BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Wednesday, December 26 , Octave of Christmas
FEAST OF ST. STEPHEN

ST. STEPHEN (d. 36 AD), Archdeacon and First Christian Martyr (Proto-Martyr)
The Acts of the Apostles tell us all that is known of this young Hellenized Jew who was chosen by the Twelve as someone 'filled with grace and the Holy Spirit' to administer charity to widows and the needy. He was also a powerful preacher for early Christianity, and ended up being condemned by the Jewish Sanhedrin for blasphemy against Moses and God, and speaking against the Temple and the Law. He was stoned to death by a mob as the future St. Paul looked 0n ('Saul entirely approved of putting him to death'). Before he died, Stephen spoke out to accuse the Jews of persecuting those who spoke out against their sins, further angering the crowd. He experienced a theophany, saying ‘Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God....’. His dying words were: "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit....Lord, do not hold this sin against them”. Tradition says his body was rescued by Gamaliel, who had been Paul's Jewish mentor, and buried where Gamaliel himself would later be buried. This fact was long forgotten until in 415, a monk was told in a dream where to find Stephen's body. The relics were exhumed and brought to Constantinople. Later Pope Pelagius I (579-590) had the relics brought to Rome where Stephen was buried with Rome's most famous deacon-martyr, St. Lawrence, in the basilica of St. Lawrence outside the Walls. Pope Benedict XVI dedicated a catechesis to him on January 10, 2007. www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2007/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20070110...
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/122611.cfm

AT THE VATICAN TODAY

Noon Angelus - Although the Feast of St. Stephen is not a major religious holiday, Benedict XVI has always led
noon Angelus in St. Peter's Square the day after Christmas, when he does not lead the traditional holiday Angelus
at noon because the Urbi et Orbi Christmas message and blessing at noon take precedence. It is an occasion to
pay tribute to St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, whom he called today a model for the New Evangelization,
showing how Christ's messengers should first be filled with the Holy Spirit and guided by him in their mission.

Around this time last year, the Pew Forum released its report on 'Global Christianity', based on a comprehensive demographic study it completed in 2010 in 200 countries.
http://benedettoxviforum.freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=8527207&p=273
This year, Pew Forum has published the bigger picture in that study, looking at all the world's major religions - including 'no religion' now professed by more persons than Hinduism (and by three times more persons than Buddhism), and next only to Christianity and Islam in its number of 'adherents', which is a quantitative index of the growing godlessness among men... Of course, the figures reflect the status in December 2010, i.e., the state of religion at the end of the first decade of the third Christian millennium. But it is not exactly a routine task to carry out a comprehensive survey of this kind every year, and there is no reason for us to presume that the trend is likely to have changed in the course of two years, during which the reach and influence of secularism has simply escalated. Or so it seems... [(In fact, even if the official title of the report says 'as of December 2010', the Executive Summary below points out it has updated some of its data to 2012...

A report on the size and distribution
of the world’s major religious groups as of 2010

December 18, 2012

Worldwide, more than eight-in-ten people identify with a religious group. A comprehensive demographic study of more than 230 countries and territories conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life estimates that there are 5.8 billion religiously affiliated adults and children around the globe, representing 84% of the 2010 world population of 6.9 billion.



The demographic study – based on analysis of more than 2,500 censuses, surveys and population registers – finds 2.2 billion Christians (32% of the world’s population), 1.6 billion Muslims (23%), 1 billion Hindus (15%), nearly 500 million Buddhists (7%) and 14 million Jews (0.2%) around the world as of 2010.

In addition, more than 400 million people (6%) practice various folk or traditional religions, including African traditional religions, Chinese folk religions, Native American religions and Australian aboriginal religions.

An estimated 58 million people – slightly less than 1% of the global population – belong to other religions, including the Baha’i faith, Jainism, Sikhism, Shintoism, Taoism, Tenrikyo, Wicca and Zoroastrianism, to mention just a few.1

At the same time, the new study by the Pew Forum also finds that roughly one-in-six people around the globe (1.1 billion, or 16%) have no religious affiliation. This makes the unaffiliated the third-largest religious group worldwide, behind Christians and Muslims, and about equal in size to the world’s Catholic population.

Surveys indicate that many of the unaffiliated hold some religious or spiritual beliefs (such as belief in God or a universal spirit) even though they do not identify with a particular faith.

The geographic distribution of religious groups varies considerably. Several religious groups are heavily concentrated in the Asia-Pacific region, including the vast majority of Hindus (99%), Buddhists (99%), adherents of folk or traditional religions (90%) and members of other world religions (89%).



Three-quarters of the religiously unaffiliated (76%) also live in the massive and populous Asia- Pacific region. Indeed, the number of religiously unaffiliated people in China alone (about 700 million) is more than twice the total population of the United States. [Wich is why China remains, for the Church, its prime mission land!]

The Asia-Pacific region also is home to most of the world’s Muslims (62%). [Largely representing Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh, three of the world's most populous nations.] About 20% of Muslims live in the Middle East and North Africa, and nearly 16% reside in sub-Saharan Africa.

Of the major religious groups covered in this study, Christians are the most evenly dispersed. Roughly equal numbers of Christians live in Europe (26%), Latin America and the Caribbean (24%) and sub-Saharan Africa (24%).
grl-exec-2

A plurality of Jews (44%) live in North America, while about four-in-ten (41%) live in the Middle East and North Africa – almost all of them in Israel.

Nearly three-quarters (73%) of the world’s people live in countries in which their religious group makes up a majority of the population. Only about a quarter (27%) of all people live as religious minorities. (This figure does not include subgroups of the eight major groups in this study, such as Shia Muslims living in Sunni-majority countries or Catholics living in Protestant-majority countries.)

Overwhelmingly, Hindus and Christians tend to live in countries where they are in the majority. Fully 97% of all Hindus live in the world’s three Hindu-majority countries (India, Mauritius and Nepal), and nearly nine-in-ten Christians (87%) are found in the world’s 157 Christian-majority countries.

Though by smaller margins, most Muslims (73%) and religiously unaffiliated people (71%) also live in countries in which they are the predominant religious group. Muslims are a majority in 49 countries, including 19 of the 20 countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

The religiously unaffiliated make up a majority of the population in six countries, of which China is by far the largest. (The others are the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hong Kong, Japan and North Korea.)

Most members of the other major religious groups live in countries in which they are in the minority. Seven-in-ten Buddhists (72%), for example, live as religious minorities. Just three-in-ten (28%) live in the seven countries where Buddhists are in the majority: Bhutan, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia, Sri Lanka and Thailand

Israel is the only country with a Jewish majority. There are no countries where members of other religions (such as Baha’is, Jains, Shintoists, Sikhs, Taoists, followers of Tenrikyo, Wiccans and Zoroastrians) make up a majority of the population. There are also no countries where people who identify with folk or traditional religions clearly form a majority.

Some religions have much younger populations, on average, than others. In part, the age differences reflect the geographic distribution of religious groups. Those with a large share of adherents in fast-growing, developing countries tend to have younger populations. Those concentrated in China and in advanced industrial countries, where population growth is slower, tend to be older.

The median age of two major groups – Muslims (23 years) and Hindus (26) – is younger than the median age of the world’s overall population (28). All the other groups are older than the global median. Christians have a median age of 30, followed by members of other religions (32), adherents of folk or traditional religions (33), the religiously unaffiliated (34) and Buddhists (34). Jews have the highest median age (36), more than a dozen years older than the youngest group, Muslims.

These are among the key findings of a study of the global religious landscape conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life as part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, which analyzes religious change and its impact on societies around the world.

The demographic study explores the size, geographic distribution and median age of eight major religious groups – including the unaffiliated – that together represent 100% of the estimated 2010 global population.

The study is based on a country-by-country analysis of data from more than 2,500 national censuses, large-scale surveys and official population registers that were collected, evaluated and standardized by the Pew Forum’s demographers and other research staff.4 Many countries have recently conducted a national census or are in the midst of doing so. Therefore, new data are likely to emerge over the next few years. However, a data collection cut-off had to be made at some point; this report is based on information available as of early 2012.

For estimates of the religious composition of individual countries, see Religious Composition by Country table. For details on the methodology used to produce estimates of religious populations in 232 countries and territories, see Appendix A. For a list of data sources by country, see Appendix B.

To see each country’s and territory’s population broken down by number and percentage into the eight major religious groups in the study, see the sortable tables at features.pewforum.org/grl/population-number.php.

There are some minor differences between the estimates presented in this study and previous Pew Forum estimates of Christian and Muslim populations around the world. These differences reflect the availability of new data sources, such as recently released censuses in a few countries, and the use of population growth projections to update estimates in countries with older primary sources. (For more details, see the Methodology.)

This study is based on self-identification. It seeks to estimate the number of people around the world who view themselves as belonging to various religious groups. It does not attempt to measure the degree to which members of these groups actively practice their faiths or how religious they are.

In order to obtain statistics that are comparable across countries, the study attempts to count groups and individuals who self-identify as members of five widely recognized world religions – Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Muslims and Jews – as well as people associated with three other religious categories that may be less familiar:

Folk religions are closely tied to a particular people, ethnicity or tribe. In some cases, elements of other world religions are blended with local beliefs and customs. These faiths often have no formal creeds or sacred texts. Examples of folk religions include African traditional religions, Chinese folk religions, Native American religions and Australian aboriginal religions.

The religiously unaffiliated population includes atheists, agnostics and people who do not identify with any particular religion in surveys. However, many of the religiously unaffiliated do hold religious or spiritual beliefs.

For example, various surveys have found that belief in God or a higher power is shared by 7% of unaffiliated Chinese adults, 30% of unaffiliated French adults and 68% of unaffiliated U.S. adults.6

The “other religions” category is diverse and comprises groups not classified elsewhere. This category includes followers of religions that often are not measured separately in censuses and surveys: the Baha’i faith, Jainism, Shintoism, Sikhism, Taoism, Tenrikyo, Wicca, Zoroastrianism and many other religions.

Because of the lack of data on these faiths in many countries, the Pew Forum has not attempted to estimate the size of individual religions within this category, though some rough estimates are available from other sources.

These and other findings are discussed in more detail in the remainder of this report, which is divided into eight sections – one for each of the major religious groupings, in order of size.

To discuss the geographic distribution of religious groups, this report divides the world into six major regions: Asia and the Pacific, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, North America and sub-Saharan Africa.

Those interested in the full report and/or its various sections may do so at
http://www.pewforum.org/global-religious-landscape-exec.aspx

HOLIDAY ANGELUS
The first Christian martyr
was a model for evangelizers



Pope Benedict led noontime Angelus prayers today in St. Peter's Square on the day after Christmas, which is the feast of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr. In English, he said this:

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Today, immediately after Christmas Day, by tradition we celebrate the feast of the first martyr, Saint Stephen the Deacon. Like him, may we be blessed by God’s grace to have the courage to speak up and to defend the truth of our faith in public, with charity and constancy. God bless all of you and your loved ones!

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Here is a full translation of the Holy Father's reflections:

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Dear brothers and sisters,

Every year, the day after the Nativity of the Lord, the liturgy celebrates the Feast of St. Stephen, deacon and first Christian martyr. The Book, Acts of the Apostles, presents us as someone full of grace and the Holy Spirit (cfr Acts 6,8-10; 7,55);.

The promise of Jesus reported in today's Gospel is fully confirmed in him, namely, that believers called on to bear witness to the Lord in difficult and dangerous circumstances shall not be abandoned and left defenseless: the Spirit of God will speak in them (cfr Mt 10,20).

The deacon Stephen, in effect, worked, spoke and died with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness to the love of Christ to the point of the ultimate sacrifice. The first martyr is described in his suffering, as a perfect imitation of Christ, whose passion he recapitulated even in the details.

The life of St. Stephen was entirely shaped by God, conformed to Christ, whose passion was repeated in him. In the final moments of his dying, he fell to his knees, repeating Jesus's prayer on the Cross, entrusting himself to the Lord (cfr Acts 7,59) and pardoning his enemies: "Lord, do not hold this sin against them" (v 60.)

Filled with the Holy Spirit, while his eyes were about to close forever, he fixed his gaze on "Jesus standing at the right hand of God" (v 55),, Lord of everyone and who draws everything to him.

On St. Stephen's Day, we too are called to fix our gaze on the Son of God, whom we contemplate in the joyous atmosphere of Christmas in all the mystery of his Incarnation.

With Baptism and Confirmation, with the precious gift of faith nourished by the Sacraments, especially by the Eucharist, Jesus Christ has joined us to him and wishes to continue dwelling in us, with the action of the Holy Spirit, his work of salvation, which rescues, appreciates, elevates and leads everyone to fulfillment.

To let ourselves be drawn to Christ, as St. Stephen did, means opening up our life to the light that calls to us, thank orients us and makes us follow the way of goodness, the way of a humanity according to God's plan of love.

Finally, St. Stephen is a model for all those who wish to place themselves in the service of the new evangelization. He demonstrates that the novelty of announcing Christ does not consist primarily in the use of original methods or techniques, which certainly have their uses, but in being full of the Holy Spirit and letting ourselves be led by him.

The novelty of proclaiming Christ is the depth of immersion in the mystery of Christ, in the assimilation of his Word and his presence in the Eucharist, so that He himself, the living Jesus, can speak and act through his messenger.

In effect, the evangelizer becomes able to bring Christ to others effectively when he lives in Christ, when the novelty of the Gospel is manifest in his own life.

Let us pray to the Virgin Mary so that the Church, in this Year of Faith, shall see a multiplication of men and women who, like St. Stephen, will be able to bear convincing and courageous witness to the Lord Jesus.

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Thanks to Beatrice who called attention to this blog post on her site

principally to protest some assertions presented as 'fact' by the blogger, who is the editor of the nominally Catholic French magazine LA VIE, which, she recalls, blisteringly opposed Benedict XVI's decision to lift the excommunication of the four FSSPX bishops in the guise of objecting to the very presence of a Holocaust denier in the Church (.e., Mons. Williamson)...

Such an unfortunate lapse of judgment against a throughly-considered decision by the Supreme Pontiff (in a matter that had nothing to do at all with the personal opinions of any of the FSSPX bishops, only with the fact that they took part in an illegal episcopal ordination expressly prohibited by the Pope at the time) is, of course, highly questionable conduct by eminent Catholics, in the eyes of simple orthodox Catholics like me. But it is also freedom of opinion, which one cannot dispute no matter how one disagrees with the opinion - somewhat like Sandro Magister's criticisms of Benedict XVI for allegedly paying only lip service to the cause of sacred music worthy of the Vatican, the kind of criticism made more out of self-indulgence in one's personal opinion or ideological commitment than out of concern for any actual damage or harm to the Church!

Nonetheless, once one has dismissed Mercier's non-facts having to do with the life of the young Joseph Ratzinger, the rest of Mercier's arguments have to do with the role of priests in general, about which he does make a lot of good points. As a take-off, however, Mercier uses the recently revealed Christmas note to the Christ Child of the seven-year-old Joseph Ratzinger. Instead of simply reporting it for the lovable early trace it represents of the boy who grew up to become Pope, Mercier feels compelled - in keeping with the title of his blog - to decipher something that is pretty clear and obvious to anyone at that time and place (Bavaria in December of 1932), and which the original reports on the letter had made clear. In his useless and counter-productive 'decryptage', Mercier trips up on his facts.

The boy Joseph's letter to the Christ-Child
and reflections on the role of priests

December 24, 2012

It is a letter written to the Christ Child by a seven-year-old boy, who writes: "Dear ChristChild, You will be coming down to earth soon. And you will bring joy to children. Bring joy to me as well. I would like a Volks-Schott, a green Mass garment, and a Heart of Jesus. I will always be good. Greetings from Joseph Ratzinger".

It's just as 'cryptic' as a message from a boy in 2012 who would specify to Santa Claus the model number of some game he wants... The Christ Child would have understood right away what little Joseph wanted. And none of the items on his wish list would surprise anyone who was aware that as children, Joseph and his older brotehr Georg liked best to play at 'saying Mass'.

At that time, it wss not rare for little boys to play at being priests, wearing costumes sewn for them by their mothers or family dressmakers, using little altars and all kinds of Mass 'accessories'. It was the masculine version of girls playing at hosting a tea party. Such toys for boys were in the merchandise catalogs sent to homes in Europe till the 1940s. And in Catholic countries, there still is a market for such toys. [Beatrice questions these assertions. Was it really so, she asks? In the Philippines, where the home catalogs we got in the mail up to the 1960s were generally from American retailers like Sears (long before there was Walmart), there was no section for religious items at all, or for religion-otiented toys and games in the children's section. And as a schoolgirl who was taken along by my grandmother and aunts on their occasional trips to Manila, during which a visit to the one Catholic retailer of Catholic books, accessories and supples at the time was obligatory, I never saw such toys and games on sale. Is Mercier having a 'false memory' recollection?... I think, however, the greater offense here is in dismissing the boy Joseph's intensely focused interest in objects having to do with the Mass as simply 'typical' of boys in his time! Even assuming boys his age preferred playing priest instead of playing soldier, wasn't the seven-year-old's single focus extraordinary? Children usually want a whole list of things, including necessities like shoes or a new sweater. Little Joseph apparently felt no lack of such necessities, but did want things his heart desired and which no other little boy might have thought of!]

Thousands of boys have played at being priests, but by their adolescence, they have usually ditched chalice, paten and surplice for other interests. The two Ratzinger boys were, however, serious enough that they both became priests, becoming ordained at the same time. An incredible twinship!

But their priesthood was a family undertaking. One that entailed sacrifice. In 1939, when Joseph entered minor seminary (high school level), his older sister Maria quit her studies and became a house cleaner to help their parents meet the cost of his enrolment in the seminary. This would be unthinkable in our day, even in a family considered to be 'super-Catho'. Just as unthinkable as a priest's costume or a mini-altar would be among the presents found in a European child's Christmas shoe these days...

[There are two major objections here. The first is a mis-statement of fact. Cardinal Ratzinger says in his autobiographical MIlestones:

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The pastor urged me to enter the minor seminary in order to be initiated systematically into the spiritual life. For my father, whose pension was very scant inded, this represented a great sacrifice. But my sister, after receiving her diploma from the scitienfic school and doing her obligatory year of service in agrioculture, found a job [as a secretary] in 1939 with a big company in Tranustein, and thus eased the family budget. And so, the decision was made, and at Easter of 1939, I entered the seminary.

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The second objection is the chauvinisi implication that Maria, being female, was 'sacrificed' in any way for the good of her younger brother. As the oldest child, she was probably most happy that she was able to help her parents at this time, just as years later, she would serve as her brother's typist and housekeeper. It was obviously the apostolate intended for her by the Lord, though she was also a third-order Franciscan.

All this, not to illustrate the colossal cultural change that has come over the Church and which partly explains the lack oif priestly vocations in Europe. But to examine the priest in Benedict XVI. Since his childhood, the future Pope appears to have been a priest in every fiber of his imagination and of his emotions. Something similar occurred with John Paul II, not since childhood as with Benedict XVI, but because of his experience of solitude during the war which led him to his radical choice of vocation...

A Pope is some kind of 'total priest', one who finds himself in maximum identification with Christ, the only High Priest. Since it is Christmas time, I wish to explore this link that exists between what we are celerbating - the Incarnation of God in his Son, Jesus Christ, and the institution of the Papacy, though I know this is a risky undertaking...

Some theology is necessary. The Incarnation is that moment in history when God decided to take on the human condition out of his radical love for his human creatures in order to save them.

The first stage of the Incarnation is the arc that goes from Mary's Yes to the angel Gabriel, to the Ascension of Jesus, passing through the Crib and the Cross, namely Jesus's time as a human being.

There is a second stage of the Incarnation, where we are today, an arc that started with the Pentecost through to the second coming of Christ: Through the gift of the Holy Spirit, the presence of Christ has 'erupted' in the bosom of his Church.

One finds a pictogram from the famous scene with the cripple at the 'Beautiful Door' of the Temple of Jerusalemn, recounted in the Acts of the Apostles (Chapter 3):

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Now Peter and John were going up to the temple area for the three o’clock hour of prayer. And a man crippled from birth was carried and placed at the gate of the temple called the 'Beautiful Gate' every day to beg for alms from the people who entered the temple. When he saw Peter and John about to go into the temple, he asked for alms. But Peter looked intently at him, as did John, and said, "Look at us".

He paid attention to them, expecting to receive something from them. Peter said, “I have neither silver nor gold, but what I do have I give you: in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazorean, [rise and] walk.” Then Peter took him by the right hand and raised him up, and immediately his feet and ankles grew strong. He leaped up, stood, and walked around, and went into the temple with them, walking and jumping and praising God.

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The parallels between this miracle and those performed by Jesus during his earthly life are absolutely gripping. The message is very clear: The victorious power of Christ had passed to each of those who believe in him or invoke him.

The 'second stage' of that I would call the 'rocket' of Incarnation is therefore that which is mysteriously prolonged in the Apostles. Jesus has been present since then in the bosom of all those who wre baptized in the fire of his Spirit.

Observe that Peter did not perform the above miracle by himself - he was with John. He explcitly asks the cripple to look at both of them. It is a sign that the second stage of the Incarnation mystery involves the Church as a brotherhood. God works in the Church through couplings of power, through complementary, even opposite, personalities. "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Mt 18,20).

The Incarnation of Christ in the Baby wrapped in swaddling clothes in the manger of Bethlehem thus leads to the mystery of the Church mediating the presence of Christ. To celebrate Christmas means celebrating the mystery of Christ's active presence among us through each of his disciples. We celebrate the mediation of divine reality by men themselves, a fact that is at the heart of Christianity.

The second stage of the Incarnation is truly an unfathomable mystery. [Aren't all mysteries by nature unfathomable?] It is not anodyne to say that this power can be relative as it was for the apostle Peter. We are told by Scripture that Peter presumed too much on his own powers when he told the Master that he was ready to die for him. And then he denied him thrice during the Passion.

it means that every human being is capable of a weakness that leads to sin as well as of the power of the resurrected Christ. That is the difficult reality and calling for every baptized person: to be a mediator of Christ through his own powers, his own capacity for greatness, despite his sins and limitations.

The Catholic Church goes farther by affirming that the mediation of Christ goes through a visible hierarchy, identified in her priests, bishops and the Pope. It is what amounts to a third-stage in the Incarnation, The priesy acts, specifically within the sacraments, in persona Christi. The Pope stands at the vertex of the mystery of priesthood.

I have convered many apostolic trips by Benedict XVI. I particularly enjoy talking to the people who make up part of the great crowds that come to attend his Masses. From Cuba to Germany, from Beirut to Madrid, what I often hear is this: "The Pope is Christ on earth". {It is what we Catholics are taught - or used to be taught - almost with our first prayers.]

The answer moves me, especially if I hear it from the 'simple folk'. I remember most especially a housecleaner from the Philippines whom I asked in Beirut last September. She had come to 'warm herself' at the Pope's symbolic flame, she who had not seen her children for six years except through Skype, she who was doing menial work in a foreign land to feed her children...

I can already sense my Protestant friends protesting, and some of my Catholic friends - who would find this identification of the Pope and the person of Christ a theological horror, that this constitutes sheer idolatry. [Not to anyone who reads Christ's messaga when he gave the keys of the Kingdom to Peter, after telling him he was the rock on which he would build his Church: "I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” He is delegating the remission of sins - which is the function of the Redeemer - to Peter in persona Christi.]

But it shows that simple Catholics [who get the idea of the Pope as Christ's representative on earth without any apparent difficulty] have a radical access to the mystery of the priesthood, which is the continuous mediation of divine intervention.

This mediation is what makes the Catholic Church so interesting, because of the inevitable mingling of good and evil in the persons called by Christ to represent him sacramentally. It is a mingling that is both a strong point and a wek point for the Church.

A strong point when the persons who take on this ministry of representing Christ are true models of holiness, as the numberless saints who were priests, bishops and Popes, Fr. St. Augustine to Jean Paul II [and Benedict XVI], passing through the Cure d'Ars and Maximilian Kolbe.

A weak point when the members of the hierarchy and the priesthood are out-and-out bastards. In 1940, Fr. Robert Alesch was a parish priest in the Parisian region. He gained the confidence of the Resistance networks by profesisng Gaullist ideas and was able to deceive many leading intellectuals of the time. But he was a paid agent of the Nazis, who paid him enough so he could support two mistresses. He encouraged young people to join the Resistance, in order to more easily denounce them eventually. In 1942, he disclosed a network that led to the arrest of 80 persons who were tortured and subsequently sent to extermination camps.

Then there are the perverted priests who vie with each other in seducing and catching as many children and minors as they can in their traps, families whose trust they exploit the better to destroy them. The most notorious example of these is the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Marcial Maciel.

The other problem about the priesthood is that the Church affirms that the sacramental representation of Christ an only be done though males, not females.

In fsct, I think that the argument that carries the best weight for why a priest (and therefore, a bishop, and a Pope), must be male is this continuous incarnation of Christ, this third stage of the rocket...

Ordaining women would be a way of relativizing the reality that God came to us as a male human being. Which would relativize everything else about his Incarnation, especially his being a Jew [and all the rights he possessed as a first=born Jewish son] and his specific rootedness in a precise historico-geographical context.

I am quite aware that I am touching sensitive points. My aim is not to polemicize or to proclaim domas, but to put some spiritual realities in perspective, within a specific framework.

There would also be a fourth stage of the rocket, which derives from the third: Through the priest's ministry, Christ becomes truly present in the bread and the wine at Mass.

According to the Catholic teaching of trans-substantiation, Christ is present body and soul, God and man, in the consecrated bread and wine. This is why we can adore him in the Sacframent, a devotional practice that has seen a spectacular comeback in the past 20 years.

My friends from the reformed churches do not believe in the third stage of the Incarnation - that a priest could have a different ontology from other baptized Christians - so they would not believe in the fourth stage, either.

It's true John Calvin never thought God could transform and inhabit matter. [He believed in a God of such limited powers, then?] But this blog is not about getting into a theological debate with the Protestants, even if it is sometimes useful to think of Catholicism in terms of how much it differs from Protestantism. {I've often thought that Protestantism has devolved into Christianity-made-easy or Christianity-as-you-like-it - Catholicism without tears and without beatitudes.]

One of the challenges of contemporary Catholicism is to live this question of the Incarnation through the priesthood. First, the priesthood of all baptized laymen that the Second Vatican Council forcefully emphasized.

It is no small matter to think that through Baptism, we carry the capacity of Christ to prophecy, calm down storms, chase out evil spirits, and offer our lives in a sacrifice of love. Which is to say that we vowed to incarnate Christ through our lives, in a priestly manner, even if we are not ordained. [All the pathetic priestettes and would-be priestettes obviously never heard of the lay prieshood of the baptized!]

Nor is it any small matter to consider the fact of the priestly hierarchy, from the lowliest priest to the Pope. One of the reasons for the crisis in the sacrament of confession is the growing inability of sinners to believe that they could possibly confess their sins to Christ through the agency of a human priest.

And one cannot exclude that the crisis in priestly vocations could come from the lack of faith among those who feel 'called' before the but recoil before the challenge of incarnating Christ through their own personal life, a task which they think is above and beyond their human abilities. [But who said the difficult task of living according to Christ is all to be done through our individual abilities and merits? God does not expect us to be self-sufficient in everything! That is why we need his grace to make up for our human limitations, for what we do not have...]

Nor is it any small matter to believe that the priesthood of ordained ministers is at the service of the proesthood of laymen. The problem here is that one can get the impression that the ordained priesthood is being used to legitimize power. One cannot deny that nominations to a bishopric or a cardinalate can serve power strategies.

In the Vatican, one cannot head a 'congregation' without the power linked to being a cardinal. [It's not 'power' per se linked to being a cardinal, because there is none other than the right to vote for a Pope. Any other power is derived from the powers associated with the position a cardinal happens to occupy, usually as a diocesan bishop or as the head of a Curial dicastery in the Vatican. In turn, dicastery heads need to be cardinals so they can exert a dignitarial superiority over the bishops and priests that they must supervise, and enjoy parity with their peers who head other dicasteries. Htat's not a power game - it's simply the routine reality of any hierachical organization.]

One could argue that it has to do with authority rather than rank, but the truth is that it is not always clear. The Church sometimes confuses the exercise of hierarchical responsibilities with the sacrament of priesthood, whose fullness is realized within the episcopate.

And women [not all women, but feminists, yes!, who are ideologues before they are Christian] feel excluded from taking part at high levels of responsibility in the Church because they cannot become priests, to begin with.

For the two kinds of priests - the lay priesthood and the ordained - the faith itself is at stake. It is totally delirious - and discouraging - to believe that any of us can 'incarnate' Christ without faith, that is, without trusting that God is present in us, and that, through his grace, he acts in us and through us.

It is also the message of Christmas: The Baby God who holds out his arms to us from his crib encourages us to believe in the mystery of his Incarnation, a mystery that continues throughout our life and in our life despite its misery and uncertainty.

Thursday, December 27, Octave of Christmas
FEAST OF ST. JOHN, APOSTLE AND EVANGELIST

Many historians and Biblical scholars will continue to insist that John the Beloved Disciple was not John the Evangelist, but in the popular mind and in Christian tradition, he is one and the same. Depictions of John through the ages alternate between showing him as a young man, as Guido Reni, Pedro Berruguete, an unknown contemporary painter, and El Greco do, in the panel above; or as venerable sage, as in the Giotto (extreme left) and traditional image (extreme right)...The vocation of John and his brother James is stated very simply in the Gospels, along with that of Peter and his brother Andrew: Jesus called them; they followed. James and John “were in a boat, with their father Zebedee, mending their nets. He called them, and immediately they left their boat and their father and followed him” (Matthew 4:21b-22). For the three former fishermen — Peter, James and John — that faith was to be rewarded by a special friendship with Jesus. They alone were privileged to be present at the Transfiguration, the raising of the daughter of Jairus and the agony in Gethsemane. But John’s friendship was even more special. Tradition assigns to him the Fourth Gospel, although most modern Scripture scholars think it unlikely that the apostle and the evangelist are the same person. John’s own Gospel refers to him as “the disciple whom Jesus loved”, the one who reclined next to Jesus at the Last Supper, and the one to whom he gave the exquisite honor, as he stood beneath the cross, of caring for his mother. “Woman, behold your son....Behold, your mother”. John and Peter were the first to enter the empty tomb after Mary Magdalene on that first Easter. And John was with Peter when the first great miracle after the Resurrection took place — the cure of the man crippled from birth — which led to their spending the night in jail together. The effect of the Resurrection on the Apostles and the first Christians is perhaps best contained in the words of Acts: “Observing the boldness of Peter and John and perceiving them to be uneducated, ordinary men, they [the questioners] were amazed, and they recognized them as the companions of Jesus”. Despite the questions raised, John is traditionally considered the author of the Fourth Gospel, three New Testament letters, and the Book of Revelation. His Gospel is a very personal account. He already sees the glorious and divine Jesus in the incidents of his mortal life. At the Last Supper, John’s Jesus speaks as if he were already in heaven. John's Gospel has been called the Gospel of Jesus’s glory.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/122711.cfm


No bulletins so far from the Vatican today.

105,000 Christians killed
in 2012 for their faith
Interview with Massimo Introvigne
Translated from the Italian service of

December 27, 2012

The Church celebrates the first Christian martyr, St. Stephen, the day after Christmas. As he was being stoned to death, he called on the Lord not to hold his executioners accountable for their sin against him.

As Pope Benedict XVI pointed out yesterday, Stephen's martyrdom brings to mind the many Christians in the world today who are being persecuted or are being killed for their faith in Jesus Christ.

News reports from many parts of the world confirm that this anti-Christian odium [something far worse than the convenient term 'Christianophobia' conveys] continues to be widespread. Massimo Introvigne, coordinator of Italy's Observatory for Religious Freedom, spoke about this to Vatican Radio's Denora Donnini:

INTROVIGNE: Perhaps the most advanced center for religious statistics is that which was founded by David Barrett in the United States [the World Evangelization Research Center, directed by him till he died last year]. It estimates that in 2012, at least 105,000 Christians were killed just because they were Christians - it means that in the past year, one Christian was martyred every 5 minutes somewhere in the World. That is a frightening statistic.

There are places like Nigeria, where, because of the Muslim fundamentalist militants Boko Aram, going to Mass means risking your life...
There are many danger areas for Christians around the world, of which three main categories can be identified: countries were the presence of Islamist fundamentalists is very strong, as in Nigeria, Somalia, Mali, Pakistan and some areas in Egypt; countries where Communist totalitarian regimes continue to rule, with North Korea being the worst; and countries dominated by ethnic nationalism professing a specific religion, as in India, where militant Hindus consider Christians to be traitors to the nation. In such places, going to Mass, or even simply going to catechism class - in Nigeria, they killed a group of schoolchildren on their way to catechism - can mean risking your life.

In Pakistan, the law on blasphemy [of Islam] principally directed against Christians, continues to be a serious concern. It has been more than three years since Asia Bibi, a mother of five, was imprisoned and condemned to death for alleged violation of this law...
Italy was the first state to officially 'adopt' Asia Bibi. And so far, the Italian government'e efforts have helped keep her alive. But we must not forget official executions that have taken place, as well as public lynchings - because often, it is the local people themselves, inflamed it is true by some militant preacher or politician, who manage to kill the victim before any legal process is even undertaken. This has become the usual scenario in Pakistan, and a case like Asia Bibi [that gets international attention] is rare.

Why do you think there is such anti-Christian hatred in the world to the point that Christians have become the most persecuted today?
On the one hand, there is this bloody persecution with deaths and tortures that arise from specific ideologies, namely, radical Islamist fundamentalism, the most aggressive versions of ethnic nationalisms, and of course, what remains of the old Communist ideology.

Without placing other kinds of persecution on the same level as religious killings, we must not forget the phenomena of intolerance, which is a cultural fact, and of discrimination through legislation which happens even in Western nations as the Holy Father points out in his Message for the next World Peace Day.

He also did not fail to point to it in his Christmas address to the Roman Curia last week, when he underscored what one might call a cultural dictatorship exercised in the name of ideology, one example being this notion of 'gender' [as a self-determined human category, in place of the human being's God-given sex]. These ideologies obviously feel threatened by Christian teachings and that is why their powerful lobbies have set into motion campaigns of anti-Christian intolerance and discrimination. [Such contemporary ideologues praise and pride themselves as tolerant of everyone, even as they continually demonstrate intolerance for anyone who does not believe as they do!]

St. Stephen died asking the Lord not to hold his death against his assassins. From all the testimonials you and similar centers have gathered, does it emerge that the Christians who have been martyred in recent years were able to pardon their persecutioners?
Of course, we do not mean to say that all 105,000 Christians documented to have been killed for the faith in 2012 were all martyrs in the theological sense. But certainly among them, there would have been a number who consciously offered their lives for the Church and who would have prayed often for their persecutioners and therefore forgiven them.

This is, of course, striking, because to be able to forgive somehow one's own persecutioners is truly a merciful act that comes from the Lord.
I must say that this is a trait unique to Christianity, because other cultures - pre- as well as post-Christian - speak instead of the right to avenge a wrong [in fact, other cultures consider this a duty in defense of honor]. Christianity has had this great civilizing role - which tends to be forgotten or ignored today - of having replaced the logic of vendetta with the logic of forgiving.

P.S. December 28, 2012
Introvigne's interview led Vittorio Messori to write this article for Corriere della Sera, which places the problem in a larger perspective:

Two centuries of Christian
persecution in modern times:
The emergency everyone ignores
by Vittorio Messori
Translated from

December 28, 2012

There were furious reactions of incredulity, if not outright rejection, when in 2011, sociologist Massimo Introvigne pointed out to an international congress in Budapest organized by the European Union, that on average, more than 100,000 Christians of various confessions are killed every year in the world for their faith.

Introvigne was speaking as the Italian representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), but also as one of the most authoritative experts on this subject, being founder and director of CESNUR, the Turin-based Centro Studi sulle Nuove Religione, and author of many scientific papers.

To those who questioned his facts, Introvigne replied with his habitual academic precision, citing the unimpeachable sources for his data, showing in the process that the figure was, in effect, an under-estimation. That, out of prudence, he had understated the actual figures shown by his sources.

Introvigne observed: “The reaction of rejecting these figures was in itself a lesson: The problem of Christian persecution is so under-estimated that when the numbers are cited, in all their horror, many Europeans and Americans find themselves disbelieving”.

On the feast day of the first Christian martyr St. Stephen, two days ago, Introvigne spoke to Vatican Radio and cited the figures of Christians killed in 2012 for their faith: 105,000, one every five minutes during the year.

Going by the most reliable figures, 10 percent of the world’s two billion Christians – therefore, 200 million, almost all in Africa and Asia – suffer because of their religion.

Thus, says Introvigne, who is now in charge of the Observatory for Religious Freedom in the Italian foreign ministry, “the persecution of Christians is today the leading world emergency in terms of religious discrimination and violence. There is no other religion that is so fought against, to the point of attempted genocide of Christians in some places”.

In Europe and in America, a continuing accusation is made against Christians, especially Catholics, for a now-remote past of inquisitions, intolerance, Crusades and censorship, even as these accusers find it hard to believe that today, the simple profession of faith in Christ can pose dangers and even the risk of death.

Today, the Pope is practically alone in denouncing the lack of religious freedom in many countries, defending the right not just of Christians but of believers in whatever faith.

“Religious freedom,” the Pope reiterated recently, as did his predecessor, John Paul II, “does not concern merely every Christian but every man. It is a right that must be recognized under natural law, regardless of religious perspective”.

The Pope points out that many countries, especially those of Muslim majority, defend themselves by pointing out that they allow freedom of worship. But Benedict XVI points out that there is no religious freedom when Christians are allowed only to worship within their churches (in Saudi Arabia, even this is not allowed – Christians have to do so in their own homes) but are strictly forbidden to even manifest their religious affiliation in public.

There is no religious freedom when having the Cross on the roof of a church or wearing the Cross on a necklace is considered a crime for which one can be arrested.

There certainly is no religious freedom when the death penalty is imposed on those who choose to be baptized rather than profess the state religion.

There are three principal settings for Christian persecution today:

First, in the remaining Communist states. In China, the only Christian militancy allowed is that of the ‘patriotic Church’, created and strictly controlled by the regime which nominates its own bishops. North Korea, most observers say, is probably the most dangerous place in the world where one can declare himself Christian. And in Cuba, the now moribund Castrism alternates between moments of tolerance and intolerance.

Then there are the ethnic nationalisms, ‘racial’ traditions which lead to periodic explosions of persecutional rage against those who, in the West. are seen through rose-colored lenses as champions of tolerance and openness: Hinduism and Buddhism.

Finally, there is the Islamic ocean which reaches from North Africa to the Middle East and tropical Asia (where the greatest concentration of Muslims are found in Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh) – in which the rare zones of relative tranquility and near-equality status of Christians are cancelled out by the rebirth of an extremism that (often with the aid of Europe and the USA – as in the Middle East and North Africa) has subverted governments and cultures that had sought to apply a more peaceful and open-minded reading of the Koran.

One other zone of bloody persecution must be added: Black Africa, where state authorities are often transient and powerless against the chaos of continual encounters between races and tribes, and where the persecution of Christians seems to be among the favorite pastimes of irregular militia, of militant Islamist preachers, and of fanatical disciples of local witchcraft.

As to remedies, these are difficult if not impossible to suggest, given the vastness, the depth, and the diversity of the factors that instigate hatred to the point of mass killings of those who believe in Jesus Christ.

It must be observed, nonetheless, that for the past two centuries, Christians have been only the persecuted, never the persecutors.
It must be said, with the necessary humility and in truth, that in this tragedy, the victimhood of Christians is a sign of spiritual nobility. No one who kills or oppresses another can find any justification or approval in the Gospel of Christ.

The bishop in detention and
the story of the 'powerless' King
born for all mankind
Translated from

December 27, 2012

No one could have failed to note the passage in Benedict XVI's Christmas Urbi et Orbi message, when he prayed, "May the King of Peace turn his gaze to the new leaders of the People’s Republic of China for the high task which awaits them", with the hope that "in fulfilling this task, they will esteem the contribution of the religions, in respect for each, in such a way that they can help to build a fraternal society for the benefit of that noble People and of the whole world".

These words, within a message which was directly broadcast to millions of persons around the world, were no mere courtesy gesture. Through them, the Pope did not just reiterate his continuing defense of religious freedom, but directly called on the new leaders of Beijing to initiate a change in religious policy which successive generations of Communist Chinese leaders have eschewed out of fear and anxiety.

It is a very difficult issue, and for now, it can be summarized in one name, Mons. Thaddeus Ma Daquin of Shanghai, who was ordained as auxiliary bishop last July 7, then detained the day after and kept under house arrest since then in a seminary next to the Shrine to Our Lady of Sheshan.

His transgression had been 'scandalous': At his episcopal ordination, he publicly expressed his loyalty to the Pope, announced that he was resigning all his positions in the government-sponsored Patriotic Association [Beijing's version of a 'national autonomous' Catholic Church in China], and refused to be 'laid hands on' by bishops who had been ordained by Beijing without the Pope's approval and therefore excommunicated from the Church.

That was obviously too much for Beijing, which has vacillated between some small gestures of change and the horror of losing control of all the levers in dealing with the Church in China. It is a regime that knows how tough it can be to deal with Chinese Catholics, particularly the so-called underground Church that has withstood decades of persecution in varying degrees, and who remain second-class citizens unable to contribute as they can to the construction of a truly fraternal society, as the Pope pointed out.

Some analysts have have said that the example taken by the regime with Mons. Ma - whose episcopal appointment they appear to have 'revoked' - must be seen in the context of the months immediately preceding the election of China's new Communist leadership.

Cardinal Joseph Zen, who has been a consistent 'hammer' against Beijing's despotism and critical of some openings sought by the Holy See in its relations with the Chinese government, said recently that the measures taken against Mons. Ma could obviously not be attributed to the new leadership, though they would have been meant to 'condition' them before they can contemplate a change of direction.

It remains to be seen how the new Secretary-General (and future President) Xi Jinping will live up to his promise to respect the Chinese Constitution regarding religious freedom.

But it appears that China's Catholics are aware of what is happening and will not be taken in. For instance, word of mouth - as well as through the Web and old-fashioned paper communications - has been spreading a letter by someone who calls himself Little Lamb addressed to Mons. Ma.

Written for Christmas, the letter pays tribute to the detained bishop's witness of faith, hope and love transmitted to all the faithful despite his loss of freedom. Little Lamb rejects the idea of Chinese-style 'Catholicism', free of any link to the Successor of Peter:

---

Our Catholic faith is one, holy, catholic and apostolic, and it is manifested in her universality, which includes communion and unity with the Holy See. The Catholic faith only requires love, that is why our rule of life is love of God, love of the Church, love of the nation, love of the people, which includes love for those who harm us.

---

In another passage, the letter says that like Jesus, Mons Ma suffers "without having committed any crime", but Little Lamb sees the bishop "experiencing his loss of freedom as a form of doing penitence for the Church in China", recalling so many lacerations against the body of the Church in China and the many enemies that have tried to subjugate her and make her wholly an instrument of the government's plans - "notwithstanding which the Church continues to be alive today under the guidance of the Holy Spirit".

The letter also addresses itself directly to Xi Jinping, warning him that he is surrounded by people who will oppose his intention to respect the Constitution in its assertion of religious freedom and will lead him to discredit among the nations of the world. It is, of course, difficult to guess exactly what Xi has in mind as he prepares to manage the very complicated situation he has inherited. [In which, necessarily, religious policy will not have the priority of economic, fiscal and geopolitical considerations!]

US intelligence estimates that by the third decade of this century, China will have established itself as the world's foremost economic power, even as they warn of serious demographic and regional disequilibria and internal tensions that make the Chinese colossus especially vulnerable. In this context, religious freedom is just one variable that the Chinese leadership will have to juggle.

And in this context, Benedict XVI wants to help by pointing out that for the new China, religious freedom is a factor that would contribute decisively to peace, harmony and social stability.

In any case, I wish to conclude this commentary by recalling another passage from the letter of the unknown Little Lamb who says that "the Cross is the foundation and summit of our faith, and only those who sincerely carry the Cross can have faith, hope and love".

As Benedict XVI says in The Infancy Narratives, there will always be those powers that "will tolerate no other kingdom and will want to eliminate the King without earthly power, whose mysterious strength they fear... (whose) Kingdom is not built on worldly power, but is based only on faith and love, and is therefore the great strength and hope in a world that so often seems to have been abandoned by the hand of God".

So it is in China today, so it will always be in this world. Merry Christmas, Mons. Ma!

The world's only statesman:
Benedict XVI looks at a
wounded, war-weary world
by Giulio Albanese
Translated from

December 27, 2012

At a time in human history as sensitive as ours, that is marked by profound social and economic inequalities, Benedict XVI has found the right words to comfort all men and women of good will wherever they may be.

His messages for the Christmas season have had the common thread of peace running through them. In the homily at the Christmas Eve Mass in St. Peter's as well as in the traditional Christmas Day message addressed urbi et orbi, the Pope reiterated his concern that the Christian community, and in general, civilian society on the planetary scale, may be aware of the importance of active participation in the construction of the common good, in respect for the positive value of life.

This is a task in which we are all involved personally, at the educational level, in promoting a Christian culture inspired by the social doctrine of the Church, and thus, by the Gospel.

In other words, it is possible to 'forge swords into ploughshares' and that "aid to the suffering replaces weapons of war", which is possible only if human beings are illumined by the grace of God and that educational agencies carry out their function by helping the new generations understand the absurdity of violence in all its forms.

The Holy Father's message is both theological and pastoral, and detailed according to the various scenarios that currently characterize the international panorama.

NO, above all, to the violences committed in the name of God, as, it has happened unfortunately, for the third year in a row, in northern Nigeria, where 12 Christians lost their lives in a Christmas Day attack on their church.

NO also to the absence of God: "Where God is not glorified, where he is forgotten or even denied, there is no peace either... While there is no denying a certain misuse of religion in history, yet it is not true that denial of God would lead to peace. If God’s light is extinguished, man’s divine dignity is also extinguished. Then the human creature would cease to be God’s image, to which we must pay honour in every person, in the weak, in the stranger, in the poor".

Benedict XVI's words are extremely important observations because they go beyond platitudes or banalizations of the meaning of peace by ideological prejudices whatever their origin may be.

And of course, his references to the crisis areas in the world are illuminating: from Syria to the Holy Land, from Mali to Kenya and Nigeria...

In the face of these overwhelming realities, the Roman Catholic Pontiff remains the only voice - one might say, the only statesman - on the contemporary world scene who is able to indicate a way out.

Moreover, as he himself underscores in his Message for the next World Day of Peace: "In growing sectors of public opinion, the ideologies of radical and technocracy are spreading the conviction that economic growth should be pursued even to the detriment of the state’s social responsibilities and civil society’s networks of solidarity, together with social rights and duties. It should be remembered that these rights and duties are fundamental for the full realization of other rights and duties, starting with those which are civil and political".

In fact, there is no doubt that much of the conflict in the world is determined by situations of exploitation, but also the lack of scruples among those who only and ever aim, whatever it takes, for the maximization of profit. [I remember as a young girl in the 1960s listening to the late President Sukarno of Indonesia, denouncing at a US-sponsored ASEAN meeting in Manila, "l'exploitation de l'homme par l'homme" (he spoke in French, not English), and it was the first time I had ever come across that memorable phrase (which turns out to be the Marxist definition of capitalism, obviously incomplete but nonetheless a resounding slogan!) It certainly impressed itself on my mind. Human nature being what it is, man continually exploits other men, and not just in capitalism.]

In 2012, there was a remarkable increase in international conflicts especially in Africa, a continent where energy sources and other natural resources present under the ground represent a factor that is paradoxically and highly destabilizing for the local populations, already beset by starvation and pandemic disease.

The Pope has also made yet another call in behalf of all refugees: "In our attitude towards the homeless, towards refugees and migrants... do we really have room for God when he seeks to enter under our roof? Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself?"

Which tells us that in this time of cultural and anthropological crisis (we are not just going through a crisis of the markets) - when narrow nationalisms seem to have re-emerged even in Europe - the primacy of love can never be misunderstood or not acknowledged.



Benedict XVI at Christmas 2012:
‘The true root of violence is rejection of God’
by Massimo Introvigne
Translated from

December 27, 2012

Every year at Christmas, TV brings to our homes the words of Benedict XVI for the season. Of course, we are struck above all by the impressive setting of St. Peter’s Basilica and by the sumptuousness of the liturgy. But one must hope that many also take note of the Pope’s words, which are never just ‘ceremonial’.

Beginning with the Gospels of the Infancy of Jesus, to which he has just dedicated a slim but memorable volume, Benedict XVI also reiterated in his Christmas Eve homily, in his Urbi et Orbi message on Christmas Day, and in his Angelus reflection on December 26, a theme of growing importance in his Magisterium: denouncing the automatic exclusion of religion and God in modern ideologies and ways of thinking – a closedness to God that does not predispose to peace but to violence and war.

A violence, he notes, which is today often manifested against Christians. The Pope cited Nigeria, where anti-Church hatred was once again demonstrated on Christmas Day in the attack on a church that left at least 12 Christians dead.

In his Christmas Eve homily, the Pope took off from the ‘almost casual remark’ by the evangelist Luke that ‘there was no room at the inn’ for Mary and Joseph. In thousands of homilies around the world, this phrase from the Gospel is commented upon to refer to refugees and migrants, to poor people in general. A true interpretation, says the Pope, calling attention the next day to the refugee emergencies in Syria, Democratic Congo and Mali.

But, he adds, we cannot stop here. Why does the contemporary world find it hard to find room for the poor and for refugees? The Holy Father says that a more fundamental question is behind this: “Do we really have room for God when he seeks to enter under our roof? Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself?”

The exclusion of God from our lives begins “when we have no time for him. The faster we can move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have. And God? The question of God never seems urgent. Our time is already completely full”.

More deeply, it is not only about leading frenetic lives. The exclusion of God is ideological.

---

Does God actually have a place in our thinking? Our process of thinking is structured in such a way that he simply ought not to exist. Even if he seems to knock at the door of our thinking, he has to be explained away. If thinking is to be taken seriously, it must be structured in such a way that the “God hypothesis” becomes superfluous. There is no room for him.

---

Entire nations, 'important' ones, are organized on this ideological premise, and the Pope’s appeal on Christmas Day to the new Chinese leadership to finally accept ‘the contribution of religions to the construction of a fraternal society” was particularly significant.

Once God is excluded from one’s thoughts, he is also excluded from life itself.

---

Not even in our feelings and desires is there any room for him. We want ourselves. We want what we can seize hold of, we want happiness that is within our reach, we want our plans and purposes to succeed. We are so ‘full’ of ourselves that there is no room left for God. And that means there is no room for others either, for children, for the poor, for the stranger.

---

In Bethlehem, the angels sang – in the most precise translation, for which the Pope explains the reasons in his book on The Infancy Narratives – “Glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace among men with whom he is pleased”.

If we make ourselves open to listening to the music and words of the angels, there is a clear indication here of the tragic consequences of rejecting God. ”Linked to God’s glory on high is peace on earth among men. Where God is not glorified, where he is forgotten or even denied, there is no peace either.”

Today, this statement may sound strange to many.

---

Nowadays, though, widespread currents of thought assert the exact opposite: they say that religions, especially monotheism, are the cause of the violence and the wars in the world. If there is to be peace, humanity must first be liberated from them. Monotheism, belief in one God, is said to be arrogance, a cause of intolerance, because by its nature, with its claim to possess the sole truth, it seeks to impose itself on everyone.

---

This is a crucial theme for Benedict XVI, which he has treated in depth during his visit to the Holy Land in 2009, in the inter-religious meeting in Assisi in 2011, and most recently, in his address to the International Theological Commission on December 7, 2012.

The Pope has acknowledged, time and again, that

---

in the course of history, monotheism has served as a pretext for intolerance and violence. It is true that religion can become corrupted and hence opposed to its deepest essence, when people think they have to take God’s cause into their own hands, making God into their private property. We must be on the lookout for these distortions of the sacred.

---

Nonetheless, “it is not true that denial of God would lead to peace. If God’s light is extinguished, man’s divine dignity is also extinguished.” The history of the past century shows this.

---

The kind of arrogant violence that then arises, the way man then despises and tramples upon man: we saw this in all its cruelty in the last century.

Only if God’s light shines over man and within him, only if every single person is desired, known and loved by God is his dignity inviolable, however wretched his situation may be.

---

Only by sincerely seeking that ‘pleasure’ of God that the angels sang about can we truly build peace. It is a message that in this season, the Pope has repeatedly offered especially to those who live in the land where Jesus and the first Christians lived: to the political factions doing battle in Syria, to the governments that have emerged from the prematurely-named Arab spring which are not necessarily tolerant of their Christian minorities, to the Israelis and Palestinians who continue to be in a seemingly endless conflict.

The Pope has prayed that “Christians in the lands where our faith had its origin may keep their homes, and that Christians and Muslims may build together their countries in the peace of God”.

But to respond best to the ideologies of violence and rejection of God, inner conversion is needed. The shepherds in Bethlehem said to each other, “Transeamus” – let us go across – to see the Baby. Conversion means ‘going over’, “daring to step beyond, to make the “transition” by which we step outside our habits of thought and habits of life, across the purely material world into the real one, across to the God who in his turn has come across to us”.

“Going across” means, ultimately, to change our ‘sick’ relationship with time.

---

The shepherds made haste. Holy curiosity and holy joy impelled them. In our case, it is probably not very often that we make haste for the things of God. God does not feature among the things that require haste. The things of God can wait, we think and we say. And yet he is the most important thing, ultimately the one truly important thing.

---

Apropos: John Paul II had the advantage that at the time when the world's most urgent priority was to bring to an end the evils of Communism, there were two 'leaders of the free world'. i.e., political leaders who were in a position to do something concrete about it, who shared his resolve and his vision in Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Today, Benedict XVI stands alone in his moral authority, and in his untiring and unfazed appeals for resolving existing conflicts through good will and negotiations that can truly bring about reconciliation, justice and peace. Other world leaders, and the ever ineffectual United Nations, occasionally pay lip service to it but have been unable to bring about any meaningful moves in that direction, although it behooves them to do so.

One might well point to Benedict XVI's fellow German, Angela Merkel, as the only other leader of consequence who has a faith-based backbone, one might say, but the world sees her less as a moral authority than as the determined leader of the one European nation that has not fallen so far into the financial quicksands of the cradle-to-grave entitlement society. (Meanwhile, the current leaders of the United Kingdom and France, in other times Europe's de facto leaders, have become so abjectly subjugated to secular ideology that both are sponsoring their respective national campaigns to destroy traditional marriage, acting grastuitously and foolishly in behalf of a trend-setting but truly insignificant minority of special interests given bogus 'rights' that would, overnight, overthrow natural law and the traditional meaning of marriage that civilized societies have always held!)

Unless I have woefully missed a significant movement in Germany to legislate same-sex unions as 'marriage', it is tempting to postulate that the two world leaders of consequence today in terms of moral authority happen to be both German - a reversal of fortune from the darkest days of that nation less than a century ago.

The historical fact:
'In Vatican-II, tradition
and renewal met in embrace'
Interview with Mons. Agostino Marchetto
By Luca Caruso
Translated from

December 27, 2012

In recent months, the Vatican Publishing House published a new book by Archbishop Agostino Marchetto entitled Il Concilio ecumenico Vaticano II. Per la sua corretta ermeneutica (The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council: Towards its correct interpretation).



It is Mons. Marchetto's secondwork on the Council. The first appeared in 2005, also published by LEV, and entitled Il Concilio ecumenico Vaticano II. Contrappunto per la sua storia )The Second Vatican Council: Counterpoint to its history).

The archbishop has served in the diplomatic service of the Holy See in different countries, and then, for almost nine years, he was the secretary of the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Itinerants.

But he has always armed himself with the instruments of his 'passion' for historical research, and his books constitute a critical study of the historiography of Vatican II.

The second book puts together 28 articles he wrote for publication between 2004 and 2011, along with some unpublished interventions. This compares to the 49 articles he anthologized in 2005, which had been first published between 1990 to 2003.

In this interview with Korazym, the prelate goes over the principal themes of the second book as well as some issues with the post-Conciliar follow-up 50 years since the Council opened.

Excellency, at the time the Council opened, you were 20 years old or thereabouts. What are your own direct memories of the event?
I entered the seminary at the age of 19. I was able to follow something of Vatican II on TV but reading newspapers was regulated. However, a teacher would bring us books that were coming out about the Council, and we read them all with great interest. Each professor would then give his own version of what was taking place.

In 1964, I came to Rome and took park in a public ceremony of the Council, which left me greatly impressed at the brilliance of the ecclesiastical world. It is true that the Council was like the explosion of the Church's universal presence, and I thought that for the world at large, Vatican II was a sign of the unity of the human family. Charles de Gaulle said that the Council was not the greatest event of the century only for the Catholic Church but for the whole world. And he was not the only one who thought so.

How did the internal polarization arise between progressivists and conservationists regarding the Council?
Without having to use parliamentary jargon, I think a more neutral terminology should be used, namely, majority view versus minority view, which were both variable during the four years of the Council.

One can say that, in general, the majority was for renewal of the Church, whereas the minority was more concerned about remaining faithful to Tradition. But these are the two great tendencies in Catholicism which should collaborate and join together.

I think that in Vatican II, Tradition and renewal did embrace each other, and that, to me, was its greatness as an Ecumenical Council and the expression of a Catholic Church in communion with Rome.

Could Vatican II have developed other than the way it did?
The measure that was used to reach conclusions which everyone could accept was dialog, then putting to a vote and thereby accepting each other's views. “Audiatur et altera pars” - listen to the other side. This was not compromise, a term which has been used to dismiss the Council documents. I find it rather a sign of catholicity - that both sides should have the proper consideration for each other.

Cardinal Frings used to say, "These are not compromises but formulations on which we can all agree. The characteristic principle of Catholicism is to put things together (et et). faithfulness to Tradition in the process of renewal, which Benedict XVI calls reform and which John XXIII called aggiornamento.

But there were two extreme positions that became important for the consequences they had after the Council: on the one hand, Lefebvre and those who followed his 'strictly traditionalist' line, and those in the majority who later claimed that Paul VI's work was anti-Conciliar, that he 'buried' Vatican II, the progressivist view that dominated the immediate post-Conciliar years. [Yet he gave them the Mass they desired and designed, and started all the necessary implementation of the Vatican-II documents. Unfortunately, he also allowed all the progressivist dogs (both ideas and persons) to run loose wafting the bogus 'spirit of Vatican II' and basically define for the public what Vatican II was about! What then do they fault him with - that he wrote Humanae vitae in 1968? Nowhere does any Vatican II document say that contraception and abortion were to be suddenly part of Catholic teaching! He even allowed all the priests who suddenly thought it was their duty to get married to go ahead, marry, but to leave the priesthood. And thank God for not Protestantizing the clergy as much as the Mass had been Protestantized!]

But your own hermeneutic has always been that of reform in continuity, as Benedict XVI described it in his address to the Roman Curia in December 2005. Were you behind that? [The question amounts to a thoughtless insult to Benedict XVI, as if he were incapable of defining his position himself and needed others to do it for him!]
No. I knew nothing about that address until after it had been delivered, although my first book on Vatican II came out in June 2005. One must remember that in Rapporto sulla Fede (The Ratzinger Report, 1984), Cardinal Ratzinger was already advocating that line. [I must bring up once again my pet observation about this interview book with Vittorio Messori. Georg Weigel credits it, to a large measure, for having spurred John Paul II to call a Special Synodal Assembly in 1985 to mark the 20th anniversary of the end of Vatican II, and to consolidate its teachings for proper implementation in the Church.]

In your new book, you identify three main lines of interpreting the Council...
Benedict XVI speaks of "reform in continuity of the one subject Church". as the Pope himself says that at different levels, there can be continuity and discontinuity. Although I am a bishop, I don't write as a bishop, but as a historian who uses the historico-critical method, and I have always held, since 1990, that this hermeneutic of continuity is confirmed in an analysis of the historical facts of the Council.

Historical facts tell me that in Vatican II, this putting together of positions took place, the desire for renewal while maintaining continuity with Tradition - this 'et-et' - not to destroy but to reinforce by reform.

For some time, there have been claims that Vatican II represented a rupture in the Church, not just among the extremists of those who were the majority at the Council and their successors, but also from the other extreme, among the diehard traditionalists.

The first group says "The Council has happened, let us just go on", as if the Council were a permanent thing, that Vatican II had sowed some seeds and that it only remains to harvest its fruits. [That seems to be a gross and inexplicable mis-statement of the progressivist view, which considers that Vatican II created a 'new Church' altogether which must not have any of the old in it! That is the rupture they mean. I frankly do not understand all these interviews that appear in the Catholic media, when no one seems to question any statement made by the interviewee, no matter how startlingly off as the above statement was! The interviewer certainly has the duty to have the interviewee clarify himself when necessary, as in this case.]

The traditionalists say instead that Vatican II did represent a rupture and that the Church should simply go back to pre-1965. These positions are not pretty. They are both willfully blind - their convictions prevent them from seeing what can be seen.

Nonetheless, Vatican II was an event that has left no one indifferent...
And that is rightfully so, because it was a great event. It is a beacon for the Church, or as the Pope says, a compass. But in order that the compass works, one must ensure certain conditions are met regarding its correct history and its correct interpretation.

Could you illustrate to us these conditions?
I always identify three 'readings' or 'scannings', if you will, to which I add adjectives. First, the history must be factual, truthful, and not ideological (in which the interpretation is not objective but depends on the person doing the interpretation, on his preconceptions and prejudices, and who would seek to bend the 'facts' to show what he personally thinks the Council should have done. We still do not have that kind of factual history, principally because many of the initial historiographers of Vatican II used the notes and papers of selected Council participants as their primary sources, rather than the Council documents themselves.

The second scanning has to do with the hermeneutic, or interpretation, which must be based on factual history, not selected views.

And the third stage is the reception - how the Council is perceived and accepted in the life of the Church. The Council documents must be properly received and perceived in order to take effect on the life of the Church. So the reception must be adequate and appropriate, as well as faithful to the Council itself. [It was this reception that concerned John Paul II most when he called the 1085 Synodal Assembly on the 20th anniversary of Vatican II. One must note that the most concrete outcome of that Synodal Assembly was the new Catechism of the Catholic Church drawn up by a committee headed by Cardinal Ratzinger, and incorporating the facts of Tradition and prior Magisterium with the teachings of Vatican II. One could consider it the primary instrument and guide for the reception of Vatican II by the universal Church.]

But the reception phase is not another Council! It is not intended to be a period of 'creativity' that is almost without bearing on the Council itself.

So in order to do justice to Vatican II, we need a correct interpretation of historical facts in order to achieve the right reception, in which we have a long way to go.

And what are the risks inherent in this?
I think a fascination with the new plays a large role. For many, he Council amounts only to whatever new it said, losing sight of that fusion of Tradition and renewal, resulting in a partial and erroneous view of what was a complex event.

In the Council, Tradition and renewal were brought together, but afterwards, everyone took from it what he wanted, and it was no longer the Council! I believe that is the post-Conciliar tragedy.

But we cannot accuse the Council, as some do, of having been ambiguous in some respects. The Council represents the extraordinary Magisterium of the Pope in communion with all the bishops of the world. Post-Council is not the Council. After the Council, the ordinary Magisterium continues, that we must accept and respect. But let us not confuse the teaching of the Council [represented in its 16 documents] and the extra-Magisterial opinions and interpretations that are made of the Council documents afterwards.

What was the influence of 1968?
After the Council, there was a crisis in accepting the teaching of the Church, a crisis in organized laity, a theological crisis, a crisis in the priesthood and in religious life. This crises in the Church coincided with the crisis of Western society, when all its traditional values were turned upside down.

What was the relationship between these two crises - the ecclesial and the secular? The 1960 counterculture movement influenced the atmosphere of contestation within the Church. The countercultural hostility to institutions and rejection of authority found its counterpart within the Church and her institutions.

But I would say that dissent in the Church came earlier - there were aspects that predated the crisis of 1968 and the post-Conciliar crisis in the Church. [Once again, the interviewer misses the obvious follow-up: What were these precedents??? Were they ever openly manifested??? I can't think of one. The movement for liturgical reform that went back to the 1920s? Did it ever rise to open dissent when priests refused to say the Mass as it was, or devised their own Masses?]

Last November, I posted Cardinal Raffaele Farina's presentation of Mons. Marchetto's second book
freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=8527207&p=364
- in which the Cardinal makes a remarkable and original distinction between aggiornamento, which is the process of bringing the Church 'up to date' with the world that was undertaken by Vatican II, and the subsequent reforms resulting from such aggiornamento. It leads me to reflecting on what a more media-savvy Church might have done right after Vatican II to disseminate the Vatican II documents systematically, with 'implementing norms' for bishops and priests, and explanatory texts for the faithful, instead of leaving the field free for all the opponents of the Church to present their versi0n(s) of Vatican II as they pleased... And so, the Church has been in post-Conciliar damage control mode all these decades...

Meanwhile, it seems 'scandalous' that 50 years since Vatican=II opened, there has yet to be a history of the Council to counteract the 5-volume progressivist version from the Bologna school that has been around since the 1970s. The closest we have to one would be Joseph Ratzinger's collected writings on Vatican II published in his COLLECTED WRITINGS in time for this 50th anniversary.

Friday, December 28, Octave of Christmas
FEAST OF THE HOLY INNOCENTS, Martyrs

The massacre of the innocents on the orders of Herod is one of those Biblical scenes that inspired the best painters. The sampling shown here are, from left, by Giotto, Ghirlandaio, and Rubens. In Hispanic countries, the Dia de Lod Ninos Inocentes is the precursor of the American April Fools' Day, when everyone is expected to pull a joke on unsuspecting 'innocents'.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/122812.cfm

No events announced for the Holy Father today.

The Vatican Press Office has not yet posted any bulletin on the following item, but here is a report from Vatican Radio's English service:

Benedict XVI greets new
Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch

December 28, 2012

At a time when the Middle East is so unstable and prone to violence, “it is increasingly urgent that the disciples of Christ offer an authentic witness of their unity, so that the world may believe the Gospel message of love, peace and reconciliation,” Pope Benedict XVI wrote in a message to greet the new Greek-Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, John X Yazigi.

The new Patriarch was elected on December 17 by his church's Holy Synod, meeting at the monastery of Our Lady of Balamand, north of Beirut. He succeeds Patriarch Ignatius IV Hazim, who died December 5 at the age of 92 years.

“We have a responsibility,” says the Pope, “to continue together along our path to show in a more visible way the spiritual reality of communion which, although still incomplete, already unites us.”

Benedict XVI expressed his hope that the relationship between Greek-Orthodox Patriarchate and the Catholic Church might continue to develop through forms of fruitful cooperation and ongoing efforts to resolve the issues that still divide the two communities.

He especially recommended active and constructive participation in the work of the Commission Joint International Yheological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches.

The Pope assured the new Patriarch of his prayers, and asked Christ "to bring healing to those who are victims of violence in the Middle East and to inspire acts of peace}.




Benedict XVI denounces the 'gender' fallacy
and defends family and marriage as civilized
societies have sustained them for 2000 years
Translated from

December 28, 2012

It is not the first time that Benedict XVI cites a rabbi in his speeches or carries on a dialog with a rabbi in writing. The first case was Jacob Neusner, a rabbi from New York [and more importantly, author of the book A rabbi speaks with Jesus, cited admiringly in the first volume of Benedict XVI's JESUS OF NAZARETH], whom two years ago, the Pope received at the Vatican with his wife, with whom he had a conversation as with an old friend.

[To those who may be reading about Neusner for the first time, his acquaintance with Joseph Ratzinger began when he asked him back in 1993 to write a comment about the Jesus book, which started an exchange of letters and books over the years (Neusner is also the most prolific contemporary author-commentator on Judaism today, having written over 900 books). They first met in person when Benedict XVI hosted an inter-faith encounter in Washington DC during his visit to the USA in April 2005. Their meeting at the Vatican came in January 2010, shortly after Benedict XVI visited the Great Synagogue of Rome for the first time.]

Benedict XVI's latest citation of a rabbi is from the Grand Rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, in connection with a paper he wrote on the threat to families today in Western societies [by the very notion of considering a union between two persons of the same sex as equivalent to traditional marriage] and its consequences for civilization.

In one of his major addresses for the year, which is always much anticipated = his Christmas address to the Roman Curia - Benedict XVI focused his reflection on two main themes, the first being the current cultural battle in defense of the family, supporting in this case a recent paper by Rabbi Bernheim.

In this way, he articulated three major points himself:
- The problem of the family is, to begin with, one that is accessible to all and comprehensible to anyone who exercises human reason, but the Judaeo-Christian tradition has illuminated and shaped its formulation in a way that cannot be surpassed;
- The Church does not wish to carry on this battle by herself, and seeks, wherever possible, interlocutors and friends who can help her sustain the essential truth about the family;
- And lastly, the French government's push to legalize same-sex 'marriage' is particularly alarming because of the cultural influence that the country still wields. Moreover, the plan by socialist President Francois Hollande has so far resulted in an unusual tension between the Church in France and state secularism.

But why would Benedict XVI have tackled this issue at all in an address that is always the object of major scrutiny? He explains it with a brief statement: "Man himself is at stake in the battle for the family".

This is not about defending a series of traditional values, isolated from the fabric of life, as if it was merely an obsession to get out of the way. The Pope wished to indicate what he believes to be the heart of the crisis in our culture: who is man, what is he, and how can he live right.

It is a question that is clearly reflected in the systematic campaign to dismantle the institutions of marriage and the family that has been underway by powerful cultural and political lobbies in Western society since the 1960s.

To begin with, Benedict XVI brilliantly and sharply tackles the relationship between freedom and ties - the increasing inability of our culture to accept stable ties as an asset that allows self-realization.

The Pope asks whether a bond that is meant to last for life is in conflict with freedom at all? He himself offers the answer:

---

Man’s refusal to make any commitment – which is becoming increasingly widespread as a result of a false understanding of freedom and self-realization, as well as the desire to escape suffering – means that man remains closed in on himself and keeps his 'I' ultimately for himself, without really rising above it.

Yet only in self-giving does man find himself, and only by opening himself to the other, to others, to children, to the family, only by letting himself be changed through suffering, does he discover the breadth of his humanity.

When such commitment is repudiated, the key figures of human existence likewise vanish: father, mother, child – essential elements of the experience of being human are lost.

---

But the statement that the mass media inevitably underscored was the Pope's reference to the 'ideology of gender', about which he fully echoes the statements made by Rabbi Bernheim.

In this so-called philosophy, sex is not an original 'given' in nature that man must accept, to live and and be as fully as he was created man or woman. Rather, one's natural sex is dismissed in favor of 'gender', in which every human being decides on his own whether he wants to play a male or a female.

Benedict XVI calls this thinking 'fallacy' along with the cultural revolution it carries with it. Man denies that he has a nature pre-constituted by the sex with which he is born, and would presume to create his own nature entirely through his will and without reference to anything else.

Reprising a theme he had stated in his address to the German Parliament, the Pope pointed out that "The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned".

It is obvious that the Pope has chosen to get into the fire - in the crater of the volcano, as it were - which no one else dares because to do so would be to turn into ashes!

If the duality of man and woman as created by God is rejected, he says, then neither does the family as a reality pre-established by natural law and "from being a subject of rights, the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain"

Basically, we are witnessing the worst cultural challenge posed in 20 centuries to the first pages of Genesis. The relationship between the philosophy of gender and the pro-active atheism in various centers of Western power is evident to the Pope.

---

When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself.

---

And as a luminous prophetic corollary to close that part of his address: "It becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man".

These days, it has become much clearer that the task of opening the way for God in today's world is intimately bound up to the cause of human dignity.

[Restan ought to devote as much attention to Benedict XVI's discourse on what constitutes authentic inter-religious dialog, in the same address to the Curia.

Few Catholic commentators, who write about inter-religious dialog as if they were experts, fail to grasp the elementary fact that, by its nature, dialog between and among different religions with widely divergent bases cannot be theological. Unlike ecumenical dialog - dialog among Christians, who all share their belief in Christ.

Inter-religious dialog is at best inter-cultural, but it can lead to common and concerted action for the common good on the bases of universal values that are shared by all cultures and religions. Other than seeking to ensure that there is freedom of religion (or no religion) for everyone, that is the only practical purpose of inter-religious dialog, and not a meaningless exercise in 'kumbaya fellowship'.]

December 27, 2012

Somehow I missed seeing this yesterday on the Feast of St. John the Evangelist....

The farewell discourses of Jesus, as the Gospel of John presents them to us, hover in a singular way between time and eternity, between the present hour of the Passion and the new presence of Jesus that is already dawning, because the Passion itself is at the same time his "glorification" as well.

On the one hand, the darkness of the betrayal, of the denial, of the abandonment of Jesus to the ultimate ignominy of the Cross weighs upon these discourses; in them, on the other hand, it seems that all of this has already been overcome and resolved into the glory that is to come.

Thus Jesus describes his Passion as a going away that leads to a new and fuller coming – as a state of being-on-the-way with which the disciples are already acquainted. [1] Thereupon Thomas, surprised, asks the question, "Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?"

Jesus answers with a statement that has become one of the central texts of Christology: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me."

This revelation of the Lord, however, elicits a new question now - or rather, a request, which this time is made by Philip: "Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied."

Again Jesus replies with a revelatory word, which leads from another perspective into the very depths of his self-consciousness, into the very depths of the Church's faith in Christ: "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (Jn 14:2-9).

The primordial human longing to see God had taken, in the Old Testament, the form of "seeking the face of God". The disciples of Jesus are men who are seeking God's face. That is why they joined up with Jesus and followed after him.

Now Philip lays this longing before the Lord and receives a surprising answer, in which the novelty of the New Testament, the new thing that is coming through Christ, shines as though in crystallized form: Yes, you can see God. Whoever sees Christ sees him.

This answer, which characterizes Christianity as a religion of fulfillment, as a religion of the divine presence, nevertheless immediately evokes a new question. "Already and not yet" has been called the fundamental attitude of Christian living; what this means becomes evident precisely in this passage.

For the next question is now (for all of post-apostolic Christianity, at least): How can you see Christ and see him in such a way that you see the Father at the same time?

This abiding question is placed in the Gospel of John, not in the discourses in the Cenacle, but rather in the Palm Sunday account. There it is related that some Greeks, who had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship, came to Philip–that is, to the disciple who in the Cenacle would voice the request to see the Father.

These Greeks present their request to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, an extensively Hellenized part of the Holy Land: "Sir, we wish to see Jesus" (Jn 12:20-21). It is the request of the pagan world, but it is also the request of the Christian faithful of all times, our request: We want to see Jesus. How can that happen?

Jesus'S response to this request, which was conveyed to the Lord by Philip together with Andrew, is mysterious, like most of the answers that Jesus gives in the fourth Gospel to the great questions of mankind that are posed to him.

It is not recorded whether there was an actual encounter between Jesus and those Greeks. Jesus'S answer, instead, opens up a horizon that is completely unexpected at this point. For Jesus sees in this request an indication that the moment of his glorification has come.

He suggests in greater detail in the following words how this glorification will come about: "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (Jn 12:24).

The glorification occurs in the Passion. This is what will produce "much fruit"–which is, we might add, the Church of the Gentiles, the encounter between Christ and the Greeks, who stand for the peoples of the world in general.

Jesus's answer transcends the moment and reaches far into the future: Indeed, the Greeks shall see me, and not only these men who have come now to Philip, but the entire world o f the Greeks. They shall see me, yes, but not in my earthly, historical life, "according to the flesh" (cf. 2 Cor 5:16 [Douay Rheims]);they will see me by and through the Passion. By and through it I am coming, and I will no longer come merely in one single geographic locality, but I will come over all geographical boundaries into the farthest reaches of the world, which wants to see the Father.

Jesus announces his coming from the perspective of his Resurrection, his coming in the power of the Holy Spirit, and so he proclaims a new way of seeing that occurs in faith. The Passion is not thereby left behind as something in the past. It is, rather, the place from which and in which alone he can be seen.

Jesus expands the parable of the dying grain of wheat that is fruitful only in death into the proper and fundamental pattern for human existence: "He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If any one serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there shall my servant be also" (Jn 12:25-26).

The seeing occurs in following after,.Following Christ as his disciple is a life lived at the place where Jesus stands, and this place is the Passion. In it, and nowhere else, is his glory present.

What does this demonstrate? The concept of seeing has acquired an unexpected dynamic. Seeing happens through a manner of living that we call following after. Seeing occurs by entering into the Passion of Jesus. There we see, and in him we see the Father also. From this perspective the words of the prophet quoted at the end of the Passion narrative of John attain their full greatness: "They shall look on him whom they have pierced" (Jn 19:37; cf. Zech 12:10).[2]

Seeing Jesus, in whom we see the Father at the same time, is a thoroughly existential act. From the verbal perspective we must add that the concept of the "face of Christ" is not found in these Johannine texts.

Yet they are implicitly connected with a central theme of the Old Testament, concerning an essential attitude of piety that is described in a series of texts as "seeking the face of God".

Despite the difference in terminology, there is a profound continuity between the Johannine "looking on Christ" and the Old Testament "being on the way" toward looking upon the face of God.

In Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians the verbal connection is also to be found, when he writes about the glory of God that appears in the face of Christ (2 Cor 4:6).

Both John and Paul refer us to the Old Testament. The New Testament texts about seeing God in Christ are deeply rooted in the piety of Israel; by and through it, they extend it through the entire breadth of the history of religion or, perhaps to put it better: They draw the obscure longing of religious history upward to Christ and thereby guide it toward his response.

If we want to understand the New Testament theology of the face of Christ, we must look back into the Old Testament. Only in this way can it be understood in all its depth.

Endnotes:

[1] Romano Guardini has described this interpretation of the farewell discourses very beautifully in: The Lord: Reflections on the Person and the Life of Jesus Christ, trans. Elinor Castendyk Briefs (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1954), pp. 374-80.

[2] For the interpretation of John 19:37, see also Rudolf Schnackenburg, Das Johannesevangeluin 3 (Herder, 1975), pp. 343-45 [English trans., The Gospel according to St. John (New York: Crossroad, 1982)].

At this point, I would dearly love to have an idea of whether any Church Father, any Doctor of the Church, has written as much commentary on the Gospels as Joseph Ratzinger has. His major commentary consists, of course, of the three volumes of JESUS OF NAZARETH, but we get them abundantly and regularly as well in his weekly catecheses and Angelus reflections. Therefore, his Gospel commentaries range throughout the liturgical year.

Out of curiosity, I went back to the Vatican Archives records of the Angelus messages by the Popes since Paul VI (for some reason, there is nothing to be found on Pius XII's Angelus messages). Rather to my surprise, I found out how Benedict XVI actually innovated on the Angelus messages compared to his predecessors.

In addition, I sampled Angelus messages from John Paul II in 1978, the first year of his Pontificate, from 1985, from 1990, from 2000 and from 2004, the last year when he was able to deliver them himself (Mons. Sandri read them later, when the Pope was unable to) - and they were pretty much generic pastoral announcements of whatever the major Church event of the week was, or liturgical feast, if it was an important one; an expression of good wishes for all the suffering (including victims of specific events or disasters), the sick and the elderly; and a praise and iinvocation of the Virgin Mary. It was the same thing with Paul VI and the few that are available on line of John XXIII.

It was Benedict XVI who began to treat the Angelus messages as a mini-homily on the Gospel of the day, while also paying tribute whenever possible to major saints whose feast days are celebrated in the days preceding and following a particular Angelus, thereby serving also as a supplemental catechesis. (For this reason, his average texts are longer than the main Angelus texts of his predecessors.)

His pedagogical style and skill are abundantly evident in how he is able to initiate the faithful listener, whatever his level of Biblical or theological awareness may be (sometimes almost non-existent as mine is), into some measure of intimacy with the Gospel of the day, in much the same way as he presents Jesus through the Gospel of John above. No one cites Scriptures more - or more illustratively and helpfully - than he does. Certainly, no one bothered earlier to go even into the significance and etymology of the terms used in the Gospel, whether in the original Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic, to their Latin translations.

These mini-homilies are no 'throw-away' bonuses - they are as carefully crafted and dense with significance on many levels as his regular homilies and his catecheses. Benedict XVI is obviously a natural catechist who misses no opportunity to make his every statement (and action) a living catechesis. This is a blessing we cannot take for granted. DEO GRATIAS, and AD MULTOS ANNOS, SANCTE PATER!

Also a belated post: this new shout-out for Anne Kissane Engelhart and Amy Welborn for their children's books on Benedict XVI....

The joy of painting
the Pope and the saints

December 26, 2012

Ann Kissane Engelhart (www.annkissaneengelhart.com) is a watercolorist based in Long Island whose paintings have been featured in the Empire State Building, St. Francis Hospital, the DeMatties Center, Brooklyn College and Wagner College and in private collections. She has won numerous awards, she has exhibited in galleries on Long Island and New York, and her illustrations have been published in a variety of magazines and periodicals.

She illustrated the children's book, Friendship With Jesus: Pope Benedict XVI talks to Children on Their First Holy Communion, which featured Benedict XVI's answers to questions put to him by children in Rome; the book was edited by popular author and blogger Amy Welborn.

Ann and Amy recently collaborated again recently in the creation of Be Saints! An Invitation from Pope Benedict XVI. She recently spoke with Catholic World Report about her artwork and illustrating two books about the Holy Father.

CWR: Your first book with Amy Welborn was Friendship With Jesus: Pope Benedict XVI talks to Children on Their First Holy Communion, which featured Benedict XVI's answers to questions put to him by children in Rome. How did you and Amy decide upon the focus of this second book? What was the creative process like for you and Amy Welborn, who edited the book?
In both instances we were inspired to create picture books after hearing the Pope speak to young people. We felt that it was important to find a way for more children to hear these wise words of the Holy Father.

When Pope Benedict visited England two years ago, he made a trip to St. Mary’s College in London where he met with young students. His beautiful and encouraging address was broadcast to every Catholic school throughout Great Britain. Of course when the Pope speaks to the people of one country, the message is intended for the whole world. We were confident that his lesson, inviting them to be the saints of the 21st century, would resonate with all Catholic children.

The English publisher, The Catholic Truth Society, was happy to make the book available after the great success of the Pope’s visit. We are delighted that Ignatius Press/ Magnificat decided to collaborate with CTS once again, making the book available in the United States and Canada.

Amy and I have developed a friendship after working on the two books, so we informally send ideas back and forth, mostly through emails. We had a similar vision for how to communicate the Pope’s important message, so it was a joy to work together again.

You’ve produced many pieces of art for collections and public displays. What is different about creating artwork for a children’s book? Are there unique compositional challenges involved in illustrating a book?
Every painting, even a simple still-life or landscape tells a story to some degree, but there is a challenge in creating a dozen or so paintings in which the elements of design, line, shape, color, texture, etc., develop in a coherent manner. They should have continuity while maintaining enough variety to keep each page transition interesting.

In an independent piece, the composition is concerned with directing the eye to the focal point and creating an illusion of space. A book illustration has the added challenge of requiring room for the text and arranging the images to accommodate the centerfold, while preserving a well-balanced design.

What is striking to you about how Pope Benedict XVI communicates with children?
When Pope Benedict meets with children and young adults his energy always appears to be renewed and he seems genuinely delighted to be with them. He respects them. With the wisdom and love of a gentle grandfather, he challenges them. He doesn’t talk down to them but rather speaks to them on their level.

His talks to children are so beautifully constructed that you sense he recognizes how important it is that the Pope communicate directly to young Catholics...the future saints.

Be Saints! contains quotes from several different saints. Why did you include quotes from saints (and blesseds) in addition to the Holy Father’s remarks? Do you have a favorite saint or quote?
Amy and I thought that the quotes would compliment Pope Benedict’s remarks. It would be helpful for the children to receive the wisdom of people who have been recognized as having achieved the extraordinary holiness that the Holy Father encourages. We included saints with whom they could identify, like the young Pier Giorgio Frassati, familiar people such as Mother Teresa and John Paul II, as well as great Englishmen like Blessed John Henry Newman and St. Thomas More since the setting for the Pope’s meeting was Great Britain.

One of the wonderful things about the saints is that there is a saint for everyone, in every phase of life. I have great admiration for Beato Fra Angelico, the patron of artists, for his deep faith and for the humility with which he used his renowned talent as a great painter of the Renaissance.

I am always touched by the simple but profound message in Mother Theresa’s quote that is included in this book, If you have a sick or lonely person at home, be there. Maybe just to hold a hand, maybe just to give a smile, that is the greatest, the most beautiful work.

You were able to give a copy of the first book, in person, to the Pope. What about this second book? Has he seen it?
As a matter of fact, I do know that he has seen it! The German journalist Peter Seewald had a copy of the book. This past spring he wrote me to let me know that he would soon be seeing Msgr. Ganswein, the private secretary of the Holy Father, and would like to give him a copy of Be Saints! After the meeting he wrote to let me know that he gave it to Msgr. Ganswein and that he was delighted with the book and that he would certainly give it to the Pope.

A few weeks later I received a beautiful letter from Pope Benedict via the Secretary of State. He said that he was grateful for our efforts to bring his words of encouragement to a wider audience of children and their families.

Watercolor is a fascinating medium. On one hand, it is often the first type of painting experienced by children; on the other hand, it can be very difficult to master. What are the unique challenges to painting in watercolor? Why do you prefer it over, say, acrylics or oils?
To be honest, it isn’t that I prefer it over oil paint, a medium that I love and I primarily worked in as an art student. Teachers and gallery owners recognized that I had an affinity for watercolor and encouraged me to concentrate my work in the medium. Eventually I began to teach watercolor classes myself.

Many people struggle with the fact that unlike oil or acrylic painting, watercolor is unforgiving due to the difficulty in making changes or corrections. There is something exciting about working in a medium that is so unpredictable. I try to strike a balance between allowing the paint colors to blend and spread freely through the water into the cotton fibers of the paper while simultaneously attempting to control it enough to describe something accurately.

This can be seen in the detailed painting of St. Mary’s College on the endpaper of the book and in the final painting of Pope Benedict waving to the children. In both of these, the background is loosely applied paint, which is effortlessly dropped onto a wet surface, contrasted by a carefully rendered portrait of the Pope and complex Gothic-Revival architecture.

Do you and Amy plan on further collaborations? How can people find out more about your work?
Yes, we are currently working on a Christmas-themed storybook and have plans for future projects. You can see examples of my portraits, landscapes and still-life paintings as well as my other children’s books and illustrations at my website, www.annkissaneengelhart.com .

One hopes the title of this article is not just wishful thinking or whistling to keep up one's spirits. The in-your-face aggressiveness of LGBT PR and their arch-supporters in the MSM - and among liberal politicians - is not just obnoxious but frightening and alarming. Also, the hopeful signs one may deduce from American society today do not necessarily apply to, say, UK society or French society who are about to see SSM in their immediate future....

Why “gay marriage” is not inevitable
by Luis Tellez
President, Witherspoon Institute

December 27, 2012

Election Day in the USA was a drubbing for marriage. The ballot initiatives to protect marriage lost by over 4% in Maine, Minnesota, Washington State, and Maryland. Those who support same-sex “marriage” reportedly spent over $33 million, while those who defend marriage spent just over $10 million.

Many friends have said that same-sex marriage is inevitable. It is not. I have confidence that fence-sitters will enter the fray in support of traditional marriage. As we continue to debate this issue, three important forces can shift the outcome in favor of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Consider first, public opinion; second, the methods and the message of LGBT activists; and third, reality.

Public opinion gives marriage a fighting chance

The American public offers differing levels of assent to same-sex marriage, depending on how the survey questions are worded. Psychologically, it matters how questions are asked.

Consider these facts:

1. Data from the New Family Structures Study (NFSS) shows 24% of the young-adult population on the fence, saying they’re “not sure” when asked whether “it should be legal for gays and lesbians to marry in America.” There’s more support than antagonism, but not a majority on either side, given the nearly one-quarter who remain on the sidelines.

2. A national post-election survey conducted on Election Day by The Polling Company, Inc., showed that 60% of American voters agree that “marriage is between one man and one woman,” while only 34% disagree. Another poll two months earlier showed that 57% were in agreement.

3. After their Election Day victories, same-sex marriage advocates stated that they will continue to prioritize expanding the legal recognition of same-sex relationships as marriages through legislatures and the courts, not through public vote.

This is a continuation of their past policy that avoided putting the issue up for a direct citizen vote (the ballot initiatives in Maryland, Washington, and Minnesota were initiated by supporters of traditional marriage; only Maine was their choice to repeal our side’s ballot measure of 2009). This indicates their lack of confidence in their ability to get enough votes.

4. Six New York state senators were ousted from office after they abandoned their constituents to vote in favor of same-sex marriage. Five of those senators lost their re-election bids this year, in large part due to their change of position on marriage; the sixth retired rather than face re-election.

5. “Third Day,” a Democratic organization’s own survey revealed that on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the most in favor, 26% labeled themselves 9-10 in favor of same-sex marriage, compared to 30% who said they were 0-1; 44% were somewhere in the middle. Only 32% said they would be glad if same-sex couples could marry; 37% said that would not be acceptable.

Despite large sums spent — as happened this November when gay activists spent a whopping $33 million — the notion that marriage is between a man and a woman continues to hold sway; and, no matter how hard activists try, it seems impossible to strip it away from the hearts of a very substantial portion of people. It is the reality of common sense deeply embedded in the human heart.

Methods and message

Efforts by the LGBT movement to make school curricula more sympathetic to the gay agenda continue to raise concerns among parents. So much so that leaders of the LGBT movement have had to adjust.

In a November 7 article in Slate, titled “How Marriage Finally Won at the Polls,” Nathaniel Frank explains how the coalition of LGBT activists working to pass gay marriage in Maine and Maryland revised their message strategy to counter the “Princess” ad prepared by Frank Schubert. Here is what Nathaniel Frank writes:

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Thalia Zepatos of 'Freedom To Marry', who oversees the coalition’s messaging research, describes another revelation from the data. Schubert’s misleading “princess” ads implied that schools could usurp the role of parents in teaching pro-gay values, but that was wrong. As Zepatos and her team pored over the research, they watched conversations in which voters spoke among themselves and kept circling back to the same insight: Parents are the parents, and they teach their kids values at home. The challenge, Zepatos and her colleagues determined, was to reassure voters about this conclusion. Parents knew they had the control, but the Schubert ads —wh ich in the past have killed a pro-gay lead in the polls at the last minute —made them anxious about losing it.

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LGBT activists have had to go out of their way to reassure parents they are in charge of teaching values to their children, given the powerful evidence provided by Schubert, and experienced by many parents.

A 2011 Research Report issued by the Democratic think tank Third Way, and used to develop the 2012 campaign to win the state ballot initiatives, stated among its six key findings that: “It is crucial to include reaffirmation of religious liberty protections as a significant part of supporters’ message framework.” And as the public is aware, it is increasingly being proclaimed by politicians working to pass gay marriage that religious liberty protections are being provided.

But this is misleading. As Jane Robbins and Emmett McGroarty show in their Public Discourse article “Mandating Our Religious Freedom,” the current Progressive movement, of which LGBT activists are a core constituency, is clearly moving in the opposite direction. And in a more recent Public Discourse article “A War on Religion?” Bruce Hausknecht provides examples contrary to the message LGBT leaders are now using to win.

Reality: Distinguishing what is myth from what is true

The Left now has the White House (for four more years), in addition to the universities, Hollywood, large portions of the media, and high-tech industry.

But can this reliance on the power of the elite institutions be sustained in the long run? Perhaps, if the majority of the people come to accept that to flourish one is to be allowed to do whatever one wants regarding sexual practices.

I submit that the majority of people do not grasp that this is the message of the LGBT movement, and as they do grasp it, they will shift to the view that our sexuality has boundaries and is ordained toward something greater than whatever we want.

Don’t take it from me; take it from Dan Savage as quoted by Mark Oppenheimer’s New York Times article, “Married with Infidelities”:

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Savage believes monogamy is right for many couples. But he believes that our discourse about it, and about sexuality more generally, is dishonest. Some people need more than one partner, he writes, just as some people need flirting, others need to be whipped, others need lovers of both sexes. We can’t help our urges, and we should not lie to our partners about them. In some marriages, talking honestly about our needs will forestall or obviate affairs; in other marriages, the conversation may lead to an affair, but with permission. In both cases, honesty is the best policy.

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Social science research shows us, and a growing body of journalistic reporting reveals, that gay men are not interested in permanent monogamous relationships. Lesbians are more apt to be monogamous, but less apt to remain together long-term.

One myth that LGBT activists push is that marriage is what most homosexual people want. Will the provision of marriage cause gay and lesbian Americans to enter lasting and stable relationships en masse? Unlikely.

Another myth that the activists push is the “no differences” thesis: the claim that there are no differences in outcomes for children parented by heterosexual couples or homosexual couples.

The sonogram helped people see the unborn child in the womb and realize it is alive; it made a powerful case for life. Similarly, we have to expose the myths of the gay marriage movement. Several events of 2012 have brought us closer to that goal.

First, in a peer-reviewed research paper published in the prestigious journal Social Science Research, titled “Same-sex parenting and children’s outcomes: A closer examination of the American psychological association’s brief on lesbian and gay parenting,” Professor Loren Marks of Louisiana State University’s School of Human Ecology reviews the 59 studies referenced in the 2005 American Psychological Association brief that supported the “no differences” thesis. Marks concludes:

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To restate, not one of the 59 studies referenced in the 2005 APA Brief compares a large, random, representative sample of lesbian or gay parents and their children with a large, random, representative sample of married parents and their children. The available data, which are drawn primarily from small convenience samples, are insufficient to support a strong generalizable claim either way. Such a statement would not be grounded in science.

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Second, Mark Regnerus’s New Family Structures Study (NFSS) uses the second-largest nationally representative sample (ever) to measure a host of outcomes in which the adult children of intact biological families fare better than any other combination, including children raised by a mother or a father who has been in a gay or a lesbian relationship.

Its results also show something striking and unexpected: only two out of 15,000 young Americans screened for the survey reported spending their entire childhood with two lesbian parents; none reported the same with two gay fathers. Children, of course, don’t fare as well when there is a lack of stability in the home.

Third, scores of people who read the Regnerus study were inspired to reveal even more about the gay subculture; and, yes, by their accounts, the Regnerus study depicts reality far better than shows like Modern Family and The New Normal. Surprised?

Most of these people will remain nameless, rather than submit themselves to unwanted hostility. But expect more of them to step up as witnesses to the lies that undergird the movement for same-sex marriage. See, for example, Robert Lopez’s essay “Growing Up With Two Moms: The Untold Children’s View.”

Fourth, legal cases are mounting against the discrimination, harassment, and loss of jobs for people who do not support same-sex marriage. A new growth industry is the pro bono legal associations to protect freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and more recently the newly created Freedom of Conscience Fund.

It is very laudable that trained professionals are stepping up to defend civil liberties; one may hope this will continue to awaken the conscience of the public.

Ultimately, the future of marriage will not be decided by our likes or our dislikes. Human suffering will periodically remind us that losing a healthy marriage culture produces all kinds of practical costs and penalties.

These are measured by those social pathologies that impose a great weight on our society, such as depression, addiction, violence, and illness, as well as missed educational and economic opportunities.

However you slice it, the intact biological family continues to be the best “Department of Health, Education and Welfare” when it comes to raising the next generation.

Marriage is worth fighting for, even if we lose. Because remember, LGBT activists will lose too as they bring us all down. And that is a sobering thought.

This essay first appeared November 26, 2012 on Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute, and is reprinted with permission.

P.S. I am sorry I have been unable to provide excerpts so far from Rabbi Gilles Bernheim's much-cited essay, which is 25 pages long on PDF and has not been translated to English. Its title is "Mariage homosexuel, homoparentalité et adoption: Ce que l’on oublie de dire" (Homosexual marriage, homoparenting and adoption: What one forgets to say). Perhaps an English translation will come out before I find time to translate some of it.

I'm not a fan of Fr. Martin, whose liberal views on social issues are as 'abhorrent' to an orthodox Catholic like me as Jesuit liberal views can be,
but this essay on St. Joseph is admirable...

Joseph's hidden life
is so eloquent
By James Martin SJ


This essay is adapted from the chapter “Hidden Lives,” from My Life with the Saints (Loyola Press) by James Martin SJ


St. Joseph and Jesus in the workshop, by contemporary British artist Pietro Annigoni

Like many saints whose lineage is traced back to the earliest days of the Church, very little is known about St Joseph, other than the few lines written about him in the gospels. He was of the line of King David, and was engaged to a young woman from Nazareth. Mary was found, quite unexpectedly, to be pregnant. But Joseph, “being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace”, as the Gospel of Matthew would have it, planned to dissolve his betrothal quietly. And so, even before Jesus is born, Joseph’s tender compassion and forgiving heart was on full display.

But God had other plans. As he did for another troubled Joseph – the patriarch of the book of Genesis – God used a dream to reveal his saving plans for the carpenter from Nazareth. In the dream, an angel let Joseph in on Mary’s secret. “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” That same angel, after the birth of Mary’s son, advised him to take the child and his mother to Egypt, to flee the murderous Herod. And Joseph listened.

A few more stories about the boy Jesus: he is lost on a journey and found teaching in the Temple – and we are into the hidden life. All the Gospel of Luke says about those 18 years is this: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and years, and in divine and human favour.”

This is Joseph’s time. A time spent caring for his son – or to put it more precisely, his “foster son” – and teaching him the trade of carpentry. (The Greek word used in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew is tekton, which can be variously translated as “craftsman” or “woodworker”, but is traditionally rendered as “carpenter”.) In Joseph’s workshop in Nazareth, Jesus would have learned about the raw materials for his craft: which wood was best suited for chairs and tables, which worked best for yokes, for ploughs. An experienced Joseph would have taught his apprentice the right way to drive a nail with a hammer, the proper way to drill a clean and deep hole in a plank, the correct way to level a ledge or lintel.

Undoubtedly, Joseph would have passed on to Jesus the values required to become a good carpenter. You need patience (for waiting until the olive wood is dry and ready), judgment (for ensuring that your plumb line is straight), honesty (for charging people a fair price) and persistence (for sanding until the tabletop is smooth to the touch). Alongside his teacher, a young Jesus laboured and built, contributing all the while to the common good of Nazareth and the surrounding towns. And is it too difficult to imagine that the skills Jesus learned from his teacher – patience, judgment, honesty and persistence – would serve him well in his later ministry? Joseph helped to fashion Jesus into what the theologian John Haughey SJ called “the instrument most needed for the salvation of the world”.

As a father, Joseph would have been one of his son’s primary teachers in his religious faith as well. Introducing him to the great men and women of the scriptures, teaching him the Hebrew prayers, preparing him for his bar mitzvah, encouraging his boy to listen to the rabbis and religious leaders of the town. And talking to him about God. Children and adolescents are usually bursting with questions about God. It is probable that Joseph was the first one to whom Jesus went with his questions. So Jesus’s understanding of God the Father, his Father, may have been shaped not only by Joseph’s own life, but by Joseph’s answers to his questions. Joseph’s faith was one of the foundations of Jesus’s faith. But almost as soon as Jesus started his ministry, Joseph disappears, at least in the Gospel narratives. What happened to the guardian of Jesus? Tradition holds that by the time that Jesus began his began preaching, Joseph had already died. Significantly, Joseph is not listed among the guests at the wedding feast at Cana, which marked the beginning of the public ministry of Jesus. But did he die before his son had reached adulthood? How would Jesus have mourned his father’s death?

At an art exhibit at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York City a few years ago, I came upon a portrait entitled The Death of Joseph, a subject rarely tackled by artists.


Death of Joseph, Francisco Goya, 1787, Oil on canvas.

In the huge portrait by Francisco Goya an ailing Joseph lies in bed. Standing beside his bed is a youthful looking Jesus, perhaps 16 or 17 years old, beardless, staring intently at Joseph. Sitting by the bed is Mary. It was an unusual picture of the Holy Family, and one that captures the sadness of the early death of Joseph.

Ironically, Joseph is traditionally invoked by Catholics as the patron of a “happy death”. In his book Soul Brothers, Richard Rohr asks: “How could it not have been happy? He knew that he had listened to the dreams that God had given him. He let those dreams take him to far-off Egypt, just like the first Joseph, and he let them bring him to a new hometown, where he surely had to start all over for a third time.” Fair enough. But it could not have been a happy death for Jesus or for Mary. How they must have wished Joseph could have seen and heard about his foster son’s work among the people of Israel. How they must have wished for the counsel of their father and husband during the confusing and painful times of Jesus’s public ministry. And how Mary must have longed for his shoulder to support her during the Crucifixion.

Whenever the death of Joseph occurred, he is not mentioned beyond those few early passages in Scripture. After that, it is his life that now becomes hidden.

It is this hiddenness of Joseph’s life that speaks to me. Appearing only briefly in the gospels, given just a few words to speak, Joseph leads a life of quiet service to God, a life that remains almost totally unknown to us. It was, necessarily, a life of humility, and a life I saw mirrored in many lives while I worked in Nairobi, with the Jesuit Refugee Service, as part of my Jesuit training.

In my time there I witnessed that humility in many local Kenyans and with the refugees with whom I worked. As part of my job I frequently visited many of the refugees in their small homes – hovels, really – in the slums of Nairobi.

One day I visited a woman to whom we had given a small sewing machine to help with her business of mending her neighbour’s clothes. She lived in a single dark room crammed with her few possessions: an old mattress on which slept her four children, a small hissing kerosene stove, a plastic pail of water, a cardboard box of clothes.

Who is more hidden than the refugee, secreted away in her small hovel in a sprawling slum, huddled over her little sewing machine, trying to earn a living for her and her family? When the refugees used to visit me at our office in Nairobi it sometimes seemed that, shorn of their connection to their country, bereft of friends, lacking money and facing the bleakest economic prospects, they were utterly submerged beneath a sea of misery, hidden from the sight of the world.

The hidden life is shared by many people, even in the more affluent parts of the world. The middle-aged, unmarried woman who dutifully cares for her aged mother, but whose sacrifices and devotion remain largely hidden from her neighbours. The loving parents of the autistic boy who will care for him for his entire life, and whose worries and heartaches remain unknown to their friends. The single mother in the inner city working two jobs to provide an education for her children, and whose tiring night shifts are still, after many years, a secret to her daytime co-workers. Countless hidden lives of love and service for others. The day-to-day pouring out of oneself (like a “libation”, as St Paul says) for God.

And it astonishes me how many of these people embrace their hidden lives of service with joy. During the first few months of my Jesuit novitiate, I worked at Youville Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, run by the Grey Nuns, a small Catholic order, which tended to the seriously ill.

Those who lived there suffered from a variety of illnesses: cancer, dementia, degenerative muscular diseases. Many were surprisingly young. For example, young men who had suffered brain injuries resulting from car or motorcycle accidents.

One mother used to come by daily to visit her 20-year-old son, to feed him, read to him and sit by his bed. Here was a life entirely hidden from the world, in a lonely hospital that few knew about, even in the area. (“Youville? Where’s that?” I was asked by even long-time Bostonians.) One winter’s afternoon I came in to find the mother combing her son’s hair. “Doesn’t he look handsome today?” she said with a radiant smile.

This kind of hiddenness is attractive because it is so far from the goals of my selfish desires. In a culture that prizes the bold gesture, the public proclamation, the newsworthy article, I find myself consistently drawn to achieving things so that other people can see them.

Doing a good work seems insufficient: others need to know that I have done this good work! In this way I find my appetite for fame in contradiction to what Jesus taught: “But when you give alms,” he says in the Gospel of Matthew, “do not let your left hand know what your right one is doing, so that you alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret, will repay you” (6:3-4).

The burning desire for fame is, of course, a manifestation of pride, a pride that seeks not for the hiddenness of the desert or the humility of the unseen act, but the adulation of others. Ultimately it is a destructive mindset, since one can never receive enough acclaim to satisfy the craving for attention or fame or notoriety. Inexorably, it leads to despair and so must be resisted.

But while necessary, the path to humility is a difficult one to tread. In the Dutch priest Henri Nouwen’s felicitous phrase, one strives to seek the freedom to be “hidden from the world, but visible to God”.

I wonder if the more hidden the act, the more it is valued by God. I am always reminded of the story of a master sculptor in one of the great medieval cathedrals of France. The old man spent hours and hours carving the back of a statue of Mary, lovingly finishing the intricate curves and folds of her gown. But, someone asked the sculptor, what’s the point? That statue will be placed in a dark niche against the wall, where certainly no one will ever see the
back of it.

God will see it, he answered. I long for that kind of holiness. But I am far from it.

Serendipitously, in looking back at Benedict XVI's Angelus mini-homilies earlier today, I came across his reflection for the fourth Sunday of Advent on December 18, 2005, in the first year of his Pontificate, which was precisely on "the silence of Joseph". It bears translation (I had not at the time begun translating the Pope's texts routinely)...

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The silence of Joseph
by Benedict XVI
Angelus, December 18, 2005

In the last days of Advent, the liturgy invites us to contemplate in a special way the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph, who lived with unique intensity the time of waiting and preparation for the birth of Jesus.

Today I wish to focus on the figure of St. Joseph. In today's Gospel St. Luke presents the Virgin Mary as "a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David" (Lk 1,27).

But it is the evangelist Matthew who highlights the putative father of Jesus, underscoring that through him, the Baby was legally [part of the Davidic descendancy, thus fulfilling the Scriptures, in which the Messiah was prophesied as 'a son of David'.

But the role of Joseph cannot certainly be reduced to this legal aspect. He is a model of the 'just man' (Mt 1,19) who, in perfect accord with his wife, welcomes the Son of God made man and watches over his human growth.

That is why, in the days preceding Christmas, it is nire than ever the right time to establish some sort of spiritual conversation with St. Joseph, so that he may help us live in fullness this great mstery of the faith.

The beloved John Paul II, who was very devoted to St. Joseph [his baptismal name was Karol Josef], left us a wonderful meditation dedicated to him in the Apostolic Exhortation Redemptoris custos (Guardian of the Redeemer).

Among the many aspects that he brings to light, he dedicates particular emphasis to the silence of St. Joseph. His is a silence permeated by contemplation of the mystery of God, in an attitude of total openness to the divine will.

In other words, the silence of St. Joseph does not manifest an interior emptiness, but on the contrary, the fullness of the faith that he carried in his heart and which guided his every thought and action.

A silence, thanks to which Joseph, as one with Mary, safeguarded the Word of God, that he had learned through Sacred Scriptures, comparing it continually with the events in the life of Christ. A silence wo en of constant prayer, prayer of benediction of the Lord, of adoration of his divine wiil and of entrusting hismelf without reservation to Providence.

One would not exaggerate to say that it was from his 'father' Joseph that Jesus learned - on the human level - that robust interiority which is a premise for authentic justice, that 'superior justice' that he would one day teach to his disciples (cfr Mt 5, 20).

Let us allow ourselves to be 'infected' by the silence of St. Joseph! It is so lacking in this world which is often too noisy, which is not favorable to recollection and listening to the voice of God. In this time of preparation for Christmas, let us cultivate interior recollection so as to receive and keep Jesus in our lives.

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Compostela cathedral inaugurates
a memorial to the only two pilgrim Popes
so far to the tomb of the Apostle James
by Segundo Leonardo Perez Lopez
Canon and Archivist-Librarian
Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela
Translated from the 12/27-12/28/12 issue of


On November 9, 1982, Blessed John Paul II gave one of the most emblematic addresses of his Pontificate in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) - an address that came to be known as the 'European discourse' which became a reference point for re-thinking the present and the future of Europe, its origins, its consciousness of being a cultural space, and its religious aspects.

On that day in Compostela, the Pope called on Europe to find herself anew and acknowledge her roots. This idea, reaffirmed constantly in the discourses of the present Pope, was highlighted by him forcefully and enthusiastically, on his own visit to Compostela on November 6, 2010, when he asked that the voice of God may resound anew in the heart of Europe.

The Municipal Council of Compostela decided to commemorate both events by commissioning Galician sculptor Jose Morales to execute a bronze relief of the two Popes - the only Popes so far who have made a pilgrimage to the tomb of the Apostle James (Santiago).

The contemporary work is the latest adornment to the Cathedral of Compostela which harmonizes very well with works from past centuries. The inscription for the memorial reads:

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SUMMI ROMANI PONTIFICES AD SEPULCRUM SANCTI IACOBI PEREGRINI

BENEDICTUS XVI - B.IOANNES PAULUS II

6-XI-2010 - 9-XI-1982 - 19-VIII-1989

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(Supreme Roman Pontiffs who came to the tomb of St. James as pilgrims
Benedict XVI - Blessed John Paul II
November 6, 2010 - November 9, 1982 - August 19, 1989)

The text clearly underscores the pilgrim nature of the papal trips (the third date represents John Paul II's visit in 1989 to Compostela).

The pilgrimage to Compostela - which was the third most popular Catholic pilgrimage site in the Middle Ages after Jerusalem and Rome - has enjoyed an unexpected surge in popularity in recent years, and there is no doubt that the papal visits have helped revive this Jacobean devotion.

John Paul II said that pilgrimage is a sign for the new millennium, especially for the younger generations, and he saw it as a privileged space for promoting the New Evangelization.

Cardinal Angelo Sodano said at the European Meeting f Youth held in Compostela on August 8, 1999: "The Church and Europe are two realities that are intimately united in their being and destiny. Together they have walked hand in hand for centuries and are permanently marked by the same history. Their encounter has enriched them reciprocally with values that are not just the soul of European civilization but also form part of all mankind's patrimony. Because of this, Europe cannot abandon Christianity as her traveling companion in her journey towards the future, just as no traveler can abandon his reasons to live and to move forward without falling into any tragic crisis".

The pilgrim, at any moment along his way, is doing so for the interior growth of his own 'I', because with his finitude and his radical uncertainty, man rarely finds himself at peace with himself, he does not enjoy full 'possession' of himself through self=knowledge and the free and sovereign action of his being.

And so he needs to journey towards the center of his personal 'I', towards the discovery that he has limitations, calling forth personal potential that are goals he must reach, as he perceives an internal truth that is superior to himself.

So man is called to walk back towards himself, a traveler headed for his own personal unification, ordering all the baggage of his intimate self and his personal experiences in accordance with external reality in order to achieve the transcendence of authentic faith in Jesus Christ, shared in the Eucharist.

I wish to conclude with the illuminating words of John Paul II, who said: "We have been chosen to go forward, but it is not us who have chosen the goal for the journey but the one who has ordered us to move ahead, the God of the Covenant".

For the diocesan community of Compostela, and for Galicia, the Camino de Santiago (The Way of St. James) is a gift and a responsibility requiring witness and offering human values, the beauty of the world created by God, and the supernatural values of the Christian tradition.

From the observatory of the pilgrimage goal, from Compostela, millennial goal of Christian hopes, place of encounter with an original witness of the Gospel of Christ, let us take on a new challenge in welcoming and caring for all the pilgrims who come from all parts of the world in ever growing numbers.

This is the testimonial and the message that the last two Popes have urged on us. So it is recorded on the new bronze commemorative relief of their visits to the tomb of St. James.

Saturday, December 29, Octave of Christmas

ST. THOMAS BECKET (England, 1118-1170), Lord Chancellor of England, Archbishop of Canterbury, Martyr
Modern literature, theater and cinema have made Becket's story familiar to the general public, and his dramatic 'murder in the cathedral' of Canterbury was long a subject for painters, and famously, T.S. Eliot's play. He was a gifted man whom Henry II chose to be his Lord Chancellor, and to whom he sent his son and heir to live with and be raised, in the custom of the day. But the King and his Chancellor soon came into conflict over the rights and privileges of the Church, and Becket was assassinated by followers of the king. He was canonized barely three years after he died. After Henry VIII set up his own Church in the early 16th century, Becket's tomb in Canterbury Cathedral was among those desecrated in the anti-Catholic frenzy that ensured, and even his bones were destroyed.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/122912.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

For some reason, the Vatican has issued no bulletin today about an event for the Holy Father today that has been
previously announced and highly publicized. He will lead a prayer service at St. Peter's Square this afternoon
for some 40,000 European youth gathered in Rome for the 35th annual encounter sponsored by the Taize community.

Pope condoles with Cardinal Re
on the death of his father
Translated from

December 29, 2012

The Vatican has released the text of a telegram sent by the Holy Father to Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re,former Prefect of Bishops, on the death of his father.

---

TO HIS EMINENCE
THE MOST REVEREND CARDINAL GIOVANNI BATTISTA RE
EMERITUS PREFECT OF THE CONGREGATION FOR BISHOPS

Having learned of the death of your beloved father, Signor Matteo, I offer you my heartfelt condolences for this severe loss to you and your family, and I assure you of my spiritual closeness at this time of sorrow, as well as of gratitude to God for all the good that he granted to your late lamented father in his earthly journey of over a hundred years.

As I raise to the Lord fervent prayers that he may receive him to eternal joy, I invoke for all who mourn him the light of faith and hope in Christ, and send a special Apostolic Blessing.

BENEDICTUS PP. XVI

---

In Urbi et Orbi message
on Christmas, Benedict XVI addresses
the new Chinese leaders directly

December 29, 2012

While in the Message for the recently-published World Day of Peace, the Pope examined themes of an anthropological and social nature, related to the underpinning of the building of peace, in the Message for Christmas Day he directly addressed ongoing conflicts, starting with the tragic situation in Syria, which has been bloodied by endless violence.

But he also sent best wishes explicitly to the new leaders of the Chinese People’s Republic, in view of their “high task”. Perhaps this was unexpected, but it shows how realistically and consciously the Pope and Church observe the path of mankind.

China has the largest population on earth – a fifth of all mankind – and it is taking on an ever-growing role in the world’s balance of power.

The new leadership should not look at itself in the usual perspective of power, but in that of peace and solidarity, “the benefit of that noble People and of the whole world”.

And also, even for the Chinest people, religious freedom is a prerequisite “for the building of a fraternal society”, as the Pope never tires of reasserting.

Religions must not be viewed with suspicion, as instruments of division or external interference, but as positive spiritual forces which are also willing to contribute to the common good.

Rome has always looked to the Catholic community in China in this spirit, as has been reiterated constantly and clearly in the Pope’s messages addressed to them. Will the new year see progress? We hope so.

The King of Peace comes for all, populations large and small. If peace is sought, the small should not be afraid of the great. If not, it is natural to be afraid.

The Pope’s greetings are expressed only in 65 languages, but we would like them to be announced in all the thousands of languages of the world, because we are one human family and we have one Father.

Pope Benedict XVI addresses
European youth in Taize assembly







VATICAN CITY, Dec. 29 (AFP) - Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday led a prayer vigil for an ecumenical gathering of around 40,000 young people in Rome's St Peter's Square. Joining them were some 10,000 Romans who are hosting the young pilgrims during their six-day meeting in the Italian capital.

The young Christians -- Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox -- came to Rome as part of a European meeting of the Taize community, an ecumenical monastic order in Taize in eastern France.

"To meet 40,000 young people from across Europe is extraordinary," said a 26-year-old participant from the Paris region. Attendants were between 16 and 35 years old. A great many of the participants come from Poland.

The gathering was part of a six-day meeting in Rome which ends on Wednesday. Previous gatherings have taken place in Rome in 1980, 1982 and 1987.

The gathering is described as 'an annual pilgrimage of trust on earth', and this year's theme is "to uncover the wellsprings of trust in God in today’s world".

In his address to them, Benedict XVI called on the young people of Europe to be bearers of Christian unity.




Vatican Radio's English service has provided a translation of the plurilingual tezt. [The Vatican Press Office has yet to post anything on the event.]

---

Thank you, dear Brother Alois, for your warm words, full of affection.

Dear young people, dear pilgrims of trust, welcome to Rome!
You have come in great numbers, from all over Europe and from other continents, to pray at the tombs of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul. In fact, in this city both shed their blood for Christ. The faith that motivated these two great apostles of Christ is the same that compelled you to start out on this journey.

During the year that is about to begin, you are proposing to uncover the wellsprings of trust in God in order to live it in your everyday life. It gladdens me that in this way, you have embraced the aims of the Year of Faith which began in October.

This is the fourth European meeting to be held in Rome. On this occasion, I would like to repeat the words my predecessor, John Paul II, said during your third Meeting in Rome: "The Pope feels deeply committed together with you all on this pilgrimage of trust on earth ... I too am called to be a pilgrim of trust in the name of Christ". (30 December 1987).

In English, he said:
Just over seventy years ago, Brother Roger established the Taizé Community. Thousands of young people from all over the world continue to go there to seek meaning for their lives. The Brothers welcome them to share in their prayer and provide them with an opportunity to experience a personal relationship with God. It was to support these young people on their journey to Christ that Brother Roger had the idea of starting a “pilgrimage of trust on earth”.

A tireless witness to the Gospel of peace and reconciliation, ardently committed to an ecumenism of holiness, Brother Roger encouraged all those who passed through Taizé to become seekers of communion. We should listen in our hearts to his spiritually lived ecumenism, and let ourselves be guided by his witness towards an ecumenism which is truly interiorized and spiritualized.

Following his example, may all of you be bearers of this message of unity. I assure you of the irrevocable commitment of the Catholic Church to continue seeking the paths of reconciliation leading to the visible unity of Christians. And so this evening I greet with special affection those among you who are Orthodox or Protestants.

In French:
Today, Christ is asking you the same question he asked his disciples, "Who am I to you?".

Peter, at whose tomb we are gathered at this moment, replied: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Mt 16:15-16). His whole life became a concrete answer to this question.

Christ also wants to receive a response from each of you born of a deep inner freedom and not of compulsion or fear. In responding to that question your life will find its strongest meaning. The text of the Letter of St. John that we have just heard helps us understand with great simplicity how to respond: "We should believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another just as he commanded us." (3:23). Have faith and love God and others! What could be more exciting? What could be more beautiful?

During these days in Rome, let this Yes to Christ grow in your hearts, above all by taking advantage of the long moments of silence that are an integral part of your community prayers, after having listened to the Word of God.

This Word, says the Second Letter of Peter, is "like a lamp shining in a dark place," which you do well to be attentive to "until day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts" (1,19).

You have to understand: if the morning star must arise in your hearts, it is because it is not always present there. Sometimes the evil and suffering of the innocent create doubt and confusion in you. And saying Yes to Christ can become difficult. But these doubts do not make you non-believers! Jesus did not reject the man in the Gospel who shouted: "I do believe, help my unbelief!" (Mk 9:24).

In German:
So that you do not lose faith during this battle, God never leaves you alone and isolated. He gives us all the joy and comfort of the communion of the Church.

During your stay in Rome, thanks to the generous hospitality of many parishes and religious communities, you are undergoing a new experience of being Church.

On your return home, to your various countries, I invite you to discover that God is making you all co-responsible for His Church, in all the variety of vocations. This communion which is the Body of Christ needs you and you all have a place in it.

Starting with your gifts, from what is specific to each of you, the Holy Spirit forms and breathes life into this mystery of communion which is the Church, in order to convey the Good News of the Gospel to the world today.

In Polish:
Together with silence, song has an important place in your community prayers. In these days the songs of Taizé fill the basilicas of Rome.

Song is a support and incomparable expression of prayer. Singing to Christ, you open yourselves to the mystery of His hope. Do not be afraid to precede the dawn in praise of God, you will not be disappointed.

Dear young friends, Christ does not remove you from the world. He sends you there where His light is missing, so that you may bring it to others. Yes, you are all called to be small lights to those around you.

With your attention to a more equitable distribution of the goods of the earth, with your commitment to justice and a new human solidarity, you will help those around you to better understand how the Gospel leads us to God and at the same time to others. So, with your faith, you will contribute to uncovering the wellsprings of trust on earth.

Be full of hope. God bless you, your family and friends!

---

Vatican Radio also provided the text of Brother Alois's greeting to the Holy Father:

---

Most Holy Father,

Today a significant milestone in our “pilgrimage of trust on earth” is taking place. We have come from all over Europe and from other continents too, from various Church affiliations. What unites us is stronger than what divides us: one baptism and the same Word of God unite us.
We have come here this evening to celebrate this unity around you, a unity which is real even if it is not yet fully realized. It is when we turn together towards Christ that it grows deeper.

Brother Roger left a legacy to our community — his desire to communicate the Gospel to young people in particular. He was deeply aware that the divisions between Christians are a barrier to handing on the faith. He opened paths of reconciliation that we have not yet finished exploring.

Inspired by his testimony, there are very many people who want to anticipate reconciliation by their lives, to live already as people who are reconciled. Reconciled Christians can become witnesses to peace and communion, bearers of a new solidarity among human beings.

Seeking a personal relationship with God is the basis of this approach. This ecumenism of prayer does not encourage a facile tolerance. It promotes a mutual listening which is demanding, and a true dialogue.

Praying here tonight, we cannot forget that the last letter written by Brother Roger, just before his violent death, was addressed to you, Holy Father, to tell you that our community wanted to walk in communion with you. Nor can we forget how, after his tragic death, your support was invaluable to encourage us to move forward. So I would like to express once again the deep affection of our hearts for your person and for your ministry.

Finally, I would like to bring the witness to hope of the many young Africans with whom we met a month ago at Kigali, Rwanda. They came from 35 countries, including Congo, North Kivu, to undertake a pilgrimage of reconciliation and peace. The great vitality of these young Christians is a promise for the future of the Church.

These young Africans wanted us to bring back a sign of their hope, sorghum seeds, so that they could grow in Europe. Can I take the liberty, Holy Father, of giving you, from them, a small traditional Rwandan basket called “agaseke” with some of these seeds of hope from Africa? Perhaps they could be planted in the Vatican gardens and blossom there?

---

Brother Roger Schuetz, the Swiss-born Protestant pastor who founded Taize, was stabbed to death by a deranged Romanian woman during a prayer service in Taize in August 2005. Long before his death, he took the unprecedented step of entering progressively into a full communion with the Catholic Church without a “conversion” that would imply a break with his origins. In 1980, during a European Meeting in Rome, he said in Saint Peter’s Basilica in the presence of Pope John Paul II: “I have found my own identity as a Christian by reconciling within myself the faith of my origins with the mystery of the Catholic faith, without breaking fellowship with anyone.” He received Communion every morning at the Catholic Mass in Taizé, and he received the sacrament from both the current and former Pope, as a visible sign of what he called "the ministry of unity exercised by the bishop of Rome."

At the end of the year, the Italian newsweekly TEMPI asks a number of Italians in various sectors of society to contribute an article for a TE DEUM issue, in which the writers describe what there was about the year about to end for which they give thanks, and their hopes for better things. Among those who contributed to this issue were two bishops, Cardinal Angelo Scola of Milan, and Mons. Luigi Negri, former bishop of San Marino-Montefeltro who was named earlier this month to be the next Archbishop of Ferrara (and will take possession in February 2013).

Year's end should focus
on beginning and rebirth
by Cardinal Angelo Scola
Archbishop of Milan
Translated from

December 27, 2012


It is paradoxical but at the end of the year, the word that most strikes me is 'beginning'. Reading Romano Guardini's precious booklet entitled L'inizio (The beginning), I learned years ago that the only angle from which one can look at the past is the teaching we can draw from it in the present in order to build the future.

Year's end, therefore, cannot be, above all, an occasion to draw up a balance sheet but rather to draw stimulus from favorable or unfavorable circumstances, from easy or difficult relationships, in view of that attitude that is a measure of man's greatness: the willingness to change, or better yet, to let oneself be changed.

That is why I cannot think of a Te Deum that does not start off from the Incarnation of God who became a Baby. The word 'beginning' is constitutively linked to the word 'birth'. We are in fact celebrating the birth of God as a Baby, looking on this not as a phenomenon of the past but as the start of an great adventure, which leads to the Passion, death and glorious Resurrection of Jesus who gave direction and sense to human history.

With the birth of the Redeemer, a new beginning is made possible = a personal rebirth, as well as a communitarian rebirth.

All this is very pertinent to the situation we are living through, be it in the Church or in the world's and Europe's social reality, and in a special way, in Italy, which will be called on in the next few months to many delicate transitions.

I cannot ignore the need to correct a number of distorted objectives that we have seen this year in the various fields of human activity - economy, finance, politics, culture, to cite just the most obvious.

But what is the condition to be able to make corrections? First of all, it is I who must change - in the words of a gospel song I sang as a child - and in the second place, I must change now, because if I don't do it now and put it off for the future, I will never change.

What does this mean concretely? It means that our relationship with the Lord must become the motive for acting, it is the substance of my faith. Benedict XVI has said that the reform of the Church must be a reform of the faith, or it will not happen.

Even as a citizen, I must decide to assume personally the civic virtues that are necessary for the construction of a society that is truly capable of civic friendship.

I believe that in the tradition of our people, a people of baptized persons, to refer to the theological virtues - faith, hope and love - and even to the cardinal virtues - prudence, justice, strength and temperance - provides the entire range of stable attitudes necessary for a person's wellbeing, conditions that are fundamental for the social renewal to which we all aspire.

How can we be helped to take this step? By reinforcing the ties that we feel most convincing for us. And then, looking at the vital spaces of the reality of our daily lives, in the church as well as in civilian society in which men and women already live their faith and are doing all they can for others.

We must continually educate ourselves to the love that liberates through the practice of the double virtue of charity and justice, and promote a free and liberating confrontation among various visions of reality, without prejudices, more capable of listening, and properly appreciating the great practical benefit of being together, acting together, avoiding all partisanship, communicating and proposing freely everything that we consider essential, good and decisive in order to live as we are expected to do.

My wish for the coming year therefore is that the word 'beginning' be conjoined to the word 'birth', in order to give rise to a consistent 'I', namely, an I-in-relationship.


Let us thank God first of all
for the presence of Benedict XVI
by Mons. Luigi Negri
Archbishop-designate for Ferrara
(formerly Bishop of San Marino-Montefeltro)
Translated from

December 27, 2012

The Te Deum for a year that has passed is like a profound dialog between our hearts and God. Contemplating him evokes those lines about his grandeurs, about new roads opening and new paths.

Our first thanks to God must be for the presence pf Benedict XVI, this gentle and most strong giant who sustains the journey of the Church, instilling her with light and energy and that novelty that makes the Christian a 'great' man.

Every day we learn about the greatness of this Pope. I had the opportunity of being by his side during the recent Bishops'
Synodal assembly when his presence, witness and teaching guaranteed us all the action of the Holy Spirit during those days.

His towering witness becomes an offering for the Year of Faith when it is possible, by following the Pope, to return to the faith as the first Christians experienced it: as an encounter with Jesus Christ, Son of God, who comes to us in the mystery of his Church, and who involves us in a journey of discipleship that brings us closer to a total change of life, "the wonder of a renewed life", of which Blessed John Paul II is an image for our time.

The greatness of the Christian life to which Benedict XVI is supreme witness confronts a Church that on many occasions has demonstrated a weakness that is not primarily moral, even if such weakness does exist, as the media do not tire of pointing out.

But the fundamental weakness of the Church comes from the refusal of many who consciously refuse to reason and live according to a culture that is born from faith. Jacques Maritain said after the Second Vatican Council that the danger for the Church was that she would kneel before the world.

We are weak because the foundation of our acting and knowing is no longer the faith but the criteria of the world. This loss of a humble and sure Christian culture is also the reason for the lack of that courage such as that which has been demonstrated to us in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, by those who could say, like Asia Bibi, "If you condemn me because I am Christian, then I am happy".

We must pray a lot so that our faith becomes our culture, a concept of life and reality which becomes the impetus for communication and mission to our brothers. The weakness of the Church corresponds to the inconsistency that characterizes our society: consumerist individualism, a lower opinion of ourselves and others if we cannot be measured by what we have, and the tendency to always try to achieve the maximum 'well-being' possible.

All this makes society a battlefield, a place of violence that we are becoming accustomed to without being fully aware of it. It is a violence that goes from the break-up of the family to that of society itself, from suicides and homicides as solutions to problems, to the manipulation of life from the moment of conception.

This world, in which the Church of God is called on to be present with a 'new humanity', is undergoing a tragedy of cosmic proportions, whose socio-political manifestations are merely a counterpoint to the vastness of the whole tragedy that the peoples of the world are living through.

In this, the Te Deum is a submissive prayer of certainty that God will give us his protection and make us live up to our faith and capable of a renewed human responsibility.

It's not a time to criticize, even if it is quibbling, but Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI has spoiled me for the writing of other ecclesiastics. I have been feeling particularly 'short-changed' by Cardinal Scola, who has the reputation of a great scholar (but not necessarily of a writer), Maybe I just have not read the right things written by him, but I do not recall ever catching my breath in admiration of something he said or the way he said it. Perhaps the essay above best illustrates what I mean, especially since it sounds as if he wrote it himself and did not just ask an aide to write a draft that he then approved... Mons. Negri, on the other hand, is someone who seems always good for an original apercu, as he is in the essay above, in what he says about Benedict XVI and the witness he provides for the faith. But he has a tendency to meander into the generic, at which point his thought seems to become muddled and his language becomes plodding...

In fact, there are only two Italian bishops whose speeches and writings I have found to be consistently commendable, both in content and in expression - the past and present presidents of the Italian bishops' conference: Cardinal Camillo Ruini, a great theologian, and Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, whom Benedict XVI had the wisdom and foresight to pluck seemingly out of nowhere to name CEI president and successor to Ruini (when Cardinal Bertone was pushing a relative lightweight - does anyone remember Mos. Benigno Papa - whom he thought he might be able to boss around). I think the twice-yearly opening and closing remarks that both Ruini and Bagnasco have had to make to the bi-annual sessions of the CEI and/or its Permanent Council are models of pastoral clarity and directness, worthy of disciples of Ratzinger.


About the Te Deum
The Te Deum, also sometimes called the Ambrosian Hymn because if its association with St. Ambrose, is a traditional hymn of joy and thanksgiving. First attributed to Sts. Ambrose, Augustine, or Hilary, it is now accredited to Nicetas, Bishop of Remesiana (4th century). It is used at the conclusion of the Office of the Readings for the Liturgy of the Hours on Sundays outside Lent, daily during the Octaves of Christmas and Easter, and on Solemnities and Feast Days. The petitions at the end were added at a later time and are optional. A partial indulgence is granted to the faithful who recite it in thanksgiving and a plenary indulgence is granted if the hymn is recited (or sung) publicly on the last day of the year, as it will be when Pope Benedict XVI celebrates Vespers tomorrow.