BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI

How MSM - and even Vatican Radio -
continue to exalt Pope Francis
at the expense of Benedict XVI

Some in the Catholic media have trumpeted Pope Francis's statements this week about wealth and the global economy - in snippets from his morning homilies and in his address to the new ambassadors from four or five countries who presented their credentials to him yesterday (Thursday) morning. This blog entry by John Thavis is typical:
www.johnthavis.com/the-popes-financial-gospel-and-the-vatican-bank#.UZa...

Of course, in all the hoopla, not one bothered to mention that all this was the burden - in explicit detail - of Benedict XVI's third encyclical Caritas in veritate, which, at the time it was published, got far more attention in the secular media than the Catholic media ever deigned to give it.

Nor, for that matter, does anyone mention Benedict's truly revolutionary decision to legislate financial transparency for all Vatican offices and opening the Vatican's finances to the scrutiny of an international enforcement organization. From what they write, one would think IOR was still as it was in the 1980s when it was involved in the Banco Ambrosiano collapse and all the sordid consequences thereof.

In the same general spirit these days of ignoring almost everything positive in Benedict XVI's Pontificate, to dredge up only the negatives that the MSM can summon, even Vatican Radio is into the act, trumpeting Pope Francis's meeting with new ecclesial communities on Sunday as the first such event since John Paul II. (Let me go back and research all the special audiences given by Benedict XVI for the new movements.) Nor does it mention that the Sunday meeting is an event of the Year of Faith that was programmed when Benedict XVI was still Pope, not something added on because there is now a new Pope.

I can understand other 'Catholic' media conforming to the MSM herd mentality about Pope Francis the perfect Pope, the instant saint, the world's all-time most popular celebrity, the miracle worker whose very election alone has already cleared the entire mess left behind by Benedict the incompetent bumbler who had not a single virtue to commend him! Because that's the way of the world, to take the path of least resistance and therefore the most 'popular', most-trod and most comfortable path within the exhilarating cocoon of demagoguery. And if you're not with them, you deserve to be an outcast.

But for a major Vatican communications outlet like Vatican Radio to toe that line is simply unconscionable - and stupid! At least, L'Osservatore Romano makes occasional positive mention of Benedict XVI - when it reports about a symposium or conference about his 'thought', for instance, or about a new book about his thought from the Vatican publishing house, as it did on May 15, when it dedicated almost a full page to publicizing the Italian edition (published by the Vatican publishing house) of Vol. XII in Joseph Ratzinger's Collected Writings - the volume dedicated to his thoughts about the priesthood and priests.
/
I will post translations of the articles ASAP.

Benedict XVI's letter praising
'Communio' on its 40th anniversary
by Michelangelo Nasca

May 16, 2013

The international theological journal Communio has published a letter dated early 2012, in which Benedict XVI praises the journal’s work, forty years after it was founded.

“Although I left the journal a long time ago and I am just a reader, I have felt closely tied to it since the day it was founded and will do so for the rest of my life,” Ratzinger wrote, in a letter to the editor of the German edition of Communio International Catholic Review (the full name of the publication), Professor Jan-Heiner Tück, on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the launch of the Italian and German editions. Communio was established by Swiss theologian, H.U. von Balthasar, in 1972.

[I don't understand why the reporter attributes the founding of the journal to von Balthasar alone, when it has always been known that he did so along with his colleagues Henri de Lubac and Joseph Ratzinger after they broke ranks with Concilium, the theological journal established by the theologians who had taken part as experts in Vatican II. From Wikipedia's entry on Communio:

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Communio is a federation of theological journals, founded in 1972 by Joseph Ratzinger, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, Walter Kasper, Marc Ouellet, Louis Bouyer and others. Communio, now published in fifteen editions (German, English, Spanish and many others), has become one of the most important journals of Catholic thought. The journals are independently edited, but also publish translations of each other's articles... (Concilium) was established in 1965 and is published five times a year. The journal was established by Anton van den Boogaard, Paul Brand, Yves Congar, Hans Küng, Johann Baptist Metz, Karl Rahner, and Edward Schillebeeckx. It is published in six languages: Croatian, English, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Concilium aims at promoting theological discussion in the "spirit of Vatican II" from which it was born. It is a Catholic journal, but is open to other Christian theological traditions and non-Christian faiths.]

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“We are now republishing this letter, as a sign of gratitude to the Pope who gave up the Petrine ministry, in an act of extreme love for the Church…” writes the editor of Communio’s Italian edition, Fr. Aldino Cazzago.

In his letter, Ratzinger recalls his friendship with Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lbac, Loui Bouyer, Marie-Joseph Le Guillou and other theologians who were members of the International Theological Commission. At its annual meeting in 1969, the commission – which aimed to keep the work of theologians in tune with the work of the Magisterium – came up with the idea of launching an international journal.

“We were right in the midst of the drama of 1968, when it seemed all sense of balance had been lost and that everything was available. It seemed as though the whole world - and the Church along with it - was being created all over again. During these discussions, it became clear that internationality – or rather, catholicity – could not equal uniformity. Although the tsunami of 1968 was wreaking havoc across the whole of the West, cultural contexts differed hugely,” Benedict XVI explained.

Theology’s big three in those years were: Balthasar, de Lubac and Ratzinger. The aim of the journal that was about to be born was “to look beyond the confines of theology, at the core elements of human existence, from which faith takes shape.”

“Our goal was to create a journal that did not just address a closed circle of readers...It had to be a dynamic exchange. We didn’t want it to be just us talking to our readers, but them speaking to us, so that through this dialogue we could delve deeper and deeper into the realities they lived in.”

Is this kind of dialogue between readers and listeners possible in today’s world? Is it possible to move a journal out of a purely intellectual context and turn it into a force that is able to mould Church life? These are the challenges Communio is called to take on and Ratzinger mentions them in his letter.

“For some years now Communio’s heads have been committed to establishing a dialogue with readers, letting the latter act as inspiration, in an exchange of doctrine and wisdom, shaped by a Christian vision of the world,” said Fr. Aldino Cazzago.

Pope Benedict XVI’s letter can be found in issue no. 235 of the German Communio, published by Jaca Book.

My addendum:

The Washington-based English edition of Communio, which with 15 language editions, has far outgrown Concilium (with six), has a separate site for Communio News, which published this on February 28.



The site also has this list of the articles written by Joseph Ratzinger that have been published in the English edition (and a link
to those that have been published in the German and French editions):




I had a post on this thread in the past year about the two anthologies that English COMMUNIO has published of these articles:

From Beatrice and her invaluable website, I learned earlier that the French COMMUNIO has published this anthology. The title translates as "TO BELIEVE AND CELEBRATE: The Communion of faith":


which contains, among other things, a rare item - a lengthy book review written by Fr. Ratzinger in 1975 of Hans Kueng's 1974 book
Christsein(published in English as 'On Being Christian'). The review is entitled "Christianity without pain" which well describes
the 'Christianity lite' advocated by Kueng and his fellow progressivists.
(I have started to translate the review whose full text Beatrice posted, and will post my translation when done.)

News posted on the Caritas.org site on May 16, 2013.

Did Pope Francis really mean this?
'Sell the churches if we must
to help the poor' -
and the MSM ignores it

I was alerted to this item by Lella on her blog, who cited a brief item from the Italian news portal La Presse citing from Pope Francis's remarks to the executive committee of Caritas International whom he met with on May 16. She then links to the story on that meeting in the Spanish service of Vatican Radio,
http://es.radiovaticana.va/news/2013/05/16/hoy_d%C3%ADa_est%C3%A1_en_peligro_el_hombre,_la_persona_humana,_la_carne_d/spa-692879
which also includes a transcript of the opening remarks by Cardinal Andres Maradiaga, president of Caritas International, and the complete remarks by Pope Francis, which is much longer than his formal homilies and catecheses, in which he says this:

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Caritas no es solamente para los primeros auxilios. Es necesario. En tiempo de guerra y de crisis hay que curar a los heridos, hay que curar a los enfermos, curar las consecuencias de tanta riqueza. Pero, también hay que promover. En cuanto se puede, promover, pero primero arreglar esto. Claro uno va viendo lo que tiene que hacer. ¡Es que se va mucho dinero en esto! Ojala se te vaya todo y tengamos que rematar las iglesias para dar de comer a los pobres.
My translation:
Caritas is not just for first aid (which) is necessary. In times of war and crisis, one must care for the wounded, one must care for the sick, heal the consequences of such wealth [he referred earlier to financial crises which motivate great international meetings, but meanwhile, people are dying of hunger]. But one must also advance them. As much as possible, one must advance them, but first, take care of this [their immediate problems]. Of course, one must see what has to be done. And all this takes a lot of money! If, after you have given everything, then we must sell the churches to be able to feed the poor!

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I do not know if the Pope realizes he said that, or if he ever reviewed the transcript of his remarks, but that last statement is pure Marxist liberation theology. It makes the Church responsible for the material wellbeing of the poor.

Jesus said to help our neighbor, as the good Samaritan did. Which means we help others to the extent that we can. He never said or implied, for example, that the Temple of Jerusalem should be sold to help the poor.

Even St. Francis never advocated selling the churches to feed the poor - his own friars begged for their food and the food of others, and what they received, they shared with the poor.

I will excuse the Anglophone media for not reporting on this - which, under any other circumstance, would have been huge headline news - simply because few of the Anglophone reporters who cover the Vatican may have even been aware there was a full transcript of the remarks. But even VIS made very short shrift, indeed, of the meeting with Caritas, reporting it only as a calendar event, as follows:

The VIS item is also the only item on the English site of news.va about the event.

Vatican Insider had a report in its Italian service with the headline one expects, but which was underplayed in the report itself:

'To help the poor, one might even have to sell the churches'

A report which Insider did not see fit to provide in its English service. Not was the Caritas event written about by the Insider's Andrea Tornielli, who has turned into Pope Francis's principal cheerleader among the Italian Vaticanistas. And as one of the Insider editors, he must surely have known about that questionable line.

Other than the Insider account, as far as I can see, the brief item cited by Lella from La Presse and an Italian Blogspot that linked to the transcript on Vatican Radio, were the only mentions in the Italian media.

Of course, the line about selling the churches was just one in a rather lengthy address - but reporters and editors habitually build headlines and construct cathedrals of rhetoric out of single phrases when it suits them. (Cardinal Sodano's 'chiaccherate' referring to idle chatter seeking to link Benedict XVI himself directly to specific sex abuse cases, but which MSM claimed referred to media reporting in general on the sex abuse cases; or even more famously, the citation from the Regensburg address which sparked a hellish firestorm).

This statement by Pope Francis could have fuelled media commentary as extensive, if not more, than any we have seen so far that they have devoted to him. But it is destined to remain unknown to the larger public.

Because I could not find an English report about the Caritas remarks on any Vatican site, I went to the Caritas site itself, which had a full news release about it (part of it seen in the first illustration above). If any Anglophone reporter covering the Vatican had been interested, they might have looked it up as well:

Pope Francis tells Caritas leadership:
A Church without charity does not exist
16 May 2013

Pope Francis met with Caritas leaders from around the world to discuss their work in helping millions of poor and vulnerable people, telling them “a Church without charity does not exist.”

The Pope said that Caritas is “an essential part of the Church” and that it “institutionalizes love in the Church”. He said Caritas has two dimensions: action and a divine dimension “situated in the heart of the Church".

He said, “Caritas is not just for emergency situations as a first aid agency. In the situation of war or during a crisis, there is a need to look after the wounded, to help the ill…but there is also a need to support them, to care for their development.”

Pope Francis said, "the priority is to care right away for their immediate needs and later, as soon as possible, for their development. If that is very expensive...we'd even have to sell the churches to feed the poorest." [Note that the Caritas translation is less literal and more contextual than the translation I made, but it does not temper the statement about selling the churches. Moreover, the Pope says 'to help the poor', not 'to help the poorest', as the Caritas translation has it..]

He said, "Caritas is the caress of the Church to its people, the caress of the Mother Church to her children, her tenderness and closeness."

Leaders from Caritas organisations are in Rome for the annual Representative Council meeting.

Caritas Internationalis President Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga said to Pope Francis “We are your Caritas to be guided by you.” The Cardinal said that Caritas member organisations from around the world had signed up to a campaign to end hunger and asked for the Pope’s blessing.

Caritas representatives from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, North America and Oceania were also able to give accounts of the challenges facing the poor in their regions.

Sr Leonie Dochamou from Caritas Benin asked the Pope for guidance in how to best serve the poor. “We in Africa have the potential to work for our own development,” she said. Pope Francis replied that one way to promote development was the example of Don Bosco, to give children the tools they need through education.

The Pope stressed the importance of “tenderness”, saying that at times the Church has lost sight of this. “The Church is fundamentally mother. The spirituality of Caritas has to refer to this,” he said. Pope Francis said that Caritas must “go to the peripheries to cure and promote the human being” and to bring to the Church “tenderness.”

On the crisis in Syria, Pope Francis said that one million people have left Syria. “They have lost everything and are on the street. I mention this as an fundamental example,” said Pope Francis.

“We have refugees in all countries, those who are smuggled, those whose passports were taken away and are forced into slavery. There is great need for the presence of the tender touch of the Church.”

It is more perplexing why the media have ignored this potentially 'juicy' news morsel served to them on a platinum platter. The Francis sycophants could use it to hail the Pope as the greatest revolutionary ever to sit on Peter's Chair; both the Catholic and secular left could use it to justify all their criticisms of the Church; and the Church 'right' could use it to bolster their claim that the Pope from Argentina is a 'threat' to the Church.

I choose to see it as a lamentable consequence of depending so much - and daily at that - on extemporaneous remarks and homilies during which one is bound to slip up, in the Freudian sense or otherwise, and a Pope cannot leave himself open to this trap. Even if he really did not mean to say that churches should be sold to help the poor, the statement itself is pure demagoguery of the kind that someone like Barack Obama can and does indulge in, but not the Vicar of Christ.

The fact that even the formidable Andrea Tornielli has chosen so far to ignore the questionable line leads me to think that the Vatican observers who were aware of what Pope Francis said chose not to report or comment on it to 'protect' the Pope. How gallant of them! A gallantry they never once thought to give Benedict XVI whom, on the contrary, most of them sought to vilify on every possible occasion.

Banner of the Jubilee website of the City of Nis

Here's another major story in the past few days that I must make up for....

It is strange that the major observance of the 1700th anniversary of Emperor Constantine's Edict of Milan in which, for the first time, the idea of religious freedom was officially recognized, has been taking place in Serbia. geographical location of the emperor's birthplace, Nis, at the time a province of the Roman Empire where Constantine's father was serving. (I do not find a similar banner or site elsewhere dedicated to the Edict of Milan.)

In Milan itself, the May 15th commemoration of the event was marked by the presence of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, who, along with the Council of Catholic Bishops' Conferences of Europe, sponsored a two-day seminar in Istanbul May 17-18 on the state of religious freedom around the world today.

On May 15, Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone sent a telegram in behalf of Pope Francis to Cardinal Angelo Scola, Archbishop of Milan, to mark the occasion. Here is a translation of the telegram:

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TO HIS EMINENCE
THE MOST REVEREND CARDINAL ANGELO SCOLA
ARCHBISHOP OF MILAN

Informed about the visit to your city of the Ecumenical Patriarch, on the occasion of solemn celebrations for the XVII Centenary of the Edict of Constantine, the Supreme Pontiff extends his fraternal greeting to His Holiness Bartholomew I, addresses his welcome to other illustrious guests who have gathered for this happy occasion, and congratulates the beloved Ambrosian Church, along with the civilian authorities and the entire city of Milan, for the importance given to the historic decision which, in decreeing religious freedom for Christians, opened new avenues for the Gospel and contributed decisively to the birth of European civilization.

Pope Francis wishes that, today as then, the common testimony of Christians in both East and West, sustained by the spirit of the Risen Lord, will contribute to the dissemination of the message of salvation in Europe and in the whole world, and that, thanks to the farsightedness of civilian authorities, the right to the public expression of one's faith may be respected everywhere, and that the contribution that Christianity continues to offer to the culture and society of our time may be welcomed without prejudice.

With these sentiments, the Holy Father, while renewing his greetings, assures his closeness in prayer to all who are present, and from the heart, he sends you, Eminence, and to the entire flock entrusted to your pastoral care, a special Apostolic Blessing as a token of copious celestial graces.

TARCISIO CARDINAL BERTONE
SECRETARY OF STATE

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It's hard to give a concise history that places the Edict of Milan in total context - or the figure of Constantine the Great, for that matter = but I did post items in the past two years related to this 17th centenary of the Edict of Milan...

In April 2012, an international academic congress entitled "Constantine the Great: The Roots of Europe" was held in the Vatican from 18 to 21 April. The event was organised by the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences to mark the 1700th anniversary of the battle of Ponte Milvio and the conversion of the Emperor Constantine. He would issue the Edict of Milan a few months later. 313 was truly an epochal year for Constantine and the immediate fate of Christianity in the early millennia.[/C[





Constantine's story is inseparably linked to his mother, the Empress Helena, whose efforts led to the discovery of the tomb where Jesus was believed to have been buried (over which the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built) and who brought back relics of the True Cross and, Tradition says, the Holy Robe of Christ, from the Holy Land to Europe. Both Constantine and Helena are considered saints in both the Byzantine and Roman churches.


'Visions of the Cross', by the School of Raphael, fresco, 1520-1524, Vatican Apostolic Palace. The central frame depicts Constantine before the Battle of Ponte Milvio )Milvian Bridge) and the cross he saw in the sky with the tag, 'In hoc signo vinces' - By this sign, you will conquer'.

The Edict of Milan established freedom of religion in the Roman empire and put an end to the persecution of certain religious groups, particularly Christians.

The Congress of 2012 focused on the environment in which Constantine lived and on relations between Christians and the Roman empire prior to the year 313.

A key area of discussion was the conversion and baptism of Constantine himself, and his attitude towards Christians following the battle of Ponte Milvio, which took place on 28 October 312 and led to the death of his rival Maxentius.

Contemporary and later Christian historians, influenced by the narrative of Eusebius of Cesarea, saw Constantine's victory as the result of divine intervention:

"From a purely strategic-military viewpoint the battle was not very important, but it soon became the founding symbol of the new world which came into being when Constantine found Christianity. Indeed ... the era of imperial persecution against Christians was about to come to an end, giving way to the evangelisation of the entire empire and moulding the profile of western Europe and the Balkans; a Europe which gave rise to the values of human dignity, distinction and cooperation between religion and the State, and freedom of conscience, religion and worship."

At the time of the Vatican conference last year, the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Riccardo Di Segni, claimed that "Constantine's conversion changed everything, and had such an impact on history that it is closely linked to anti-Jewish persecution".

But Vatican historians say otherwise. "There was not the least shade of anti-Semitism", saying that a black legend on Constantine continues to be fed today by those "who do not look kindly on the contributions of Christians to the public life".


Constantine the Great (272-337) was Roman Emperor from 306 to his death. Center photo, imperial coin from 313; right, head of the so-called Constantine Colossus, a 12-meter high statue of the emperor during his lifetime, now in Rome's Museo Capitolino.


Serbia is celebrating the event particularly in Nis, a city of south Serbia where Constantine was born to a Roman soldier and his wife. The city of NIS has a bilingual website on the Jubilee Year at
edictofmilan2013.com/en/
from which comes the following overview:

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Considering the all-encompassing significance and the impact of the Edict of Milan on church, state and social life in Europe since the age of Constantine the Great until our time. and its everlasting value and permanent actuality, the Nis City has declared the Year of 2013 the Official Year of Edict of Milan Anniversary Celebration. Events dedicated to the jubilee celebration will last throughout the year of 2013.

In Rome, the most powerful empire of the ancient world, almost three centuries after the birth of Jesus Christ, only 5% of the population was Christian. At that time Constantine was born in Nis. When his reign began, the Empire was pagan. He had visions and dreams in which the Monogram of Christ appeared followed by the words 'In hoc signo vinces" - By this sign, you will conquer - and he did go on to many military victories.

In 313, Constantine and his co-emperor Licinius announced that it was proper that Christians and those who profess other religions should be free to practice the religion that appeared best to each one, thereby officially establishing religious freedom and tolerance throughout the Empire.

The Edict of Milan did not make Christianity the state religion - it made the Roman Empire officially neutral with regard to religious worship, without making paganism, which was widespread, illegal.

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The religious freedom instituted for the first time anywhere by the Edict of Milan has particular resonance today when religious freedom is under widespread relentless assault, as never before in modern times, from the United States and Western Europe, to the countries of the false 'Arab spring', the Muslim countries of the Middle East, South Asia and Indonesia; and the Communist holdouts China, North Korea and Cuba..

The following post is useful for giving us the texts of the Edict of Constantine and the subsequent Edict of Theodosius which did establish Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire:

A fateful anniversary
by Joseph A. Komonchak

May 15, 2013

A brief story from Vatican Radio notes that a meeting of Catholics and Orthodox will take place this week in Istanbul to mark the 1,700th anniversary of the so-called Edict of Milan in which the emperors Constantine and Licinius ordered that all citizens be permitted to worship God as they saw fit.

The instruction freed Christianity from the threat and reality of persecution and ordered that confiscated Christian buildings be restored. A translation is provided below. It will be noted that the toleration is granted to all religions. It does not represent an establishment of Christianity, which would come later in the century with the edict of Theodosius I, also given below.

Constantine himself, however, certainly favored the Church with his patronage; and before the year 313 was over, he would be asked by Donatist bishops in northern Africa to intervene in their disputes with Catholic bishops, and he showed no reluctance to include arbitrating such disputes among his imperial duties and rights. A fatal entanglement ensued.

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The “Edict of Milan ” (313 A.D.)

When I, Constantine Augustus, and I, Licinius Augustus, fortunately met near Milan and were considering everything that pertained to the public welfare and security, we thought that, among other things which we saw would be for the good of many, regulations pertaining to the reverence of the Divinity ought certainly to be made first, so that we might grant to Christians and others full authority to observe that religion which each preferred so that any Divinity whatsoever in the seat of the heavens may be propitious and kindly disposed to us and all who are placed under our rule.

And thus by this wholesome counsel and most upright provision, we thought to arrange that no one whatsoever should be denied the opportunity to give his heart to the observance of the Christian religion [and] of that religion which he should think best for himself, so that the Supreme Deity, to whose worship we freely yield our hearts, may show in all things His usual favor and benevolence.

Therefore, your Worship should know that it has pleased us to remove all conditions whatsoever, which were in the rescripts formerly given to you officially, concerning the Christians, and now any one of these who wishes to observe the Christian religion may do so freely and openly, without molestation.

We thought it fit to commend these things most fully to your care that you may know that we have given to those Christians free and unrestricted opportunity of religious worship.

When you see that this has been granted to them by us, your Worship will know that we have also conceded to other religions the right of open and free observance of their worship for the sake of the peace of our times, that each one may have the free opportunity to worship as he pleases; this regulation is made so that we may not seem to detract from any dignity or any religion.

Moreover, in the case of the Christians especially, we esteemed it best to order that if it happens that anyone heretofore has bought from our treasury from anyone whatsoever, those places where they were previously accustomed to assemble, concerning which a certain decree had been made and a letter sent to you officially, the same shall be restored to the Christians without payment or any claim of recompense and without any kind of fraud or deception. Those, moreover, who have obtained the same by gift, are likewise to return them at once to the Christians. Besides, both those who have purchased and those who have secured them by gift, are to appeal to the vicar if they seek any recompense from our bounty, that they may be cared for through our clemency.

All this property ought to be delivered at once to the community of the Christians through your intercession, and without delay. And since these Christians are known to have possessed not only those places in which they were accustomed to assemble, but also other property, namely the churches, belonging to them as a corporation and not as individuals, all these things which we have included under the above law, you will order to be restored, without any hesitation or controversy at all, to these Christians, that is to say to the corporations and their conventicles: providing, of course, that the above arrangements be followed so that those who return the same without payment, as we have said, may hope for an indemnity from our bounty.

In all these circumstances you ought to tender your most efficacious intervention to the community of the Christians, that our command may be carried into effect as quickly as possible, whereby, moreover, through our clemency, public order may be secured.

Let this be done so that, as we have said above, Divine favor towards us, which, under the most important circumstances we have already experienced, may, for all time, preserve and prosper our successes together with the good of the state.

Moreover, in order that the statement of this decree of our good will may come to the notice of all, this rescript, published by your decree, shall be announced everywhere and brought to the knowledge of all, so that the decree of this, our benevolence, cannot be concealed.


Edict of Theodosius (380 A.D.)

It is our desire that all the various nations which are subject to our Clemency and Moderation, should continue to profess that religion which was delivered to the Romans by the divine Apostle Peter, as it has been preserved by faithful tradition, and which is now professed by the Pontiff Damasus and by Peter, Bishop of Alexandria, a man of apostolic holiness.

According to the apostolic teaching and the doctrine of the Gospel, let us believe in the one deity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, in equal majesty and in a holy Trinity.

We authorize the followers of this law to assume the title of Catholic Christians; but as for the others, since, in our judgment they are foolish madmen, we decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious name of heretics, and shall not presume to give to their conventicles the name of churches.

They will suffer in the first place the chastisement of the divine condemnation and in the second the punishment of our authority which in accordance with the will of Heaven we shall decide to inflict.

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[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 19/05/2013 11:22]

Saturday, May 18, Seventh Week of Easter

ST. POPE JOHN I (Italy 470?-526, Pope (523-526) and Martyr
Very little is known about this Pope who was born near Siena. He was only an archdeacon when he was elected Pope
within seven days of his predecessor's death. At the time, Italy had been under the Visigoth king Theodoric the Great
for 30 years. He espoused Arianism, the heresy which denied the divinity of Christ, but tolerated the orthodox Christians.
He asked the new Pope to lead a Roman delegation to Constantinople to ask the Eastern Emperor Justin I, the first non-Arian
on the throne in 50 years, to recall his new decree punishing Arians for their heresy. John I received a tumultuous welcome
from the court and the people, and the patriarchs of the East came to pledge their loyalty to him. Justin I stood by his
anti-Arian decree, and John I returned to Italy. Because of the billiant reception he got in Constantinople, Theodoric had
him arrested when he landed in Ravenna and thrown into prison on charges he was part of a plot against him. The Pope quickly
died in prison of ill treatment and privation. His body was eentually taken to Rome and is buried in St. Peter's Basilica.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/051813.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

Pope Francis met with

- H.E. Madame Angela Merkel, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, and her delegation

- Mons. Mirosław Adamczyk, Apostolic Nuncio to Liberia

= Mons. Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (weekly meeting)

In the afternoon, he led a Pentecost Prayer Vigil at St. Peter's Square with members of new ecclesial
movements and communities in a special event for the Year of Faith. He answered questions from four
representatives of the movements.

BLESSED JOHN PAUL II
would be 93 today



One year ago...
Benedict XVI met with H.E. Bruno Joubert, Ambassador of France, who presented his credentials; Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, Archbishop of Genoa, and president of the Italian bishops' conference (CEI). and
bishops of the United States (Region XIV and XV) on ad limina visit. {
This was the last meeting with the US bishops who came to the Vatican for their ad limina visit over a period of six months. In the afternoon, he had his regular weekly meeting with Cardinal William Joseph Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.



Pope Benedict concludes 6-month
course of meetings with US bishops
on their ad limina visit to Rome
May 18, 2012



Pope Benedict XVI met with the final group of bishops from the United States coming to Rome on their ad limina visits, including bishops of the various Eastern Churches present in the United States, and then addressed all the bishops of Regions XIV and XV, most of whom he had met with in separate groups earlier.

Here is the full text of the Holy Father's address:

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Dear Brother Bishops,

I greet all of you with fraternal affection in the Lord. Our meeting today concludes the series of quinquennial visits of the Bishops of the United States of America ad limina Apostolorum.

As you know, over these past six months I have wished to reflect with you and your Brother Bishops on a number of pressing spiritual and cultural challenges facing the Church in your country as it takes up the task of the new evangelization.

I am particularly pleased that this, our final meeting, takes place in the presence of the Bishops of the various Eastern Churches present in the United States, since you and your faithful embody in a unique way the ethnic, cultural and spiritual richness of the American Catholic community, past and present.

Historically, the Church in America has struggled to recognize and incorporate this diversity, and has succeeded, not without difficulty, in forging a communion in Christ and in the apostolic faith which mirrors the catholicity which is an indefectible mark of the Church.

In this communion, which finds its source and model in the mystery of the Triune God (cf. Lumen Gentium, 4), unity and diversity are constantly reconciled and enhanced, as a sign and sacrament of the ultimate vocation and destiny of the entire human family.

Throughout our meetings, you and your Brother Bishops have spoken insistently of the importance of preserving, fostering and advancing this gift of Catholic unity as an essential condition for the fulfilment of the Church’s mission in your country.

In this concluding talk, I would like simply to touch on two specific points which have recurred in our discussions and which, with you, I consider crucial for the exercise of your ministry of guiding Christ’s flock forward amid the difficulties and opportunities of the present moment.

I would begin by praising your unremitting efforts, in the best traditions of the Church in America, to respond to the ongoing phenomenon of immigration in your country.

The Catholic community in the United States continues, with great generosity, to welcome waves of new immigrants, to provide them with pastoral care and charitable assistance, and to support ways of regularizing their situation, especially with regard to the unification of families.

A particular sign of this is the long-standing commitment of the American Bishops to immigration reform. This is clearly a difficult and complex issue from the civil and political, as well as the social and economic, but above all from the human point of view.

It is thus of profound concern to the Church, since it involves ensuring the just treatment and the defence of the human dignity of immigrants.

In our day too, the Church in America is called to embrace, incorporate and cultivate the rich patrimony of faith and culture present in America’s many immigrant groups, including not only those of your own rites, but also the swelling numbers of Hispanic, Asian and African Catholics.

The demanding pastoral task of fostering a communion of cultures within your local Churches must be considered of particular importance in the exercise of your ministry at the service of unity (cf. Directory for the Pastoral Ministry of Bishops, 63).

This diaconia of communion entails more than simply respecting linguistic diversity, promoting sound traditions, and providing much-needed social programs and services. It also calls for a commitment to ongoing preaching, catechesis and pastoral activity aimed at inspiring in all the faithful a deeper sense of their communion in the apostolic faith and their responsibility for the Church’s mission in the United States.

Nor can the significance of this challenge be underestimated: the immense promise and the vibrant energies of a new generation of Catholics are waiting to be tapped for the renewal of the Church’s life and the rebuilding of the fabric of American society.

This commitment to fostering Catholic unity is necessary not only for meeting the positive challenges of the new evangelization but also countering the forces of disgregation within the Church which increasingly represent a grave obstacle to her mission in the United States.

I appreciate the efforts being made to encourage the faithful, individually and in the variety of ecclesial associations, to move forward together, speaking with one voice in addressing the urgent problems of the present moment.

Here I would repeat the heartfelt plea that I made to America’s Catholics during my Pastoral Visit: “We can only move forward if we turn our gaze together to Christ” and thus embrace “that true spiritual renewal desired by the Council, a renewal which can only strengthen the Church in that holiness and unity indispensable for the effective proclamation of the Gospel in today’s world” (Homily in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, 19 April 2008).

In our conversations, many of you have spoken of your concern to build ever stronger relationships of friendship, cooperation and trust with your priests. At the present time, too, I urge you to remain particularly close to the men and women in your local Churches who are committed to following Christ ever more perfectly by generously embracing the evangelical counsels.

I wish to reaffirm my deep gratitude for the example of fidelity and self-sacrifice given by many consecrated women in your country, and to join them in praying that this moment of discernment will bear abundant spiritual fruit for the revitalization and strengthening of their communities in fidelity to Christ and the Church, as well as to their founding charisms.

The urgent need in our own time for credible and attractive witnesses to the redemptive and transformative power of the Gospel makes it essential to recapture a sense of the sublime dignity and beauty of the consecrated life, to pray for religious vocations and to promote them actively, while strengthening existing channels for communication and cooperation, especially through the work of the Vicar or Delegate for Religious in each Diocese.

Dear Brother Bishops, it is my hope that the Year of Faith which will open on 12 October this year, the fiftieth anniversary of the convening of the Second Vatican Council, will awaken a desire on the part of the entire Catholic community in America to reappropriate with joy and gratitude the priceless treasure of our faith.

With the progressive weakening of traditional Christian values, and the threat of a season in which our fidelity to the Gospel may cost us dearly, the truth of Christ needs not only to be understood, articulated and defended, but to be proposed joyfully and confidently as the key to authentic human fulfilment and to the welfare of society as a whole.

Now, at the conclusion of these meetings, I willingly join all of you in thanking Almighty God for the signs of new vitality and hope with which he has blessed the Church in the United States of America.

At the same time I ask him to confirm you and your Brother Bishops in your delicate mission of guiding the Catholic community in your country in the ways of unity, truth and charity as it faces the challenges of the future.

In the words of the ancient prayer, let us ask the Lord to direct our hearts and those of our people, that the flock may never fail in obedience to its shepherds, nor the shepherds in the care of the flock (cf. Sacramentarium Veronense, Missa de natale Episcoporum).

With great affection I commend you, and the clergy, religious and lay faithful entrusted to your pastoral care, to the loving intercession of Mary Immaculate, Patroness of the United States, and I cordially impart my Apostolic Blessing as a pledge of joy and peace in the Lord.

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*I like the Pope's phrase about 'credible and attractive witnesses' to the Gospel. Anyone engaged in 'evangelizing' others, in whatever way, can do so much more credibly if he can do it in a way that 'attracts' others, that draws them in up to the point of involvement in the message, that is positive and not reeking of sulphur and brimstone - in other words, the way Benedict XVI himself, John Paul II and all the saints have done...

I wanted to get this lookback feature in, before reading any accounts of the Pentecost prayer vigil led today by Pope Francis to avoid any appearance of 'comparing' two events, but I suppose that is inevitable. Anyway, enjoy this lookback to seven years ago...

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350,000 at Pentecost rally
and prayer vigil with Benedict XVI




VATICAN CITY, June 3, 2006 (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI joined a cheering crowd of 350,000 people overflowing from St. Peter's Square for a Saturday evening rally aimed at boosting faith and encouraging efforts to spread the Roman Catholic Church's message throughout the world.

Participants, many of them young people, began arriving in early morning to gain a place in the square. Some of them strummed guitars and sang to pass the hours while waiting for the Pope to appear.

]


Benedict, wearing a fur-trimmed crimson cape against a chilly breeze, waved to the faithful from the popemobile, as he was driven toward the steps of St. Peter's Basilica.

More than 100 religious groups were represented. The Rome police prefecture's office, which coordinates security in Rome, estimated the crowd at 350,000 people at the start of the rally.

The crowd stretched down the boulevard leading to the Tiber River.

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On the eve of Pentecost,
Benedict XVI leads Vespers
with new ecclesial movements
Translated from

June 3, 2006



At 5:30 p.m. today, the Holy Father met more than 350,000 representatives of Church movements and new communities at St. Peter’s Square.

After a tribute from the President of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, Mons. Stanislaw Rylko, and the reading of a message from Chiara Lubich, founder of the Works of Mary (Focolari movement), the Vespers for the eve of Pentecost were celebrated.

The reading of each of three Psalms was followed by a ‘reflection’ by Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Community of St. Egidio; Kiko Arguello, founder of the Neo-Catechumenal Way; and Mons. Julian Carron, president of the Brotherhood of Communion and Liberation.

After the brief Reading, the Pope gave the following homily. Here is a translation:

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Dear brothers and sisters!

You have arrived in truly great numbers this afternoon at St. Peter’s Square to participate in the Pentecost Vigil. Belonging to divergent nations and cultures, you who are here represent all the members of church movements and new communities gathered spiritually around the Successor of Peter to proclaim the joy of believing in Jesus Christ and to renew the commitment to be His faithful disciples in our time. I thank you for your participation, and I address a cordial greeting to each one of you.

My affectionate thoughts go first of all to the Cardinals, to my venerated brothers in the Episcopate and priesthood, and to all the religious men and women. I greet the officials of your numerous ecclesiastical entities which demonstrate the living action of the Holy Spirit on the people of God.

I salute those who have prepared this extraordinary event, particularly those who work in the Pontifical Council for the Laity, with its Secretary, Mons. Josef Clemens, and its President, Mons. Rylko, whom I also thank for the cordial sentiments expressed towards me at the start of Vespers.

A similar encounter comes to mind which took place in this same Piazza on May 31, 1998, with the beloved John Paul II. Great evangelist of our time, he accompanied and guided you during his entire pontificate.

Many times he called your associations and communities ‘providential’, especially because the sanctifying Spirit works through you to reawaken the faith in the heart of many Christians and make them rediscover the vocation they received at Baptism, helping them to be witnesses of hope, full of that fire of love which is precisely the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Now we ask ourselves: Who or what is the Holy Spirit? How do we recognize Him? In what way do we go toward Him and He to us? One first answer is given by the great Pentecostal hymn of the Church, Veni creator Spiritus, "Come Spirit of Creation”. The hymn refers to the first passages of the Bible which express through images the creation of the universe. Above all, it says that the Spirit of God hovered over the chaos, over the waters of the abyss.

The world in which we live is the work of the Spirit of Creation. Pentecost is not only the beginning of the Church, and therefore, in a special way, its feast; Pentecost is also the feast of creation. The world does not exist by itself; it came from the creative Spirit of God. And therefore it also mirrors the wisdom of God. That wisdom, in its breadth and in the all-comprehensive logic of its laws, allows us to glimpse something of the Creative Spirit of God. It calls forth our reverential awe.

It is precisely he who, as a Christian, believes in the Creative Spirit, must realize that we cannot use and abuse the world and its resources simply as materials do with as we please; that we should consider creation as a gift entrusted to us, not to be destroyed, but so that it becomes the garden of God and therefore a garden of men.

Faced with the multiple forms of abuse of the earth that we see today, we can almost hear the groan of creation that St. Paul wrote about (Rm 8, 22). We begin to understand the words of the Apostle, that creation impatiently awaits the children of God in order to be set free and to reach its splendor.

Dear friends, we wish to be the children of God whom creation awaits, and we can be so because in Baptism, the Lord has made us so. Yes, both creation and history await us, await men and women who are truly children of God and act accordingly.

If we look at history, we see how around monasteries, creation (nature) has been able to prosper, as though with the installation of the Spirit of God in the hearts of men, the splendor of the Creative Spirit has infused the earth itself – a splendor which the barbarities of human thirst for power have obscured and sometimes even almost completely extinguished.

Around Francis of Assisi, the same thing happened. It happens wherever the Spirit of God comes into men’s souls, this Spirit which our hymn describes as light, love and energy. Thus we have a first answer to the question, what is the Holy Spirit, what does He do and how do we recognize Him? He comes to us through creation.

Nevertheless, God’s good creation, in the course of human history, has been covered over by a massive layer of filth which makes it – if not impossible – at least difficult to recognize in it the reflection of the Creator. Although a sunset at sea, or an excursion in the mountains, or a flower that opens, reawakens in us, almost spontaneously, a consciousness of the existence of the Creator.

But the Spirit of Creation comes to our aid. He has entered into history and speaks to us in a new way. In Jesus Christ, God himself became man and has allowed us, so to speak, to look intimately at God himself. And there we see something totally unexpected: In God there exists an I and a You. Far remote from a mysterious God, God is not an infinite solitude, He is an event of love.

If by looking at creation we can see the Spirit of Creation, God Himself, almost like creative mathematics, as a power who makes the laws of the world and brings order, and afterwards, also as beauty, then we come to know this: the Spirit of Creation has a heart. He is Love.

The Son exists who talks to the Father. And both are one together in the Spirit, which is, in a manner of speaking, the climate of loving and giving which makes of them the one God. This unity of love, which is God, is a unity that is much more sublime than the unity of the simplest indivisible particle there is. The triune God is the one God.

Through Jesus, we have said, we are able to have a glimpse at the intimacy of God. John in his Gospel expressed it this way: “No one has ever seen God; but his only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has revealed Him (to us) (Jn 1,18). But Jesus did not just allow us to look into the intimacy of God; with Him, God emerged from his intimacy and came to us. This is what happens in his life, passion, death and resurrection, in His words.

Jesus was not content to simply come to us. He wanted more. He wanted unification. This is the significance of the images of the banquet and the wedding. We should not only know something about Him, but through Him we should be drawn to God. For this, he had to die and resurrect. Now, he is no longer found in a specific place, but his Spirit, the Holy Spirit, emanates from Him and enters our hearts, thus conjoining us with Jesus Himself and with the Father – with the one and Triune God.

This is Pentecost: Jesus, and through Him, God himself, comes to us and draws us towards Him. “He sends the Holy Spirit,” – so Scripture says. What was the effect? Above all, I would like to stress two aspects: the Holy Spirit, through whom God comes to us, brings us life and liberty. Let us look at both things closely.

“I have come so that they may have life and may have It in abundance,” Jesus says in the Gospel of John (10,10). Life and liberty – they are the things that all of us want. But what is it – where and how do we find “life”?

I think that, spontaneously, the greater majority of men have the same concept of life as the prodigal son in the Gospel. He had asked for his share of the inheritance, and now he felt free, and he wanted to live without the weight of any duties at home. He only wanted to live – to get from life all that it had to offer. To enjoy it fully. To live it up, drink fully of life and not miss anything of worth that it could offer. In the end, he found himself a mere swineherd – envying those very animals, so empty had his life become, so in vain. Even his freedom proved to be in vain.

Isn’t the same thing happening these days? When one wants nothing better in life than to be master of it, then life becomes emptier, poorer. It becomes easier then to find refuge in drugs, in grand illusions. And then doubt emerges whether living , after all is said and done, is truly a gift at all. So no, we do not find life this way.

Jesus’s words on life in abundance is found in His discourse on the Good Shepherd. They are words that have a double context. About the shepherd, Jesus says he gives his own life (for his flock).

“No one takes away my life, but I offer it myself.” (cfr Jn 10,18). Life is found only by giving it; it is not found by wanting to possess it. This is what we should learn from Christ; this is what we are taught by the Holy Spirit, who is pure giving, God giving Himself. The more one offers his life for others, for good itself, the more abundantly will the river of life flow.

In the second place, the discourse tells us that life blossoms in walking together with the Shepherd who knows the pasture – the places where the springs of life arise. We find life in communion with Him who is life Himself – in communion with the living God, a communion to which we are introduced by the Holy Spirit, whom the hymn calls fons vivus, living fountain.

The pasture in which the springs of life flow is the word of God as we find it in the Scriptures, in the faith of the Church. The pasture is God himself who, in the communion of faith, we come to know through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Dear friends, your movements were born precisely out of a thirst for true life; they are movements for life in every aspect. Where the true spring of life no longer flows, whenever one only appropriates life instead of giving it, then even the lives of others are endangered. Because then, one is disposed to exclude defenseless life, life which is yet unborn, because it seems to reduce the space of one’s life.

If we want to protect life, then we must rediscover the spring of life; then life itself will emerge in all its beauty and sublimeness. And so, we must let ourselves be revived by the Holy Spirit, the creative source of life.

I already stressed the subject of freedom earlier. The themes of life and liberty are linked in the story of the prodigal son. He wanted to live and therefore he wanted to be completely free. To be free, in this view, is to do as one pleases – not to have to accept any criteria other than from oneself. To follow only my desire and my will. Who lives that way will soon encounter someone else who wishes to live the same way. The necessary consequence of such a selfish view of freedom is violence, the reciprocal destruction of both liberty and life.

Instead, Sacred Scripture links the concept of liberty with that of filiality: ”You have not received the spirit of slavery to fall back in fear, but you have received the spirit of adopted sons through which we can cry, 'Abba! Father!’” (Rm 8.15). What does this mean?

St. Paul assumes here the social system of the ancient world, in which there were slaves who possessed nothing and therefore had no interest however things turned out. In contrast, there were the sons, who were also heirs, and therefore were concerned with the preservation and good administration of their properties or the preservation of the State. But because they were free, these sons, they also had responsibilities.

Leaving aside the sociological background of that time, the principle is always valid: freedom and responsibility go together. True freedom is demonstrated through responsibility, in a manner of behavior that takes co-responsibility for the world, for oneself and for others. Free is the son to whom something belongs that he will not allow to be destroyed. All the worldly responsibilities of which we speak are however, partial responsibilities, for a specific environment, for a specific State, etc.

But the Holy Spirit makes us sons and daughters of God. He involves us in God’s own responsibility for His world, for all of humanity. He teaches us to look at the world, at others and at ourselves with the eyes of God. We do good not as slaves who are not free to do otherwise, but we do good because we personally bear responsibility for the whole, because we love truth and goodness, because we love God himself and therefore even His creatures.

This is the true freedom to which the Holy Spirit wants to lead us. The church movements wish to be and should be schools of freedom, of this true freedom. In such schools we want to learn true freedom, not that of slaves who aim to cut a piece of the cake for themselves even if this will mean that others will not have a share. We want genuine freedom, that of heirs, the freedom of the children of God.

In this world, so full of fictitious freedoms that destroy the environment and man himself, we wish, with the power of the Holy Spirit, to learn together what true freedom is; to construct schools of freedom; to show others with our life that we are free, and how beautiful it is to be genuinely free in the freedom of the children of God.

The Holy Spirit, in granting life and liberty, also gives us unity. These are three gifts which are inseparable. I have already spoken too long. But allow me to say a word on unity. To understand it, there is a phrase which may be useful but at first hearing, it may seem rather to distance us from it.

To Nicodemus, who in his search for truth, came by night with his questions to Jesus, He said: ”The Spirit breathes where it will” (Jn 3,8). But the will of the Spirit is not arbitrary (capricious). It is the will to truth and to goodness. Therefore it does not breathe just anywhere, turning this way now, and that way next. His breath is not squandered; it unites us, because truth unites, love unites.

The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the Spirit which unites the Father with the Son in the Love which gives and welcomes, in the one God. The Spirit unites us in such a way that St. Paul could say at one point: “You are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3,28). The Spirit, with His breath, impels us towards Christ. And the Holy Spirit operates corporally, not just subjectively or ‘spiritually.’

To the disciples who thought He was only a ‘spirit’, the Risen Christ said: “It is really me! Touch me and look: a simple spirit – a ghost – does not have flesh and bone like you see I have” (cfr Lk 24,39). This is true of the Risen Christ in every epoch of history. He is not just a ghost, not simply a spirit, a thought or an idea. He remains the Incarnate One – who took on our flesh – and continues always to edify His body, makes of us His body.

The Spirit breathes where it will, and his will is unity made incarnate, the unity which encounters the world and transforms it.

In the Letter to the Ephesians, St.Paul tells us that this Body of Christ, which is the Church, has ligaments, and he identifies them: the apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers (cfr 4,12). The Spirit in His gifts is multiform – we see it. If we look at history, if we look at this assembly here in St. Peter’s Square, then we realize how He always calls forth new gifts; we see the diversity of organs which He creates and how, always anew, He works corporally. Yet in Him, multiplicity and unity go together.

He breathes where He will. He does so in unexpected ways, in unexpected places, and in previously unimagined ways. And with what multiplicity and corporality He does so! And it is precisely here that multiplicity and unity are inseparable. He wants your multiformity and he wants you for the only Body, in union with its durable orders – the ligaments of the Church - with the successors of the apostles, and the Successor of Peter.

He doesn’t spare us the effort of learning how to relate to each other reciprocally; but He shows us that He works in view of the one body and in the unity of that one body. It is only that way through which this unity can acquire its strength and its beauty. So take part in the edification of the one body! The ministers will watch that the Spirit is not extinguished (cfr 1 Thes 5, 19) and you will not cease to bring your gifts to the entire community.

Once again: the Spirit breathes where it will. But his will is unity. He leads us to Christ, to His body. "From Christ,” St. Paul tells us, “the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, with the proper functioning of each part, brings about the body's growth and builds itself up in love.” (Eph 4, 16).

The Holy Spirit wants unity, wants totality. Therefore His presence is demonstrated above all even in the missionary drive. Whoever has encountered something of the true, the good and the beautiful in his own life - the only genuine treasure, the precious pearl – runs to share it everywhere, with his family and at work, in all the spheres of his existence.

He does so without any fear, because he knows he has been adopted as a son of God; without any presumption, because everything is a gift; without discouragement, because the Spirit of God precedes his action in the hearts of men, and like a seed in the most diverse of cultures and religions. He does so without frontiers, because he bears good news that is meant for all men and for all peoples.

Dear friends, I ask you to be – even more, so much more – than collaborators in the universal apostolic ministry of the Pope, opening the doors to Christ. This is the best service that the Church can do for men and especially so for the poor, so that a person’s life, a more just order in society, and peaceful coexistence among nations may find in Christ the keystone on which to construct an authentic civilization, the civilization of love.

The Holy Spirit grants to believers a higher vision of the world, of life, of history, and makes them guardians of the hope that never disappoints.

Let us therefore pray to God the Father, through our Lord Jesus Christ, in the grace of the Holy Spirit, that the celebration of Pentecost be like an ardent flame and a raging wind for Christian life and for the mission of the whole Church.

I lay the intentions of your various movements and communities in the heart of the Most BLEssed Virgin Mary, who was present at the Cenacle with the Apostles, that she may beseech their realization. On everyone I invoke the gifts of the Spirit so that even in these our times, we may all have the experience of a new Pentecost.

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L'Osservatore Romano had a brief editorial on the Pentecost vigil, under the banner headline "LIFE, LIBERTY, UNITY, CO-RESPONSIBILITY':

Benedict's majestic Magisterium
Editorial
Translated from the 6/5-6/6/2006 issue of


The Magisterium that Benedict XVI, with rigor and vigor, has been carRying out since the day he was elected to the Chair of Peter, reached one of its highest moments on the Vigil of Pentecost.

The homily at the Vespers celebration, in the presence of hundreds of thousands of representatives of church movements and new communities, will enter into the history of Pontifical teaching as one of those fundamental discourses which can never be set aside.

There are many key words which could synthesize the sense of this true and proper treatment of lay ecclesiality - (which was) a great hymn to the animating beauty of the Spirit, and at the same time, an exigent guidebook for the vocation of church movements and communities in the Church and in the world.

One of these key words certainly is the expression which the Pope used in referring to the 'feast of creation' at Pentecost: 'the garden of God.' In the variety of its colors, of its forms, of its sounds, even the extraordinary celebration on Saturday evening was, in a certain sense, an image of the ‘garden of God.’

But four words seem to us particularly expressive of the main passages of the Pope’s reflections: life, liberty, unity, co-responsibility.

It is truly from the Holy Spirit, “creative fountain of life,” that the impetuous river of the movements and communities flows from. In His school, they learn daily what “true freedom” is. In His powerful Breath, they experience that ‘unity’ which orients individual charisms to edify the one Body which the Church.

Only men and women who are alive, free and united can feel authentic ‘co-responsbility”, that is, be involved in “the same responsibility that God has for the world and for all humanity.”

It is a sublime and demanding mission. A mission for ‘sons' not 'slaves'. A mission for souls kindled with the fire of Pentecost.

What is news if this was not?

You'd think a crowd of hundreds of thousands gathered for any reason would be news, wouldn't you? Especially if the gathering was for prayer! No for some pop concert, Renato Farina, an Italian writer whose perceptive pieces about Benedict XVI we have posted in translation a number of times, writes about the Saturday Pentecost Vigil encounter of some 400,000 Catholics with their Pope at St. Peter's Square.

The theme of the encounter was THE BEAUTY OF BEING CHRISTIAN AND THE JOY OF COMMUNICATING IT. Anyone who watched the TV coverage or has seen photographs of the assembly could vouch that the participants certainly lived up to it! Farina reflects about why such an event was not considered news by most of mainstream media in Italy...:

How many divisions
has the Pope, 2006
By RENATO FARINA
Translated from

June 4, 2006

Yesterday (6/3/06) the movements and new communities were in St. Peter’s Square. The crowds stretched, under a blue sky and gusts of wind, all the way to the banks of the Tiber. But where was the news?

No one was killed, no one burned flags, there were no anti-American slogans.

The crowds were asked to come by the Pope. They prayed.

Confidentially, I can tell you I was very proud. Among the 37,000 ciellini present [representatives of Comunione e Liberazione] was my 16-year-old son. An overnight trip by bus, and the whole day under a beautiful sun, and then back to the bus and home to Brianza – two sleepless days - and to go to Rome, he spent his allowance.

I asked him why. “Dad, I am looking for happiness. I am going with my friends.”

Looking for happiness? Without breaking or bashing anything? Logical! There is no news.

The Reuters corespondent, the legendary Phil Pullella, who is always the first to be wherever the Pope sets foot, whether in Africa or Garbatella, is not pleased. “But there’s little to write about!”

There were 350,000, no - make that 400,000, but the only news to say was: there were a lot.

So there would be a few lines in the papers. This crowd deserved more, but no one would buy them!

Then, Ratzinger’s discourse was too religious to enter into the big international news circuits.

More important to them was the morning ”cordial encounter” between Benedict XVI and Tony Blair, when “positive dialog with moderate Islam” was stressed (the phrase in quotes is from the Vatican Press Office).

And yet. And yet. What injustice! It was the New York Times which in 2003 described public opinion manifested in the public squares as “the new superpower.” But only if the crowds are dominated by red banners or rainbow flags? In such a case, the 400,000 gathered here Saturday would have been counted as a million to a million and a half by the labor unions and the nightly TV news programs!

But these 400,000 came here for the Pope, to pray even! Therefore, where’s the news?

There was news? Well, what?...

The largest demonstration on the planet yesterday took place in St. Peter’s to announce “that the only treasure, the precious pearl” has been recovered. It belongs even to you who is reading this and to any man who accepts it to the very ends of the earth. That in life, “there is something true, good and beautiful,” one can meet Him personally, it is “the person of Jesus Christ, and he is not a ghost.”

Impossible to just keep it to yourselves, boys and girls. (I write boys and girls but among the 120 movements present yesterday, there were as many white-haired persons as youths).

But I realize: This is an old story. Also: It’s a question of grace. But if one writes - the Pope said so, the quotations above become official Papal statements. It’s easy, so easy, to raise an eyebrow, and say, So what if the Pope said so?

But for once, whatever we believe or don’t believe, let’s pause awhile. Yesterday deserved news coverage. Someone like me is telling you, and I understand if you want to place a hand on my shoulder and say, Sorry pal, maybe next time, I have other things to do.

But here we have someone like Papa Ratzinger with the lightpower of some stars in the heavens! How he speaks of God, this Bavarian man, how he makes God present and living – it is a spectacle that is like the snows of Kilimanjaro or a sunset behind Mont Blanc.

It is truly a crime against reason and against the pleasure of living not to take seriously what he is saying. He does not limit himself to arguing the existence of God. He offers the possibility of another life, another freedom. The only way out of despair.

He is not prophesying the Apocalypse. This man is showing us a beautiful road towards “joy.” He says simply ”God is love.” And it overwhelms me, I am ashamed to say. The rules of journalism would dictate that one gloss over such statements.

Nevertheless! How virile is this love of God. It builds monasteries that withstand the onslaught of barbarians. Those were the Middle Ages, when men like Benedict and Francis lived.

But there is today. The Christian challenge continues. It had been given up for dead, Christianity. Stalin ridiculed it, and before him, Nietzsche.

Yesterday, the Soviet satellites launched to spy on us, still in orbit even if the USSR is long dead, were forced to see from on high the Pope’s divisions assembled in St. Peter’s Square.

On the giant screens, one could see images of the first encounter. May 31, 1998. The aging Wojtyla listening to an aging Giussani (founder of CL), who described the heart of man beseeching Christ, and the heart of God. Both are now gone, but no one here believes that...

Papa Ratzinger, in his red cloak, had earlier passed through these multicolored and festive crowds.

Then followed the testimonies, the songs. The recitation of Vespers, with the Psalms commented on by movement leaders.

Then it was his turn. The Pope. He described the heart of our times. But he also spoke – and here, there was but one page - of the “intimnacy of God”, of “the heart of God.”

Here I summarize: Quoting Wojtyla, he used the word ‘providential’ to describe “your associations and communities…above all because the sanctifying Spirit uses these to reawaken the faith in the hearts of so many Christians.”

He tackles the difficult questions: “Now we ask ourselves. Who or what is the Holy Spirit? How can we recognize Him?…The world in which we live is the work of this Creative Spirit. Pentecost is also a feast of creation. The world does not exist of itself; it comes from the Creative Spirit of God, from God’s creative Word. And because of this, it also mirrors the wisdom of God.”

In short: The beauty of creation reveals God. But what has man done with this creation? “God’s good creation, in the course of human, history, has been covered over with a massive layer of filth…But the Creative Spirit comes to our aid. He entered history and therefore speaks to in a new way. In Jesus Christ, God himself became man and has allowed us, so to speak, to take a look at the intimacy of God himself.”

Here Ratzinger opens a mysterious page: He describes God. “We see something completely unexpected: In God, there exists an I and a You. The mysterious and remote God is not an infinite solitude, he is an event of love. If by looking at Creation we think we are able to glimpse something of the Creative Spirit, God himself, almost like creative mathematics, a power who makes the laws of the world and imposes order, but also, as beauty, then we come to know: the Creative Spirit has a heart. And that is Love.”

These sentences are not easy to chew, but they are good for our teeth.

God sent Jesus. “Jesus did not just allow us to look at the intimacy of God. With Him, God himself emerged from His intimacy to come to us…Jesus, and through Him, God Himself, comes to us and draws us within Him.”

In short…you get what I mean. This is catechism. It won’t play in the papers. They’d rather have the catechism according to Dan Brown.

Ratzinger describes life today: “The greater majority of men today have the same concept of life as the prodigal son in the Gospels… To get from life all that it can offer. To enjoy life to the full – to live, simply to live. At the end he found himself a mere swineherd, envying those animals outright, so empty had his existence become, so in vain. Even his freedom proved to be in vain.

"Is this not perhaps also happening today? When one only wants to take mastery of life, it becomes emptier, poorer. It is easy to end up taking refuge in drugs, in grand illusions. And the doubt arises whether living, after all is said and done, is really any good at all. No, this is not the way to find life.”

There is another possibility. I will let Don Julian Carron, Don Gius’s successor, who spoke after the Pope, synthesize it: “It is up to Christians today to give the reasons for living, for our faith. Without imposing anything. We may be listened to or not, but no one can stop us from spreading the news that the Pope spoke of… Maybe it will take centuries to reverse the actual situation. It is a bit like Christianity was at its very beginning.”

Maybe I have bored you. But I would like you to know that in order to serve you and do my job yesterday, I gained a plenary indulgence. That, and a decided wish to live!

It is gratifying that L'Osservatore Romano published this article about the new ecclesial movements in time for the day dedicated to them during the Year of Faith. Mons. Clemens was the private secretary to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger during most of his time as CDF Prefect, until 2002, when Clemens was named Secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Laity. (Because Clemens, perhaps by design, limited himself to the thoughts expressed by Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope, the OR editors need not have had to think twice about using the material!)

The article is excerpted from a lecture given by Mons. Clemens on May 16 to an international conference in Rome entitled "Springtime of the Church and the action of the Holy Spirit" organized by the Pontifical University Regina Apostolorum, on the role of the ecclesial movements and new communities in the formation and promotion of the faith.

Ecclesial movements and new communities
in the thinking of Cardinal Ratzinger
'A gesture from the good Lord
that none of us planned or expected'
by Mons. Josef Clemens
Secretary, Pontifical Council for the Laity
Translated from the 5/17/13 issue of


On many occasions, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger recalled that in the mid-1940s he first got to know an ecclesial movement, the Neo-
catechumenal Way, through one of his pupils, then towards the end of the 1960s, Comunione e Liberazione and the Charismatic Renewal, and at the start of the 1970s, the Focolari.

The theologian cardinal proposed a definition of the concept of such 'movements' in a lectio magistrali given in 1998 at the first world congress of ecclesial movements in Rome.

Starting with the Franciscan movement of the 12th century, he said:
"Movements are born for the most part with a charismatic leader, and configure themselves into concrete communities which by virtue of their origins, re-live the Gospel in its entirety, and without hesitations, they recognize in the Church their reason for being, without which they cannot subsist"

His statements in the interview-book Rapporto sulla fede (The Ratzinger Report, 1985), widen the horizon traced above and constitute more of a phenomenological description than a true and proper definition:n:

---

What opens up hope at the level of the universal Church - and this is taking place at the heart of the crisis of the Church in the Western world - is the emergence of the new movements that no one had anticipated, but which sprung forth spontaneously from the interior vitality of the faith itself.

They manifest - even if quietly - something of a new Pentecost in the Church. In growing numbers, I have been getting to meet groups of young people in whom there is heartfelt adherence to the entire faith of the Church.

These are young people who want to live this faith in full and who carry in themselves a great missionary impulse. Yet all the intense life of faith present in these movements does not imply an escape into intimacy or a retreat into privacy but simply, a full and integral catholicity.

The joy of faith that they experience has something that is contagious. And spontaneously, there is a growth among them of new vocations to the priesthood and to religious life.

---

The cardinal's response to journalist Vittorio Messori must be seen in the context of his evaluation of the post-conciliar period. After noting the incomplete and unillateral interpretation of the Conciliar texts and discussing some of the less positive developments after Vatican II, Messori asks the cardinal if he could name some positive elements from that troubled time for the Church. The cardinal names the birth of the ecclesial movements as the first positive element at the level of the universalhurch.

For the theologian cardinal, movements are born from the interior power of the faith itself - they are true gifts of the Holy Spirit, signs of hope and elementa that were truly revivifying in the post-Conciliar period.

I would like to cite some of his statements that were full of enthusiasm about the movements.

"Look, all of a sudden, we have something no one had planned. We see how once more, the Holy Spirit had, so to speak, asked to be heard".

Or, "I find it wonderful that the Spirit is far stronger than our programs and calculations, far beyond what we could even imagine".

Or, "The gifts of the Spirit must be given - and they have been given".

It is clear that the pneumatic origin of ecclesial movements is the premise and foundation of his reflections. The question naturally arises why a person known to have such moderate and considered judgments should be so enthusiastic about such 'irruptions of the Spirit'.

The answer can be found in his dialog with bishops in 1999, when the cardinal spoke of two very negative experiences in the post-conciliar period, that he lived firsthand as a university professor in Muenster, Tuebingen and Regensburg, and then as Archbishop of Munich-Freising. Namely, the loss of enthusiasm and of an ecclesial profile in academic theology, and the growing bureaucratization of the Church in Germany.

He said: "Seeing these two dangers for the Church - a theology which was no longer the faith considered with reason, but the expression of faith from a position of limited reason, and bureaucratization which does not serve to open the doors to faith but closes it in on itself - at a time when these two factors had become all too evident, I truly welcomed the novelty of the mas a gesture of the good Lord. I saw that the Council was bearing fruit in them, that the Lord was present in his Church, in which all our efforts, though well-intentioned, were fruitless but had, on the contrary, become counter-productive.. The Lord found other doors and through them wide open for his presence among those whose only resources were faith and grace".

The cardinal has taken a stand on every occasion about the second element, that of bureaucratization. Some circles in the Church, especially in Germany, had expected ecclesial renewal through the empowerment of various ecclesial offices and a maximized pastoral projection. They over-estimated the pastoral usefulness of the numerous commissions and councils formed in dioceses and parishes, and had become blind to the failure of such initiatives. This is the context in which the cardinal insists on the necessary and continuing reform of such Church 'structures'.

Cardinal Ratzinger was firmly convinced that a theology that was conceived and taught as 'pure academic science' and the growing 'bureaucratization' of the Church were not favorable to the action of the Holy Spirit but instead erected barriers against it.

Any bureaucratic pastoral plan tends to produce a certain uniformity in the life of the Church, a uniformity which is then 'disturbed' by the variety of the movements, in which religiosity is expressed in different ways - 'focolari' (family-based) or neo-catechumenal, cursillo or C&L, just as there had been the Benedictine, Franciscan and Dominican movements. The richness of the faith allows all such movements to co-exist under the same roof, in the same 'con-dominium'.

And so, there ensued some conflicts between the movements and a certain ecclesial establishment which rejects such a variety of approaches as well as what it considers a 'simple' expression of the faith, and which therefore, put up resistances and obstacles, whether it was at the stage of the movement being inserted into the local Church or at the approval of their statutes.

But for Cardinal Ratzinger, diversity is a legitimate and necessary expression of the liveliness and catholicity of the Church.

The fruitful integration of the movements into the ecclesial fabric requires a clarity in the basic criteria for discerning their various experiences.

As the first essential criterion, Cardinal Ratzinger cites that they must be rooted in the faith of the Church. "Whoever does not recognize the apostolic faith cannot claim to undertake any apostolic activity".

The unity of faith also gives rise to a strong desire for unity, of staying within the living community of the Church, thus being in unity with the successors of the Apostles and the Successor of Peter. Consequently, the movements are obliged to integrate themselves into the life of the local and universal Church.

The second criterion is a desire for apostolic life. Of course, the three essential elements of apostolic life (poverty, chastity and obedience) cannot be applied uniformly to all the members of a movement (which will include consecrated persons and laymen), but constitute for all members an orientation for their personal lives.

But the desire for apostolic life also means the firm intention to serve. First, in announcing the Gospel, and necessarily linked to it, helping any neighbor in need.

"All this presupposes a profound encounter with Christ. Only when a person is struck and profoundly marked in his most intimate self by Christ, only then can he be reconciled in the Holy Spirit, only then can true communion grow".

This Christological-pneumatological and existential basis can then have various accentuations, in the variety of which the novelty of Christianity and the youthfulness of the Church is incessantly renewed by the Holy Spirit.

But the cardinal also warns against the major danger to ecclesial movements which lies in being unilateral and exclusive, which comes in turn from their absolutization of their special charism, which amounts to one part claiming to be 'the whole'.This also gives rise to conflict with the local Church, in which both sides are at fault.

Cardinal Ratzinger, speaking with Messori, laid emphasis on the young people who adhere 'unconditionally; to the Catholic faith and who say they want to live this faith in its fullness. A full and integral catholicity which leads to a contagious joy, one that inspires not a few vocations to the priesthood and religious life.

Unlike the 'tired' Catholicism of those who doubt their very faith, the members and friends of the ecclesial movements have a fresh and enthusiastic faith, which is most visible in the World Youth Day celebrations instituted by John Paul II in 1984.

About a year after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, Joseph Ratzinger, then professor of dogma and the history of dogma in Tuebingen, wrote an essay on the conciliar statements regarding mission outside of the traditional missio ad gentes.

Commenting on the decree regarding lay apostolate, he stressed the need for a renewed awareness of the dynamic and missionary character of being Christian: "To be Christian means in itself that the Christian must go out of himself, exert himself beyond his own person, and is therefore marked by a missionary impulse that he must express - by every believer and at all times - in external acts that express the most profound nature of Christianity".

One of the great hopes that Professor Ratzinger linked to his own experience of the Council - in which he took part from the start, when he was 35, as a theological consultant - was the rediscovery of the missionary dimension of being Christian.

The open welcome by the Archbishop of Munich and Freising towards all the new movements and his subsequent favorable evaluation of the movements when he was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith may be explained in this specific perspective.

Since many of our contemporaries are no longer 'reached' by the Word of God, there is more than ever an urgent need for men and women who live the integral Christian faith in an integral manner.

The 'explosion of secularism and mass apostasy' in some European countries could well push Christians to a different 'movement', namely, to retreat into closed circles. But the Christian must never forget that he has been given a universal mission "in which the Creator God is at stake, the God of all, and if by grace, we have come to hear his voice, his revelation, then we have the responsibility to make this message resound around the world".

That is why there is urgent need for a strong awareness - and corresponding action - that the Gospel may reach all men. Thanks to their missionary impulse, the movements have been of great help to the whole Church in facing the challenge of secularity.

That is why Cardinal Ratzinger welcomed with enthusiasm the 'counter-current' strength of the movements as 'a gesture from the good Lord who found other doors and threw them open for his presence among those whose only resources are faith and grace".

Among the objections against the movements is that they are said to be blind or passive to the great social challenges of our time - namely, that the movements have been too self-referential and predominantly 'spiritual'.

The answer is that for the true Christian, there is no conflict between spiritual growth and social commitment. And it is also true that our commitment to others must be based on a stable foundation.

And so, Cardinal Ratzinger underscored that "Pure action cannot survive without a doctrinal foundation, and once it no longer springs from faith, it will find other foundations".

Helping the poor and efforts to build a just society, along with peaceful coexistence among all nations, have their measure and continuing reference point in Christ, in order create an authentic civilization, a civilization of love.

In general, the purpose of the ecclesial movements to live a genuine apostolic life does not separate evangelization from social commitment, as most of them have continually shown. Many of them demonstrate the realization of what Cardinal Ratzinger described in his 1998 lecture:

---

Apostolic life is not the end in itself, but it provides the freedom to serve. Apostolic life calls forth apostolic action, in which the announcement of the Gospel, the missionary element, takes first place.

In following Christ, evangelization is always in first place -
evangelizare pauperibus, to announce the Gospel to the poor. But this is never accomplished by words alone. Love, which is the heart, the center or truth and the operative center of the Gospel announcement, must be lived out and become the announcement itself.

And that is why in whatever form, social service is always part of evangelization.

---

This approach rejects some theological tendencies in the past few decades which, because of the great poverty present in many parts of the world, give the priority to social commitment, and in fact, seem to replace evangelization with social service, thus finding roots in other ideologies and no longer in the faith of the Church.

Against this tendency, Cardinal Ratzinger has maintained that authentic faith - as an encounter with Christ and an experience of the closeness of God - inspires every Christian act and nourishes his social commitment.

May 19, 2013, Pentecost Sunday

From left: 12th-century Russian icon; 16th-cent. Mt. Athos icon; illumination from the Duc du Berry's Tres Riches Heures, 1413-1416; Bernini's Holy Spirit, 1647-1653, St. Peter's Basilica; El Greco, 1596-1600; Rubens, 1619; contemporary icon.
Pentecost, which celebrates the descent of the Holy Spirit on Mary and the Apostles after Jesus had ascended to heaven, comes 50 days after Easter and marks the end of the Easter season.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/051913-pentecost-mass-during...

Today's saint:

ST. TEOFILO (TEOFALU) DA CORTE (Italy, 1676-1740), Capuchin
Born to a noble family in Corsica, Biagio dei Signori joined the Capuchins at
age 17 on the mainland, and was first assigned to a retreat house in Subiaco.
Subsequently, he was assigned to establish Franciscan retreat houses all over
Italy, distinguishing himself by his preaching and missionary zeal. He was
always sickly, but he did not spare himself, serving the faithful in the
confessional, in hospitals, and at the graveside. He was canonized in 1930.


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

Pentecost Sunday Mass and Regina caeli - Pope Francis celebrated Mass for the members of ecclesial movements
and new communities that sprung up after the Second Vatican Council. In his homily, he reflected on the elements
of newsness, harmony and mission in the events of the first Pentecost. Before the Regina caeli prayers -
the last this year (the Angelus resumes during the Ordinary time that follows Easter) - he thanked all the movements,
communities and associations whom he called 'a gift and treasure for the Church'.

EIGHT YEARS AND ONE MONTH AGO,

Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope.

OUR LOVE AND PRAYERS, YOUR HOLINESS!

One year ago...
The Holy Father met with 15 US bishops of various Oriental rites on ad-limina visit; and members of various Italian popular Catholic movements.

But let us look back at Benedict XVI's last Pentecost Mass as Pope:

MASS OF PENTECOST SUNDAY
May 27, 2012

At 9:30 this morning, the Holy Father Benedict XVI presided at St. Peter's Basilica at Holy Mass with the cardinals, archbishops and bishops present in Rome as concelebrants.



Here is Vatican Radio's English translation of the Holy Father's homily:

---

Dear brothers and sisters

I am happy to celebrate this Holy Mass with you – a Mass animated by the Choir of the Academy of Santa Cecilia and by the Youth Orchestra, whom I thank – on this Feast of Pentecost.

This mystery constitutes the baptism of the Church, it is an event that gave the Church the initial shape and thrust of its mission, so to speak. This shape and thrust are always valid, always timely, and they are renewed through the actions of the liturgy, especially.

This morning I want to reflect on an essential aspect of the mystery of Pentecost, which maintains all its importance in our own day as well. Pentecost is the feast of human unity, understanding and sharing.

We can all see how in our world, despite us being closer to one another through developments in communications, with geographical distances seeming to disappear – understanding and sharing among people is often superficial and difficult.

There are imbalances that frequently lead to conflicts; dialogue between generations is hard and differences sometimes prevail; we witness daily events where people appear to be growing more aggressive and belligerent; understanding one another takes too much effort and people prefer to remain inside their own sphere, cultivating their own interests. In this situation, can we really discover and experience the unity we so need?

The account of Pentecost in the Acts of the Apostles, which we heard in the first reading, is set against a background that contains one of the last great frescoes of the Old Testament: the ancient story of the construction of the Tower of Babel.

But what is Babel? It is the description of a kingdom in which people have concentrated so much power they think they no longer need depend on a God who is far away. They believe they are so powerful they can build their own way to heaven in order to open the gates and put themselves in God's place.

But it is at this very moment that something strange and unusual happens. While they are working to build the tower, they suddenly realise they are working against one another. While trying to be like God, they run the risk of not even being human – because they have lost an essential element of being human: the ability to agree, to understand one another and to work together.

This biblical story contains an eternal truth: we see this truth throughout history and in our own time as well. Progress and science have given us the power to dominate the forces of nature, to manipulate the elements, to reproduce living things, almost to the point of manufacturing human beings.

In this situation, praying to God appears outmoded, pointless, because we can build and create whatever we want. We do not realise that we are reliving the same experience as Babel.

It's true we have multiplied the possibilities of communicating, of possessing information, of transmitting news – but can we say our ability to understand each other has increased? Or, paradoxically, do we understand each other even less?

Doesn't it seem like feelings of mistrust, suspicion and mutual fear have insinuated themselves into human relationships to the point where one person can even pose a threat to another? Let's go back to the initial question: can unity and harmony really exist? How?

The answer lies in Sacred Scripture: unity can only exist as a gift of God's Spirit, which will give us a new heart and a new tongue, a new ability to communicate. This is what happened at Pentecost.

On that morning, fifty days after Easter, a powerful wind blew over Jerusalem and the flame of the Holy Spirit descended on the gathered disciples. It came to rest upon the head of each of them and ignited in them a divine fire, a fire of love, capable of transforming things.

Their fear disappeared, their hearts were filled with new strength, their tongues were loosened and they began to speak freely, in such a way that everyone could understand the news that Jesus Christ had died and was risen. On Pentecost, where there was division and incomprehension, unity and understanding were born.

But let's look at today's Gospel in which Jesus affirms: “When he comes, the Spirit of truth, He will guide you to the whole truth”.

Speaking about the Holy Spirit, Jesus is explaining to us what the Church is and how she must live in order to be herself, to be the place of unity and communion in Truth; he tells us that acting like Christians means not being closed inside our own spheres, but opening ourselves towards others; it means welcoming the whole Church within ourselves or, better still, allowing the Church to welcome us.

So, when I speak, think and act like a Christian, I don't stay closed off within myself – but I do so in everything and starting from everything: thus the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of unity and truth, can continue to resonate in people's hearts and minds, encouraging them to meet and welcome one another.

Precisely because it acts in this way, the Spirit introduces us to the whole truth, who is Jesus, and guides us to examine and understand it. We do not grow in understanding by closing ourselves off inside ourselves, but only by becoming capable of listening and sharing, in the “ourselves” of the Church, with an attitude of deep personal humility.

Now it's clearer why Babel is Babel and Pentecost is Pentecost. When people want to become God, they succeed only in pitting themselves against each other. When they place themselves within the Lord's truth, on the other hand, they open themselves to the action of his Spirit which supports and unites them.

The contrast between Babel and Pentecost returns in the second reading, where the Apostle Paul says: “Walk according to the Spirit and you will not be brought to satisfy the desires of the flesh”.

St Paul tells us that our personal life is marked by interior conflict and division, between impulses that come from the flesh and those that come from the Spirit: and we cannot follow all of them.

We cannot be both selfish and generous, we cannot follow the tendency to dominate others and experience the joy of disinterested service. We have to choose which impulse to follow and we can do so authentically only with the help of the Spirit of Christ.

St Paul lists the works of the flesh: they are the sins of selfishness and violence, like hostility, discord, jealousy, dissent. These are thoughts and actions that do not allow us to live in a truly human and Christian way, in love. This direction leads us to losing our life. The Holy Spirit, though, guides us towards the heights of God, so that, on this earth, we can already experience the seed of divine life that is within us.

St Paul confirms: “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace”. We note how the Apostle uses the plural to describe the works of the flesh that provoke the loss of our humanity – while he uses the singular to define the action of the Spirit, speaking of “the fruit”. In the same way, the dispersion of Babel contrasts with the unity of Pentecost.

Dear friends, we must live according to the Spirit of unity and truth, and this is why we must pray for the Spirit to enlighten and guide us to overcome the temptation to follow our own truths, and to welcome the truth of Christ transmitted in the Church.

Luke's account of Pentecost tells us that, before rising to heaven, Jesus asked the Apostles to stay together and to prepare themselves to receive the Holy Spirit. And they gathered together in prayer with Mary in the Upper Room and awaited the promised event.

Just as when it was born, the Church today still gathers with Mary and prays: “Veni Sancte Spiritus! - Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love!”. Amen.

---

MASS ON PENTECOST SUNDAY
May 19, 2013

At 10 a.m. today, the Holy Father, Pope Francis, celebrated Mass for the members of movements, new communities, associations and lay groups from around the world who came to Rome as pilgrims in the Year of Faith.



The only newsphotos I could find online of the Mass itself. All other photos are of the Pope touring among the faithful in the Popemobile after the Mass.

Here is the Vatican's English translation of his homily.

---

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Today we contemplate and re-live in the liturgy the outpouring of the Holy Spirit sent by the risen Christ upon his Church; an event of grace which filled the Upper Room in Jerusalem and then spread throughout the world.

But what happened on that day, so distant from us and yet so close as to touch the very depths of our hearts? Luke gives us the answer in the passage of the Acts of the Apostles which we have heard (2:1-11).

The evangelist brings us back to Jerusalem, to the Upper Room where the apostles were gathered. The first element which draws our attention is the sound which suddenly came from heaven "like the rush of a violent wind", and filled the house; then the "tongues as of fire" which divided and came to rest on each of the apostles.

Sound and tongues of fire: these are clear, concrete signs which touch the apostles not only from without but also within: deep in their minds and hearts. As a result, "all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit", who unleashed his irresistible power with amazing consequences: they all "began to speak in different languages, as the Spirit gave them ability".

A completely unexpected scene opens up before our eyes: a great crowd gathers, astonished because each one heard the apostles speaking in his own language. They all experience something new, something which had never happened before: "We hear them, each of us, speaking our own language". And what is it that they are they speaking about? "God’s deeds of power".

In the light of this passage from Acts, I would like to reflect on three words linked to the working of the Holy Spirit: newness, harmony and mission.

1. Newness always makes us a bit fearful, because we feel more secure if we have everything under control, if we are the ones who build, programme and plan our lives in accordance with our own ideas, our own comfort, our own preferences.

This is also the case when it comes to God. Often we follow him, we accept him, but only up to a certain point. It is hard to abandon ourselves to him with complete trust, allowing the Holy Spirit to be the soul and guide of our lives in our every decision.

We fear that God may force us to strike out on new paths and leave behind our all too narrow, closed and selfish horizons in order to become open to his own.

Yet throughout the history of salvation, whenever God reveals himself, he brings newness - God always brings newness - , and demands our complete trust: Noah, mocked by all, builds an ark and is saved; Abram leaves his land with only a promise in hand; Moses stands up to the might of Pharaoh and leads his people to freedom; the apostles, huddled fearfully in the Upper Room, go forth with courage to proclaim the Gospel.

This is not a question of novelty for novelty’s sake, the search for something new to relieve our boredom, as is so often the case in our own day. The newness which God brings into our life is something that actually brings fulfilment, that gives true joy, true serenity, because God loves us and desires only our good.

Let us ask ourselves today: Are we open to "God’s surprises"? Or are we closed and fearful before the newness of the Holy Spirit? Do we have the courage to strike out along the new paths which God’s newness sets before us, or do we resist, barricaded in transient structures which have lost their capacity for openness to what is new? We would do well to ask ourselves these questions all through the day.

2. A second thought: the Holy Spirit would appear to create disorder in the Church, since he brings the diversity of charisms and gifts; yet all this, by his working, is a great source of wealth, for the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of unity, which does not mean uniformity, but which leads everything back to harmony.

In the Church, it is the Holy Spirit who creates harmony. One of Fathers of the Church has an expression which I love: the Holy Spirit himself is harmony – "Ipse harmonia est". He is indeed harmony. Only the Spirit can awaken diversity, plurality and multiplicity, while at the same time building unity.

Here too, when we are the ones who try to create diversity and close ourselves up in what makes us different and other, we bring division. When we are the ones who want to build unity in accordance with our human plans, we end up creating uniformity, standardization.

But if instead we let ourselves be guided by the Spirit, richness, variety and diversity never become a source of conflict, because he impels us to experience variety within the communion of the Church.

Journeying together in the Church, under the guidance of her pastors who possess a special charism and ministry, is a sign of the working of the Holy Spirit. Having a sense of the Church is something fundamental for every Christian, every community and every movement. It is the Church which brings Christ to me, and me to Christ; parallel journeys are very dangerous!

When we venture beyond (proagon) the Church’s teaching and community - the Apostle John tells us in his Second Letter - and do not remain in them, we are not one with the God of Jesus Christ (cf. 2 Jn 1, 9).

So let us ask ourselves: Am I open to the harmony of the Holy Spirit, overcoming every form of exclusivity? Do I let myself be guided by him, living in the Church and with the Church?

3. A final point. The older theologians used to say that the soul is a kind of sailboat, the Holy Spirit is the wind which fills its sails and drives it forward, and the gusts of wind are the gifts of the Spirit. Lacking his impulse and his grace, we do not go forward.

The Holy Spirit draws us into the mystery of the living God and saves us from the threat of a Church which is gnostic and self-referential, closed in on herself; he impels us to open the doors and go forth to proclaim and bear witness to the good news of the Gospel, to communicate the joy of faith, the encounter with Christ.

The Holy Spirit is the soul of mission. The events that took place in Jerusalem almost two thousand years ago are not something far removed from us; they are events which affect us and become a lived experience in each of us.

The Pentecost of the Upper Room in Jerusalem is the beginning, a beginning which endures. The Holy Spirit is the supreme gift of the risen Christ to his apostles, yet he wants that gift to reach everyone.

As we heard in the Gospel, Jesus says: "I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to remain with you forever" (Jn 14:16). It is the Paraclete Spirit, the "Comforter", who grants us the courage to take to the streets of the world, bringing the Gospel!

The Holy Spirit makes us look to the horizon and drive us to the very outskirts of existence in order to proclaim life in Jesus Christ. Let us ask ourselves: do we tend to stay closed in on ourselves, on our group, or do we let the Holy Spirit open us to mission? Today let us remember these three words: newness, harmony and mission.

Today’s liturgy is a great prayer which the Church, in union with Jesus, raises up to the Father, asking him to renew the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. May each of us, and every group and movement, in the harmony of the Church, cry out to the Father and implore this gift.

Today too, as at her origins, the Church, in union with Mary, cries out:"Veni, Sancte Spiritus! Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and kindle in them the fire of your love!" Amen.

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I apologize for straying from the chronological order but I did not see this AP story on the Pope's encounter with the new ecclesial movements and communities yesterday. Vatican Radio did not have an account of the Q&A with the Pope which was the bulk of the event. Unlike the similar gathering in 2006 with Benedict XVI, which was Vespers and a prayer vigil, this was not a liturgical event, but more of a 'pep rally' as the AP describes it.

This morning, I read the transcript of the Q&A on the Italian service of Vatican Radio online - and it is quite impressive. So impressive I am surprised not more has been made of it so far. It's one that deserves translation - and that I would like to translate - because it appears to be very typically Francis, and as he was speaking at a public event, he avoided many of the informal asides he has been making during the morning homilies at Santa Marta. Other than something that I am surprised the AP report omits. Among other things, the Pope said that he would prefer the crowd not to shout out his name but rather the name of Jesus.

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I would like to make a slight reproach, but fraternally, just between us. All of you shout in the piazza, "Francesco, Francesco, Papa Francesco!" But where is Jesus? I would prefer that you shout "Jesus! Jesus is the Lord, and he is among us!" So from now on, no more "Francesco!", but "Jesus!"

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We get the message, of course, but this one I believe he did not think through sufficiently. For the faithful to be crying out "Jesus, Jesus!" when he passes by in the Popemobile would be absurd, as it would seem like they were addressing him as Jesus. In any case, that is a sort of demagoguery - a playing to the crowd - that no Pope before him has indulged in. Human nature being what it is, the faithful will shout out the name of the Pope, not primarily because he is John Paul II or Benedict XVI or Francis, but because he is the Vicar of Christ, and therefore represents Christ. I am sure no Pope before him - or he himself, for that matter - ever thought that the acclamation was primarily for him as an individual, but rather that it is for whom he represents. So, file that suggestion away along with the sweeping statement that "we must sell the churches if we must in order to feed the poor!"

Pope leads pep rally at Vatican,
meets with German chancellor
By FRANCES D'EMILIO


VATICAN CITY, May 18, 2013 (AP) - Pope Francis lamented that investment losses by banks trigger more alarm about the economic crisis than the struggle of people to feed their families, as he led a huge rally Saturday to invigorate the Church's moral conscience, hours after he held talks at the Vatican about the economic crisis with Germany's leader.

Some 200,000 people, from Europe, Asia and the pope's native South America, filled St. Peter's Square and nearby streets to join Francis in hours of prayer, music and speeches aimed at encouraging Catholics to strengthen their faith and making morality play a greater role in everyday life.

"If investments, the banks plunge, this is a tragedy, if families are hurting, if they have nothing to eat, well, this is nothing - this is our crisis today," Francis told the crowd, insisting that the true crisis is one of moral values.

Francis said his Church "opposes this mentality" and pledged that it will be dedicated to "the poor people." [He never once used any term that can be paraphrased to 'his Church' - he always said 'the Church' or 'a Church that...', even if he did avoid a direct answer to the question "How can we live as 'a poor Church that is for the poor, as you said when you were elected", since he premised his entire answer to that question by saying the Church was not political nor a well-structured organization, nothing like an NGO, but that her primary task was to live the Gospel and bear witness to it. No more "let us sell the churches if we must to help the poor" as in his remarks to the Caritas executives earlier in the week.]

Earlier in the day, the Pope met privately with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who made a brief visit to Rome, mindful of the importance of Christian voters back home ahead of an election she faces in September. She joined the Pope in expressing concern about the many victims of Europe's economic crisis.

Francis, who is Argentine, has picked up on campaigns by the two previous popes, the Polish John Paul II and German Benedict XVI, to reinvigorate what the Catholic Church sees as flagging religious enthusiasm on a continent with Christian roots, including a dwindling number of churchgoers in much of Western Europe, and a decline in morality.

"I see continuity in the missionary aspect, in becoming aware of the importance of Christianity for our Christian roots," said Merkel, adding that the `'simple and touching words" of Francis, who was elected Pontiff two months ago, are already reaching people. [Does that mean she thinks Benedict's words did not??? Sorry to be testy about this, even if it appears that no one, no matter how intelligent, has been exempt from Benedict-amnesia since March 13. And he's very much alive. Obviously, part of B16's new crucifixion is this living death by the willful oblivion of others.]

The vast cobblestone square outside St. Peter's Basilica is traditionally the boundary for pontiffs greeting the faithful at outdoor Vatican gatherings. [Benedict did it more than once, and I am positive John Paul II did!] But Francis kept going in his pope-mobile past the edge of the square as he waved cheerfully and sometimes blew kisses to the enthusiastic crowd, which the Vatican said numbered some 200,000. [One would think AP would have looked back at its own report of a similar event in 2006 with Benedict XVI, at which it reported a figure of 350,000 from Rome police estimates (VIS said 400,000) and published photos of Benedict XVI in the Popemobile in Via della Conciliazione with St. Peter's Square and the Basilica in the far background! I am so glad I posted that report and have those photos from 2006 to illustrate the point.]

He was driven halfway down the Rome boulevard that leads from the square to the Tiber River before turning back.

Merkel's Christian Democrat party depends heavily on support from Protestant and Catholic voters in Germany, and the 45-minute chat and photo opportunity in the Apostolic Palace could be a welcome campaign boost for a leader largely identified by Europe's economically suffering citizens as a champion of debt reduction, including painful austerity across much of the continent.

For its part, the Vatican is eager for allies in its campaign to anchor European societies more solidly in their heritage of Christian roots. The Church also seeks support on behalf of Christians who face persecution in the world.

During the rally, Francis embraced one of the speakers, Paul Bhatti, whose brother Shahbaz, a Pakistani government minister, was assassinated in 2011 after urging reform of a blasphemy law in Pakistan that had targeted Christians.

But the suffering of Europeans caught in the continent's grip of joblessness and other economic woes also dominated the Pope's concerns. On Thursday, Francis blasted what he called a `'cult of money" in a global financial system that ends up tyrannizing, not helping, the world's poor.

`'It's not just an economic crisis," but an existential problem depressing morale," Francis told the rally Saturday. `"It's a deep crisis. We just cannot worry about ourselves ... close ourselves in a sense of helplessness." The Pontiff urged people to help the needy, especially those on the margins of societies.

Merkel, asked by reporters about the Pope's scathing criticism of the global financial system, said they had spoken about regulation of financial markets.

"The regulation of the financial markets is our central problem, our central task," Merkel said. "We are moving ahead, but we are not yet where we want to be, where we could say that a derailment of the guard rails of social market won't happen again."

Merkel added: "It ought to be like this: The economy is there to serve the people. In the last few years, this hasn't been the case at all everywhere."

Italy, Spain, Ireland, Portugal and especially Greece have seen governments concentrate on debt reduction while slashing state spending. With growth stymied, unemployment, especially among young people, has soared. Businesses, many of them family-run in southern Europe, have failed as bank lending dried up.

The chancellor said the Pope had stressed that the world needs a strong and just Europe.

Merkel is campaigning for re-election in September's general election. Half of Germany's population is Catholic. In Bavaria there is a strong conservative and Catholic tradition.

According to a Vatican statement, Francis and Merkel also discussed safeguarding human rights, the persecutions faced by Christians and religious freedom.

Q&A with Pope Francis
Translated from the Italian service of

May 19, 2013

To have the courage of faith without being stiff and starchy, to construct a culture of encounter, to help one's neighbor, especially those in need, whose fate is more important than that of banks - In synthesis, this is what Pope Francis said in his remarks yesterday to a crowd of some 200,000 persons who were in St. Peter's Square to take part in a Pentecost vigil dedicated to movements, new communities, associations and lay groups, on the occasion of the Year of Faith.

[After opening remarks by Mons. Salvatore Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for New Evangelization, and testimonials by the Irish journalist John Waters and Paul Bhatti, brother of the late Pakistani Minister for Religious Minorities Shahbaz Bhatti, who was assassinated by Muslim extremists in 2010, the Pope answered four questions presented by selected representatives. The Vatican said he knew the questions in advance, but his responses were all off the cuff.] [I have become habituated to the deficiencies of RV reporting, but failing to give the context of the transcript it provides is just unforgivable sloppiness!]

(Apparently, the questions were read out first, and then the Pope answered them serially; I will place the corresponding answer after the question)..]

"Christian truth is attractive and persuasive because it responds to the profound needs of human existence, announcing in a convincing way that Christ is the only Savior of the whole man and of all men". Holy Father, these words of yours have struck us profoundly - they express in a direct and radical way the experience that each of us wishes to live, especially in the Year of Faith and the pilgrimage which brought us here today. We are before you to renew our faith, to confirm it, to strengthen it. We know that faith is not something we have once and for all. As Benedict XVI said in Porta fidei, "Faith is not an obvious assumption". This statement does not have to do only with the world, other people, the traditions from which we come. It concerns each of us, above all. Too many times we act as if faith were a seedling of novelty, the beginning of change, but it is difficult to invest all our life into it. It does not become the source of all our knowledge and action. Holiness, how did you arrive at the certainty of faith in your life? And what way can you show us so that we can each conquer the weakness of our faith? [Why must a questioner have to give a speech saying obvious things to the Pope before asking the question??? It makes the occasion nothing but an ego trip.]
THE POPE: Good evening to everyone. I am happy to be meeting you and that we are all together in this piazza to pray, to be united and to await the gift of the Spirit.

I was told about your questions, and I have thought about them - therefore, I am not speaking unknowingly. First, truth! I have it here, written down. The first question - "How did you arrive at the certainty of faith in your life? And what way can you show us so that we can each conquer the weakness of our faith?"

That's a historical question because it has to do with my story, the story of my life. I had the grace of growing up in a family in which the faith was lived simply and concretely. But it was, above all, my grandmother, my father's mother, who marked out my path of faith. She was a woman who explained, who spoke to us of Jesus, she taught us the .

I remember that on Good Friday, she would bring us, in the evening, to the procession of candles, and at the end of the procession came the 'dead Jesus'. Grandma made us children kneel down and told us, "Look, he is dead, but tomorrow, he will rise again".

So I received the first announcement of Christ from this woman, from my grandmother! This is a most beautiful thing. The first announcement, in the home, with the family, This makes me think of the love of so many mothers and so many grandmothers in transmitting the faith. It is they who transmit the faith. This was from the earliest times, since even St. Paul said to Timothy: "I remember the faith of your mother and your grandmother" (cfr 2Tm 1,5).

All the mothers who are here, all grandmothers - think of this! Transmit the faith. That God may place us next to persons who can help us in our way to faith. We do not find faith in the abstract - no! It is always from someone who preaches, who tells us who Jesus is, who gives us the first announcement. That was the first experience of faith I had.

But there is a day that was very important for me: September 21, 1953. I was almost 17. It was the Day for Students - for us the first day of spring, for you, the first day of autumn. Before going to the festivities, I passed by my parish church, I found a priest I did not know, and I felt I needed to confess.

It was, for me, an experience of encounter: I found someone who was
waiting for me. I do not know what happened, I do not remember, I do not know why the priest was there, someone I did not know, or why I felt the need to go to confession. The truth is - someone was waiting for me. And had been waiting for some time.

After confession, I felt that something had changed. I was not the same person. I had heard something like a voice, a call - and I was convinced that I must become a priest.

This experience of faith is important. We say that we must seek God, to go to him and seek forgiveness, but when we go to him, he is already waiting for us. He first of all. We, in Spanish have an expression that says this well, "The Lord is always one step ahead of us". He first - he is already awaiting us. And this is a tremendous grace: to find someone who is awaiting you.

You go to him as a sinner, but he is already waiting for you in order to forgive. This is the experience that the Prophets of Israel described when they said that the Lord is like the almond flower, the first flower of spring (cfr Jer 1,11-12). Before the other flowers bloom, there he is, awaiting us. The Lord awaits.

And when we seek him, we find this reality: It is he who is waiting for us in order to welcome us, to give us his love. And this brings a wonder to your heart that you can hardly believe - and thus your faith grows. Through the encounter with a person, the encounter with the Lord.

Someone may say, "No, I prefer to learn the faith in books". It is important to study it, but, attention, this alone does not suffice. The important thing is the encounter with Jesus, the encounter with him, because this is what gives you faith, it is he himself who gives it to you.

You yourself have spoken of the weakness of faith, what is to be done to overcome that weakness. The greatest enemy of weakness - and it is curious - is fear. But do not be afraid. We are weak, and we know it. But he is stronger. If you go with him, there is no problem. A baby is most fragile - and I have seen so many today - but it is with the father or the mother, and so it is secure. With the Lord, we are secure.

Faith grows with the Lord, in the hands of the Lord himself. This makes us grow in the faith and strengthens us. But not if we think we can do it all by ourselves... Think what happened to St. Peter. "Lord, I will never deny you"(cfr Mt 26,33-35); then, the cock crowed and he denied him three times (cfr vv. 69-75).

Think about it: when we have too much confidence in ourselves, we become weaker, yes, weaker. We must always be with the Lord. To be with the Lord means with the Eucharist, with the Bible, with prayer, but even with the family, with Mamma, because it is she who brings us to the Lord. She is the mother, she knows everything. And so, pray to Our Lady as well and ask her to "make me strong, as Mamma is".

This is what I think about the weakness of faith, at least from my personal experience. One thing that makes me strong every day is praying the Rosary to the Madonna. I feel great strength just by going to her.

Holy Father, mine is an experience of daily life much like others. I seek to live the faith at work and in my contact with others in sincere witness to the good that I have received from my encounter with the Lord. I am - we all are - 'thoughts of God', invested by a mysterious love that has given us life. I teach at a school, and this awareness is a reason for me to be passionate about my schoolchildren and even about my colleagues. And I have often seen how many seek happiness in various individual itineraries, in which life and its great questions are reduced to the materialism of those who want everything and are always dissatisfied, or a nihilism in which nothing has any meaning. I wonder how the proposal of faith - as a personal encounter, interaction with a community, with people - can reach the hearts of men and women in our time.

We were created for the infinite = "Play your life for great stakes", you said recently - and yet, everything around us and around our children seems to say we must be content with mediocre and immediate answers, and that man should adapt himself to the finite, without seeking anything else. At times, we are intimidated, like the Apostles before Pentecost. The Church is inviting us to take part in the New Evangelization. I think all of us who are here tonight feel this challenge most strongly = it is at the heart of our experiences.

So I would like to ask you, Holy Father, to help me and all of us to understand how we should meet this challenge in our time. What do you consider the most important thing for all of us movements, associations and communities in order to carry out the mission we are called to do? How can we communicate the faith effectively today?
Let us go to your question. [He repeats it, reading.] I will answer with three words.

The first: Jesus. What is the most important thing? Jesus. If we make progress with organization, with other things, even beautiful things, but without Jesus, we are not moving ahead. Nothing will work. Jesus is more important.

Now, I would like to make a slight reproach, but fraternally, just between us. All of you shout in the piazza, "Francesco, Francesco, Papa Francesco!" But where is Jesus? I would prefer that you shout "Jesus! Jesus is the Lord, and he is among us!" So from now on, no more "Francesco!", but "Jesus!"

The second word: prayer. To look at the face of God, but above all - and this is linked to what I said earlier - to feel that he is looking at us. The Lord is looking at us - he does so first. It is what I experience in front of the Tabernacle when I pray before the Lord at night.

Sometimes, I nod off, it is true, because the efforts of the day can make you doze off. But I feel such comfort just knowing that he is looking at me. We think that we must pray and that this means talk, talk, talk. No! Let the Lord look at you. When he looks at us, he gives us strength and he helps us bear witness to him - and the question was about witnessing to the faith, right?

First, Jesus, then prayer. And we will feel that God is holding us by the hand. I will underscore the importance of this - let us allow ourselves to be led by him. This is more important than any calculation. We are true evangelizers if we let ourselves be led by him.

Let us think again of Peter. Perhaps he was having a siesta, after lunch, and he had a vision - that of a tablecloth with all the animals of the earth. He heard Jesus telling him something he did not understand. Just then, some non-Jewish people arrived asking him to go to a house. And he saw that the Holy Spirit was there. Peter allowed himself to be led by Jesus to work his first evangelization with the Gentiles - something unimaginable in those times (cfr Acts 10,9-33). [Biblical illiterate that I am, I had never heard or read this anecdote before - it deserves to be read. It is much more than the sketchy summary given by the Pope, who assumes that his listeners are familiar with the story.]

And all of history is just so. All of history. Let us be led by Jesus. He is the leader, Our leader is Jesus.

The third word: Witness. Jesus, prayer - which is allowing ourselves to be led by him; then witness. But I would like to add something else. Allowing ourselves to be led by Jesus leads you to his surprises. One might think that evangelization must be programmed by committee, thinking of strategies, making plans. But these are just instruments, small instruments. The important thing is Jesus and letting ourselves be led by him. Then we can strategize, but this is secondary.

Finally, giving witness. Communicating the faith can only be done through witness, which is love. Not with our ideas, but with the Gospel lived in our own existence and which the Holy Spirit causes to dwell within us. It is like a synergy between us and the Holy Spirit, and this leads to witness.

The Church is brought forward by the saints, who are precisely those who have given witness. As John Paul II and Benedict XVI said, the world today is in great need of witnesses. Not so much of teachers but of witnesses. [Actually, Benedict XVI liked to quote Paul VI who said that the best teachers are those who are first credible witnesses to the faith.]

Do not speak so much, but speak with your whole life. It is important to be consistent in your life. A consistency which means living your
Christianity as an encounter with Jesus who brings us to others, not
christianity as a social fact - that sociologically, we are Christians, closed in on ourselves. No. Not that. Witness [is important]!

Holy Father, I listened with great emotion to the words you said at your audience with newsmen after your election: "How I would like a church that is poor and that is for the poor!" Many of us are engaged in works of charity and justice - we are an active part of that presence of the Church rooted among those who suffer. I am an employee, I have a family, and as much as I can, I am personally committed to be close to the poor and to help them. But that is not why I feel I am doing right. I would like to say with Mother Teresa that everything is for Christ. A great help in living this experience are the brothers and sisters of my community who are engaged in the same work, in which we are sustained by faith and prayer.

The need is great. You have reminded us, "How many poor persons there still are in the world, and how much suffering they must undergo!" And the economic crisis has aggravated everything. I think of the poverty that afflicts so many countries, and which has now turned up even in the world of the well-off, in the lack of work, in mass migrations, in new slaveries, in the abandonment and solitude of so many families, so many old people, so many persons who are homeless and unemployed.

I would like to ask you, Holy Father, how I and all of us can live as a poor Church that is for the poor? What is it that people who suffer demand from our faith? We all, as movements and lay associations - what concrete and effective contribution can we give to the Church and society in order to face a crisis that also involves public ethics, the right models of development, politics - in sort, a new way of being men and women? [Wow! Typical bleeding heart liberal who deludes himself that he can take on singlehanded all the problems of the world. Please wake up and be more humble. Charity begins at home. Each of us, following Christ, can do what we can, as best as we can. God does not ask more. All together, our little personal contributions can help. Jesus did not say that his way would solve all the problems of the world, if only because there will always be evil in the world. ]

As to this question - let me go back to the importance of witness. First of all, the principal contribution we can give is to live the Gospel. The Church is not a political movement, nor a well-organized structure. It is not that. We are not an NGO, because when the Church becomes an NGO, it loses salt, it becomes tasteless, it is nothing but a hollow organization. You must be clever about this, because the devil can deceive you, because there is the danger of 'efficientism'. It is one thing to preach Jesus. Efficiency is something else. That is a different value.

The fundamental value of the Church is to live the Gospel and to bear witness to our faith. The Church is the salt of the earth, the light of the world, she is called on to make present in society the yeast of the Kingdom of God, and she does this primarily through her witness, of fraternal love, of solidarity, of sharing.

When one hears it said that solidarity is not a value but a 'primary attitude' that must disappear, that is wrong. Then one is only thinking of worldly efficiency. This time of crisis, such as that we are living - but you did say that we live in a world of lies [????] - we must be aware that it is not just an economic crisis. It is not a cultural crisis.

It is a crisis of man - it is man who is in crisis. It is man who can be destroyed. But man is supposed to be an image of God. That is why it is a profound crisis. At this time, we cannot solely be concerned with ourselves, to be closed inside our own loneliness, in discouragement, in a sense of impotence in the face of problems. Do not close yourself off, please! It is a danger - to be enclosed in our parishes, in our circle of friends, in the movement, with those who think like we do. Do you know what happens then? When the Church stays closed, she becomes sick. She becomes sick.

Think of a room that has been closed for more than a year. When you enter it, it smells of humidity, many things are not right within. A Church closed in on itself is the same thing - it is a sick Church.

The Church must get out of herself. [But is that not the essence of mission and evangelization? "Go forth and make disciples of all peoples" Or, on another level, a happy Christian naturally wants to share the source of his joy with others. How can he remain closed in on himself? I've never quite understood Cardinal Bergoglio's obsession with this 'closed Church', unless he means all those elements = episcopal, clergy and lay - who focus on diocesan, parish and their associated circles of petty power and self-importance to the exclusion of actually 'being Christian'! ]

But where to? Towards the peripheries of existence, whatever they are. but get out! [These existential peripheries can be right in my neighborhood, in my parish. If I try to act as a good Christian in my circle of existence, does it not include 'working' in these peripheries? Are not the priests, the religious, the various organizations who do work with these peripheral or marginalized lives already outside themselves, giving themselves?]

Jesus tells us, "Go forth and preach. Bear witness to the Gospel". (cfr Mk 16,15). But what happens when we get out of ourselves? It could be like leaving your house and going out to the street - where an accident can happen. But I tell you, I would prefer a thousand times a Church in which accidents happen than a Church that is sick from being closed off.

So get out, get out! Think of what it says in the Apocalypse. It says a beautiful thing: that Jesus is at the door and knocks, he is knocking to enter our hearts (cfr Ap 3,20). This is the meaning of the Apocalypse.

But ask yourself this question: How many times is Jesus in our hearts and asks to be let out, but we don 't let him out, for our own security, because so often, we are enclosed within decaying structures, which only serve to enslave us when we should be free children of God. [Another concept of the Pope that I cannot grasp. Am I dense? How can any Christian keep Jesus to himself, even if he wanted to? Jesus cannot be imprisoned by anyone in anything, least of all in anyone's heart - it would be tantamount to not having Jesus at all, because selfishness keeps Jesus out! But this is all part of Cardinal Begoglio's pre-Conclave manifesto that I have many problems with, problems which I have yet to fully articulate, because my problems with it may be idiopathic to myself alone and do not bother anyone else.]

In getting out, it is important to set out to meet others. For me, this is very important - to meet others. [Why else would a Christian go forth? Just to take a walk?]

And why is it important? Because faith is an encounter with Jesus, and we must do as Jesus did - meet others. We live in a culture of confrontation, a culture of fragmentation, a culture in which we throw out whatever is not useful, a culture of the disposable.

But I ask you to think - because this is part of the crisis - of the older people, who represent the wisdom of a people, of babies, in this culture of the disposable.

So we must go out to meet others, and we must create with our faith a culture of encounter, a culture of friendship, a culture in which we find brothers, where we can speak even with those who do not think as we do, even with those of other faiths, who do not have our faith. Everyone has something in common with us: they are images of God, they are children of God. We must go forth to meet others, without negotiating our own identity.

One other thing is important: go out to be with the poor. If we get out of ourselves, we will encounter poverty.

Today - and it makes my heart ache to say so - today, to find a homeless man who has died of the cold is not news. Today news is, perhaps, a scandal. A scandal, oh yes!, now, that is news!

Today, the thought that so many babies are dying of hunger is not news. But this is serious. This is serious! We cannot remain calm about these things. But... that's the way it is!

We cannot be stiff and starchy Christians, those who are too educated, who talk of theology while having tea, in all tranquility. No. We must be courageous Christians and go forth to seek out those who are the very flesh of Christ, the poor who are the very flesh of Christ.

When I go out to give confession - now I cannot, because to go out for confession... I can't get out of here, but that's another problem - when I would give confession in my earlier dioceses, there were always those whom I would ask, "Do you give alms?" "Yes, Father". "Good! That's good!" But I would ask two more questions: "Tell me, when you give alms, do you look into the eyes of the person you are giving to?" "I don't know... I have not thought about it". And my next question: "When you give alms, do you touch the hand of the person, or do you just drop the coin into his hand?"

This is the problem: to touch the flesh of Christ, to take upon ourselves the pain of the poor. For us Christians, poverty is not a sociological or philosophical or cultural category - it is theological. I would even say, perhaps that is the first category, because God, the Son of God, lowered himself, made himself poor in order to be able to walk with us.

This is our poverty - the poverty of the flesh of Christ, the poverty that brought us the Son of God in his Incarnation. [Dear Pope, you lost me there! I feel I am being drawn into the labyrinth of some theological improvisation.] A poor Church that is for the poor begins with going forth to touch the flesh of Christ. If we do this, then we shall begin to understand something, to understand what is poverty, the poverty of the Lord. [But Jesus was never destitute, he never suffered because of 'poverty'! Other than his voluntary 40 days in the desert, he was never materially deprived. He identified with the poor. That's something else. His suffering was bearing the burden of the sins of mankind.]

This is not easy. And there is a problem that is harmful to Christians: the spirit of the world, the worldly spirit, spiritual worldliness. It leads us to a self-sufficiency, living according to the spirit of the world rather than that of Jesus.

The question you had - how must we live in order to face the crisis that involves public ethics, models of development, and politics - inasmuch as this is a human crisis, a crisis that destroys man, it is also a crisis that strips man of ethics. In the public life, in politics, without ethics, an ethical reference point, everything is possible, everything can be done.

But we see, when we read the newspapers, that the lack of ethics in public life has caused so much evil to all mankind. I would like to tell you a story. I already told it twice this week, but I will do it a third time with you.

It is about a Biblical midrash [a homiletic story told by Jewish rabbis to illustrate passages from the Bible Careful, Pope Francis! Benedict XVI never used a term he did not explain] of a 12th century rabbi. He recounts the construction of the Tower of Babel, and says that in order to build it, bricks had to be manufactured. What did this mean? to go out, make dough out of mud, add the straw to the mud, etc - then bake everything in an oven. When the bricks were done, they had to be brought up to continue building the tower.

A brick was a treasure, for all the work that went into making it. When a brick fell, it was a national tragedy and the guilty laborer was punished. A brick was so precious that when one fell and broke, it was a tragedy. But if a laborer fell and died, nothing happened. It was something else altogether.

That is happening today. If bank investments fall a little, "It's a tragedy: What shall we do?" But if people who have nothing to eat are dying of hunger, or because they are sick, nothing is done. This is our crisis today. But the witness of a poor Church that is for the poor contradicts this mentality.

[But what is the Pope's definition of 'a poor Church'? He has never defined that (it certainly cannot be reduced to the token symbol of wearing plain new chasubles instead of the chasubles in all varieties worn by previous Popes that are available in the sacristy of St. Peter's), and the secular left has interpreted it that Francis intends to have the Church - the Vatican as well as all local churches - sell off her patrimony and anything valuable that she has in order to help the poor. Which he did articulate in his remarks to Caritas last week, though he avoided saying it today. An obviously improbable scenario, because even if it could happen, the resources raised would be finite and would hardly scratch the surface of the global poverty phenomenon, much less erase it from the face of the earth.


To walk, to construct, to profess. ('Camminare, costruire, confessare'). This 'program' of yours for a Church as movement - or so I understood it when I heard your first homily as Pope - has comforted and urged us on. Comforted, because we have found ourselves in profound unity once more with the Christian community and with the entire universal Church. Urged on, because in a way, you have made us get rid of the dust of time and superficiality from our adherence to the Church. [EXCUSE ME???? I should think Pope Francis has no need of all this fawning - and it is fawning, even if, the speaker genuinely means it. But then if the most reputable cardinals have fawned even worse, why should we expect any better of a layman who is theoretically less spiritually fit than a cardinal?]
But I must say that I cannot overcome a sense of unease that one of these three words provokes in me: to confess (or profess), meaning to bear witness to the faith. We can think of so many of our brothers who are suffering because of it, as we just heard [Paul Bhatti spoke about religious persecution in Pakistan] Of those who have to think twice before going to Sunday Mass because it would mean risking their life. Of those who are targeted and discriminated against because of their Christian faith in too many parts of the world. I think that in the face of all this, our witness of faith is timid and clumsy. We would like to do more, but what? How can we aid these brothers? How can we alleviate their suffering since we cannot do anything, or very little, to change their political and social circumstances?
To announce the Gospel, two virtues are necessary: courage and patience. The Christians who are being persecuted are in the Church of patience. They are suffering, and there are more martyrs today than in the first centuries of the Church. More martyrs! Who are our brothers and sisters. They are suffering, And they will carry their faith to martyrdom. But martyrdom is never a defeat - it is the highest degree of witness that we can give.

We are all on the way to martyrdom, little martyrdoms - renouncing this, not doing that - but we are on the way. But they, poor ones, will give their lives, but they will give it as they do in Pakistan - out of love for Jesus, bearing witness to Jesus.

A Christian should always have this attitude of meekness, of humility - that's exactly what the martyrs have - trusting in Jesus, entrusting themselves to Jesus.

It must be pointed out that many times, these conflicts do not have a religious origin: often, there are other causes, social or political, but unfortunately, religious membership is utilized to pour gasoline on a fire.

A Christian must always know how to respond to evil with goodness, even if this is often difficult. Meanwhile, we can seek to let our persecuted brothers and sisters feel that we are profoundly united to them - profoundly united to their situation, that we know they are Christians who have 'entered into patience'.

When Jesus went towards his Passion, he entered into patience. These Christians too have entered into patience. Let them know it, and let the Lord know. [???Doesn't the Lord know everything?]

I ask you: Are you praying for these brothers and sisters? Do you pray for them? In your everyday prayers? I will not ask you now to raise your hands if you do. I will not ask it now. But think of it. In our prayers every day, let us say to Jesus: "Lord, look at this brother, look at this sister who is suffering so much!" They are experiencing the limits between life and death. [I wish he had started his answer with this, which is the most obvious answer to the question that is almost outrageous in its sanctimony! Isn't that what every Catholic is taught - If there is nothing else you can do, PRAY! They also serve who 'only' sit (or kneel) and pray. As many saints did, as contemplatives do, as Benedict XVI does.]

Their experience should make us promote religious freedom for all. For all. Every man and every woman should be free to profess their own religion, whatever it is. Why? Because each man and each woman is a child of God.

I think I have said something about your questions. Excuse me if I went on too long. Thank you very much. Thank you to everyone, and do not forget: no closed Church, but a Church that goes out, that goes to the peripheries of existence. May the Lord lead us there. Thank you.

[Dear Pope Francis, I do not know what the missionaries through the centuries have been doing, if not going to the peripheries of existence. What all the country priests in the back of nowhere have been doing. What the Magisterium of the Popes. especially its social doctrine of the Church since the 19th century, has been doing (best exemplified by the life and work of Don Bosco and the other remarkable 'social saints' of Turin at that time).


P.S. I must admit sheepishly that after translating the Q&A, I find it less impressive than I originally thought it was. The Pope is an excellent communicator when it comes to traditional concepts, but not about his pet concepts which I find rather murky, such as a closed Church that must get out of herself to in order go the 'peripheries of existence', or people keeping Jesus in their hearts and not allowing him to leave, or 'a poor Church'.

And I must add this rejoinder: It's not exactly true that nothing is being done for the poorest and neediest of society today. The Church herself (and her associated agencies) is the largest ongoing charitable organization worldwide that does not just provide food for the needy wherever and whenever she can, but also provides healthcare and educational services, as part of her missionary work.

True, her work is limited by available resources, but somehow, Catholic charities have survived, even despite the economic crisis. And there is no lack of charitable or philanthropic agencies, both secular and religious - regardless of what prompts their philanthropy - who do what they can to help fill in what governments cannot do. The Western world generally responds to help victims of natural calamities, refugees and other victims of war. In many countries of the Third World, programs are in place to help the poor to help themselves, like mini-credit banks, agricultural cooperatives, job training and educational opportunities. The Church certainly does not plan to constitute herself into universal nanny, or worse, a surrogate for the welfare state and its culture of dependency - that is not her mission.

Of course, any and all available aid is never enough. But Jesus did not say "You will always have the poor among you" as a throwaway line (unless I continue to miss the true theological sense of that statement by taking it literally). But he did say it in reply to Judas who decried the waste of expensive perfume used to anoint the Master's feet, when it could have been sold and the money raised given to the poor - that's quite explicit!

And as much as we lament the lack of ethics that led to all the financial problems of recent years, banks and financial institutions have to restabilize themselves because they are an integral part of a globalized economy. And no recovery will be possible if they continue to be shaky. We can only hope they have learned their lessons about ethical practices, and that the governments of the world can better regulate them.

Here is yet another major administrative and legislative reform at the Vatican begun under Benedict XVI, but which must now undergo two years of fine-tuning before it can be approved by the current Pope. One can almost bet, however, that when it goes into effect, none of the credit will go to Benedict XVI...Thanks to CNS for an excellent enterprise story (I haven't read about this elsewhere) which will surely come in handy two years from now.

Vatican official on planned
changes in canon law:
Church teaching doesn't change,
but church laws can be improved
By Cindy Wooden


VATICAN CITY. May 17, 2013 (CNS) -- Bishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta has a special briefcase he uses exclusively to carry documentation for a project that would completely revise an entire section of the Catholic Church's basic law.

The black case contains a 40-page draft text for a new "Book VI: Sanctions in the Church" section of the Code of Canon Law, as well as the 800-page synthesis of recommended amendments and objections to the proposed changes.

Bishop Arrieta, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, delves into the briefcase at work in his office overlooking St. Peter's Square and at home in the evening.

Like any society, the Catholic Church has laws, Bishop Arrieta said, and while the tenets of its faith do not change, its laws do need to be adapted to the changing situations in which its members try to live out their faith.

While the pontifical council is looking at small adjustments to several sections of the Code of Canon Law, promulgated in 1983, and ways to speed up the process for evaluating the validity of marriages, the section concerning offenses and penalties was judged to be in need of more than a touch-up.


File photo shows Cardinal Ratzinger, then barely a year as CDF Prefect, looking on as John Paul II signed the decree promulgating the Revised Canon Law Code on January 25, 1983.

The current code was drafted in the 1970s, Bishop Arrieta said, "a period that was a bit naive" in regard to the need for a detailed description of offenses, procedures for investigating them and penalties to impose on the guilty. It reflected a feeling that "we are all good," he said, and that "penalties should be applied rarely."

"The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, when Pope Benedict was prefect, was obliged to act as a consequence of the fact that the (Church's) penal law was not working," he said.

[It must be remembered that some time in 2010, Mons. Arrieta revealed how, back in 1988, Cardinal Ratzinger had written his office three letters requesting for a clarification and streamlining of procedures that had to do with disciplining priests. At the time, the CDF was competent to decide only on requests for dispensation from priesthood made for a variety of reasons, some of which had to do with charges of 'grievous and scandalous conduct', charges for which the local bishop was solely responsible for investigation and appropriate disposition - and this included sex abuse acccusations. I must look up the article Arrieta wrote for the OR at the time.]

The naivete of the law became clear with the sexual abuse crisis, Bishop Arrieta said. In addition, the sanctions section of the 1983 code was written with such an emphasis on the role of the individual bishop in his local diocese that each bishop bore the full weight of deciding when and how to intervene and what sort of sanction or punishment to impose on the guilty.

The law ended up being too vague, and church sanctions were being applied so haphazardly, that the Church appeared to be divided, he said. [From the facts that have emerged in the past decade on how bishops have dealt with their sex offender priests, it would appear that most of them decided not to act at all, or used the discretion given to them to cover up for the offenders.]

The project to revise the section began in 2008. The draft was completed in 2011 and sent to bishops' conferences and pontifical faculties of canon law, which had a year to respond. The suggestions were organized and synthesized, and now council officials and consultants -- mostly professors of canon law -- meet for an afternoon every two weeks to go through them, line by line.

Bishop Arrieta said it will be at least two years before a new draft is ready to present to Pope Francis. As the Church's chief legislator, it is the pope who decides whether or not to promulgate it and order that it replace the current law.

The proposed draft incorporates the Vatican's 2010 updated definition of "delicta graviora" -- Latin for "graver offenses," including clerical sexual abuse of minors, the "attempted ordination of women" and acts committed by priests against the sanctity of the Eucharist and against the sacrament of penance.

The two chief concerns in the new section, as in all church law, he said, are "to safeguard the truth and protect the dignity of persons."

At the same time, the rules are more stringent -- "if someone does this, he must be punished," the bishop said. While it withdraws the discretionary power of the bishop in certain cases, he said, "it is for the good of the bishop."

Another set of modifications to the Code of Canon Law are already on Pope Francis' desk, awaiting his judgment. They deal with areas in which the code for the Latin-rite Catholic majority differs from the Code of Canons of the Eastern Catholic Churches.

Bishop Arrieta said that in most cases they are rules for situations that the Latin-rite code never envisioned, but that the Eastern code, published in 1990, did. With the large number of Eastern Christians -- Catholic and Orthodox -- who have migrated to predominantly Latin territories in the last 25 years, Latin-rite pastors need guidance, he said.

For example, Eastern Catholics who do not have access to a priest or parish of their rite are free to receive the sacraments in a Latin-rite parish, including baptism and matrimony. The proposed revisions for the code specify that in such situations the parish's sacramental register must include a notation that the people involved belonged to an Eastern Catholic church, he said. In addition, Latin-rite pastors must know that while a Latin-rite marriage is valid in the presence of a deacon, in the Eastern-rite churches a priest must preside.

Many Catholics think canon law is something they need to be concerned about only if their marriage breaks down and they want an annulment.

The annulment process is another area currently under study and scrutiny by the pontifical council, the bishop said. The church's law must uphold church teaching, but do so responding to the concrete situations of the faithful.

"Church law follows the theological reality of things," he said. "It isn't canon law that forbids divorce, the faith does. Canon law then transforms that into juridical language."

So while the council is not trying to find ways to facilitate annulments, "we are trying to identify the bottlenecks that delay" judgments in the annulment process and identify improved procedures, he said.

P.S. Until I googled just now to check the date of Mons. Arrieta's article for OR, I did not realize that the Vatican site itself under RESOURCES carries Mons. Arrieta's presentation of the background to the Canon Law revision project - it is the full version of what OR published two years ago.
www.vatican.va/resources/resources_arrieta-20101202_en.html

---

Cardinal Ratzinger and the revision of
the canonical penal law system:
A crucial role
by Mons. Juan Ignacio Arrieta
Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts

In the coming weeks, the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts will distribute to its Members and Consultors the draft of a document containing suggestions for the revision of Book VI of the Code of Canon Law, the basis of the Church’s penal law system. For almost two years a commission of experts in penal law has been re-examining the text promulgated in 1983, to maintain the general plan and the existing numbering of the canons, while revising some of the decisions taken at the time, which can be seen to be insufficient.

This initiative originated in a task entrusted to the new Superiors of the Dicastery by Benedict XVI on 28 September 2007. In the course of that exchange it became clear that the initiative sprang from a deeply-held conviction of the Pontiff, the fruit of years of personal experience, and from his concern for the integrity and the consistent application of Church discipline.

This conviction and this concern guided the steps of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger since he took office as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, despite the objective difficulties deriving, among other factors, from the particular legislative situation of the Church at the time, in the wake of the promulgation of the 1983 Code of Canon Law. To facilitate a better understanding, it is helpful here to recall certain elements of the newly revised legislative framework of the time.

The Penal Law System of the Code
The juridical layout of the penal law system of the 1983 Code is substantially different from that of the previous Code of 1917 and it matches the ecclesiological context delineated by the Second Vatican Council.

The principles of subsidiarity and “decentralization” have a key role in shaping penal discipline; the latter concept indicates the greater weight given to particular law, and especially to the initiative of individual Bishops in their pastoral governance, since they, as the Council teaches (cf. Lumen Gentium, 27), are Vicars of Christ in their respective dioceses. In most cases, in fact, the Code entrusts to the judgement of local Ordinaries and Religious Superiors the task of discerning whether or not to impose penal sanctions and how to do so in particular cases.

There is a further factor, though, which marks the new canonical penal law even more profoundly: the juridical procedures and safeguarding mechanisms that were established for the application of canonical penalties.

Consistently with the listing of the fundamental rights of all the baptized (included in the Code for the first time), there were now systems to protect and safeguard these rights, drawn partly from the Church’s canonical tradition and partly from other areas of juridical experience: sometimes this was done in a way that did not fully accord with the reality of the Church throughout the world.

Guarantees are essential, especially in the penal law system; but they must be balanced and they must also allow the collective interest to be effectively safeguarded. Subsequent experience has shown that some of the particular means adopted by the Code to guarantee rights were not a sine qua non and could have been replaced by other safeguards more in harmony with the reality of the Church: in some cases they even presented an objective obstacle – at times an insurmountable one given the scarcity of resources – to the effective application of the penal law system.

One could say, paradoxical though it may now seem, that of all the books of the Code, Book VI on penal sanctions was the one that “benefited” least from the constant fluidity that characterized the normative framework of the postconciliar period.

Other areas of canonical discipline at the time could be assessed in the light of practical ecclesial reality by evaluating positively or negatively the results of various norms ad experimentum when it came to drawing up the definitive norms of the Code.

The new penal law system, however, being “completely new” in relation to what had gone before, or almost so, lacked this “opportunity” for experimental evaluation, and so it was established practically ex nihilo in 1983. The number of delicts listed had been drastically reduced to include only particularly grave forms of conduct, and the imposition of sanctions was dependent upon the criteria of evaluation – inevitably diverse – of each individual Ordinary.

It should be added that in this area of canonical discipline, a widespread anti-juridical bias has exercised, and continues to exercise, a degree of influence, giving rise, among other things, to the difficulty of harmonizing the demands of pastoral charity with those of justice and good governance.

Even the wording of some canons in the Code, where tolerance is invoked, could be unduly misinterpreted as seeking to dissuade the Ordinary from applying penal sanctions where the demands of justice require them.

A Request from Cardinal Ratzinger (19 February 1988)
Within this legislative framework a contrasting element emerged in the shape of a letter dated 19 February 1988 from the Prefect of the then Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, to the President of the then Pontifical Commission for the Authentic Interpretation of the Code of Canon Law, Cardinal José Rosalío Castillo Lara.

is an important and unique document that draws attention to the negative consequences produced in the Church by some of the options contained within the penal law system established barely five years earlier. This document has come to light in the context of the work being carried out by the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts on the revision of Book VI.

The reason for writing the letter is clearly explained. The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was competent at the time for examining petitions for dispensation from the priestly obligations assumed at ordination.

Such dispensations were granted as a maternal gesture of grace on the part of the Church after, on the one hand, examining attentively the full circumstances of the particular case and, on the other hand, taking into account the objective gravity of the obligations undertaken before God and the Church at the moment of priestly ordination. Yet the circumstances motivating some of the requests for dispensation were anything but deserving of a gesture of grace. The text of the letter sets out the problem eloquently:

---

Your Eminence, this Dicastery, in the course of examining petitions for dispensation from priestly obligations, has to deal with cases of priests who, in the exercise of their ministry, have been guilty of grave and scandalous conduct, for which the Code of Canon Law, after due process, provides for the imposition of specific penalties, not excluding reduction to the lay state.

These provisions, in the judgement of this Dicastery, ought in some cases, for the good of the faithful, to take precedence over the request for dispensation from priestly obligations, which, by its nature, involves a 'grace' in favour of the petitioner. Yet in view of the complexity of the penal process required by the Code in these circumstances, some Ordinaries are likely to experience considerable difficulty in implementing such a penal process.

I would be grateful to Your Eminence, therefore, if you were to communicate your valued opinion regarding the possibility of making provision, in specific cases, for a more rapid and simplified penal process”.

---

The letter expresses, first and foremost, the natural repugnance of the system of justice towards bestowing as an “act of grace” (dispensation from priestly obligations) something which should instead be imposed as a punishment (dismissal ex poena from the clerical state).

As a means of avoiding the “technical complications” of the process established by the Code for punishing delicts, recourse was sometimes made to a “voluntary” request on the part of the offender to leave the priesthood. In this way the same “practical” result, so to speak, could be achieved, namely the expulsion of the subject from the priesthood – if this was the penal sanction called for – while at the same time circumventing a “burdensome” juridical process. It was a “pastoral” way of proceeding, as we tended to say in such cases, at the margins of what the law prescribed.

Nevertheless, this approach also sidestepped justice and – as Cardinal Ratzinger explained – it unjustly omitted from consideration “the good of the faithful”. This was the central motive for the request, and it was the reason for asserting the need for precedence in these cases to be given to the imposition of just penal sanctions through a more rapid and simplified process than the one provided in the Code of Canon Law.

It should be noted that, while the Code recognized the existence of a specific jurisdiction on the part of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in penal matters (can. 1362 §1, 1° CIC), one not limited to cases of evidently doctrinal character, it was not at all evident in the normative context of that time which other specific crimes would fall under the penal competence of that Dicastery. Canon 6 of the Code, moreover, had expressly abrogated all other previously existing penal laws.

Cardinal Ratzinger's letter presupposes, therefore, that juridical responsibility in penal matters lies with Ordinaries or Religious Superiors, as is indicated by the letter of the Code.

The response (10 March 1988)
After an interval of three weeks, the reply came from Cardinal Castillo Lara in a letter dated 10 March 1988. The swiftness and the content of the response can be understood if one takes account of the particular legislative situation at the time: since the vast work of compiling the Code had only just been completed, having occupied the Commission for decades, the task of adjusting other norms of universal and particular law was still in progress.

The response was certainly sympathetic to the motivation of the request and the appropriateness of the criterion of giving precedence to penal sanctions over the concession of graces; inevitably, though, it also confirmed the prior necessity of duly observing the norms of the newly promulgated Code.

---

I can well understand Your Eminence’s concern at the fact that the Ordinaries involved did not first exercise their judicial power in order to punish such crimes sufficiently, even to protect the common good of the faithful. Nevertheless the problem seems to lie not with juridical procedure, but with the responsible exercise of the task of governance.

In the current Code, the offences that can lead to loss of the clerical state have been clearly indicated: they are listed in canons 1364 §1, 1367, 1370, 1387, 1394 and 1395. At the same time the procedure has been greatly simplified in comparison with the previous norms of the 1917 Code: it has been speeded up and streamlined, partly with a view to encouraging the Ordinaries to exercise their authority through the necessary judgement of the offenders 'ad normam iuris' and the imposition of the sanctions provided.

To seek to simplify the judicial procedure further so as to impose or declare sanctions as grave as dismissal from the clerical state, or to change the current norm of can. 1342 §2 which prohibits proceeding with an extra-judicial administrative decree in these cases (cf. can. 1720), does not seem at all appropriate.

Indeed, on the one hand it would endanger the fundamental right of defence – and in causes that affect the person’s state – while on the other hand it would favour the deplorable tendency – owing perhaps to lack of due knowledge or esteem for the law – towards ambivalent so-called ‘pastoral’ governance, which ultimately is not pastoral at all, because it tends to obscure the due exercise of authority, thereby damaging the common good of the faithful.

At other difficult times in the life of the Church, when there has been confusion of consciences and relaxation of ecclesiastical discipline, the sacred Pastors have not failed to exercise their judicial power in order to protect the supreme good of the ‘salus animarum’.

---

The letter then proceeds with an excursus on the debate which had taken place during the revision of the Code prior to the decision not to include so-called dismissal ex officio from the clerical state.

“All things considered”, the reply concluded, “this Pontifical Commission is of the opinion that Bishops must be suitably reminded (cf. can. 1389), whenever it should prove necessary, not to omit to exercise their judicial and coercive power, instead of forwarding petitions for dispensation to the Holy See”.

While agreeing on the fundamental requirement to protect “the common good of the faithful”, the Commission considered it dangerous to circumvent certain practical safeguards, preferring instead to exhort those in positions of responsibility to implement the provisions of the law. The exchange of letters was concluded with a courteous reply, dated the following 14 May, from Cardinal Ratzinger:

---

I am pleased to inform you that this Dicastery has received your valued opinion on the possibility of providing for a swifter and more simplified procedure than the one currently in force for the imposition of sanctions by competent Ordinaries on priests guilty of grave and scandalous conduct. In this regard, I wish to assure Your Eminence that the arguments you have put forward will be carefully considered by this Congregation

---

”.
Competences further extended (28 June 1988)
The issue appeared to be formally closed, but the problem had not been resolved. In fact, the first important sign of a change in the situation took place just one month later, with the promulgation (28 June 1988) of the Apostolic Constitution Pastor Bonus, which altered the overall structure of the Roman Curia as established in 1967 by Regimini Ecclesiae Universae, and reallocated the competences of individual Dicasteries.

Article 52 clearly laid down the exclusive penal jurisdiction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, not only with regard to offences against the faith or in the celebration of the sacraments, but also with regard to “more serious offences against morals”, proceeding to the declaration or imposition of canonical sanctions in accordance with the norms of common or proper law”.

This text, evidently suggested by Cardinal Ratzinger’s Congregation on the basis of its own experience, is directly related to what we are examining, and with respect to the previous situation the change introduced by the Apostolic Constitution Pastor Bonus is of some importance.

Within a normative framework governed by the above-mentioned criteria of “subsidiarity” and “decentralization”, then, Pastor Bonus now executed a juridical act of “reservation” to the Holy See (cf. can. 381 §1) of a whole category of offences that the Supreme Pontiff entrusted to the exclusive jurisdiction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

It is quite unlikely that a choice of this kind, better defining the competences of the Congregation and revising the Code’s criterion regarding who should apply these canonical penalties, would have been implemented at all if the overall system had been working well.

The norm in question, however, was still insufficient at the practical level. Elementary requirements of the certainty of law now made it necessary to identify exactly what these “more serious offences against morals” were, that Pastor Bonus was entrusting to the Congregation, withdrawing them from the jurisdiction of Ordinaries.

Two subsequent interventions of importance
The events described thus far occurred within a short period of time: a few months during the first half of 1988. In the years that followed efforts were still being made to address emergency situations arising within the Church’s penal sphere by following the general criteria of the 1983 Code as broadly summarized in the letter from Cardinal Castillo Lara.

There were moves to encourage the intervention of local Ordinaries, sometimes accompanied by efforts to streamline the procedures, if necessary by means of a special law, mainly through dialogue with the Episcopal Conferences.

Yet repeated experience confirmed the inadequacy of these solutions and the need to find others of greater scope, operating on a different level.

Two solutions in particular significantly altered the framework of canonical penal law on which the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts has been obliged to work in recent months, and both were instigated by the current Pontiff, in perfect continuity with the concerns he expressed in the above-mentioned letter of 1988.

The first initiative, now quite widely known, concerns the preparation in the late 1990s of the Norms on the so-called delicta graviora, which effectively implemented article 52 of the Apostolic Constitution Pastor Bonus by specifically indicating which crimes against morals were to be considered “more serious” – thus bringing them under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

These Norms, finally promulgated in 2001, inevitably appeared to “go against” the criteria provided by the Code for the application of penal sanctions, so much so that in many areas they were immediately branded “centralizing” norms, whereas in reality they were responding to a particular need for “completion”, aimed in primis at resolving a serious ecclesial problem regarding the proper functioning of the penal system and in secundis at ensuring uniform treatment of this type of case throughout the Church.

To this end the Congregation had first to prepare the relevant internal procedural norms, and likewise to reorganize the Dicastery so as to harmonize this judicial activity with the processual rules of the Code.

After 2001, moreover, and on the basis of the juridical experience acquired, Cardinal Ratzinger obtained from John Paul II new faculties and dispensations to deal with the various situations, to the point of actually defining new offences. These subsequent modifications are now codified in the Norms on the delicta graviora published by the Congregation last July.

There is, however, a second initiative of Cardinal Ratzinger that helped to change the overall application of the Church’s penal law, namely his intervention as a Member of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples in the preparation of the special faculties that, similarly by way of necessary “completion”, were granted to that Congregation for purposes of addressing other kinds of disciplinary problems in mission territories.

It is not hard to understand that, owing to the scarcity of resources of every kind, the obstacles to implementation of the Code’s penal law system were felt particularly keenly in mission territories dependent on the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, which represent almost half of the Catholic world.

Hence, in its Plenary Assembly of February 1997, the Congregation decided to request from the Holy Father “special faculties” which would allow it to act administratively in specific penal situations on the margins of the general provisions of the Code: the Relator of that Plenary Assembly was Cardinal Ratzinger. It is public knowledge that these “faculties” were updated and extended in 2008, while others of a similar nature, have since been granted to the Congregation for the Clergy.

Experience will tell to what extent the modifications to Book VI will succeed in restoring balance, making special measures no longer necessary. In any case, the role played in this more than 20-year process of renewing penal discipline, by the decisive action Cardinal Ratzinger, has been crucial, to the point that it truly constitutes one of the “constant elements” that have characterized his Roman years from the very first.

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May 20, Seventh Week in Ordinary Time

ST. BERNARDINO DA SIENA (Italy, 1380-1444), Franciscan, Preacher
The other great medieval saint of Siena was, like an earlier Franciscan, Anthony of Padua (1195-1231), considered the greatest preacher of his time, attracting as many as 30,000 to his sermons which he had to give in piazzas and open places because no church was big enough to hold his audiences. He was characterized by solid holiness, boundless energy and joy, and designed and popularized the trigram IHS to symbolize the Holy Name of Jesus in order to focus the attention of the faithful on Christ. Joan of Arc would use the trigram on her battle standard and St. Ignatius Loyola's Society of Jesus would adapt it for their symbol. Bernardino was born to a noble family and received the best education. When he was 20, Siena was afflicted by the plague. He and some fellow members in a Marian confraternity helped nurse patients in Siena's hospital until the plague broke. He contracted it himself bur recovered, Inspired by a meeting with the man who would become St. Vincent Ferrer, he joined the Franciscan Friars of Strict Observance (of which he would later become the Superior General) at age 22, then after his ordination, spent 12 years of solitude devoted to prayer and studies in theology and canon law, during which, it is said, he learned to preach by speaking to the country folk and learning the best ways to communicate to them, using their language and their images. In 1417, he was named vicar of Tuscany. This marked the start of his public preaching which soon took him to other major cities of Italy, also earning a reputation for conciliating feuding political factions (pro-Pope vs Pro-Holy Roman Emperor). He started the idea of the 'bonfire of vanities' during which he encouraged the faithful to burn objects of temptation. He was very outspoken against the practice of homosexuality. In 1527, a cycle of sermons he gave in Siena was meticulously transcribed and give a vivid idea of his eloquent preaching. Strangely, his advocacy of the trigram twice brought him to trial for heresy, first in Rome, in 1427, and then at the Council of Basel. Both times, he was acquitted. He impressed Pope Martin V so much that he wanted to name him Bishop of Siena, Bernardine refused, as he did later offers to become Bishop of Ferrara and of Urbino. Among his disciples were Giovanni (John) da Capistrano and Giacomo delle Marche, both of whom would become saints. Another four of his closest disciples have been beatified. He himself was canonized just six years after his death. He died of natural causes while on a visit to L'Aquila to settle yet another political feud. He is buried in L'Aquila in a basilica that his disciples Giovanni and Giacomo caused to have built soon after his death. He and Catherine are the co-patrons of Siena.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/052013.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

At Domus Sanctae Marthae, Pope Francis met with

= Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, emeritus President of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei.

At the Vatican Apostolic Palace:

- Nine bishops from Sicily Group 1) on ad-limina visit

- Cardinal Robert Sarah, President of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum

And in the afternoon, at Domus Sanctae Marthae:

- Nine more bishops from Sicily (Group 2) on ad limina visit.




One year ago...
Before the Regina caeli prayers, Benedict XVI reflected on the Ascension of Jesus, which was celebrated on this Sunday in most countries, including Italy. Afterwards, he had a number of pastoral reminders and messages. First, on the World Day for Social Communications marked on May 20, for which he had released his message last January on 'Silence and words'; and the Feast of Mary Help of Christians on May 24, which is celebrated most especially in the Marian shrine of Sheshan near Shanghai, and which, since 2008,
the Church marks as a day of prayer for the Church in China. The Pope then expressed his condolences and prayers for the victims of the terrorist bomb planted at a school in Brindisi, southeastern Italy, on May 19, killing a girl and wounding dozens of others; and for the victims of an earthquake that struck north of Bologna, Italy, in the morning. He also greeted Italy's Movement for Life who turn out annually for the Angelus or Regina caeli to publicize their movement.

REGINA CAELI
May 20, 2012



Here is a translation of the Holy Father's words today:

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Dear brothers and sisters,

Forty days after the Resurrection, according to the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus ascended to heaven. That is, he returned to his Father who had sent him to the world.

In many countries, this mystery is celebrated not on Thursday (that is the 40th day since Easter Sunday] but today, which is the Sunday after that Thursday.

The Ascension of the Lord marks the full compliance of the work of salvation that began with the Incarnation. After having instructed his disciples for the last time, Jesus rose to heaven (cfr Mk 16,19).

But he has not 'distanced himself from our lowly state' (cfr Preface for Ascension I). In fact, in his humanity, he has taken up mankind with himself to the intimacy of the Father, and has revealed the final destination of our earthly pilgrimage.

Just as he came down from heaven for us, and suffered and died on the cross for us, so he rose again and returned to the Father, who is no longer remote, but 'our God', 'our Father' (cfr Jn 20,17).

The Ascension is the last act of our liberation from the yoke of sin, as the apostle Paul writes: "He ascended on high and took prisoners captive" (Eph 4,8). St. Leo the Great explains that this mystery "proclaims not just the immortality of the soul but also that of the flesh. Today, in fact, we are not only confirmed to be the possessors of Paradise. but we are also penetrated by Christ from the heights of heaven" (De Ascensione Domini, Tractatus 73, 2.4: CCL 138 A, 451.453).

That is why the disciples, when they saw the Master rise from the earth and towards the sky, they were not seized by desolation, but felt a great joy and felt themselves urged on to proclaim the victory of Christ over death (cfr Mk 16,20).

And the Risen Lord worked with them, distributing to each one his own charism, so that the Christian community in its entirety could reflect the harmonious richness of heaven.

St. Paul continues: "He gave gifts to men... And he gave some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers... for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the full stature of Christ" (Eph 4,8.11-13).

Dear friends, the Ascension tells us that in Christ, our humanity is carried up to God. And so, everytime we pray, the earth conjoins with heaven. Just as incense when it burns sends its smoke upwards with its gentle odor, so it is that when we raise our fervent and trustful prayer to the Lord, it reaches up to the Throne of God, where it is heard by him and answered.

In the famous work of San Juan de la Cruz [John of the Cross], Ascent to Mount Carmel, we read that "for us to see the desires of our heart fulfilled, there is no better way than to place the force of our prayers into that which pleases God most. Then, he will not just give us what we ask for, namely, salvation, but also what he sees right and good for us, even if we do not ask for it" (Libro III, cap. 44, 2, Roma 1991, 335).

After the prayers, he said:
Today, we celebrate the World Day for Social Communications on the theme "Silence and words: The path to evangelization". Silence is an integral part of communication - it is the favored place in which to encounter the Word of God and our brothers and sisters.

I invite everyone to pray so that communications, in its every form, may always serve to establish authentic dialog with others, one that is based on reciprocal respect, on listening, and on sharing.

Thursday, May 24, is a day dedicated to the liturgical commemoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the Help of Christians, venerated with great devotion in the shrine of Sheshan, near Shanghai.

Let us join in prayer with all the Catholics of China so that they may announce Christ who died and rose again, with humility and joy; that they may be faithful to his Church and to the Successor of Peter; and that they may live daily in a way that is consistent with the faith that they profess.

Mary, faithful Virgin, sustain the Chinese Catholics on their journey, make their prayers ever more intensely valuable in the eyes of the Lord, and let the affection and participation of the universal Church in the journey of the Chinese Catholics continue to grow.

I address a heartfelt greeting to the thousands of members of the Italian Movement for Life who are now gathered in Aula Paolo VI. Dear friends, your movement has always been committed to the defense of human life, according to the teachings of the Church.

Along these lines, you have announced a new initiative called 'Uno di noi' (One of us) to stand up for the dignity and fundamental rights of every human being from the time he is conceived.

I encourage you and urge you to always be witnesses and builders of the culture of life.

In his closing greeting to Italian pilgrims, he said:
Today, unfortunately, I must talk about the children at the school in Brindisi who were the targets yesterday of a vile bomb attack. Let us pray together for the wounded, many among them seriously, and especially for the young Melissa, innocent victim of brutal violence, for her family, and all those who are in grief.

My affectionate thoughts also go to the dear people of Emilia-Romagna stricken a few hours ago by an earthquake. I am spiritually close to all those who are being tested by this calamity. Let us ask God's mercy for those who have died, and relief in their suffering for those who were injured.

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NB: The bomb planted in the Brindisi school was intended to mark the 20th anniversary of the ambush killing near Palermo by Mafia gunmen of a judge who was trying some Mafia cases, his wife and three bodyguards. It will be recalled that when Pope Benedict made a pastoral visit to Palermo in 2010, on his way to the airport afterwards, he stopped to offer a prayer at the roadside memorial to those Mafia victims... The magnitude 6.0 earthquake struck north of Bologna and has claimed six deaths so far.

Regarding the statements made last week by Pope Francis about the contemporary crisis in which the failure of banks or investments is considered a major tragedy while the death of thousands because of hunger is habitually ignored, let me quote the lead paragraph from a May 19 story by Andrea Tornielli, http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/vaticano/dettaglio-articolo/articolo/papa-el-papa-pope-24945/
for which the INSIDER does not provide an English translation:

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Pope Francis, before a crowd of faithful, repeated yesterday evening that the Church is not a political organization nor an NGO. But he also pronounced judgments that were very blunt and clear on poverty, on the economic crisis and its causes, in a way that so far, no political leader has been able to make.

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Hello! Didn't one Benedict XVI write a 30,000-word encyclical about this in 2009, an encyclical that quickly topped the Italian bet-seller lists in its first few weeks of release? And that was just less than four years ago!

Now, I know Tornielli was not only a fair and objective chronicle- commentator of Benedict XVI's Pontificate, but was also one of the few who did not hesitate to show he admired Benedict XVI and what he did as Pope - for which we can all be thankful.

However, having been the very first author in the world to come out with a book about Pope Francis (within three weeks of his election), based primarily on interviews he had done in Rome previously with Cardinal Bergoglio, Tornielli has also turned into the new Pope's leading cheerleader among the Vaticanistas. I have no quarrel with that, except that in doing so, he has virtually ignored what Benedict XVI said and did as Pope, and much like the legion of personages (including all the cardinal electors) who developed a terminal case of Benedict-amnesia after March 13, 2013, he has since held out Pope Francis as the only valid standard, as it were, for Popes, whose every gesture and statement is a 'first' or an 'only' in papal history.

Granted, Tornielli is technically truthful when he writes that Pope Francis spoke out about the crisis "in a way that so far, no political leader has been able to make}. But that would have been the perfect opening for him to say that, unlike political leaders, Benedict XVI did speak out, more than once, and most memorably and categorically, in the encyclical Caritas in veritate, in which he analyzed in detail the causes and consequences of the economic crisis and called specifically for a man-centered ethical approach to development, economics and finance. But he does not even mention Benedict XVI in the whole story!

Strangely, when I tried to look back at whatever Tornielli had written in the past about CIV, I only found two - an article in April 2009 about the forthcoming release of the encyclical; and after it was released, a brief chapter-by-chapter synthesis of the encyclical which was published in Vatican Insider. There were so many excellent as well as controversial commentaries in the Anglophone media at the time - I rounded them up in the CARITAS IN VERITATE thread of this forum - that I was not even aware Tornielli had chosen to take a pass on CIV. Which is perhaps understandable, for any run-of-the-mill reporter - which Tornielli is not - because CIV is so wide-ranging that no one article or commentary can encompass its scope other than by Tornielli's ploy of a brief chapter-by-chapter synthesis.

However, before we take a look at what Tornielli wrote in April 2009, let me quote the catechesis of Benedict XVI that prompted the article. On April 23, 2009, during his continuing catecheses on early and medieval Christian writers who made seminal contributions to Catholic thought, Benedict XVI spoke about the little-known 8th century monk Ambrose Autpert, a Frenchman who became a Benedictine monk at the great medieval Benedictine abbey of Benevento in Italy (between Montecassino and Naples). As he always did in his catecheses, Benedict did not fail to apply the teaching to actual conditions in our time:

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A small ascetic tract entitled Conflictus vitiorum et virtutum (Conflict between vices and virtues) had the same purpose. It was a great success in the Middle Ages and was republished in 1473 in Utrecht (Holland) under the name of Gregory the Great, and one year later, in Strasbourg, under the name of St. Augustine.

In it, Ambrose Autpert intended to teach monks concrete ways on how to face spiritual combat in day to day life. In a significant manner, he applied the statement from 2 Tim 3,12: "All who want to live religiously in Christ Jesus will be persecuted" - no longer to external persecution, but to the assault from the forces of evil that the Christian must confront within himself.

Twenty-four pairs of combatants are presented in a kind of dispute: each vice seeks to hook the soul with subtle reasonings, while its opposite virtue rebuts these insinuations, preferably using the words of Scripture.

In this tract on the conflict between vices and virtues, Autpert countered cupiditas (greed) with contemptus mundi (contempt for the world) which would become an important element in monastic spirituality.

This contempt for the world is not contempt for Creation, of the beauty and goodness of Creation and the Creator, but a contempt for a false vision of the world presented and insinuated to us by greed itself.

Greed insinuates that 'to have' is the peak value of our being, of living in the world with the appearance of being 'important'. Thus, greed falsifies creation and destroys the world.

Autpert notes that the greed for profit among the rich and powerful in the society of his time also existed in the souls of monks, and therefore, he wrote another tract entitled De cupiditate (about greed), in which, following the Apostle Paul, he denounces greed from the start as the root of all evil.

He wrote: "Many thorns sprout from the ground from different roots. But in the hearts of men, the sharp points of all vices come from one root only, greed" (De cupiditate 1: CCCM 27B, p. 963).

I point this out especially since it is revealed in all its actuality in the light of the present world economic crisis. We see that it is from this very root of greed that such a crisis is born.

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And here is what Tornielli wrote for Il Giornale the day after:

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The Pope rewrites his encyclical:
'Greed was at the root of the global crisis'
by Andrea Tornielli
Translated from

April 24, 2009

The present global economic crisis arose out of 'greed'. " Greed insinuates that 'to have' is the peak value of our being, of living in the world with the appearance of being 'important'," Pope Benedict XVI said yesterday during his Wednesday General Audience, speaking about the 8th century monk, St. Ambrose Autpert.

And it is precisely this crisis that brought the economy of the whole world to is knees which is at the center of crucial paragraphs in the new encyclical of Benedict XVI, Caritas in veritate, on social issues and globalization, the release of which has been delayed a number of times. It is now expected to come out on June 29, Feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul...

It is known that Benedict XVI wants the encyclical not to be vague in any way, especially not about the current crisis, that it must not use generic slogans, and that it will contribute something original in terms of what the crisis means for the faith and for people in general...

The Pope began writing it in 2007, during the 40th anniversary year of Paul VI's Populorum progressio, hoping to release it in March 2008... [This was postponed initially to the end of summer, and when the economic crisis erupted in October 2008, it had to be further postponed.] Now, it is expected to be released on June 29, Feast of Saints Peter and Paul...

The encyclical will deal with the social problems that plague humanity today (globalization, poverty, access to resources, care of the environment) approached through the social doctrine of the Church, and therefore it will advocate justice, fraternal solidarity, and changing not just laws and public structures but the lives of every human being.

Benedict XVI has often said that "The Church always needs men who are able to make great renunciations, and communities that create the foundations for social justice".

In Benedict's first encyclical, Deus caritas est, the term 'justice' is used 50 times, as he underscores that commitment to justice is a way of giving witness to Christian love.

Thus, he emphasizes 'global solidarity' which will treat the poorest and the neediest as a priority, along with protecting the rights of families, creating stable work opportunities, and the recovery of ethics in finance and business through appropriate rules and controls.

Enroute to Africa in March 2009, the Pope told newsmen: "The cause of the worldwide recession is above all ethical in nature, because where there is no ethics, no morality, there can never be any rightness in human relationships".

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In his 'synthesis' of CIV on July 8, 2009, the day after the encyclical was published, Tornielli certainly did not fail to pick out the essentials, even if he took the easy way out by choosing not to comment on the encyclical.

The subhead: 'Benedict XVI confronts the most serious problems of the globalized society: from development to poverty'The boxed heads: 'ETHICS: The Pontiff warns against the exclusive goal of profit which destroys resources'
'DENUNCIATION: Hunger is 'a scandal'. One must denounce practices of demographic control'

Now, one can understand a Vaticanista forgetting what a Pope may have said four years ago or that he even said it if he had done so a number of times on various occasions, but surely, he cannot completely forget that Benedict XVI wrote CIV - after all, he only wrote 3 encyclicals! Considering what he himself had written about CIV, Mr. Tornielli's amnesia is very strange, to say the least, and certainly, most unworthy of a newsman with his reputation.

Caritas in veritate was, of course, hailed by many leading secular economists for its realistic overview of the global economic and financial crisis, and by Catholic intellectuals for its re-statement of Christian humanism in contemporary terms, its no-nonsense exhortation for the ethic of the common good as the only way to bring back sense to the global economic system, and its emphasis on the logic of giving freely, without expectation of payment or reward,

The crisis is approaching its fifth anniversary this year; CIV was published about 9 months after its onset - its long-anticipated release was delayed precisely because the crisis erupted fullblown in the autumn of 2008 and its unprecedented magnitude and extent became quickly evident, so it had to be factored into the encyclical.) Among the many commentaries at the time about CIV, let me use this one from a leading British economist.



If the Nobel Prize juries weren't so ideologically driven, I would send this article as a nominating letter for Benedict XVI to be considered for the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics. 2013 P.S. Ettore Gotti Tedeschi actually brought up the Nobel Prize idea in one of his many articles about CIV.

Pope Benedict is
the man on the money
The best analysis yet of the global economic crisis,
tells how people, not just rules, must change
by Brian Griffiths

July 13, 2009

Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach is a trustee of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lambeth Trust and Vice-Chairman of Goldman Sachs International. He was an economic adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. A devout evangelical Christian, he is, by virtue of his title, a member of the House of Lords.

When Cardinal Ratzinger was elected Pope, his strengths and weaknesses seemed clear. Here was an eminent theologian, philosopher and guardian of Christian truth, but a man unlikely to make the Church’s message relevant to the world today.

How simplistic this now looks in the light of his third encyclical, in which Pope Benedict XVI confronts head-on the financial crisis that has rocked the world.

The language may be dense, but the message is sufficiently rewarding. The encyclical analyses modern capitalism from an ethical and spiritual perspective as well as a technical one.

As a result it makes the (UK) Government’s White Paper on financial reforms published two days later look embarrassingly one-dimensional and colourless.

It is highly critical of today’s global economy but always positive. Its major concern is how to promote human development in the context of justice and the common good.

Despite heavy competition from some of the world’s finest minds, it is without doubt the most articulate, comprehensive and thoughtful response to the financial crisis that has yet appeared. It should strike a chord with all who wish to see modern capitalism serving broader human ends.

The Pope makes it clear that the encyclical takes its inspiration from Populorum Progressio, the encyclical published by Paul VI in 1967, at the height of anti-capitalism in Europe. It attacked liberal capitalism, was ambivalent about economic growth, recommended expropriation of landed estates if poorly used and enthused about economic planning.

It was in stark contrast to Centesimus Annus (1991), the most recent encyclical dealing with economic matters, published after the fall of communism by a Polish Pope.

John Paul II affirmed the market economy as a way of producing wealth by allowing human creativity and enterprise to flourish.

Pope Benedict is highly critical of modern capitalism.
- He believes that the international economy is marked by “grave deviations and failures”.
- Economic growth is weighed down by “malfunctions and dramatic problems”.
- Businesses that are answerable almost exclusively to their investors have limited social value.
- The financial system has been abused by speculative financial dealing and has wreaked havoc on the real economy.
- Globalisation has undermined the rights of workers, downsized social security systems and exploited the environment.
- As global prosperity has grown, so has “the scandal of glaring inequalities”.

Despite these criticisms, the encyclical has a positive view of profit, providing it is not an exclusive goal.
- It recognises that more labour mobility resulting from deregulation can increase wealth.
- It accepts that economic growth has lifted billions out of poverty and enabled some developing countries to become effective players in international politics.
- Globalisation offers an unprecedented chance of large-scale redistribution of wealth worldwide.

The kind of market economy Pope Benedict defends is much closer to the European social model than the “spontaneous order” of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.

For him, market capitalism can never be conceived of in purely technical terms. Development is not just about freeing up markets, removing tariffs, increasing investment and reforming institutions. It is not even about social policies to accompany economic reforms.

At the heart of the market is the human person, possessing dignity, deserving of justice and bearing the divine image. The market needs to be infused with a morality emanating from Christian humanism, which respects truth and encourages charity.

The encyclical suggests six major ways to make global capitalism more human.

First, it calls for “the management of globalisation” and a reform of international economic institutions. They are needed “to manage the global economy, to revive economies hit by the crisis, to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis . . . to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration”.

Not surprisingly, for this huge task we need “a true world political authority” through reform of the United Nations.

Next, there needs to be greater diversity among the enterprises that create wealth: mutual societies, credit unions and hybrid forms of commercial organisation.

Third, globalisation has weakened the ability of trade unions to represent the interests of workers, something that needs to be reversed.

Fourth, the scandal of inequality requires countries to increase the proportion of GDP given as foreign aid.

Fifth, because the environment is the gift of the Creator we have an inter-generational responsibility to tackle climate change.

Finally, everyone involved in the market, traders, producers, bankers — even consumers — must be alert to the moral consequences of their actions.

“Development is impossible without upright men and women, without financiers and politicians whose consciences are finely attuned to the common good.”

Pope Benedict’s words are not just platitudes. They affect every person at work every day. In the City [London's financial center], they are a challenge to management to create a culture of prudence, responsibility and integrity.

There has to be zero tolerance for misleading clients, fudging conflicts of interest and inflating valuations. However great the revenue they produce, those who deviate must be disciplined. This kind of ethos cannot be imposed by regulation alone.

And just to show Benedict's active awareness of the problems of society and the Church's obligations to the poor, let me quote from a brief address he gave last year on May 19, 2012, to three major Italian lay Catholic associations, in which he cites some of the principles he laid out in CIV. (I didn't use this as a lookback feature yesterday only because the major event to mark was Pentecost.)



The Pope to Italian lay associations:
'True giving is at the heart of being Christian'

May 19, 2012




The Ecclesial Movement of Cultural Engagement, the Federation of Christian Organizations for International Voluntary Service and the Movement of Christian Workers are Italian-based lay associations founded between 1932 and 1972.

Their mission is to spread the Gospel through volunteer work aiding the needy in Italy and in other countries throughout the world, as well as defending human rights, promoting social justice and education.

Speaking to the three associations gathered at the Aula Paolo VI on the occasion of their respective anniversaries, Pope Benedict underlined that fact that their establishment can be attributed to the inspiration of Pope Paul the VI who as a priest and then as Pope had been a vocal supporter of ecclesial associations such as these.
Here is the body of his address:

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I am happy to welcome you today at this gathering together of the Movimento Ecclesiale di Impegno Culturale (MEIC), the Federazione Organismi Cristiani di Servizio Internazionale Volontario (FOCSIV), and the Movimento Cristiano Lavoratori (MCL)....

This year, your associations are celebrating the anniversaries of your founding: 80 years for MEIC, 40 for FOCSIV and MCL. All three owe their existence to the wise work of the Servant of God Paul VI, who, when he was the National Assistant of Italian Catholic Action in 1932, supported the first steps of the Movimento Laureati (movement of graduates) in Catholic Action, and as Pope, recognized the FOCSIV and assisted at the birth of MCL in 1972...

Anniversaries are propitious occasions to re-think your respective charisms with gratitude but also with a critical eye, mindful of your historic origins and the new signs of the times.

Culture, voluntariate, and work constitute an indissoluble trinomial in the daily commitment of the Catholic laity, who wish their belonging to Christ and to the Church to have an impact both in the private as well as the public spheres of society.

The lay faithful play a role whenever they act in these spheres, and when in their cultural service and their solidarity with those who are in need and have work concerns, they strive to promote human dignity.

These three spheres of action are bound by a common denominator: the gift of oneself.

Cultural involvement, especially at the school and university levels, oriented towards the formation of future generations, is indeed not limited to the transmission of technical and theoretical ideas, but implies the gift of oneself with words and through example.

Volunteer work, an irreplaceable resource for society, means not so much giving things, but giving oneself while concretely aiding those who are in need. Work is not just an instrument for individual profit, but an occasion to express one's own abilities, exerting oneself, in the spirit of service, in professional activity, whether one is a laborer, a farmer, a scientist or any other occupation.

For you, all this has a special connotation - the Christian one. Your activities must be inspired by charity. This means learning to see with the eyes of Christ and giving to others much more than what they need externally - to give them the look of caring, the gesture of love that they need.

This is born from the love that comes from God, who loved us first; it is born from our intimate encounter with him (cfr Deus Caritas est, 18).

St. Paul, in his farewell talk to the elders of Ephesus, recalls a truth expressed by Jesus: "It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20,35).

Dear friends, it is the logic of giving, a logic that is often mistreated, but which you appreciate and bear witness to. To give your own time, your own abilities and competencies, your own education, your professionalism. In a word, to pay attention to others, without expecting any reward in this world. And I thank you for this great witness. Doing so, one does not just do good for others, but can discover profound happiness, according to the logic of Christ, who gave all of himself.

The family is the first place where one experiences free love. When this does not happen, then the family is denatured, it goes into crisis. When it is lived in the family, giving oneself without reservations for the good of others is a fundamental educational moment to learn to live as Christians - even in our relations with culture, with volunteer service and with the workplace.

In the encyclical Caritas in veritate, I wanted to extend the family model of the logic of gratuitousness and of giving to a universal dimension. Justice alone is not sufficient.

In order for there to be true justice, that 'something more' is necessary which only gratuity and solidarity can give: "Solidarity is first and foremost a sense of responsibility on the part of everyone with regard to everyone, and it cannot therefore be merely delegated to the State. While in the past it was possible to argue that justice had to come first and gratuitousness could follow afterwards, as a complement, today it is clear that without gratuitousness, there can be no justice in the first place" (No. 38).

Gratuitousness is not acquired on the market, nor can it be prescribed by law. Yet both the economy and politics need gratuitousness, persons capable of reciprocal giving (cfr ibid. 39)

Our meeting today proves two elements: the affirmation on your part of the need to continue to follow the way of the Gospel, faithful to the social doctrine of the Church and loyal to your Pastors; and on the other hand, my encouragement, the Pope's encouragement, who invites you to persevere constantly in your commitment on behalf of your brothers.

This commitment also includes the task of pointing to injustice, and to bear witness to the values on which the dignity of persons is based, promoting forms of solidarity which promote the common good.

The MEIC cultural movement, in the light of its history, is called to renewed service in the world of culture, which presents urgent and complex challenges, for the dissemination of Christian humanism. Reason and faith are allied in the journey towards the Truth.

May the FOCSIV volunteers federation continue to trust above all in the power of charity that comes from God, carrying forward your commitment against every form of poverty and exclusion, and working in behalf of the more disadvantaged populations.

And may the MCL movemen bring light and Christian hope to the workplace in order to gain even more social justice. Moreover, may you look always at the world of the young who, today more than ever, are seeking ways of involvement that bring together idealism and concreteness.

Dear friends, I wish each of you to proceed with joy in your personal and associative commitments, bearing witness to the Gospel of giving and gratuitousness...

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[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/05/2013 15:39]

Tuesday, May 21, 2013, Seventh Week in Ordinary Time

SAN CRISTOBAL MAGALLANES & 24 OTHER MEXICAN MARTYRS (d 1915-1928)
The anti-Catholic persecutions by the governments of Mexico in the early 20th
century resulted in many martyrs. Cristobal, a diocesan priest, and 24 others
(21 priests and 3 laymen) coming from eight states of Mexico were beatified in
1992 and canonized in 2000. They were all falsely accused of rebellion and
summarily executed without a trial. Born to a poor family, Cristobal was 30 when
he was ordained. After being a school chaplain, he became parish priest of his
hometown where he built schools, catechism centers, industrial shops and even
spearheaded the construction of a dam to provide electricity. He actively
evangelized pagan natives, and preached and wrote against armed rebellion.
Readings for today's Mass: www.usccb.org/bible/readings/052113.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY
At 5:30 p.m., Pope Francis visited the 'Dono di Maria' hospitality house run by the Missionaries of Charity
in the Vatican, and greeted the sisters, staff. volunteers and the needy persons who were being assisted
at the time of the visit.




Two years ago on this day...
Benedict XVI had a 15-minute conversation with the astronauts on board the international space shuttle, which broadcast live worldwide. Taking place fifty years since the first manned space flight by Yuri Gagarin in April 1961, it was a 'first' in papal history.

One year ago...
Benedict XVI lunched with the members of the College of Cardinals present in Rome at the Sala Ducale of the Apostolic Palace, to thank them for their good wishes to him on his recent 85th birthday and the seventh anniversary of his Pontificate.



Pope's luncheon for the cardinals:
'History is a struggle between
love of oneself and love of God'
Translated from the 5/21-5/22 issue of



Sorry for the poor photo quality. The pictures are from thumbnails on RV (left) and on OR (right).

History is a struggle between two loves: love of oneself and love of God - a struggle in which it is important to have friends around.

Pope Benedict XVI said this to the cardinals present in Rome who attended a luncheon offered Monday by the Holy Father to thank them for the good wishes they extended on his 85th birthday and the seventh anniversary of his Pontificate.

He began his after-luncheon remarks by saying:

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At this time, my words can only be of gratitude. Gratitude to the Lord first of all for the years that he has conceded to me. Years with so many days of joy, splendid times, but also dark nights.

Looking back, however, one understands that even dark nights are necessary and good, and a reason for thanks a well.

Today, the words ecclesia militans ('Church militant') are a bit out of fashion, but in fact, we can understand even better that it is true, that it carries the truth.

We see how evil is trying to be dominant in the world and that it is necessary to join this struggle against evil. We see how evil is working in so many ways, often bloody, with various forms of violence, but also masquerading as good and as such, destroying the moral foundations of society.

---

The Pontiff then recalled St. Augustine for whom all of history is the struggle between two loves: love of oneself to the point of spurning God; and love of God to the point of giving oneself in martyrdom.

"We are in this struggle, and in this, it is very important to have friends. As for myself, I am surrounded by friends from the College of Cardinals - they are my friends, and I feel at home. I feel secure in this company of great friends who are with me and all of us together with the Lord".

[How many of those cardinals present could have heard those words without flinching? As holy as the Holy Father is, I cannot help thinking he was also being ironic in a typically German way to say those words the week a book came out in Italy that exposed some of his private files to the world - never mind if it is not he that comes out looking bad in any of it. DIM]

In conclusion, the Pope expressed his thanks for that friendship. First addressing Cardinal Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals, he said:

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Thanks to you, Eminence, for everything you have done in this respect, and will always do. Thank you to all of you for your communion in joy as well as in sorrow.

Let us go forward. The Lord has said to us, "Take courage! I have defeated the world", and we are on the Lord's team, the winning team.
Thank you to everyone, and may the Lord Bless you all. Let us drink to that.

---

P.S. 2013 From the Vatican website, here is the Vatican's translation of the full remarks, the full text of which was not immediately available last year:

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Your Eminence,
Dear Brothers,

At this moment my words can only be of gratitude. A “thank you” first of all to the Lord for the many years he has given me; years filled with many days of joy, marvelous times but also with dark nights. Yet, in retrospect, one understands that those nights were necessary and good, a cause for thanksgiving.

Today the phrase ecclesia militans is somewhat out of fashion but in fact we can understand ever more so that it is true, that it contains within it the truth. We see how evil wishes to dominate in the world and that it is necessary to fight against evil. We see that it does so in so many ways: cruelty, through the different forms of violence, but even disguised as good, and thereby undermining the moral foundations of society.

St Augustine said that all history is a struggle between two loves: love of self to the point of despising God; and love of God to the point of despising oneself, in martyrdom. We are caught up in this struggle, and in this struggle, it is very important to have friends.

And as for myself, I am surrounded by my friends in the College of Cardinals; you are my friends and I feel at home with you, I feel safe in this company of great friends, who are here with me and all together with the Lord.

Thank you for this friendship. Thank you, Your Eminence, for all you have done for this event today and for all that you always do. Thank you for the communion in joys and in troubles.

Let us move ahead, the Lord said: "Courage! I have conquered the world.} We are on the Lord’s team, hence on the winning team. I thank you all. May the Lord bless all of you. And let us raise our glasses.DIM]

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Earlier, Cardinal Sodano addressed the following tribute to the Holy Father in the name of the College of Cardinals:

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Holy Father, beloved Successor of Peter, last April 16 you observed your 85th birthday, celebrating Mass with the bishops of Bavaria at the Pauline Chapel.

On that day, I had the honor to take part myself in that moment of intense prayer representing the larger Pontifical family. Before the Mass began, I had the duty to thank you for the generous service you have given to the Church in the course of these years, after having responded with love to Jesus's call, "If you love me, feed my lambs, feed my sheep" (Jn 21,15-17).

On that occasion, I asked the Lord to realize in you the promise made by God to the righteous man in Psalm 91: "Longitudine dierum replebo eum et ostendam illi salutare meum" (With length of days I will satisfy him, and fill him with my saving power) (Ps 91,16).

With the same sentiments, I am happy today to renew to Your Holiness, the wishes of my brother cardinals who live in Rome, who congratulate you on the milestone that you have reached and express to you their most fervent wishes for the future.

We are still in Easter time, and 'Alleluia' continues to come from our hearts for the wonders that God continues to manifest among us through the ministry of the Successor of Peter.

Of course, our voices cannot be like those of the Rome Opera Chorus which recently performed for you Verdi's Te Deum, nor can we be like the powerful voices of the Leipzig Choir who on April 20, sang for you Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's famous Lobgesang.

But with the same enthusiasm, at least, we raise a hymn of thanks to the Lord for the gifts that he has given you and that he has given his Holy Church through your Petrine ministry.

Indeed, during the past seven years, you have never ceased to invite all believers to rediscover the content of the faith, a faith that is professed, celebrated, lived and prayed, as you reminded us very well in the Apostolic Letter Porta fidei.

To a world in search of a better future, Your Holiness has always reminded us that the only forces for progress are those that change man's heart, in fidelity to the spiritual values that can never be extinguished.

Moreover, as a good Samaritan on the roads of the world, you continue to urge us to serving our neighbor, reminding us of the words of Jesus: "Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me" (Mt 25,41).

And now, Holy Father, thank you for inviting us to this fraternal agape. Among the many gravosi negotia (serious matters) of every day, may Your Holiness be able to enjoy at least a moment, or some moments, of that otia (leisure) that the ancient Romans spoke of.

Grateful for your example of great fraternity, we express to you our closeness at the start of the eighth year of your Pontificate and we wish you long and happy and blessed years.

---

P.S. 2013 Compare Cardinal Sodano's words above (or even the words he addressed to Benedict XVI right after the latter announced his renunciation of the Papacy on February 11, 2013) with the pro-forma telegram he and the other cardinals would send to Benedict XVI less than one year later, at the start of the pre-Conclave General Congregations! - and you have a measure of the hypocrisy and fawning, on the one hand, that characterizes typical 'deference' (even by so-called 'princes of the Church') to whoever happens to be at the top, and on the other, the thoughtless cruelty with which the same person is treated after he is no longer 'in power'. I hope Pope Francis is not now the victim of the very same hypocrisy from these very same 'princes'!



P.P.S. At this point, I must note that there was no such wholesale and individual overt rejection of Pope John Paul II when he passed away - even if it is true that the universal praises that came from the cardinals (more than half of them already cardinals at the time he died) could not have been only because he died, and no one should speak ill of the dead, but also because the chronicles of the time had already made a judgment on his Pontificate as a great one in the years since his affliction became evident, and many, if not all, of them doubtless agree with that judgment.

And of course, there was no such wholesale rejection and criticism of any of the other Popes in my lifetime upon their death. The invectives against Pius XII only began after the success of the 1960 anti-Pius XII propaganda play 'The Deputy'; and posthumous criticism of Paul VI, which re-surfaced at a decent interval after he died, centered on passionate denunciation of his encyclical Humanae vitae by media and all the secular voices, as well as polemics over how he had implemented Vatican II. But there was none against John XXIII nor John Paul I (who, of course, only had 33 days as Pope).

No, it fell on Benedict XVI, still very much alive - whom before March 13, 2005, many of those very same cardinals who then heartlessly rejected him or ignored his virtues and achievements to focus on his presumed failings and inadequacies, had praised to high heavens for his well-known virtues and the good things he did as Pope - to be the overnight object of rejection and none-too-subtle blame for the current problems of the Church. One would think they at least owe him the respect that is due to age, to an 86-year-old man, who was Pope and one they all once recognized as a holy man!

Yet, one can almost hear behind their reservations a "Thank God he resigned!", giving him no credit whatsoever for the wisdom and good sense of his selfless decision to resign. A decision that enabled them to elect, so to speak, the Pope of their dreams.

Of course, I am bitter. Not so much against the media, because that's the way they are, but about the cardinals and other Church prelates who have behaved monstrously towards Benedict, and who, in articulating their most un-Christian rejection of him and his Pontificate, can and do exercise some influence and conditioning over the faithful. Because, shame on them, they, more than anyone else, ought to know better.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/05/2013 20:31]

Vatican denies Pope Francis
performed a public exorcism


VATICAN CITY, May 21, 2013 (CNS) -- When Pope Francis solemnly laid both hands on the head of a young man in a wheelchair and prayed intently over him for several minutes, he was not performing an exorcism, said the Vatican spokesman.

The young man, who was among dozens of people in wheelchairs greeted by the pope at the end of Mass May 19, appeared somewhat agitated when the pope approached. A priest with him said something to the pope, who then prayed over the man.

"The Holy Father had no intention of performing an exorcism, but -- as he often does with the sick and suffering people presented to him -- he simply intended to pray for the suffering person before him," said Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi.

Father Lombardi issued his statement late May 20 after Italian papers began reporting the story, citing TV2000, the satellite television station owned by the Italian bishops' conference.

Promoting an upcoming program on Pope Francis's teaching about the existence of the devil and his influence on people, the station said it had asked several exorcists to watch the video clip from May 20 and they agreed, "It was a prayer of liberation from evil or a real exorcism."

Other theologians and exorcists contacted by Italian media said a priest -- even the Pope -- would never perform an exorcism on the spur of the moment and without first ascertaining that the suffering person was not afflicted by a physical or mental illness. In addition, exorcism is a rite that includes set prayers, blessings and invocations.

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, "The solemn exorcism, called 'a major exorcism,' can be performed only by a priest and with the permission of the bishop. The priest must proceed with prudence, strictly observing the rules established by the church. Exorcism is directed at the expulsion of demons or to the liberation from demonic possession through the spiritual authority which Jesus entrusted to his church. Illness, especially psychological illness, is a very different matter; treating this is the concern of medical science. Therefore, before an exorcism is performed, it is important to ascertain that one is dealing with the presence of the Evil One, and not an illness."


Fr. Gabriel Amorth, perhaps the world's most publicized exorcist, recounted in a book written by Paolo Rodari a couple of years ago, an even more 'dramatic' incident of a man who appeared to be in full possession of the devil (contortions and screaming and throwing himself to the ground) during one of Benedict XVI's General Audiences, and as dramatic as the person's calming down appeared after Benedict had blsssed him - from afar - the event was not called an 'exorcism'. Nor, I must say, did I make too much of it since Fr. Amorth himself has been quoted to say that the very presence of the Pope drives the devil to frenzy, so one assumes the Pope's blessing would drive him away, as the Cross scares off Dracula, himself a devil-figure.

P.S.[I must apologize for my bad recollection - there were actually two men, but here is how the AFP reported it at the time (February 2012):

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Benedict XVI cured two men of demonic possession when he blessed them in St Peter’s Square, a leading exorcist has claimed.

Fr Gabriele Amorth said that when the Pope blessed the men they “flew three meters backwards” and “howled no longer”.

In extracts from a new book, published yesterday by Panorama magazine in Italy, Fr Amorth explained that incident occurred when the men, known only as Giovanni and Marco, attended a general audience [in 2009].

When the Pope appeared, Fr Amorth said, according to AFP: “The two possessed men fell to the floor and banged their heads on the ground. The Swiss guards watched but did nothing; perhaps they have seen how the possessed react when faced by the Pope before?

“The Pope began to wave to the crowd and Giovanni and Marco started to howl, drool, shake and fly into a rage. The possessed were then hit by a wild jolt, their whole bodies were hit. They flew three meters backwards … and howled no longer.” [And all this is said to have happened with B16 merely blessing the men from afar. Just imagine if anything like this had happened with Pope Francis - it would have made headlines around the world for the next few days!]

Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi denied that the Pope had performed an exorcism.

“Even if the facts are true, it’s not correct to talk about an exorcism by the Pope, who was not warned or aware of their presence,” he said.

Fr Amorth made a similar claim about Blessed Pope John Paul II. In 2000, he said that the late Pope performed an impromptu exorcism on a a teenage girl at the end of an audience in St Peter’s Square. The Vatican’s press office declined to comment on the claim at the time.

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It is most regrettable that the Italian bishops' own TV network initiated such a questionable conclusion about what happened in St. Peter's Square last Sunday. And just to drum up interest in a forthcoming special about Pope Francis and the devil. [P.S. TV2000 executive Dino Boffo has since apologized for the rash call of 'exorcism' used by his reporters about the episode and says anything similar won't happen again. However, Fr. Amorth has gotten into the act to say that what happened on Sunday was a genuine exorcism that did not require any rituals, and that he himself exorcised the same man with the proper rituals the following day. (He claimed the man, a Mexican, was possessed by four demons on account of Mexican bishops failing to fight the legalization of abortion in Mexico. Any my eyebrow just went skyhigh1 Perhaps this is the sort of thing that gives exorcists a bad name.) What a soap opera this has turned out to be!]

It notches up the level and pitch of general media reporting about Pope Francis's public appearances, in which gestures habitually done by his predecessors - because they are customary for modern Popes, such as kissing babies or blessing a handicapped person - are made to appear historic and unusual for a Pope. It will not be long before someone reports the occurrence of a miracle during one of the Pope's appearances. And, God willing, may it be so, but may it be genuine, and not just further unnecessary hype by the media.

Yes, there have been a couple of times when he stopped the Popemobile in order to get off and bless a paraplegic or a handicapped boy - those certainly deserved to be remarked upon. But the media play given to both incidents afterwards implied that he was the first Pope ever to show a gesture of kindness to the disabled or the sick. Going back to Pius XII, it is so easy to bring up online photographs of all the Popes in the modern communications era making equally tender gestures.

At least since the time of Paul VI, who initiated the General Audiences as they are today, the Prefecture for the Pontifical Household has always included sick and handicapped persons who can be brought to the Vatican by their caregivers, in the list of people that the Pope greets individually after the general audience. It provides an opportunity for the Pope, who cannot habitually visit hospitals and similar centers for the sick and disabled, to perform a corporal act of mercy that is not just intended for the persons present but for all who suffer like them. In the same way that the Pope's Angelus and Regina caeli greetings always end with blessings for the sick and disabled, for newlyweds (who will create new Christian families), and for young people.

The novelty of a new Pope - even if he does turn out to be the most exceptional Pope in history as his adulators think - does not excuse a willful abdication of perspective and common sense in those who report and comment on the Papacy.

A new book, co-authored by the Vaticanista Giacomo Galeazzi and his co-investigator Ferruccio Pinotti, claims the Vatican hierarchy is infiltrated with Masons, and has always been, and even names names. But I have not posted anything about it so far because I have not really seen a good account of it that is sufficiently objective and informative.

However, this observation by AGI Vaticanista Salvatore Izzo is quite relevant because it touches on the role that Cardinal Ratzinger played in reaffirming the Church's position against Masonic associations. Thanks to Lella who has posted it on her blog, although apparently the item itself does not appear on the AGI site.

The 1983 Code of Canon Law omitted
any mention of the ban on Masons
This prompted Cardinal Ratzinger to issue a specific
Declaration against Freemasonry shortly thereafter
by Salvatore Izzo

VATICAN CITY, May 20, 2013 (Translated from AGI) - What role did the Masons have in the difficulties encountered by Benedict XVI during his Pontificate - for example, in the [external and internal] attacks against him after the Regensburg lecture, or in the distortion of his remarks on condoms and AIDS before his visit to Africa in 2009, or even in the defamatory campaign launched against him in 2010 with the re-ignition of the media furor over sex-offender priests?

This is a question that the new book Vaticano Massone (The Mason Vatican) by Giacomo Galeazzi and Ferruccio Pinotti seeks to answer.

They recount:

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In 1983, when the new Code of Canon Law was promulgated, the word 'Masonry' or 'Freemasonry' disappeared, to be replaced by the generic expression 'sects' in the list of organizations who have traditionally conspired against the Church...

The omission of an explicit ban against Freemasonry in the 1983 Code can be read as the stipulation that followed a sensitive 'pact' within the Roman Curia in the face of a historical tragedy like the IOR-Banco Ambrosiano crisis*, which led the Vatican to admit its responsibility in the collapse of the bank led by banker Roberto Calvi, a Mason..."

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But this was soon doused by cold reality, because (as in the cases of Cardinal Groer and Father Maciel), someone in the Vatican disagreed with the omission and decided to call John Paul II's attention to it.

It was the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Caith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who "almost immediately intervened to make an important correction to the new Code signed by Papa Wojtyla" (on January 25, 1983).

On November 26, 1983, the CDF published a Declaration on Masonic Associations, prepared by Cardinal Ratzinger and approved by John Paul II, which explicitly stated that the Church's condemnation of Freemasonry and membership in Masonic associations remained unchanged.

This is the text of the declaration:
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19831126_declaration-masonic_en.html

---

It has been asked whether there has been any change in the Church’s decision in regard to Masonic associations since the new Code of Canon Law does not mention them expressly, unlike the previous Code.

This Sacred Congregation is in a position to reply that this circumstance in due to an editorial criterion which was followed also in the case of other associations likewise unmentioned inasmuch as they are contained in wider categories.

Therefore the Church’s negative judgment in regard to Masonic association remains unchanged since their principles have always been considered irreconcilable with the doctrine of the Church and therefore membership in them remains forbidden. The faithful who enrol in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion.

It is not within the competence of local ecclesiastical authorities to give a judgment on the nature of Masonic associations which would imply a derogation from what has been decided above, and this in line with the Declaration of this Sacred Congregation issued on 17 February 1981 (cf. AAS 73 1981 pp. 240-241; English language edition of L’Osservatore Romano, 9 March 1981).

In an audience granted to the undersigned Cardinal Prefect, the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II approved and ordered the publication of this Declaration which had been decided in an ordinary meeting of this Sacred Congregation.

Rome, from the Office of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 26 November 1983.

JOSEPH Cardinal RATZINGER
Prefect

+ Fr. Jerome Hamer, O.P.
Titular Archbishop of Lorium
Secretary

---

A quick backgrounder on Freemasonry, its historically anti-Catholic stand, and the Catholic Church position on Masonic associayions in general can be found here:
www.ewtn.com/library/ANSWERS/WHATMAS.HTM

*[A brief historical note on the IOR, for those who may not be aware of the following facts: IOR was the majority stockholder in the Banco Ambrosiano, when a series of faulty offshore bank transactions by the bank led to its collapse in 1982 with tragic consequences, including the murder (or suicide) of Calvi who was found hanging by his neck from a bridge in London, and the fact that IOR had to pay out at least $250 million tothe bank depositors affected by the crash. Compare this monumental 'blunder' of IOR - a genuine scandal - more than 30 years ago, when it was led by an archbishop who was one of John Paul II's closest associates, to the fact that in 2010, Italian bank authorities questioned an IOR transaction involving 23 million euros to purchase German bonds, an amount they froze for a few months and then released, even if they claim they are still investigating the 'questionable' transaction (they claim IOR was not acting on its own behalf but in behalf of unnamed depositors possibly laundering money) - and the different standard and/or convenient amnesia applying to the Pontificate of Benedict XVI is obvious.

Under his Pontificate, the IOR was not involved - or at least, it was not reported to be - in any other questionable financial transaction other than the above. This arose precisely during the period when Moneyval was carrying out its initial investigation of monetary practices in the Vatican. The fact that the episode did not figure at all in Moneyval's favorable interim report on the Holy See in July 2012 must be taken to mean that even Moneyval found the IOR's explanation for the questioned transaction satisfactory.]

After finally looking up the book referenced above, I am rather shocked to see its exploitative, misleading and fallacious subtitle, which is: "Lodges, money and hidden powers - The secret side of the Church of Pope Francis"


First of all, the Church is not 'the Church of Pope Francis', or of any Pope, for that matter. The book publishers are obviously using his name as a drawing card to attract potential book buyers (Of course, if the book had been published when Benedict XVI was still Pope, the publishers would have used the equally fallacious line 'the Church of Pope Benedict XVI' .)

More importantly, Pope Francis had nothing to do with whatever the book claims to have been taking place at the Vatican and within the Curia having to do with the Masons. He has only been Pope since March 13, 2013. Not that anyone would believe he had anything to do with it, but just the fact of using a patently misleading statement as the subtitielof the book is grossly objectionable and unethical.

It gets worse... Here's a translation of the publisher's online blurb for the book. Reading it, one would think this is the ultimate in conspiracy theory:

---

Masonry and the Church. Masonry and finance. Masonry and Vatileaks. Masonry and the Argentine dictatorship. Masonjry and the Jesuits. Masonry and Pope Francis, [Aha, there's the supposed chain that leads to Pope Francis.]

The links, most times hidden and secret, between the Church and Masonry are convoluted and controversial, but even through contradictory episodes, they have remained solid. What is suggested and what has been ventilated in many ways is that behind the most recent and revolutionary events at the Vatican, starting with the resignation of Benedict XVI, is the hand of Masonic lodges.

And in Vatican corridors, it is even whispered around that even the election of the new Pope was their work. After a Papacy that was closed off to the Masons like that of Papa Ratzinger, it is probable that there are many Masons who hope to flourish again thanks to the Jesuit Pope and the long-standing 'sympathy' between the Society of Jesus and the Masons.

]The book is] based on 'explosive' documents - above all, a previously unpublished and unprecedented exchange of letters between the Holy See and the Masonic leadership [in Italy] - and on exclusive interviews with key personages, such as Licio Gelli", through scrupulous reconstruction of events, and an investigation into very close interweaving relations between the Church, Masonry, politics, the Mafia and finance. It is a rigorous investigation that urgently raises the question: Will the new Pope, who is touched by suspicions (or at least, loud silences) on his relations with Argentine dictators (of the early 2000s) which were firmly Masonic, succeed in renewing an institution that is on the verge of anarchy?

---

I certainly hope Galeazzi had nothing to do with this blurb, or at the very least, that he denounces it!

Also, suddenly, to sell a book, the Church, widely 'perceived' to have rid herself of all her major problems simply with a change in Popes, is now described as 'on the verge of anarchy'???

The first review I happened to read about the book came from La
Repubblica, so it was most suspect, as far as I was concerned. But it emphasizes the points made by the blurb, saying straight out that the claims made in the book cannot be dismissed as Vati-fantasizing a la Dan Brown. So could it be that even Repubblica's editorial enthusiasm for Pope Francis - simply because he is not Benedict XVI, and that he is perceived to be a 'popular' Pope who has 'liberal' positions in common with them - can be shunted aside, in this case at least, to make way for the newspaper's habitually rabid anti-Church animus?

In any case, for all the 'rumors' floated for decades about supposed Masons in the Curial hierarchy, nothing definite has been established, and from what I have read so far, the only prelate directly linked to the Masons is the late Cardinal Silvio Oddi, who in 1983, co-signed a letter (reproduced in the book) with the Grand Master of the Great Masonic Eastern Lodge in Italy, to John Paul II, requesting a 'pact of conciliation' between the Church and Freemasonry on the grounds that they shared the common objective of 'the betterment of the individual which can be achieved only through love and tolerance' - a letter believed to have led to the omission of any mention of the Masons in the Revised Canon Code of 1983, which was discussed in the first story in this post... Or maybe, more names are in the book but are not being published in the media so people will buy the book.]

*Licio Gelli is an Italian banker with ties to the Mafia who was implicated in the Banco Ambrosiano collapse, the murder of Roberto Calvi, and many other subsequent scandals, for which he has been tried and convicted numerous times but who has always managed to get away somehow. When his house was raided in 1982 in connection with the Banco Ambrosiano case, a list of 982 prominent Italians, among them many politicians, and Silvio Berlusconi, who had not yet entered politics at the time, who were members of P2, a rogue Masonic lodge headed by Gelli. No less interesting is the story of Gelli's ties with Argentina, starting from the time of Peron, down to the last series of military dictators. (Not that this substantiates in any way Cardinal Bergoglio's supposed 'suspicious' relations with the last Argentine military junta.) Read the Wikipedia entry on Gelli - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licio_Gelli - to get an idea of his unbelievably convoluted story.

AIF to publish its 2012 report
on its work against money-laundering
by Salvatore Izzo


VATICAN CITY, May 20, 2013 (Translated from AGI) - The Authority for Financial Information [AIF from its Italian name] instituted by Benedict XVI in December 2010, will publish in the next few days its first Annual Report on Activities in Financial Information and Oversight to Prevent and Combat Money Laundering and Funding of Terrorism.

This was announced by the Vatican Press Office, saying that on Wednesday, May 22, the director of AIF Rene Bruelhart, will hold a News briefing to present the report and the data it contains.

One is almost grateful to Mr. Izzo for immediately attributing the creation of AIF to Benedict XVI, because there was no mention of Benedict XVI in the Vatican bulletin announcing the news conference. Meanwhile, I would not rule out that the MSM, when they report on this tomorrow, will present it as "an example of the new atmosphere of openness and transparency brought to the Vatican by Pope Francis", without bothering to recall how the AIF was created, by whom, and for what purpose. But I sure would like to be surprised by them for a change!

What a pleasant surprise to see a new Benedict XVI anthology from such an unexpected milieu! And a great service, too, because our emeritus Pope never minced his words about Catholic education, a topic he always stressed when speaking to visiting bishops, and about which he had first-hand knowledge. Interestingly, the first position John Paul II offered Cardinal Ratzinger in his Curia as soon as he became Pope was to be Prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education. An offer the cardinal refused because he had only been Archbishop of Munich for a year and a half. John Paul II's subsequent invitations over the next three years until the cardinal relented were for the job he eventually came to Rome for, as CDF Prefect.

Benedict XVI and education:
A reason open to God
by FATHER C. J. MCCLOSKEY

May 20, 2013

A REASON OPEN TO GOD
On Universities, Education and Culture
By Pope Benedict XVI
The Catholic University of America Press, 2013
336 pages, $24.95
To order: cuapress.cua.edu

In May comes graduation days. Commencement time offers a moment for reflection on the purpose of higher education — especially in our Catholic universities.

And every year we watch the Catholic universities to see who the commencement speakers are, and we dissect the ways they honor or detract from a university’s mission.

What a Catholic university’s mission should be is an oft-debated topic, but we needn’t look far to find a guide to measure our critique.

All three of our most recent popes, from Blessed John Paul II to Pope Francis, have had extensive experience in higher Catholic education as professors. In one way or another, we could refer to them as “university men.”

The Catholic University of America Press has done us a great service by publishing A Reason Open to God, with Pope Benedict’s teachings during his pontificate. The book has a foreword by the president of Catholic University, John Garvey, who has continued the fine work of his predecessor (now-Bishop David O’Connell of Trenton, N.J.) in reconstructing CUA into a truly Catholic university.

This collection is of particular value to Catholic Americans, as one of our finest boasts was that we had by far the largest collection of Catholic universities in the world, at least through the decade of the tumultuous ’60s. The majority of these universities were staffed by thriving religious congregations, both male and female.

Then, out of the blue, a revolution took place in 1967 that changed Catholic higher education radically, but we hope not forever. It was known as the Land O’ Lakes Conference, for that is where a group of Catholic college presidents and academics undertook a revolution in Catholic education that hopefully will someday (soon) be rolled back.

The Land O’ Lakes document began this way: The Catholic university today must be a university in the full modern sense of the word, with a strong commitment to and concern for academic excellence. To perform its teaching and research functions effectively, the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself. To say this is simply to assert that institutional autonomy and academic freedom are essential conditions of life and growth and indeed of survival for Catholic universities, as for all universities.”

Now compare this with Pope Benedict’s address to Catholic educators at Catholic University in Washington on April 17, 2008:

“It is the case that any appeal to the principle of academic freedom to justify positions that contradict the faith and the teaching of the Church would obstruct or even betray the university’s freedom and identity and mission: a mission at the heart of the Church’s munus docendi [teaching function] and is not autonomous or independent of it.”

The contrast is clear. We can only hope that our bishops in each diocese with at least a nominally Catholic college or university will address the matter under the leadership of our new Pope.

This book contains all of Pope Benedict’s talks on the subjects mentioned in the title, with the great majority being given in the context of pastoral visits throughout the world.

I found most interesting those talks in England, on the occasion of his trip to beatify Blessed John Henry Newman, with whom Pope Benedict had a special relation as a fellow theologian. In his homily, Pope Benedict, used Blessed John Henry’s own words to describe the goal of Catholic university professors:

“I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious — but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold and what they do not, who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it.”

Would that all of our universities yielded such young men and women, the earth would be ablaze with the truths of our faith!

All in all, this book deserves a place on the bookshelves of every Catholic teacher, student and parent — and its words a place in their hearts.

Father McCloskey is a Church historian and research fellow
at the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013, Seventh Week in Ordinary Time

ST. RITA DA CASCIA (Italy, 1391-1457), Mother, Widow, Augustinian nun, Mystic
Born near Perugia, Margherita Lotti always wanted to be a nun, but at 12, her family married her off to a powerful local politician who turned out to be abusive. She bore him twin sons. After 18 years of marriage, her husband was murdered. Not long after, both sons died of natural causes, and at age 36, after several attempts, she was finally accepted at the Augustinian convent in Cascia, where she would remain until she died. She lived a life of penance and prayer and was particularly devoted to the Passion of Christ. In 1451, she received a stigma on the forehead resembling those made by the crown of thorns, a wound that bled and caused her pain for the rest of her life. Because of her reputation, many came to seek her spiritual counsel. She spent the last four years of her life bedridden - it is said, sustained only the Eucharist. One day, she asked a cousin to bring her a rose from her old home. Though it was wintertime, the cousin found a single rose blooming. This became a symbol for the belief in Rita's grace to obtain the impossible. With St. Jude Thaddeus, she is considered the saint of impossible and desperate causes. After her death, many miracles were attributed to her, and her body remained incorruptible. She was beatified in 1606 but was not canonized till 1900. Her remains are venerated in the Basilica of Santa Rita in Cascia.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/052213.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

General Audience - Continuing his catecheses on the articles of faith in the Apostles' Creed, Pope Francis reflected
on 'the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church', which he said was inseparably linked to the Holy Spirit who guides
the Church and every member of the Church to carry out Christ's mandate to carry his message to all peoples.
Vatican Radio's English translation of the catechesis:
http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2013/05/22/audience:_the_holy_spirit,_unity_and_communion_%5Bfull_text%5D/en1-694369
After the GA, he met with H.E. Thomas Boni Yayi, President of the Republic of Benin, in the small reception hall
of the Aula Paolo VI.



One year ago...
There were no official events for Benedict XVI. But a news conference was held at the Vatican to present the program for the VII World Encounter of Families which was to take place in Milan from May 29-June on the theme "The Family: Work and Celebration", with the presence of the Holy Father in its concluding two days.




However, media interest this time last year was focused on the just-released book by Gianluigi Nuzzi in which he published the rather random assortment of correspondence and documents that - we would learn within a week - were pilfered from Benedict XVI's desk (or that of his secretary, at any rate) by the traitorous valet Paolo Gabriele.

The most interesting first rejoinder to the book was from Andrea Tornielli, who had reported for Il Giornale most of the 'major' episodes dredged up in the book that had to do with Cardinal Bertone's attempts to consolidate power in his hands - all fortunately vetoed by Benedict xVI. It is instructive to look at Tornielli's piece, because it illustrates some of my earlier reservations about the tenor of commentary in the Italian media, even by someone like Tornielli, whose judgments and opinions I have generally found congenial. But this time, I find even the premise of his title almost outrageous!

The Vatican's irritation
over Vatileaks and Nuzzi's book
Translated from

May 20, 2012

Dear friends, I have just finished reading the book by Gianluigi Nuzzi that contains all the Vatileaks - letters and documents coming from someone (or more than one) from the Vatican who turned them over to the journalist.

As you know, on Monday, the Holy See reacted with extreme severity, defining the entire operation as 'a criminal act' and that "it will take the necessary measures" including a request for international collaboration [namely, Italy's - since the documents taken unlawfully from Vatican files were given to an Italian citizen who published them in Italy]. [2013 P.S. And is anything still being done about that? Or has it become academic and therefore no longer to be pursued since the principal victim of the crime is no longer Pope?

The great irritation at the Vatican is evident and even understandable ['Irritation' is hardly the word to use in this case: the outrage and the criminal acts are not just like an attack of prickly heat; they are heat-seeking missiles hoping to be destructive!] to see notes, memoranda and letters disclosed in public barely a few months, in some cases, a few weeks after they were written.

I do not know what legal bases there may be to take recourse against the book's publication, but it is obvious to me that the Holy See has a serious problem of internal security, and that the 'criminal act' was committed by someone (or some people) who work in the Apostolic Palace [which houses the papal apartment, the various papal reception halls and offices, and the Secretariat of State] and have access to the archives - being able to intercept documents coming from the Pope's desk, from his secretary and from the Secretary of State.

Committed by someone who is apparently following a precise plan whose contours are still unclear. But the problem seems to be worsening, and it is about these moles in the Vatican.

[I'm sorry but I find it outrageous that even someone like Tornielli makes the this security problem the paramount concern, without even touching on the violation of the Pope's personal right to privacy and to privileged communication "as an individual, as the Supreme Head of the Church, and as sovereign of Vatican City State", in the words of the Vatican statement.

I have now found the provision in the Italian Constitution which is applicable, in its listing of fundamental personal rights: "Art. 15 - The freedom and the secrecy of correspondence and any other form of communications are inviolable". It's like the postman or your neighbor opening your mail - that action is criminal in any civilized country. Why should stealing the Pope's private files be any less criminal, considering he is also a Head of State? So I do not understand why the Italian journalists commenting on the matter can simply shrug it off!]]

As far as I can see, the internal investigation to discover the responsible parties (leakers) is still scrabbling around in the dark.
The three aged cardinals in charge of the investigation (Herranz, Tomko and De Giorgi) have received the report of the inquiries made by the Vatican Gendarmerie, but it seems that they contain no precise elements attributable to anyone in particular, despite the fact that persons who could have access to the confidential files in question are certainly not too many. [That was always a basic assumption made by interested 'onlookers' like me...It's irrelevant for Tornielli to refer to the investigating cardinals as 'aged' - no one has accused them of being less than sharp at their age, much less senile, and they are all younger than the Pope, whose faculties have not been questioned.]

From this angle, the appointment of the investigating committee, which began work on April 25, as well as the Vatican statement on Monday, would seem to be deterrent measures to avoid that further leaks should occur. But four months since the first leaked documents were published, no one seems to have learned anything!

One must not fail to point out, too, that the harsh Vatican statement was virtually an involuntary gift to Nuzzi [ie, it helps raise interest in the book and therefore its sales]. Obviously, this was not the intention at all, but rather to send a precise signal.

As for the book itself, it certainly has some documentary interest because of the letters - already partly disclosed last January-February in Nuzzi's TV program and in the newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano.

They serve to confirm the general context of reports that even without having seen those documents, in some cases, even I, in my little way and from fragments gleaned here and there, was able to report.

Take the private meal of the Pope with President Napolitano on January 19, 2009. I reported about that lunch (not dinner as reported) in Il Giornale four days after it took place. [What the book publishes are notes prepared by Mons. Dominique Mamberti, Deputy Secretary for Relations with States, of the talking points for the discussion. So, big deal already!]

Also interesting was a note on the episode of a car with a Vatican license plate which on the evening of December 10, 2009, was riddled by bullets while its passengers were having dinner in a Roman restaurant. This, too, confirmed a reconstruction of that event provided in Il Giornale a few weeks after it happened. I wrote about it in connection with the Christmas Eve episode in St. Peter's Basilica when a mentally troubled young woman lunged at the Pope.

Same thing with the paragraphs dedicated to the Williamson case and the lifting of the excommunication from the four Lefebvrian bishops. Nuzzi recycles the substance of the meeting held at the Secretariat of State that we [Tornielli and co-author Paolo Rodari] made public in the book Attacco a Ratzinger published in August 2010.

Same thing with the reconstruction of Cardinal Bertone's attempt to gain control of the Toniolo Institute (which manages the Sacro Cuore University and its affiliates like the Gemelli Hospital) by naming his own man, Giovanni Maria Flick, in place of Cardinal Tettamanzi as chairrman of the board= [and how the Pope overruled Bertone after Tettamanzi came to see the Pope privately. After all, and Bertone should have known this, the incoming Archbishop of Milan would take over as soon as Tettamanzi retired.].

Same thing with the internal debates generated in the Apostolic Palace by Bertone's plan to acquire the financially-troubled San Raffaele health-and-education empire with IOR funds [also vetoed by the Pope].

New details are provided only in the Boffo case, by disclosing Boffo's letters to Mons, Gaenswein; as well as previously unpublished communications regarding the appointment of Cardinal Angelo Scola to be Archbishop of Milan.

In subsequent posts, I will write about some other documents that serve to illustrate internal dynamics within the Apostolic Palace.

But I disagree on one point that Nuzzi writes in his Introduction and which some authoritative book reviewers agreed with. And that is when they say that it is immaterial to ask who could have lifted so many and so varied an assortment of documents, but that one must concentrate on what the documents contain. Which, as I said above, simply serve to contribute more details to episodes that had already been reported in the media.

But I think that to ask questions about what happened and what possible disputes are going on in the Vatican, about who carried out such a massive and unprecedented document leak and why, are just as important as simply examining the documents to decipher the dynamic of relationships in the Apostolic Palace. [More important, I would say, since, in effect, what do the documents show but the normal differences of opinion and yes, even factional wrangling, that happens in any major executive office?]

And Nuzzi will excuse me if I find his explanation hard to believe that the source(s) he codenames 'Maria' who fenced all the stolen documents to him did so only because he/they want 'transparency' at the Vatican. Especially since they've only made 'transparent' what was already known - it's like switching on floodlights in an already quite visible show window. It makes us perhaps notice dust and cobwebs we might not otherwise have seen, but little else that is informative or useful... Also, Tornielli leaves out Nuzzi's other attribution to his source/sources - that they wanted to do this "for the good of the Church and the Holy Father".]

Elsewhere on the page
benedettoxviforum.freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=85272...
I translate the chapter descriptions in Nuzzi's book, as well as his Introduction to the book, from which the following seemed to me to be the most significant, but which, to my knowledge, was simply ignored by the media who preferred to concentrate on the hardly-salacious and truth to say, quite boring minutiae of the pilfered documents.

---

Another truth emerges that cracks open a rather widespread commonplace about this Pope: the common impression of Benedict XVI as a dogmatic theologian who is remote from the problems of the Roman Curia and of the Church in general, does not correspond to the truth. The image of a Pontiff dedicated only to studying sacred texts and doctrinal questions is false. [Tell that to Marco Politi, will you?]

Of course, Joseph Ratzinger remains a very cultured and highly refined scholar, but he is also a pastor who attentively follows in detail the critical situations of daily life, and seeks to impose changes that are often hindered - on thorny topical issues, scandals that must be set right and quieted down, the persecutions that continue to be perpetrated against Christians in many parts of the world.

He is a Pope who is alert and dynamic, who desires light and truth, but inevitably, in the opinion of this writer, the victim of compromises and of 'reasons of state' that manage to hamper any change. [Easy to say, but Nuzzi offers no scintilla of evidence in the book of any 'change' Benedict XVI wished to make which was hindered in any way!*

He always asks to be kept up to date on the most serious troubles that the Church faces. And he even proposes radical measures while seeking to mediate among the various elements that make up the Church.

He is engaged in intense activity which makes the papal apartment the physical seat of a rule that embraces the whole world.

A simple office, a modest library stuffed with books, low armchairs, a wooden desk, and two landline telephones, no cellulars. That is the office of Joseph Ratzinger, 265th Pontiff in the history of Roman Catholicism,

And yet this office is one of the centers of world power. The pulsing heart of the Church, yet inaccessible to the more than a billion Catholics who inhabit the planet. Here the Pope advises his secretaries as they filter through the most sensitive documents. Here he makes his most difficult decisions. [Probably not. In his chapel, more likely!]

Translated from the Introduction
to SUA SANTITA
by Gianluigi Nuzzi

---

2013 P.S. How does Nuzzi square all that praise of Benedict XVI a very much 'hands=on' Pope, with his source's [in a week's time we were to learn it was Paolo Gabriele, when he was arrested by the Vatican police] brazen statements at his trial that from the questions the Pope asked at mealtime, he concluded that Benedict XVI was clueless and uninforrmed about what was happening in the Vatican and the Church? (i.e., he never read nay of those documents that were pilfered! What chutzpah this treacherous valet had!) And the media simply let him get away with that absurd statement without even challenging it?

Even worse are Gabriele's sanctimonious pretensions, as it is played up on the dust jacket of the book?

---

"My courage is to make known the most troubling events in the life of the Church, make public certain secrets, small and big stories, that have not gone beyond the Bronze Door. Only this way can I feel free, liberated from the unbearable complicity of someone who, while knowing things, must keep silent" - Statement to the author by 'Maria', codename for the principal, anonymous and secret source within the Vatican who furnished the hundreds of documents on which this book is based.

---

Once again, it must be pointed out that the vaunted documents revealed nothing earth-shaking, or even 'major' in terms of substantial content, no scandal involving money, nothing criminal, and nothing that reflected badly in any way on Benedict XVI himself - and yet, the way MSM played up Vatileaks, one would think it was the Banco Ambrosiano-IOR scandal a hundred times worse! Considering the odd assortment that was published, they seemed to have been pilfered catch-as-catch-can (now we know it is Gabriele and his modus operandi, he copied what he could when he could, which obviously did not leave him much choice).


The final word on Vatileaks has not been said because the coverage and commentary on it were so skewed and focused on the wrong things, missing the forest for the trees. I doubt that anyone among the Italian Vaticanistas will ever be able to write a definitive account of it because they are all wearing identical blinders. But since 'Vatileaks' has come to be the demeaning and disparaging shortcut universally used to connote all the problems attributed to the Pontificate of Benedict XVI, clearing the episode up, objectively and fairly, once and for all, is important for the correct 'public perception' of his Pontificate.