«Lo Spirito del Signore mi ha mandato»

Il cardinale Martini in dialogo con i suoi preti

Abstract

In the 22 years of his episcopate in Milan, cardinal C.M. Martini maintained a deep and far reaching dialogue with his priests, a dialogue which assumed a wide variety of forms, spanning from pastoral letters to individual encounters as requested by the priests themselves. This contribution focuses in particular on the parable and the contents of the homilies given during the Holy Thursday Chrism Masses, which not only provide a robust and stimulating theology and spirituality of the priestly ministry but permit us to reconstruct the spiritual experience of the Archbishop, intimately entwined with the living struggle of his presbyterate and to be read bearing in mind the critical events and transformations which the Church and Italian society as a whole underwent during the last part of the twentieth century. The contribution closes with an analysis of the anthropological and spiritual experience of priests which one can perceive in the cardinal’s Easter messages: strained tensions, innate polarizations and traits of a style of ministerial existence.