Word, context, text and testimony

approaches to Elli Benincá's theological-pastoral legacy

Abstract

This article investigates the challenge of evangelization based on some approaches to the theological-pastoral legacy of the priest and educator Elli Benincá, considering the relevance of the Word, the context, the text and the testimony in Christian praxis. The central aim of the article is to justify the relevance of these priority elements of Benincá’s life and legacy for an evangelization that considers the reality of people as a place for the manifestation of divine grace (DV 2). From Christian practice, we experience the personal encounter with God made flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, always within the socio-historical contexts in which we testify to out faith in the Christian community, through communion, participation, annunciation and service. Based on this objective, the question that the article aims to answer is how to think about evangelization, bearing in mind the annunciation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the current context, which is marked by superficiality, a culture of indifference and a pastoral practice that is disconnected from people’s concrete life experience. Therefore, our hypothesis is that to recover the power of the Gospel, which is central to Christian life, it is necessary to understand the relationship between Word, context, text and testimony. And in this sense, Benincá’s legacy becomes a kind of obligatory passage for a theology not of the balconies, but of the streets, the frontiers, or the peripheries, as Pope Francis calls for. From the texts and the testimony, for having experienced something with the Priest and educator Benincá, we propose to reflect on these aspects, which are methodologically organized into four steps. After the initial considerations, we then attempt to understand Priest Elli Benincá and his theological-pastoral work anchored in the Word of God. It continues with the concern for the Word and active listening, committed to God’s interpellations that come from listening as praxis. It then focuses on the Benincan theological-pastoral approach, associating the listening, the grace and the praxis. It concludes with a fourth aspect, relating theological-pastoral work to ecclesial formation and participation.