Last Friday, the Holy Father gave his Christmas address to the Roman Curia. Reviewing the year, he spoke at some length about his visit to Brazil. He used the reflection as an opportunity to answer the question of whether the visit to Aparecida (a pilgrimage site where a miraculous statue of Our Lady is venerated) was an excessive retreat into interiority when we should be occupied with questions of justice. He also dealt with the question of whether we should evangelise today instead of simply working with other faiths for peace. Sandro Magister has a translation of the relevant sections of the address. (Surprise: The Pope Takes the Curia to Brazil)After speaking more briefly of his other pastoral visits during the year, he concluded (my translation):
We must not deceive ourselves, certainly: the secularism of our times and the pressure of the ideological presumptions to which the secularist conscience tends, with its exclusive claim to definitive rationality, pose no small problem. We know this and we are aware of the burden of the struggle that is imposed on us in these times. But we also know that the Lord keeps his promise: "Behold, I am with you all days, even to the end of the world." (Mt 28.20) In this joyful certainty, welcoming the incentive of the reflections of the Aparecida for us also to renew our being with Christ, let us go forward with trust into the New Year. Let us go under the maternal gaze of the Aparecida; of Her as the one designated "handmaid of the Lord". Her protection keeps us safe and full of hope.
6 comments:
i see you're back to the wonderfully high standard of posting..we missed a couple of days!
Those who say that devotion to the Mother of God is a retreat into interiority when we should be focused on questions of justice show unbelievable ignorance! Did she not say 'Fecit potentiam in brachio suo, dispersit superbos mente cordis sui. Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles.'? (The Magnificat). Is she not also the mother of the one who will come to judge the living and the dead, and establish the universal reign of justice?
Jackie - I only missed Christmas Day! I did this also last year and decided that it was a good policy.
Oliver - I agree with you (and so does the Pope). It was good that the Holy Father dealt with this nonsense because it is sadly quite common.
It is well worth reading this valuable speech in full, and in the light of Pope Benedict's previous addresses to the Roman Curia in 2005 and 2006.
Reflecting on his recent foreign visits, and on inter religious friendship and dialogue, it is apparent that Pope Benedict wishes to emphasise the priority of evangelisation, of preaching the Gospel to an unbelieving world.
Herein lies the importance of Pope Benedict's condemnation, in 2005, of the hermeneutic of dicscontinuity or rupture, which seems to produce a pre-conciliar Church and a post-conciliar Church, as if they were two different churches.
How can the one Church
authentically proclaim the same
Gospel from two different points of view ?
How can it thus evangelise the anti clerical world of secular humanism ?
It can't.
The Church was not invented, or re-invented, by the Second Vatican Council. (Nor did the Council ever say it was.)
The Church dates back to Our Lord Jesus Christ and his Apostles.
The Church did not come to an end in 1962.
Therefore, a hermeneutic of discontinuity or rupture is contrary to the Church's divine mission to teach Christ's Truth to all nations.
This presumably is why Pope Benedict in 2005 echoed the words of Blessed John XIII at the opening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962, when he said the Church's duty was "to transmit doctrine, pure and integral, without attenuation or distortion."
At the closing of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, Paul VI quoted the words of John XIII :
"The sacred deposit of Christian doctrine be guarded and taught more effectively.
Therefore, seek first the kingdom of God."
Through all the bewildering changes of the post Vatican II era, these words have never gone away.
In fact, Pope Benedict in his speech to the Curia in 2005 in the spirit of continuity specifically called attention to the words of his predecessors.
We have probably all read exhortations in recent decades to hold dialogue, to engage with people, and to speak to the modern world.
But this all means nothing if we do not "first seek the kingdom of God."
I've always felt a little wary, somehow, when I heard people speak of evangelism, when quite often they meant social justice, peace and the dignity of man.
These things are of course good in themselves, but they are not quite the same thing as the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
That is why I would suggest that when Pope Benedict speaks of the need for evangelisation, people would do well to re-read what he and his predecessors have already said and written about "adherence to all the teaching of the Church in its entirety and preciseness."
Pope Benedict is quite right, of course.
If the Church does not retreat into its interiority, as at Aparecida, in order to venerate the Mother of God, how then can it go forth to evangelise ? (especially, in these secularist times.)
And another thing ..
I've only just read the comment by Oliver Hayes about the Church's retreat into its interiority in order to venerate the Mother of God.
He makes the point far more succinctly than I did in my (longish) comment !
Prayer and evangelism are not incompatible - the two can and must go together. Focusing on campaigning for justice is meaningless without first grounding it in the Faith. Faith without works is dead but works without faith will not achieve anything. A temporary 'retreat into interiority' is necessary to enable us to evangelise.
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