Aspecte religioase şi social-istorice privind pastoraţia persoanelor vârstnice

Abstract

The pastoral care of the elderly in our Church requires a specific approach, it includes several particularities, taking into account the fact that the elderly lived in two historical periods, diametrically opposed, separated by the events of December 1989. Then, almost unexpectedly, the communist political regime disappeared over night, after which there followed a period of adaptation to the new Romanian, European and international political, social and religious realities.The political regime changed when today’s seniors were in their 40s and 50s, the age of full adulthood. Many of them had a certain stable socio-economic position, which they had acquired with sacrificesand compromises, bearing in mind that in a society with a rigid political regime it was not easy to climb the steps of a hierarchy. You had to pay attention to everyone and everything. There was a certain social balance, which was acquired through sacrifices, strain and not infrequently disappointments, which could not be confessed to almost anyone.Even if it was a society with some social and economic stability and predictability, the efforts to adapt to it were commensurate, with costs that mostly remained in the memory of the elderly. A society with almost perfect social control, where reports, investigations and statements of all kinds were the order of the day.

All this strict and all-encompassing social control, in the Romanian communist society, led to the emergence of a fear or fear. This fear or fear, almost dormant since the communist period, is present in the souls of the elderly even today, mostly. Our elderly people today are sensitive people, full of emotionality, which they often mask with clumsiness, who cannot and do not want to part with their past. A past that they analyze and redefine almost daily, most of the time through a superlative construction. The study aims to analyze some sensitive aspects of the lives of the elderly for a better understanding of their pastoral care.