the two is weakened, the Church as a whole suffers.

After all these reflections and arguments, what should remain at the end is above all a feeling of gratitude and joy. Gratitude that the Holy Spirit is quite plainly at work in the Church and is lavishing new gifts on her in our time too, gifts through which she relives the joy of her youth (cf. Ps 42:4 Vulgate). Gratitude for the many people, young and old, who accept God's call and joyfully enter into the service of the Gospel without looking back. Gratitude for the bishops who open themselves up to the new movements, create room for them in their local Churches, struggle patiently with them in order to overcome their one-sidedness and guide them to the right form. Above all, in this place and at this time, let us thank Pope John Paul II. He surpasses us all in his capacity for enthusiasm, in his strength of interior rejuvenation won from faith, in his discernment of spirits, in his humble and courageous struggle for the fullness of services for the sake of the Gospel, and in his unity with the bishops of the whole world: a unity based on a willingness both to listen and teach. He leads us all to Christ. Christ lives, and he sends the Holy Spirit from the Father, that is the joyful and life-giving experience that is given to us by the meeting with the ecclesial movements in our time.

† Joseph Cardinal RATZINGER
Prefect of the Congregation
for the Doctrine of Faith