BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Please see preceding page for earlier posts on 9/2/10.




Benedict XVI's teaching
urges us to 'great things'
by BRUNO MASTROIANNI
Translated from

8/31/10

To desire great things. In fact, that is one of the key points in Benedict XVI's Magisterium. His insistence on the harmony between faith and reason leads to inviting man not to be content with a flat vision of existence.

For Benedict XVI, reason cannot be reduced to a mere capacity for scientific calculation and rationality because it has a much broader horizon: that of "the man who knows who he is, who knows his true measure against the greatness of God".

In this way, reason "is never exhausted but broadens, becomes greater", as he told the International Theological Commission last December.

Along the same line, he insists on the concept of religious freedom which, as he explained very well in Caritas in veritate, does not refer only to "the battles and conflicts that are fought in the world in the name of religious motivation" but also to "the programmed promotion of relgious indifference or practical atheism in many nations".

It is not by chance that this theme of religious freedom as "the human right to seek the truth in religious matters" (as it is defined in Dignitatis humanae) was chosen by the Pope as the theme for the World Day of Pace in 2011.

Religion is not an affectation that brings a smattering of the sacred into our life, nor is it something to be added to human concerns as if it were something extraneous.

Religion, according to Papa Ratzinger, is the revolution of the man who does not accept to live like an animal, even if an intelligent one, but acknowledges that he is destined for something greater. And so, religion is the way to become fully human.

Friday, September 3, 22nd Week in Ordinary Time

ST. POPE GREGORY THE GREAT (Italy, ca 540-624)
Civilian Prefect of Rome, Monk and Abbot, Papal Deacon and Envoy, Pope (590-604), Doctor of the Church
In 2008, Benedict XVI devoted two Wednesday catecheses to his great predecessor
www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2008/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20080528...
Gregory's parents Gordian and Sylvia, Roman patricians of the Anicia clan and devout Christians, are both venerated as saints. A great-great-grand-uncle was Pope Felix III (483-492) and one of his immediate predecessors Agapetus (535-536) was also from his clan. Gregory is generally considered to have established the medieval Papacy and propagated medieval spirituality as embodied in St. Benedict. He is well-known for his writings, which were more prolific than those of any of his predecessors as Pope [and probably not matched by any other Pope until Benedict XVI] but his most important works were written as Pope. In The Rule for Pastors written at the start of his Pontificate, he described the ideal bishop as teacher and guide of his flock. In Book 2 of his Dialogs, he wrote about the 'Life and Miracles of St. Benedict of Nursia' who had died when Gregory was a child; the work became the primary historical source for Benedict's biography. His homilies continue to be quoted today and some 860 of letters he wrote as Pope were conserved. Gregory started life in the footsteps of his father as a Roman administrator, becoming Prefect of Rome when he was 32. After a few years, he left civilian life to become a monk, converting the family home into a monastery. After he was ordained, he was named one of the Pope's seven deacons for Rome, but in 679, Pelagius II named him his ambassador to the imperial court in Constantinople, which by then was the capital of the Roman Empire. He served there for six years, then chose to return to his monastery where he became abbot. But in 590, he was elected Pope by acclamation to succeed Pelagius. At the time, the papacy had little influence outside Italy. Gregory sought from the start to reaffirm the primacy of Rome as his predecessor Leo the Great had done. He considered evangelization of Europe's pagan lands a priority, and in this context, he sent a mission to England led by the future St. Augustine of Canterbury. Gregory also required all his bishops to engage in systematic assistance to the poor, an activity which was responsible for reestablishing the prestige and influence of the papacy in Italy against the distant imperial rule in Constantinople. His papacy was also characterized by his tireless efforts at peacemaking with pagan monarchs. He revitalized the liturgy, introducing the use of prayers in the Canon of the Mass that vary according to the liturgical season. The so-called Tridentine Mass of 1570, adopted after the Council of Trent, in effect, simply formalized the rubrics of the Mass as it had been celebrated since the time of Pope Gregory, and 'Gregorian rite' is still interchangeably used as a term for the Tridentine Mass. Around 800, when a system of notation was devised for the plainsong used in liturgy, it came to be called Gregorian chant although he had died two centuries earlier. As Benedict XVI has pointed out, "Gregory remained a simple monk at heart.. and wanted to be simply servus servorum Dei, servant of the servants of God". He coined the phrase, which has become one of the 'titles' for the Supreme Pontiff. It manifested "his way of living and acting, convinced that a bishop should, above all, imitate the humility of God and follow Christ in this way".
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/nab/readings/090310.shtml


OR today.

Page 1 highlights the meeting between the Holy Father and Israeli President Shimon Peres yesterday, resonating with the start of
direct peace talks in Washington between Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Other Page 1
stories: Continuing alarm over unemployment in the US; Mogadishu hospitals and refugee camps overburdened by victims of the
Islamic extremist insurgency against the Somali government; and a story about rock singer Nina Hagen who has found faith. In
the inside pages, the recently completed 'cleaning up' of Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.


THE POPE'S DAY

The Holy Father met today with

- Bishops of Brazil (Northeast Sector III) on ad limina visit.


The Vatican also released the text of the Holy Father's message for World Youth Day 2011 to be held
in Madrid next August.

Thanks to

for calling attention to this blog entry by someone who is apparently a leading atheist, since the article has appeared not only on his blog in the NEW HUMANIST magazine (the lettering may be too small on the magazine's logo below - the magazine subhead reads 'Ideas for godless people'), but in Googling for more info about Sims, it turns out he also posted the article on the site PLANET ATHEISM... He gives a full account of the Protest-the-Pope debate reported briefly in the Catholic Herald (see yesterday's post). Although he persists in a few fallacious stereotypes perpetrated by the secularists, he does concede the fundamental question of the right of the Church to be heard even in a secular society - and even comes to the conclusion that the main secularist arguments against state funding for the Pope's visit would not pass the logic test!


Protest the Pope debate:
Righteous indignation or unreasonable outrage?
by Paul Sims

Thursday, 2 September 2010

Last night, I attended a debate entitled "The Papal visit should not be a State Visit" at London's Conway Hall, organised by the Central London Humanist Group, along with the BHA and the South Place Ethical Society.

Speaking for the motion were the prominent atheist philosopher AC Grayling and the tireless human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, while the two Catholics contesting the motion were the journalist and former press secretary to the Archbishop of Westminster, Austen Ivereigh, and the Benedictine monk Father Christopher Jamison, who appeared on the TV series The Monastery.

Ivereigh and Jamison were representing Catholic Voices, a group of 20 speakers formed to put the Catholic side of the debate in the media in the run up to the Papal Visit to the UK, which takes place from 16-19 September.

Polly Toynbee, Guardian columnist and president of the BHA, chaired the debate and it was perhaps a sign of what was to come that the first mention of the Papal Visit during her introduction drew a boo from one member of the audience.

After Toynbee had laid out the format - eight minutes for each speaker, followed by audience questions (with no vote, because that would just reflect who had happened to turn up) – we were straight into the debate.

First up was AC Grayling, speaking in favour of the motion. The are, he said, two primary reasons for opposing the Pope's state visit.

The first and, it would seem, most important, is that the Vatican is not really a state. Grayling provided a brief history lesson – the Papacy did possess temporal power during the medieval and early modern periods in the form of the Papal States, which covered a large part of central Italy, but these were lost with the formation of the modern Italian state in 1870.

The status of the Vatican as a state was only recovered with the 1929 Lateran Pacts, in which the Catholic Church and the fascist government of Mussolini reached an agreement on the sovereignty of the Holy See.

Therefore, said Grayling, the circumstances of its creation means the argument that the Holy See is a state is moot. He then used an example that greatly amused the secularists in the crowd – if he tried to turn his garden in South London into a state, of which he is the monarch, and asked the Queen for a state visit, what would be the response?

This moved Grayling into the second part of his argument against the state visit, which is that all religions are "self-constituted, interest group". By coming to the UK, the Pope is not representing a state and its people in any real sense, but rather the interests of Britain's Catholics – a relatively small constituency of around nine per cent of the population (and even fewer if you only include regular worshippers).

Any self-constituted organisation with an interest, such as a trade union, or the Women's Institute, or the BHA, ought to fund itself. It's influence, argued Grayling, should be proportional to its representation. The religious voice is already over-amplified in British public life, and the taxpayer should not be forced to pay £12 million for the head of the Catholic Church to come to the UK. Therefore, the Papal visit should be a private visit, funded by those who want the Pope here.

Grayling also added a final reason for his opposition to the state visit, which he said he had been searching hard for a way to articulate without sounding aggressive. But, he said, there is no other way of saying it.

The hierarchy of the Catholic Church has been instrumental in covering up criminal acts, i.e. the sexual abuse of children. It has been involved in a criminal conspiracy. If we knew this in connection with another organisation, would we roll out the red carpet for its leader?

This final point received enormous cheers and applause from the audience, making it clear that the overwhelming majority were on the side of the motion. It was hardly surprising, given that members of the Protest the Pope coalition had organised the debate, and that you might call Conway Hall the (non-) spiritual home of British atheism, but I had wondered how many Catholics might make it, given that it had been widely publicised.

So, with the crowd fired up by Grayling, Father Christopher Jamison took the podium to oppose the motion. He began by expressing anger at the fact that Grayling, at the end of his eight minutes, had seen fit to mock the current Pope's namesake, Benedict XV – how dare he, said Jamison, mock the one leader in Europe who had stood up and tried to stop the First World War (not an unfair point - read his Peace Note of 1917 if you're interested).

With that out of the way, Jamison moved into putting the case for a state visit, saying there were rational and humane reasons for it going ahead, which all those who believe in reason and common dialogue should support.

A state visit is where the Queen invites the head of another state to come and make an address in her country – the Vatican extended that honour to her in 1980, so we owe the Pope the same honour in return.

Jamison disputed Grayling's claim that the Vatican is not a state – the Holy See, he said, pre-dates the modern Vatican State by centuries. In fact, it is the world's first United Nations, uniting peoples across the world by common belief.

The UK government has long recognised the significance of the Holy See, particularly its role played in tackling global poverty and climate change. For this reasons, more British diplomatic representatives have visited the Holy See in recent years than they have any other state.

So why should we welcome the state visit? Because, Jamison suggested, of British democratic values – this debate raises a fundamental question about the nature of secular society, about whether it is closed or open. Does this society allow only a platform for "secularist ideology", closed to other opinions? Or is it open? Are all voices welcome, even those that question it? Everyone, secularists included, should welcome a public square filled with diverse beliefs and values.

Jamison then moved to answer Grayling's arguments regarding the failing of the Catholic Church. As someone who has worked for many years in Catholic education, Jamison said he had to deal with taking on board the 1989 Children's Act, which tightened regulations protecting children.

At the time, argued Jamison, all British schools were failing in this regard – children were abused in all sections of society. He elaborated on this later during the questions, when a survivor of abuse told her story and suggested the Church suffers from "institutional narcissism". It was a particularly powerful moment in the evening, and I was struck by Jamison's response – he seemed visibly shocked and moved, and pointed out that since 1989, those involved in Catholic education have had to learn to protect children in ways that were quite new to them.

But they did learn, and the Catholic Church in the UK (he said he couldn't speak for it in other countries) now has a child protection procedure in place which is commended by the government.

I think this was one of the more insightful moments in the debate – while continuing to campaign for openness in relation to the shocking abuse and cynical cover-ups, it's important that we remember that many people involved in the Catholic Church do feel a real sense of hurt and guilt over the abuse that has occurred in Catholic institutions, and many have worked hard to change things. I think this was exhibited by Jamison in that part of last night's debate.

Having addressed the abuse, Jamison implored us not to assess an institution by its failings, but by its successes. The Catholic Church is, he suggested, "the world's largest contributor to civil society ... promoting love, hope and common good".

At this point, we heard the first widespread heckles from the audience and things didn't improve with Jamison's next point – the Church makes a global contribution to the world's wellbeing, providing a quarter of all global HIV care. This elicited huge cries of "nonsense" and boos, not to mention a few expletives from some people sat behind me.

At this point, Polly Toynbee stepped in to calm things down – "I think you should let him speak" – and Jamison asked the audience who they think should be allowed a platform. "What have we to fear," he asked, "other than a closing of minds?"

He ended with an appeal to the audience to "exercise reason over sentiment" – secularists may disagree with the Pope, but they should accept diverse voices. We need an open secularism.

Next up was Peter Tatchell, who focused on the moral arguments against the visit. He said he agrees with the Pope's rejection of materialism and consumerism, but Benedict XVI preaches a harsh, intolerant version of Catholicism that even many Catholics reject.

His opposition to the ordination of women is "sexism and patriarchy of the highest and most shameful kind". He opposes humane scientific advances such as IVF and stem cell research. He says that an HIV positive husband can not even use a condom to prevent the infection of his wife. He approves homophobic discrimination. He has been actively involved in the cover-up of child sex abuse, most notoriously in his authorship, as the then-Cardinal Ratzinger, of a 2001 letter threatening excommunication for any bishop reporting abuse cases to the police.

Worst of all, in Tatchell's view, Benedict rescinded the excommunication of Bishop Richard Williamson and the ultra-conservative Society of St Pius X, despite Williamson's much-documented Holocaust denial. The Pope has also pressed the case for the Beatification of Pope Pius XII, the wartime Pope who, many argue, cooperated with the Nazis and failed to oppose the Holocaust.

For Tatchell, these two cases in particular show just how far the current Pope has departed from the gospels he preaches of love and compassion. Therefore, we should not honour him with a state visit – if he was a religious leader of the stature of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, then absolutely, but not Benedict XVI.

Finally we heard from Austen Ivereigh, with Toynbee urging us to hear him with "rationality and respect". He began by reading a recent quote concerning the Church by National Secular Society president Terry Sanderson, in which he replaced the word "Catholics" with Jews and so on. Presumably he was picking up the argument of the Pope's personal preacher, who likened the treatment of Benedict over child abuse scandals to the the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis. [Which is, as usual, perpetrating the now-established myth flatly distorting what Fr. Cantalamessa actually said!]

(As an opening gambit to win over an audience of secularists, likening opposition to a state visit by a religious leader to mass persecution of people on account of their race was hardly destined to be a winner, but it's one possible approach, I guess...]

Then Ivereigh moved on to slightly firmer ground, suggesting that the opposition argument that most people in Britain don't want a state visit is untrue. According to a new survey by Catholic magazine The Tablet, only five per cent of those polled said they were "strongly opposed" to the visit. (I wonder if there's a lesson here for anyone trying to use statistics in these kinds of arguments –Grayling told us only nine per cent in Britain are Catholic, Ivereigh told us only five per cent. It follows that both are suggesting they speak for the more reasonable majority, but is it not fairer to say that together these statistics show that the majority of people have no strong opinions on this?)

Britain, said Ivereigh, has not stopped being a tolerant society. The case put by the opposition is based, in his view, on an abandonment of reason and perspective, on a parody of the Catholic Church. The opponents of the visit spread misapprehensions, caricatures and half-baked truths.

He then tried to show us why this is the case. Women can't be priests because Jesus intended the Church to be run by men [hearty laughter from the audience]. [I must say that was probably the worst way to state that argument - I'd have snorted too if i were in the audience!].

(He said) IVF destroys human life in the process of creation. It's the same with stem cell research – the scientists involved don't respect human life. It's dogma, and it doesn't even work. [Again, Ivereigh is off the mark - the Church does not oppose all stem cell research, just using embryos for research!]

Ivereigh was hardly winning the crowd over at this point, but his next point lost them completely – the Pope is right on condoms, and the science backs it up (he's put this argument in the Guardian in the past). [Sims - and the entire anti-Pope crowd - completely ignores the scientific evidence based on epidemiological statistics that even the UK magazine Lancet reported in the past - before the Pope's 2008 statement.] The spread of the virus, he argued, has accelerated in line with the growth in condom use – abstinence and fidelity really are the best way forward.

Is the Church in favour of discrimination? No, said Ivereigh, it is the leading supporter of human rights in the world. It stand up for the rights of gay people – yes, it disagrees with gay adoption, and it supports the rights of Catholic institutions to only employ those who reflect their ethos, but it does not support discrimination.

On child abuse, Ivereigh argued that Ratzinger's 2001 letter did not order bishops to remain silent. [He ought to have been most emphatic about this, since this obstinate mis-statement of facts about De gravioribus delicti and its antecedent Crimen sollecitationis was the burden of the 2006 BBC documentary slandering Cardinal Ratzinger!] He has led the drive for openness on the issue of abuse, and has done more than any other person in the Church to address the problem. The Catholic Church is the only organisation in the UK that annually published a report on instances of sexual abuse in its institutions.

Ivereigh also stressed that Bishop Williamson's order was rehabilitated, not Williamson himself, and that Pope Pius XII had been a great defender of Jews.

The idea, he argued, that the Church is an enemy of human rights is absurd. It works to emancipate – the homeless, the poor, women, immigrants, the unborn. It is the greatest friend of the marginalised, inspired by the teachings of the faith.

He concluded by saying that yes, Catholics and humanists disagree on some rights. But do secularists want to allow free interplay of those ideas, or do they want to push them away? In this respect, Catholics are the true humanists.

The debate ended there, and move into a particularly fruitless "questions" format, in which the majority of participants failed to ask the speakers any actual questions. I wouldn't say this is unique to last night's debate – it's part of the reason I don't watch Question Time on TV – but I do find it incredibly tiresome when audience member after audience member takes the microphone to deliver a general point of their own, without asking the panel anything at all. Maybe I'm just not a fan of this format.

But the questions section was also the point at which the booing, heckling and shouting reached its loudest, and it was that aspect of last night's debate that left me feeling a little uncomfortable as I headed home on the tube.

I think both Grayling and Tatchell delivered strong arguments against the visit being a state visit, and I don't think either of the Catholic speakers did enough to convince me that they were wrong. Frankly, some of their arguments were absurd, particularly in relation to HIV and condoms (I find the idea that the Catholic Church is the world's greatest provider of HIV care particularly laughable, as well as Ivereigh's claim that the Pope is right on condoms). [Sims finds these statements 'laughable' because he persists, like other anti-Church paladins, to ignore documented fact - what institution but the Church can anyone name that provides more direct care to HIV victims in Africa and Asia?]

But a key element of their argument was that a secular state should provide an open forum for contending viewpoints, and that the opponents of the visit want a closed society and do not want this "free interplay", as Ivereigh called it.

I don't think that this is true, and I don't think it is even that relevant to the state visit argument, which is not about whether the Pope should come, but who should fund it. But it's a common argument levelled by religious opponents against secularists/humanists/atheists, and it's an image we must be careful not to project.

Last night the audience, in which opponents of the visit enormously outnumbered supporters, frequently shouted down Catholics (including those posing questions from the audience), rather than hearing their views and then arguing against them rationally.

There was a lot of shouting – including plenty of swearing – and at times the speakers were not able to finish making their points (I'd say it was an atmosphere closer to what I'm used to experiencing at football matches than at, say, intellectual talks).

In my view this is not how to conduct a debate. Ivereigh accuses secularists of presenting a caricature of the Catholic Church – similarly, could it not be argued that this kind of conduct by a vocal minority allows opponents of secularism to paint the caricature of "atheist fundamentalism"?

The result is that Ivereigh can emerge from the debate and describe it, as he does in the video attached to this blogpost, as "a bearpit" and "very nasty". It's also the way it's portrayed by Ed West in his post at the Catholic Herald.

Are secularists and humanists committed, as both Catholic commentators suggested we should be, to an open society of diverse views and beliefs? If we are, then it doesn't mean we should support a state, taxpayer-funded visit by the Pope, but we certainly ought to be willing to listen calmly to the arguments and have a civilised debate with those who think we should.

At times, last night's event gave the impression that many secularists don't even want to hear the counter-arguments. My own secularism is based, to a great extent, on a commitment to free speech and reasoned debate, which is why I feel uncomfortable with what I saw last night. (My predecessor in this job, Padraig Reidy, recently expressed some similar concerns in the Observer.)

I've gone on quite long enough, but one final thing – I don't feel we really did get to the bottom of the question of whether the visit should be a state one last night, but I did have a question of my own that I was trying to put to the anti-state visit side, particularly AC Grayling.

There seem to be two key arguments against the state visit – one technical, one moral. The technical argument questions the Vatican's status as a sovereign state, and therefore the Pope's right to a state visit. The moral argument holds that the Vatican's human rights record – on AIDS, child abuse, women, gay rights etc – means the Pope is not morally deserving of the honour of a state visit.

I wonder if these two arguments don't contradict each other slightly? If we follow the technical argument, then the leader of any country we deem to be legitimate is entitled to a state visit, including leaders of states we may deem to have questionable human rights records, such as Saudi Arabia, whose leaders frequently come here.

Yet if we follow the moral argument consistently, we would no more allow a state visit from the leader of Saudi Arabia as we would the leader of the Vatican.

It's just a thought – I wonder if opponents of the state visit shouldn't concentrate on one or the other? The moral argument would have wider implications, and make a greater stand in relation to the UK's ties to many other questionable regimes.

I never got the chance to ask Grayling, but my guess would be he would say you could apply both the moral and technical criteria to the Holy See – and it passes neither.


P.S. I don't know if Austen Ivereigh was exactly the best person to field on the Catholic side in the above debate. Quite apart from the two lame 'arguments' he gave, I have found quite a number of his articles and blogs for AMERICA magazine dubious, to say the least, and I assume it has to do with the fact that his previous job was spokesman of the former Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Murphy O'Connor, whose ultra-liberal positions and record are well-known.


If you want negative bias at its worst, there's the cover story in this week's
issue of the British magazine NEW STATESMAN, a leftwing magazine that
espouses all the fashionable liberal causes ...

and chooses this week to espouse the views of the lawyer who is leading
the 'legal' case for arresting the Pope and whose book against Benedict XVI
is being published by Penguin in time for the papal visit.

THE POPE'S MESSAGE
FOR WYD 2011

---

"Planted and built up in Jesus Christ, firm in the faith" (cf. Col 2:7)

Dear Friends,

I often think back on the World Youth Day held in Sydney in 2008. There we had an experience of a great festival of faith in which the Spirit of God was actively at work, building deep communion among the participants who had come from all over the world.

That gathering, like those on previous occasions, bore rich fruit in the lives of many young people and in the life of the whole Church. Now we are looking forward to the next World Youth Day, to be held in Madrid in August 2011.

Back in 1989, several months before the historic fall of the Berlin Wall, this pilgrimage of young people halted in Spain, in Santiago de Compostela. Now, at a time when Europe greatly needs to rediscover its Christian roots, our meeting will take place in Madrid with the theme: "Planted and built up in Jesus Christ, firm in the faith" (cf. Col 2:7).

I encourage you to take part in this event, which is so important for the Church in Europe and for the universal Church. I would like all young people – those who share our faith in Jesus Christ, but also those who are wavering or uncertain, or who do not believe in him – to share this experience, which can prove decisive for their lives. It is an experience of the Lord Jesus, risen and alive, and of his love for each of us.


1. At the source of your deepest aspirations

In every period of history, including our own, many young people experience a deep desire for personal relationships marked by truth and solidarity. Many of them yearn to build authentic friendships, to know true love, to start a family that will remain united, to achieve personal fulfilment and real security, all of which are the guarantee of a serene and happy future.

In thinking of my own youth, I realize that stability and security are not the questions that most occupy the minds of young people. True enough, it is important to have a job and thus to have firm ground beneath our feet, yet the years of our youth are also a time when we are seeking to get the most out of life.

When I think back on that time, I remember above all that we were not willing to settle for a conventional middle-class life. We wanted something great, something new. We wanted to discover life itself, in all its grandeur and beauty. Naturally, part of that was due to the times we lived in.

During the Nazi dictatorship and the war, we were, so to speak, "hemmed in" by the dominant power structure. So we wanted to break out into the open, to experience the whole range of human possibilities.

I think that, to some extent, this urge to break out of the ordinary is present in every generation. Part of being young is desiring something beyond everyday life and a secure job, a yearning for something really truly greater.

Is this simply an empty dream that fades away as we become older? No! Men and women were created for something great, for infinity. Nothing else will ever be enough. Saint Augustine was right when he said "our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you".

The desire for a more meaningful life is a sign that God created us and that we bear his "imprint". God is life, and that is why every creature reaches out towards life. Because human beings are made in the image of God, we do this in a unique and special way. We reach out for love, joy and peace.

So we can see how absurd it is to think that we can truly live by removing God from the picture! God is the source of life. To set God aside is to separate ourselves from that source and, inevitably, to deprive ourselves of fulfilment and joy: "without the Creator, the creature fades into nothingness" (Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, 36).
In some parts of the world, particularly in the West, today’s culture tends to exclude God, and to consider faith a purely private issue with no relevance for the life of society. Even though the set of values underpinning society comes from the Gospel – values like the sense of the dignity of the person, of solidarity, of work and of the family –, we see a certain "eclipse of God" taking place, a kind of amnesia which, albeit not an outright rejection of Christianity, is nonetheless a denial of the treasure of our faith, a denial that could lead to the loss of our deepest identity.

For this reason, dear friends, I encourage you to strengthen your faith in God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. You are the future of society and of the Church! As the Apostle Paul wrote to the Christians of Colossae, it is vital to have roots, a solid foundation! This is particularly true today.

Many people have no stable points of reference on which to build their lives, and so they end up deeply insecure. There is a growing mentality of relativism, which holds that everything is equally valid, that truth and absolute points of reference do not exist. But this way of thinking does not lead to true freedom, but rather to instability, confusion and blind conformity to the fads of the moment.

As young people, you are entitled to receive from previous generations solid points of reference to help you to make choices and on which to build your lives: like a young plant which needs solid support until it can sink deep roots and become a sturdy tree capable of bearing fruit.


2. Planted and built up in Jesus Christ

In order to highlight the importance of faith in the lives of believers, I would like to reflect with you on each of the three terms used by Saint Paul in the expression: "Planted and built up in Jesus Christ, firm in the faith" (cf. Col 2:7).

We can distinguish three images: "planted" calls to mind a tree and the roots that feed it; "built up" refers to the construction of a house; "firm" indicates growth in physical or moral strength. These images are very eloquent.

Before commenting on them, I would like to point out that grammatically all three terms in the original text are in the passive voice. This means that it is Christ himself who takes the initiative to plant, build up and confirm the faithful.

The first image is that of a tree which is firmly planted thanks to its roots, which keep it upright and give it nourishment. Without those roots, it would be blown away by the wind and would die.

What are our roots? Naturally our parents, our families and the culture of our country are very important elements of our personal identity.

But the Bible reveals a further element. The prophet Jeremiah wrote: "Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit" (Jer 17:7-8).

For the prophet, to send out roots means to put one’s trust in God. From him we draw our life. Without him, we cannot truly live. "God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son" (1 Jn 5:11).

Jesus himself tells us that he is our life (cf. Jn 14:6). Consequently, Christian faith is not only a matter of believing that certain things are true, but above all a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

It is an encounter with the Son of God that gives new energy to the whole of our existence. When we enter into a personal relationship with him, Christ reveals our true identity and, in friendship with him, our life grows towards complete fulfilment.

There is a moment, when we are young, when each of us wonders: what meaning does my life have? What purpose and direction should I give to it? This is a very important moment, and it can worry us, perhaps for some time. We start wondering about the kind of work we should take up, the kind of relationships we should establish, the friendships we should cultivate...

Here, once more, I think of my own youth. I was somehow aware quite early on that the Lord wanted me to be a priest. Then later, after the war, when I was in the seminary and at university on the way towards that goal, I had to recapture that certainty. I had to ask myself: is this really the path I was meant to take? Is this really God’s will for me? Will I be able to remain faithful to him and completely at his service?

A decision like this demands a certain struggle. It cannot be otherwise. But then came the certainty: this is the right thing! Yes, the Lord wants me, and he will give me strength. If I listen to him and walk with him, I become truly myself. What counts is not the fulfilment of my desires, but of his will. In this way life becomes authentic.

Just as the roots of a tree keep it firmly planted in the soil, so the foundations of a house give it long-lasting stability. Through faith, we have been built up in Jesus Christ (cfr Col 2:7), even as a house is built on its foundations.

Sacred history provides many examples of saints who built their lives on the word of God. The first is Abraham, our father in faith, who obeyed God when he was asked to leave his ancestral home and to set out for an unknown land. "Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, and he was called the friend of God" (Jas 2:23).

Being built up in Jesus Christ means responding positively to God’s call, trusting in him and putting his word into practice. Jesus himself reprimanded his disciples: "Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord’, and do not do what I tell you?" (Lk 6:46).

He went on to use the image of building a house: "I will show you what someone is like who comes to me, listens to my words, and acts on them. That one is like a person building a house, who dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock; when the flood came, the river burst against that house but could not shake it because it had been well built" (Lk 6:47-48).

Dear friends, build your own house on rock, just like the person who "dug deeply". Try each day to follow Christ’s word. Listen to him as a true friend with whom you can share your path in life. With him at your side, you will find courage and hope to face difficulties and problems, and even to overcome disappointments and set-backs.

You are constantly being offered easier choices, but you yourselves know that these are ultimately deceptive and cannot bring you serenity and joy. Only the word of God can show us the authentic way, and only the faith we have received is the light which shines on our path.

Gratefully accept this spiritual gift which you have received from your families; strive to respond responsibly to God’s call, and to grow in your faith. Do not believe those who tell you that you don’t need others to build up your life! Find support in the faith of those who are dear to you, in the faith of the Church, and thank the Lord that you have received it and have made it your own!


3. Firm in the faith

You are "planted and built up in Jesus Christ, firm in the faith" (cf. Col 2:7). The Letter from which these words are taken was written by Saint Paul in order to respond to a specific need of the Christians in the city of Colossae. That community was threatened by the influence of certain cultural trends that were turning the faithful away from the Gospel.

Our own cultural context, dear young people, is not unlike that of the ancient Colossians. Indeed, there is a strong current of secularist thought that aims to make God marginal in the lives of people and society by proposing and attempting to create a "paradise" without him.

Yet experience tells us that a world without God becomes a "hell": filled with selfishness, broken families, hatred between individuals and nations, and a great deficit of love, joy and hope.

On the other hand, wherever individuals and nations accept God’s presence, worship him in truth and listen to his voice, then the civilization of love is being built, a civilization in which the dignity of all is respected, and communion increases, with all its benefits.

Yet some Christians allow themselves to be seduced by secularism or attracted by religious currents that draw them away from faith in Jesus Christ. There are others who, while not yielding to these enticements, have simply allowed their faith to grow cold, with inevitable negative effects on their moral lives.

To those Christians influenced by ideas alien to the Gospel the Apostle Paul spoke of the power of Christ’s death and resurrection. This mystery is the foundation of our lives and the centre of Christian faith. All philosophies that disregard it and consider it "foolishness" (1 Cor 1:23) reveal their limitations with respect to the great questions deep in the hearts of human beings.

As the Successor of the Apostle Peter, I too want to confirm you in the faith (cf. Lk 22:32). We firmly believe that Jesus Christ offered himself on the Cross in order to give us his love.

In his passion, he bore our sufferings, took upon himself our sins, obtained forgiveness for us and reconciled us with God the Father, opening for us the way to eternal life.

Thus we were freed from the thing that most encumbers our lives: the slavery of sin. We can love everyone, even our enemies, and we can share this love with the poorest of our brothers and sisters and all those in difficulty.

Dear friends, the Cross often frightens us because it seems to be a denial of life. In fact, the opposite is true! It is God’s "yes" to mankind, the supreme expression of his love and the source from which eternal life flows.

Indeed, it is from Jesus’s heart, pierced on the Cross, that this divine life streamed forth, ever accessible to those who raise their eyes towards the Crucified One. I can only urge you, then, to embrace the Cross of Jesus, the sign of God’s love, as the source of new life.

Apart from Jesus Christ risen from the dead, there can be no salvation! He alone can free the world from evil and bring about the growth of the Kingdom of justice, peace and love to which we all aspire.


4. Believing in Jesus Christ without having seen him

In the Gospel we find a description of the Apostle Thomas’s experience of faith when he accepted the mystery of the Cross and resurrection of Christ. Thomas was one of the twelve Apostles. He followed Jesus and was an eyewitness of his healings and miracles. He listened to his words, and he experienced dismay at Jesus’ death.

That Easter evening when the Lord appeared to the disciples, Thomas was not present. When he was told that Jesus was alive and had shown himself, Thomas stated: "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe" (Jn 20:25).

We too want to be able to see Jesus, to speak with him and to feel his presence even more powerfully. For many people today, it has become difficult to approach Jesus. There are so many images of Jesus in circulation which, while claiming to be scientific, detract from his greatness and the uniqueness of his person.

That is why, after many years of study and reflection, I thought of sharing something of my own personal encounter with Jesus by writing a book. It was a way to help others see, hear and touch the Lord in whom God came to us in order to make himself known.

Jesus himself, when he appeared again to his disciples a week later, said to Thomas: "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe" (Jn 20:27).

We too can have tangible contact with Jesus and put our hand, so to speak, upon the signs of his Passion, the signs of his love. It is in the sacraments that he draws particularly near to us and gives himself to us.

Dear young people, learn to "see" and to "meet" Jesus in the Eucharist, where he is present and close to us, and even becomes food for our journey.

In the sacrament of Penance the Lord reveals his mercy and always grants us his forgiveness. Recognize and serve Jesus in the poor, the sick, and in our brothers and sisters who are in difficulty and in need of help.

Enter into a personal dialogue with Jesus Christ and cultivate it in faith. Get to know him better by reading the Gospels and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Converse with him in prayer, and place your trust in him. He will never betray that trust!

"Faith is first of all a personal adherence of man to God. At the same time, and inseparably, it is a free assent to the whole truth that God has revealed" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 150).

Thus you will acquire a mature and solid faith, one which will not be based simply on religious sentiment or on a vague memory of the catechism you studied as a child. You will come to know God and to live authentically in union with him, like the Apostle Thomas who showed his firm faith in Jesus in the words: "My Lord and my God!".


5. Sustained by the faith of the Church, in order to be witnesses

Jesus said to Thomas: "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe" (Jn 20:29). He was thinking of the path the Church was to follow, based on the faith of eyewitnesses: the Apostles.

Thus we come to see that our personal faith in Christ, which comes into being through dialogue with him, is bound to the faith of the Church.

We do not believe as isolated individuals, but rather, through Baptism, we are members of this great family; it is the faith professed by the Church which reinforces our personal faith.

The Creed that we proclaim at Sunday Mass protects us from the danger of believing in a God other than the one revealed by Christ: "Each believer is thus a link in the great chain of believers. I cannot believe without being carried by the faith of others, and by my faith I help support others in the faith" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 166).

Let us always thank the Lord for the gift of the Church, for the Church helps us to advance securely in the faith that gives us true life (cf. Jn 20:31).

In the history of the Church, the saints and the martyrs have always drawn from the glorious Cross of Christ the strength to be faithful to God even to the point of offering their own lives. In faith they found the strength to overcome their weaknesses and to prevail over every adversity.

Indeed, as the Apostle John says, "Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?" (1 Jn 5:5). The victory born of faith is that of love.

There have been, and still are, many Christians who are living witnesses of the power of faith that is expressed in charity. They have been peacemakers, promoters of justice and workers for a more humane world, a world in accordance with God’s plan. With competence and professionalism, they have been committed in different sectors of the life of society, contributing effectively to the welfare of all. The charity that comes from faith led them to offer concrete witness by their actions and words.

Christ is not a treasure meant for us alone; he is the most precious treasure we have, one that is meant to be shared with others. In our age of globalization, be witnesses of Christian hope all over the world. How many people long to receive this hope!

Standing before the tomb of his friend Lazarus, who had died four days earlier, as he was about to call the dead man back to life, Jesus said to Lazarus’s sister Martha: "If you believe, you will see the glory of God" (cf. Jn 11:40).

In the same way, if you believe, and if you are able to live out your faith and bear witness to it every day, you will become a means of helping other young people like yourselves to find the meaning and joy of life, which is born of an encounter with Christ!


6. On the way to World Youth Day in Madrid

Dear friends, once again I invite you to attend World Youth Day in Madrid. I await each of you with great joy.

Jesus Christ wishes to make you firm in faith through the Church. The decision to believe in Jesus Christ and to follow him is not an easy one. It is hindered by our personal failures and by the many voices that point us towards easier paths.

Do not be discouraged. Rather, look for the support of the Christian community, the support of the Church! Throughout this year, carefully prepare for the meeting in Madrid with the bishops, priests and youth leaders in your dioceses, parish communities, associations and movements. The quality of our meeting will depend above all on our spiritual preparation, our prayer, our common hearing of the word of God and our mutual support.

Dear young people, the Church depends on you! She needs your lively faith, your creative charity and the energy of your hope. Your presence renews, rejuvenates and gives new energy to the Church.

That is why World Youth Days are a grace, not only for you, but for the entire People of God. The Church in Spain is actively preparing to welcome you and to share this joyful experience of faith with you.

I thank the dioceses, parishes, shrines, religious communities, ecclesial associations and movements, and all who are hard at work in preparing for this event. The Lord will not fail to grant them his blessings.

May the Virgin Mary accompany you along this path of preparation. At the message of the angel, she received God’s word with faith. It was in faith that she consented to what God was accomplishing in her. By proclaiming her "fiat", her "yes", she received the gift of immense charity which led her to give herself entirely to God. May she intercede for each one of you so that, in the coming World Youth Day you may grow in faith and love.

I assure you of a paternal remembrance in my prayers and I give you my heartfelt blessing.

From the Vatican
6 August 2010
Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord

---

Benedict XVI's messages to young people, whatever the form they take, are always as special, singularly moving and personal as his messages to his fellow priests and bishops. It's about time the Vatican publishing house put out an anthology of his messages to young people, which would include all the wonderful papal texts at the WYD in Cologne and Sydney.

It also struck me that much of it could well be a message to the Catholics in the United Kingdom...

Papal activity in August



VATICAN CITY, Sept. 2 (VIS) - Following is a list of Pope Benedict's activities during the month of August. It includes the Angelus, general and private audiences, other pontifical acts, letters, messages, telegrams and other news. The activities are presented in chronological order under their respective headings.

ANGELUS

- 1: The Holy Father recalls the saints days and feast days of early August: St. Alfonso Maria de Liguori and St. John Mary Vianney, and the feasts of the dedication of St. Mary Major Basilica and of the Transfiguration of the Lord. Following the Angelus he expresses his happiness at the fact that the convention on the prohibition of cluster munitions comes into effect today, recalling the many victims who have suffered and continue to suffer because of them.

- 8: Benedict XVI, commenting on today's Gospel reading, highlights the Lord's call to remain vigilant, alert and full of love for His coming at the end of time. He then goes on to mention a number of saints whose liturgical memory falls in this period and who lived their lives rooted in God: Dominic of Guzman, Clare of Assisi, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) and Maximilian Kolbe.

- 15: On the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Virgin, the Holy Father calls on the Virgin Mary "to accompany us in this earthly life, to help us look up to heaven, and one day to welcome us alongside her Son Jesus".

- 22: Before praying the Angelus, the Pope speaks about the Virgin Mary, who is venerated today as Queen. To Mary's intercession the Holy Father entrusts "daily prayer for peace, especially where the absurd logic of violence is most prevalent, so that all mankind may become convinced that we must be as brothers in this world, helping one another to build a civilisation of love".

- 29: In his last Angelus of August, Benedict XVI comments on the parable of the wedding guests, inviting people to imitate Christ as a model of humility and gratitude and, like Him, to take the last lowest place. He then goes on to recall how 1 September marks the Day for the Protection of Creation, an initiative promoted by the Italian Episcopal Conference "which this year highlights how there can be no peace without respect for the environment". He also makes special mention of miners trapped in the San Jose mine in the Chilean region of Atacama.

WEDNESDAY GENERAL AUDIENCES

- 4: The Pope travels by helicopter from Castelgandolfo to the Vatican where, in St. Peter's Square, he meets with participants in a pilgrimage of altar servers, addressing them in German. Following the catechesis, he makes an appeal for peoples recently affected by serious natural calamities.

- 11: At today's general audience, held at the Apostolic Palace of Castelgandolfo, the Pope turns his attention to a number of martyr saints, both from the early centuries of the Church and from more recent times, such as Lawrence, Hippolytus, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross and Maximilian Kolbe. The Holy Father highlights how "God calls us all to sanctity" and he invites people to call on the Lord to enflame their hearts so that, like the saints and martyrs, "we may be capable of loving as He loved us".

- 18: In his catechesis today the Pope speaks about St. Pius X, who "teaches us that at the root of our apostolic activity, in the various fields in which we work, there must always be an intimate personal union with Christ, a union to be cultivated and nurtured day after day". He also makes an appeal for people affected by the recent flooding in Pakistan which has caused many deaths and left thousands of families homeless.

- 25: Benedict XVI turns his attention to St. Augustine who, he said, "became a great 'travelling companion' in my own life and ministry". He also invites the faithful to gain a deeper knowledge of the saints, reading their lives and their writings. "Be sure", he explained, "that they will become guides to help you love the Lord with ever greater love, and an important help for your human and Christian development". At the end of the audience, the Pope launches an appeal for an end to violence in Mogadishu, giving assurances of his "closeness to the families of the victims and to everyone who is suffering because of hatred and instability in Somalia".

LETTERS, MESSAGES AND TELEGRAMS

- 12: Publication of a Letter, dated 29 June, in which the Holy Father appoints Cardinal Francisco Javier Errazuriz Ossa, archbishop of Santiago de Chile, Chile, as his special envoy to celebrations marking the centenary of the diocese of Catamarca, Argentina, due to take place on 21 August.

- 18: The Holy Father sends a telegram of condolence to the family of Francesco Cossiga, former president of the Italian Republic, who died on 17 August. He also sends a telegram of condolence, through Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone S.D.B., to Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, for the death on 16 August of Nicola Cabibbo, president emeritus of that academy.

- 21: Publication of a Letter, dated 27 July, in which the Holy Father appoints Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, as his special envoy to the fifteenth centenary celebrations of the Marian shrine of Mary of Grace, Our Lady of Mentorella in the Italian diocese of Tivoli, which are due to be held on 29 August.

- 22: Message of the Holy Father, sent via Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone S.D.B., to Bishop Francesco Lambiasi of Rimini, Italy, for the thirty-first "Meeting for Friendship among Peoples" which is being held in that city from 22 to 28 August on the theme: "That nature which pushes us to desire great things is the heart".

- 26: Publication of the Holy Father's Message to Sr. Mary Prema, superior general of the Missionaries of Charity, for the centenary of the birth of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

OTHER NEWS

- 15: For the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Virgin, the Pope celebrates Mass and pronounces a homily in the parish church of St. Thomas of Villanova in Castelgandolfo.

- 31: Publication of the words pronounced by the Pope at the Mass which concluded his meeting with a group of his former students (Ratzinger Schulerkreis). The meeting took place at Castelgandolfo from 27 to 30 August.

AUDIENCES

- 30: The Holy Father receives in audience Bishop Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

OTHER PONTIFICAL ACTS

- 2: Appointment of Fr. Joseph William Tobin C.SS.R. as secretary of the Congregation for Institutes of Apostolic Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, at the same time elevating him to the dignity of archbishop.

- 3: The Holy Father gives his assent to election by the Synod of Bishops of the Greek-Catholic Ukrainian Church of Fr. Venedykt Aleksiychuk as auxiliary of the archieparchy of Lviv of the Ukrainians, Ukraine.

- 4: Appointment of Fr. Pascal Chang-Soi SS.CC. as coadjutor bishop of the diocese of Taiohae, Marquesas Islands.

- 7: Appointment of Cardinal Jozef Tomko, prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, as special papal envoy to celebrations marking the third centenary of the consecration of the cathedral of Minsk, Belarus, due to be held on 9 October. Appointment of Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, as special papal envoy to celebrations marking the millennium of the abbey of Saint Pierre de Solesmes, France, scheduled for 12 October.

- 10: Resignation of Bishop Ercole Lupinacci from the pastoral care of the eparchy of Lungro of the Italo-Albanians, Italy, in conformity with canon 210 para. 1 of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches. Appointment of Archbishop Salvatore Nunnari of Cosenza-Bisignano, Italy, as apostolic administrator "sede vacante et ad nutum Sanctae Sedis" of the same eparchy.

- 11: Appointment of Fr. Jan Dacok S.J. as theologian of the Apostolic Penitentiary. Appointment of Msgr. Giovanni Vaccarotto and of Fr. Settimio Maroncelli O.F.M. as prelate auditors of the Tribunal of the Roman Rota.

- 20: Appointment of Msgr. Dennis Moutel as bishop of Saint-Brieuc, France. He succeeds Bishop Lucien Fruchaud, whose resignation from the pastoral care of the same diocese was accepted, upon having reached the age limit.

- 21: Appointment of Bishop Antoine Ganye of Dassa-Zoume, Benin, as archbishop of Cotonou, Benin. He succeeds Archbishop Marcel Honorat Leon Agboton, whose resignation from the pastoral care of the same archdiocese was accepted, in accordance with canon 401 para. 2 of the Code of Canon Law.

- 24: Appointment of Bishop Mario Iceta Gavicagogeascoa, auxiliary of Bilbao, Spain, as bishop of the same diocese.

Most of the first stories on the Pope's Msssage for WYD 2011, including those in the Italian media, have focused on what he said about his own youth, as if he were saying these things for the first time. In that sense, the following story by AFP is typical - never mind that Joseph Ratzinger discussed these things amply and openly in his memoir MILESTONES back in 1997, and in various other interviews since then... All very well, but today's reporting almost completely misses the main thrust of his message to the youth.


Pope gives rare glimpse into youth
and vocation in Nazi Germany



VATICAN CITY, Sept. 3 (AFP) - Pope Benedict XVI offered a rare glimpse into his youth, recalling the ambitions of his generation in Nazi Germany and his vocation in a message ahead of the 2011 World Youth Day in Madrid.

"During the Nazi dictatorship and the war, we were, so to speak, 'hemmed in' by the dominant power structure. So we wanted to break out into the open, to experience the whole range of human possibilities," the Pope said.

Born in 1927 in the German region of Bavaria, Joseph Ratzinger was conscripted into Adolf Hitler's army in the last few months of World War II.

"We were not willing to settle for a conventional middle-class life," Pope Benedict said, comparing his own generation's ambitions with those of today's youth. "Naturally, part of that was due to the times we lived in," he added.

The Pope also discussed his vocation as a priest and his doubts about it after the war.

"I was somehow aware quite early on that the Lord wanted me to be a priest," the Pope said.

"Then later, after the war, when I was in the seminary and at university on the way towards that goal, I had to recapture that certainty. I had to ask myself: is this really the path I was meant to take?" the Pope said.

Pope Benedict said he then found certainty that priesthood was the right path for him.

World Youth Day, launched by Benedict XVI's predecessor John Paul II, is held in a different city every two or three years.

The last occasion was in 2008 in Sydney, Australia.



Meanwhile, Lella on her blog has drawn attention to this unusual reaction from someone who is apparently very much a 'secularist'...


What if the Pope is right?
by Davide Orecchio
Translated from his blog

Sept. 3, 2010

This time, Ratzinger has said something I like. His letter to the youth is beautiful. Read it in full, go beyond the news agencies' force-fitted headlines )Ex: "God first, before work"). And absorb all its theological implications (after all, he's the Pope). Set aside his attack on relativism and proceed to the core of the message, which is this:

"Dear young people, think big! Do not aim only for a permanent sinecure that someone may give you like alms sooner or later. Do not think only of having a 'secure job' for yourself in this society. Think instead of changing this society. Dream of changing it. Dream of your happiness and work to realize it. And if you do, if you are brave and courageous enough to do so, then you will see that the problem of work will resolve itself."

[The above is not a direct quote from the Letter for WYD 2011 at all! It is - mirabile dictu - Orechhio's own synthesis of what the Pope has been saying not just in this letter, but on various occasions, and which was, in fact, the theme fo Bruno Mastroianni's last opienion piece for TEMPI (see post at the top of this page).]

I am not a fan of the Vatican. I attend Gay Pride events out of sheer ideology, and I tremble with emotion whenever I pass by a statue of Giordano Bruno. But this letter, too, has moved me.

Ratzinger calls on the youth to achieve 'something great, something new', and not to get lost in the normality of 'conventional midle-class life'.

He writes: "Part of being young is desiring something beyond everyday life and a secure job, a yearning for something really and truly greater. Is this simply an empty dream that fades away as we become older? No! Men and women were created for something great, for infinity. Nothing else will ever be enough."

If the young people of 1943 had been content with permanent sinecures [i.e., guaranteed jobs in government], would they have gone after the fascists and the Nazis?

If the young people of 1968 had been content with permanent sinecures, would they have been able to challenge authority?

The guaranteed job is a metaphor whose dark side is job precariousness, the slavery of what exists, the opposite of dreaming, the incubus to reality.

The guaranteed job, today, in Italy, in the world, is Matrix, an evil software. In the best of hypotheses, it's blackmail - ask the Fiat workers in Pomigliano or the Chinese laborers who manufacture the iPads. [I must confess I don't get the sense of this paragraph at all. I do not know what the Matrix software is and why it is evil and how it can blackmail laborers.]

So dear young people, role up your sleeves and work to give us a different world in which the 'guaranteed jobs' are more desirable adn worthy.

Perhaps I am exaggerating in my Ratzingerian exegesis, so let me stop here...

No surprises in this story - except the responses to the 'blind' questions on statements from Caritas in veritate - but if the state visitor in question had been, say, the President of Germany or France, British taxpayers would probably have objected just as much to the expense. I'm not sure if they would be honest in their answer if the guest were the Saudi king or the president of Turkey or Iran, because for fear of offending Muslims, they might all say "Yes, their government should fund the expenses for their visit".


Survey shows UK taxpayers think
they should not fund the Pope's visit

Sept. 3, 2010


Some 77% of Britons think taxpayers should not help pay for Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Scotland and England, a survey suggests.

An online poll of 2,005 adults issued by think tank Theos also showed 79% had "no personal interest" in his visit.

The Pope is due to arrive on 16 September, the first papal visit since Pope John Paul II's 1982 trip.

The cost of the trip to UK taxpayers, previously estimated at £8m, could rise to between £10m and £12m.

The Catholic Church is also expected to make a contribution of between £9m and £10m towards the costs, which do not include an expected multi-million pound bill for policing the visit.

In the Theos survey, some 76% also rejected taxpayer funding for the visit on the grounds that the Pope was a religious figure.

Nearly one in four - 24% - agreed with the statement "I don't approve of the Pope's visit to Britain" with 49% disagreeing.

Under a third, or 29%, said they believed the visit would be good for Britain while 33% disagreed.

Earlier this week, a survey of 1,000 Scots found just 2% were "strongly opposed" to the visit, with more than 15 times as many people saying they were in favour of it.

Another 3% in the survey carried out by Opinion Research Business for the Roman Catholic Church, said they "objected" to the Pontiff's visit to Scotland. Some 63% said they were "neither for nor against the visit".

In the Theos survey, researchers also put 12 statements - taken without naming the source - from the Pope's third encyclical letter which outlines his social policy, to people taking part in the survey.

A majority backed 11 out of the 12 extracts, including 82% agreeing with the statement "technologically advanced societies can and must lower their domestic energy consumption".

Some 79% agreed with the Pope's statement "the natural environment is more than raw material to be manipulated at our pleasure".

Paul Wolley, director of Theos, said the British public "clearly had a problem" with the funding of the papal visit, possibly because they were unaware that in addition to being a religious leader Pope Benedict was also a head of state. [Perhaps the survey question should have pointed that out! UK history books and current events classes probably don't teach anything about the Vatican.]

"It is only a relatively small proportion of people who are actively opposed to the visit itself. On the whole, the public is more disengaged than hostile.

"What is really striking is not simply that the public tends to agree with Pope Benedict's social teaching but that they agree so strongly.

"This confirms the view that beneath the terrible stories of sex abuse that have dominated coverage of the Catholic church in recent times, there remains real potential for the Church to connect with the public."

A spokesman for the Catholic Bishops' Conference said it was pleased the survey showed the majority of people agreed with Catholic social teaching.

"It is also good to see that so many people in the UK approve of this historic visit. The Pope will bring a message of hope to all, showing that faith in God is not a problem to be solved but a gift to be discovered afresh by all.

"While there is considerable discussion and debate in the lead up to the Pope's visit, once he arrives and people see him and hear what he has to say they will give him a warm welcome."

A Government spokesman said: "The Holy See is an internationally-recognised nation with significant influence across the world, while the Catholic Church has a billion adherents.

"The Pope is visiting at the invitation of the Queen. It is right and proper that the British Government should pay a share of the costs of the visit." [And that's that! It is highly unlikely that anyone will issue a parliamentary challenge to teh new UK Government, so soon after general elections, on the silly question of whether it should spend what it must for a head of state visiting on official invitation!]


9/4/10
Not surprisingly, headlines of the type 'Taxpayers should not fund Pope' head and dominate the online lists of papal news today!

Papal rosaries for
trapped Chilean miners



Santiago, Chile, Sep 3, 2010(CNA/EWTN News) - Rosaries blessed personally by Pope Benedict XVI were received by family members on behalf of each of the miners buried far under Chile's northern desert. Cardinal Francisco Javier Errazuriz, who delivered the gifts, noted how the adversity has brought Chileans closer together.

The Cardinal Archbishop of Santiago celebrated the Eucharist with family members of the 33 trapped miners on Thursday. Sunday will mark one month since the San Jose mine shaft collapsed, leaving them trapped half-a-mile underground.

At Mass, the cardinal underscored the Pope's spiritual support for the miners and their families, which was made known during the Angelus last Sunday. In that message, the Holy Father assured them of his prayers for them to remain calm and for rescue efforts to reach a "happy conclusion."

Cardinal Errazuriz explained to family members that Pope Benedict also wished to give each of them the gift of a rosary to show his affection and concern.

Reflecting on the overall situation brought about by the collapsed mine shaft, Cardinal Errazuriz said before Mass that it is "impressive how this fact has united all of us as a family and there is nobody in Chile who isn't following what is happening to them day-to-day."

He praised the faith of the miners and the strength, happiness, solidarity and discipline they have shown in the face of difficulty. Noting also the collaboration of so many people and the great efforts that are being made to save the miners, the cardinal said that many important tasks could be taken on in the nation "with that spirit of solidarity."

Praising the mass mobilization to rescue the miners, he said, "This effort proclaims the value of all human life, which is priceless."

New hopes for peace between
Israel and Palestinians

Sept. 4, 2010

As direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians got underway in Washington under the auspices of the U.S administration, at Castel Gandolfo, the Pope received the President of Israel, Shimon Peres, demonstrating to him the intense hope, his and that of the whole Church, for a successful outcome to negotiations towards "a stable peace in the Holy Land and throughout the region" based on "an agreement that respects the legitimate aspirations of both peoples."



No one can deny the difficulty of the undertaking, after many failed attempts and in a context where many act - not only with words but with violence – to ensure that even this fails. But the path of dialogue is the only one capable of building a future of peace in justice, which is really what everyone hopes for even though suffering and hate have clouded their vision.

It is the path that the Church has always indicated with patience and with perseverance, and which Pope Benedict, during his memorable journey last year, confirmed with courage even after the terrible crisis in Gaza.

The beautiful dedication that President Peres personally composed for the gift offered to the Pope, a silver menorah, a symbol of Israel is an extraordinary testimony to this patient courage: " To his Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, the shepherd who seeks to lead us to the fields of blessings and the fields of peace. With great esteem".

The politicians’ commitment is therefore accompanied by the commitment of the great moral and religious authorities. Will there finally be peace? We all have to strive in this direction”.

Saturday, Sept. 4, 22nd Week in Ordinary Time


Benedict XVI venerated the saint's incorrupt body when he visited Viterbo in Sept. 2009.
ST. ROSA DI VITERBO (Italy, 1233-1251), Virgin, Franciscan lay sister
Rosa achieved sainthood in only 18 years of life. While still very young, she began a life of penance in her parents’ house. She was as generous to the poor as she was strict with herself. At the age of 10 she became a Secular Franciscan and soon began preaching in the streets about sin and the sufferings of Jesus. Viterbo, her native city, was then in revolt against the Pope. When Rosa took the Pope’s side against the emperor, she and her family were exiled from the city. When the Pope’s side won in Viterbo, Rose was allowed to return. Her attempt at age 15 to found a religious community failed, and she returned to a life of prayer and penance in her father’s home, where she died in 1251. Rose was canonized in 1457. Her feast has been celebrated in Viterbo with a procession on the eve of the feast featuring a monumental lighted tower (called the 'macchina di Santa Rosa') topped by her image. A more detailed account of her life was posted in the PASTORAL VISITS theread
benedettoxviforum.freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=859...
when the Holy Father visited Viterbo last year.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/nab/readings/090410.shtml



Today's OR features the Holy Father's Message for World Youth Day in 2011. Other Page 1 items: The US plans greater support for Arab nations as part of its strategy to push for a Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement; US Fed chairman Ben Bernanke admits errors made in managing the economic crisis; and a hasty headline saying 'the nightmare of a black sea' has returned - over a fire, not an exp,losion, that took place in an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Perhaps more disturbing is an inside-page story in which the Vaticna newspaper reports for the first time about the debate over an Islamic developer's plan to build a $100-million Islamic cultural center and mosque two blocks away from Ground Zero - the 'news story' claims tendentiously that the opposition by many Americans [to the location of the proposed mosque, not to building it] is raising fears of a new intolerance in the USA, may provoke more Islamic terrorism and justify the fears of those who think that a 'clash of civilizations' is inevitable; it also claims erroneously that opinion is divided in the US about this issue. COLORE=#1216FF]This is blatantly false! Latest polls all show that at least 70% of Americans oppose having a mosque in that particular location. Why the OR should choose to take this dishonest position is a most objectionable violation of truth that one does not expect to see in 'the Pope's newspaper' and is a disservice to him.!


THE POPE'S DAY

The Holy Father met today with

- Bishops of Brazil (Northeast Sector III, Group 2) on ad limina visit

- The following ambassadors who made their farewell visits:
- H.E. Kagefumi Ueno, Ambassador from japan
- H.E. Francesco Kim Ji-Young, Ambassador from South Korea
- H.E. János Balassa, Ambassador from Hungary

- Mons. Celestino Migliore, Apostolic Nuncio to Poland
(until recently Permanent Observer to the UN in New York City)


The Holy Father also named a new Apostolic Nuncio to Jordan and Iraq -
Mons. Giorgio Lingua, a career diplomat in the Vatican Secretariat of
State. He will also be raised to the rank of Archbishop.

Four questions about
the Pope's trip to the UK

Sept. 3, 2010


Now that September has arrived, news agencies are beginning to focus in earnest on Pope Benedict XVI's Sept. 16-19 trip to the United Kingdom. I know that because of the phone calls and e-mails I've received from colleagues in Scotland and England in the last few days, seeking a sound-bite for whatever curtain-raising piece they have to do.

Press culture in the U.K. is extremely competitive, so when there's no actual news to report it has to be manufactured. Here's a recent case in point vis-à-vis the papal trip: Not long ago, local organizers put out a "pilgrim's guide" for people attending the big events. It included tips on stuff not to bring, such as booze, BBQs, and open flames.

Also on the list were musical instruments, which prompted a reporter from the Daily Telegraph to call the bishops' conference to ask: "Does that include the vuvuzela?" (That, of course, is the god-awful horn made famous by the South African World Cup.) The person on the other end of the line said something on the order of, "Well, yes, I suppose it would."

The next-day headline, which predictably became a mini-sensation in "News of the Weird" columns all over the world: "Pope Bans Vuvuzela."

It was great fun [Great fun? Stupid is not great fun!], even if each of the three words in that header was misleading. (The Pope didn't do anything; this was more of a suggestion than a ban; and nobody specifically nixed vuvuzelas.

Though, to be honest, Benedict probably ought to be grateful -- this is one instance in which the media made up something that probably helped his reputation.)

In the spirit of feeding the media beast, I'll present my answers to the four most common questions I've received about the trip. By no means does this add up to a comprehensive analysis of the most important points. Instead, it's a window into the questions reporters are asking, which may preview themes likely to loom large in media coverage.

1. Is this the most challenging trip of Benedict's papacy?

My basic answer is, "Don't flatter yourselves." This will be Benedict's 17th foreign trip, and not only is this probably not the most strenuous test he's faced, it's arguably not even his most demanding visit in Western Europe.

In terms of immediate context, Benedict's 2006 trip to Turkey was far more dicey -- his first to a Muslim nation, hard on the heels of his Regensburg speech which triggered fierce protest around the Islamic world. The Pope's 2009 trip to Israel and the Palestinian Territories was also a high-wire act, both on the diplomatic and inter-religious levels.

Within Europe, Benedict's July 2006 trip to Spain was at least as potentially choppy, featuring his first-ever showdown with Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero -- seen by many European Catholics as an avatar of secularism on steroids. Spain's fierce anti-clerical rage is at least arguably more menacing for a pope than gentle English ridicule. (Remember the line from "A Man for All Seasons" -- "This isn't Spain, you know. This is England.")

That said, there are challenges aplenty awaiting Benedict.

After all, he's a religious conservative colliding with a fairly liberal, secular culture; a German visiting a country that fought two wars against Germany in the 20th century; a Pope travelling to a place where ambivalence about the papacy is part of the DNA; and the head of the Catholic church visiting a culture where the main Catholic storyline of late has been about pedophile priests. All in all, it's a tough room.

Let's count the ways: High-profile atheists want the Pope arrested for alleged complicity in covering up sexual abuse scandals. A Foreign Office bureaucrat has suggested that Benedict visit an abortion clinic or launch his own brand of condoms. There's a growing chorus of complaint about why British taxpayers should pay $18.5 million for the trip. Reportedly, British Catholics have been reluctant to pick up their share of the tab, or even to get tickets for the big events, despite the lure of marquee performers such as Susan Boyle. Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robinson is publishing a book called The Case of the Pope, arguing that Benedict should be stripped of his status as "the one man left in the world who is above the law."

There will be some intra-Catholic noise. Advocates of women priests have paid for ads on fifteen red buses in London reading "Pope Benedict -- Ordain Women Now!" Next week, a group called Catholic Voices for Reform is holding a press conference to present Benedict with questions on matters such as "corruption" and "mindless obedience." Outside the Catholic fold, a mix of secularists, gay rights activists, and others plan to march in London on Sept. 18 under the banner of "Protest the Pope!" A smaller group is organizing a separate demonstration against his visit to the Twickenham neighborhood the day before.

If the question is whether Benedict XVI has his work cut out for him, the answer is "sure." I've written before that a papal trip anyplace in Western Europe these days is the sociological equivalent of a Gay Pride rally, in that Catholics too now perceive themselves as a misunderstood minority obliged to practice a politics of identity.

Recently Edmund Adamus, director of pastoral affairs in the diocese of Westminster, said that Britain has become more anti-Catholic than Saudi Arabia, China and Pakistan, because of its embrace of a "culture of death".

Catholic composer James MacMillan, who has produced a new setting of the Mass to mark the papal visit, has called anti-Catholicism "the new anti-Semitism of the liberal intellectual." Whatever backlash awaits Benedict in the U.K. will only strengthen such perceptions.

If the question, however, is whether this trip presents a set of headaches the Pope has never seen before, the answer is basically "Been there, done that."

As a footnote, the potential for blowback in Scotland is probably less significant. A recent national poll found only two percent of Scots are "strongly opposed" to the Pope's visit, while 31 percent said they're "very or fairly favorable" and 63 percent are indifferent.

2. Overall, what do you expect?

Prediction is a hazardous business, but here's one I feel safe in making: Whatever the consensus public expectations are for the trip, Benedict will almost certainly exceed them. I have three reasons for saying so.

First, when Benedict hits the road, he benefits from the bar being set low. People know his papacy has been marred by a series of PR debacles, so anything that happens short of absolute disaster can be spun as a success. Further, most people have never seen the Pope before, and what they've heard second-hand usually isn't good -- that he's cold, aloof, authoritarian, repressive, etc. Measured against that caricature, contact with the real man always seems a pleasant surprise. (Perhaps this is the genius behind the Vatican's apparent PR bungling: they've created a scenario in which Benedict basically can't lose.)

Second, anti-papal protestors usually have a bigger voice in the media than their sociological footprint on the ground, so predictions of massive demonstrations almost never materialize. The few who turn out to jeer seem a footnote in comparison to the enthusiastic crowds greeting the Pope, especially because the supporters will be in every camera frame, while the protestors won't get within a mile of the action. The vast majority of folk who are unenthusiastic about the Pope's presence will simply ignore the trip, rather than mounting barricades.

Third, Benedict is not going to ride into town and give people excuses to get mad. This is not going to be Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi's recent 48-hour whirlwind visit to Rome, where he hired a bevy of female escorts to listen to him proclaim that Islam should be the religion of Europe, demanded that EU nations pay him $6.5 billion a year to stem the flow of illegal immigrants from Africa, blew off a meeting with Italian Bishop Domenico Mogavero, and then took off -- leaving behind a chorus of protests that the visit amounted to a "national humiliation."

That's just not the style of Benedict XVI, who is an unfailingly gracious and humble guest. The road is actually where Benedict's commitment to "affirmative orthodoxy," meaning the most positive spin possible on the traditional Christian message, becomes especially palpable. [That Allen calls the Pope's messaging 'spin' is one of the many reasons I have become so disaffected with him in the past 2-3 years!]

Each time people have gone into a papal trip expecting the Ali-Frazier prizefight -- the Cologne World Youth Day in '05, for example, or the meeting with Zapatero in '06 -- what they got instead was "I'd like to buy the world a Coke."

Benedict is likely to extol the riches of English history and culture, declaring the tensions opened by the English Reformation closed. He'll express gratitude for progress in Anglican/Catholic relations and reaffirm his commitment to Christian unity. He'll stress the desire of the church to be a positive force for the common good.

He'll also try to offer a shot in the arm to the six million Catholics in the U.K., particularly by lifting up the example of Cardinal John Henry Newman, set for beatification in Birmingham on the last day of the papal trip.

All that will strike even dubious Scots or Brits as more friendly than they expected, and will probably produce a short-term boost in the Pope's favorability ratings. (After his April 2008 trip to the United States, which was also a laboratory experiment in affirmative orthodoxy, two national polls found a ten-point bump in the percentage of Americans who approved of Benedict's job performance.)

In a recent piece for the English magazine Standpoint, American Catholic writer George Weigel predicted that "Those who expect to meet 'God's Rottweiler' will find instead a shy, soft-spoken man of exquisite manners … Those looking for a hidebound clerical enforcer will meet instead a man of deep faith, a gentle pastor." Based on my experience of covering papal trips, that's about right.

For all those reasons, the trip may not be a home run, but it's unlikely to be a strikeout either. (Or, to use a cricket image, since this is the U.K., Benedict's not going to be a "walking wicket." I presume someone will tell me if I used that term correctly.)

3. Will the sex abuse crisis overshadow the trip?

Probably not. It didn't in the United States or Australia in 2008, both places where the sexual abuse crisis has been more intense. Things have been so comparatively calm in the U.K. that Bishop Kieran Conry of Arundel and Brighton recently suggested that Pope Benedict "may well be relieved to be coming to a place where, unlike some of his other recent trips, there are no big problems for him to sort out."

Here's the main reason, however, why the crisis won't overshadow the trip: A papal journey is one of those rare moments when the Vatican is adept at offering the media another story to do.

While the Pope is in town, there will be plenty of compelling pictures and sound: Benedict XVI meeting the Queen, visiting the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace, standing in the spot in Westminster Hall where St. Thomas More was condemned, praying at the tomb of St. Edward the Confessor, and on and on.

That's as opposed to the Vatican's usual modus operandi during a crisis, which is to hunker down and wait for the storm to pass, issuing only terse statements, while rogue officials offer unsolicited remarks which often make things worse.

In his Standpoint piece, Weigel complained that "seemingly endless stories of clerical sexual abuse, and the mismanagement of these sins and crimes by Catholic bishops, are not the only story to be told about the Church at the end of the first decade of the 21st century."

He's right, of course, but the PR reality is that the Vatican is often unable to provide an alternative narrative. A papal trip is the towering exception.

Three other variables may determine how big a deal the crisis seems while Benedict is on the ground.

First, some observers believe that media outlets are planning to reveal new abuse cases in the U.K. just ahead of Benedict's arrival, thus triggering a new cycle of the crisis, akin to what happened in Germany earlier this year.

Writing in the Guardian on Monday, Paul Donovan opined that such revelations "would shoot to pieces the strategy that has attempted to separate the church in the U.K. from the rest of the world on child abuse, arguing it acted properly and put in place rigid guidelines."

Second, Cardinal Seán Brady of Ireland has announced plans to accompany the Pope in Scotland and England. Brady has been under fire for his role in the massive sexual abuse crisis in Ireland, including charges that in the 1970s he participated in putting the victims of a notorious abuser under a gag order. [For Allen to state the Brady case with such a general statement that indicates his 'role' was more than just the single incident mentioned is most unfair, and the kind of 'offensive handy generalization' journalism that has marked MSM's shoddy and almost sleazy reporting of the sex abuses by priests.]

If Brady is spotted at the Pope's right hand, it could spark a new round of commentary about how Benedict "doesn't get it."

Third, the Pope himself could put the crisis in the spotlight by holding a meeting with victims. While these encounters are always staged off-camera, at least some of the victims usually speak with the media afterwards, and in any event they make news.

Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster recently said that "careful consideration" was being given to holding such a meeting in England. If it happens, it would be Benedict's fifth session with victims, after meetings during previous trips to the United States, Australia and Malta, and one in Rome with members of Canadian "first nations" abused in church-run institutions.

By now, these meetings draw mixed reviews. The Pope gets credit for reaching out, and the victims who take part are often moved. Others, however, will object that it's empty PR. [Allen ought to have added: "As the Pope's detractors will always object to anything he does, and as victim advocates - not necessarily the victims themselves - will never find anything adequate enough or good enough".]

The Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests, the main victims' group in the States, put out a preemptive press release ahead of the U.K. trip asserting that such meetings "change nothing and protect no one," and believing they do is "a sad and silly and reckless assumption."

4. What's Benedict's agenda for the trip?

In the sense in which that question is usually intended, the answer is: "None." This isn't a typical state visit, in which Benedict is hoping to persuade the English Parliament to adopt this law or block that one, or aiming to wrest some commercial or foreign policy concession from the Cameron government. There is no short-term check-list, which means that there will be no way to assess on Sept. 20 whether or not the trip was a success.

That's not to say, of course, that Benedict is traveling to Scotland and England just for the hell of it.

The Pope legendarily thinks in centuries, and so his "agenda" in the U.K., as elsewhere, is decidedly long-term. His vision of Christianity in the West today is as a "creative minority" (a term he borrows from British historian Arnold Toynbee).

By "minority," Benedict means a church that's no longer a culture-shaping majority but rather a subculture, which of course is no more than a concession to sociological reality. By "creative," he means a subculture clear about its own identity, and passionate about infusing that energy and vision into society.

Building a "creative minority" is thus a two-stage project:

•Fostering a strong sense of Catholic identity by emphasizing traditional markers of Catholic thought, speech and practice;
•Applying that identity to broader social, cultural and political debates, rather than retreating into a ghetto.
In broad strokes, Benedict's "agenda" is to advance the creative minority project in the United Kingdom.

What might that mean in practice? Perhaps Peter Sanford, a former editor of the Catholic Herald, had it about right in his piece in Sunday's Guardian: "Pope Benedict may want to stiffen the collective Catholic resolve."

Sanford sketched the pragmatic, middle-of-the-road ethos of English Catholicism, often terribly concerned with being socially acceptable. He then quoted an English bishop to the effect that maybe he and his colleagues need to engage in "a little more searching and even brutal debate" with the broader culture. That, Sanford opined, "will be music to the Pope's ears".


The Telegraph found a new negative twist to give to that recent much-publicized poll. How many 'Religious Affairs Correspondents' does the Telegraph have anyway? I now count three billed as such, including Martin Beckford, the byline that had been familair for months. In the past few days, there are two Jonathans added to the list. Is that how the newspaper deals with a subject in which their readers have a clear 'lack of interest'????


Surveys find lack of interest
in Pope Benedict's visit
By Jonathan Wynne-Jones
Religious Affairs Correspondent

04 Sep 2010


Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Britain is failing to excite the public, according to new opinion polls.

More than three quarters of Britons think the taxpayer should not contribute to the cost of Pope Benedict XVI's visit. They said that it was wrong to be expected to burden the cost of the tour around Scotland and England because the Pope is religious figure.

{When was it ever thought necessary to poll the British people on whether they agreed that the state should pay any costs for a state visit? Were they ever polled to find out whether King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia merited his state visit last year?

This administrative decision to invite another head of state officially is is a prerogative entirely at the direcretion of the government that the people elected to represent them, a prerogative that has never had to be put to a vote! Curiously, a demand for a vote on this matter in Parliament was never one of the grandstanding ploys that anti-Catholics have attempted to protest the visit and discredit the Pope!]

Taxpayers will shoulder between £10 million and £12 million of the bill for the trip. [And UK tacxpayers paid at least 20-million pounds for the security alone of the last one-day G20 summit held in London. Were there howls of protest about that, or the inevitable and persistent agline about cost that accompany every UK article these days about the Pope? This selective sanctimony regarding the Pope's visit is nauseatingly odious!]

The survey of 2,005 adults, conducted for Theos, a religious think-tank, showed only 29 per cent believed the visit would be good for Britain while a third disagreed with this.

Despite it being the first papal visit since 1982 when Pope John Paul II came to Britain, a separate Ipsos MORI poll also found a low level of interest in the tour, which begins on September 16. [And was the level of interest in John Paul II's visit in 1982 any better????]

The survey, carried out for the Tablet, a Catholic newspaper, discovered one in four (20%) support the Pope's visit, while 11 per cent oppose it. [A significant statistic for the liberal Tablet, since the Catholics who oppose the visit are slightly more than half of those who support it.]

Only one in five said they planned to follow the visit closely and this figure dropped to one in 10 of those with no religious affiliation.

[Since UK Catholics now number about 5.9 million as of December 2009, according to the central Vatican statistics office, and the current population of the UK is about 61 million, Catholics - liberal or orthodox, observant or not - account for 9.7% of the population, so for one out of 10 of the non-affiliated to say they plan to follow the visit closely is quite a level of interest!]

However, a spokesman for the Catholic Church said that there would be a high level of interest when the Pope finally arrives.

“We’re confident we’ll be at capacity for these events," he said. "We anticipate huge crowds will come to see the Pope.” [He sounds like someone whistling in the dark. Best to keep the expectations low!]

From the blog of the parish priest of St. Michael the Arhangel church in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, a message that ought to come more often from more priests and bishops....


Unity with the Pope

Saturday, September 4, 2010


Last June, in his address to new archbishops, Pope Benedict said the greatest harm to the Church comes not from persecution from outside the Church but rather from that which "pollutes the Christian faith and the life of its members and its communities, eroding the integrity of the Mystical Body, weakening its ability to prophecy and witness..."

Even at the beginning of the Church's history, St. Paul specified some of the dangers within the Church such as negative attitudes that belong to the world, selfishness, vanity, pride, love of money, etc. (cf. 3.1 to 5 )

The Body of Christ continues our Lord's redemptive mission today ad throughout history. There have been many persecutions against the Church over the last twenty centuries; some were quite harsh and cruel. Yet, they strengthened the Church. The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.

The sins of the members of the Body of Christ impede its mission. Those who teach false doctrine as well as those who live immorally damage and make the Church less effective. This gives all the more reason to avoid everything that is contrary to the Faith no matter how attractively it is presented or how charismatic the speaker might be.

We want the truth and have a right to it. The authentic truth of Christ is guaranteed by the Pope. No Pope throughout history has ever formally taught anything contrary to faith and morals.

When bishops, priests, religious, theologians and the faithful are in union with the Holy Father, we are kept free from errors in the area of faith and morals. We can rest in the assurance that we have the true Gospel handed on to us.

The papacy is a great gift to us -- to the world. Let us never forget to pray for the Pope each day.

Another Vaticanista hazards
to say the Pope will announce
a new consistory on Oct. 20
Translated from

Sept. 4, 2010

Before the end of the Synod Assembly on the Middle East which will take place at the Vatican on Oct. 10-24, Benedict XVI will announce a new consistory to create new cardinals.

This announcement could be made at the General Audience of Wednesday, Oct. 20, in which case, the Consistory would take place a month later, on the Feast of Christ the King.

By January 1, 2011, the number of cardinal electors will be down to 101 out of the maximum 120 set by Paul VI and reaaffirmed by John Paul II. So the Pope could create at least 19 new cardinals.

It is equally likely that there will be another consistory next year since Benedict's second consistory took place in 2007, and the number of Curial heads and metropolitan archbishops traditionally honored with the rank of cardinal has risen.

The leading candidates are thought to be:
From the Curia: Angelo Amato, Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Sainthood; Raymond Leo Burke, Prefect of the Apostolic Segnatura; Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity; Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture; Francesco Monterisi, arch-priest of St. Paul outside the Walls; Paolo Sardi, patron of the Sovereign order of Malta;

From metropolitan archbishops: Paolo Romeo, of Palermo; Giuseppe Betori, of Florence; Donald Wuerl of Washington, DC; Edmond O'Brien of Baltimore; Timothy Dolan of New York; Thomas Collins of Toronto, Reinhard Marx of Munich; Kazimierz Nycz of Warsaw, Braulio Rodríguez Plaza of Toledo, Vincent Nichols of Westminster (London), Willem Jacobus Eijk of Utrecht, André-Joseph Léonard of Mechelen-Brussels; Malcolm Ranjith of Colombo; Charles Maung Bo of Yangon (Myanmar), Peter Takeo Okada (Tokyo), Nicolás Cotugno Fanizzi of Montevideo, Orani João Tempesta of Rio de Janeiro; Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya of Kinshasa (Congo), Simon-Victor Tonyé Bakot of Yaoundé (Cameroon), and Cyprian Kizito Lwanga of Kampala (Uganda).

[The metropolitans alone already number 19.]

Archbishop Nichols welcomes
'historic' papal visit

Sept 3, 2010


Pope Benedict will make his first visit to Britain as head of the Roman Catholic Church on September 16-19. This will also be the first official papal visit to the country.

Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, talks with Reuters about the trip in the context of the Church’s child-abuse scandal, tensions with the Anglican Church and planned protests.

Here's our news story on the interview:

---

UK archbishop says Benedict XVI
is not fishing for Anglicans
By Avril Ormsby


LONDON, Sept. 3 (Reuters) - The leader of the Catholics in England in Wales rejected accusations that Pope Benedict was fishing for converts and said "delicate and difficult" issues existed between his church and the Anglican Communion.

His comments come two weeks before Pope Benedict's four-day trip to England and Scotland, the first papal visit since John Paul II's pastoral visit in 1982 and the first-ever official papal visit to Britain.

Relations between the two churches have been tense since the Pope offered disaffected Anglicans opposed to their church's ordination of women and homosexual bishops the chance to convert to Rome while keeping some of their traditions.

"There are delicate, difficult issues between our two churches at the moment," Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, head of the 5.2 million Catholics in England and Wales, told Reuters.

But, Nichols said the offer came after groups of Anglicans repeatedly asked for a response to their request for special provision to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church.

"Sometimes people want to say 'oh, this is the initiative of the Pope who is going fishing for Anglicans'. That is not true. He is responding to requests that he has received, and those requests we have to handle sensitively on both sides."

Pope Benedict is due to meet Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual head of the Anglican Communion and leader of its mother church, the Church of England, during his stay.

Many Anglicans believe Williams was humiliated by last October's offer, which was made with little advance warning, while some Catholics are unhappy at the terms of the offer, which would allow married Anglican priests to convert.

Nichols said that although the issue was sensitive it would not break the strong relationship between the two churches.

"We have work to do, but we will do it together," he said. "We will not be having harsh words with each other."

It is not clear how many intend to convert, he said. The lack of financial provision is likely to be a stumbling block, but in July the traditionalist Anglican Bishop of Fulham, John Broadhurst, suggested several hundred clergy and many laity would leave in the next three years.

Nichols also suggested the Pope would not be affected by the adverse media attention ahead of the trip and the protests planned by secularists, gay rights groups, women ordination campaigners and those angry at the child-abuse scandal which has spread throughout the Catholic Church globally.

He pointed to recent papal visits where intense media criticism dissipated, he said, when people listened to what the Pope had to say.

"I don't think they will affect him deeply. No. Because I think he is a man who intelligently studies the world, and he knows the ebb and flow of opinion," he said.

Meanwhile, he said the cost [to the Church] of the Pope's visit between September 16-19 was likely to rise above 9 million pounds ($13.92 million) -- higher than the initial estimate of 7 million pounds.

The state's share of the bill is likely to rise by 50 percent to 12 million pounds.

The Church has raised nearly 6 million pounds, and Nichols was confident of raising the outstanding sum.

He also rejected media reports that there was a lack of interest in tickets for the public masses in Glasgow, London and Birmingham, saying "they are pretty well packed out now".

---

Below are excerpts from the transcript.

The Pope is due to arrive in Scotland shortly. What keeps you awake at night about the visit?
Actually I feel at the moment quite relaxed and looking forward to this visit very much, and I think this is true of a lot of people. I think we are well prepared, I think most issues have been settled and agreed, and I get increasingly a sense within our society that this is a significant moment.

A visit that is profoundly historical in its nature, and I believe that when the Pope comes he will be warmly received and attentively listened to. We do have great character of hospitality towards guests and he is a guest of her Majesty the Queen and I think society will respond accordingly.

There are rumours that the British tabloids are storing up a sex abuse scandal to coincide with the papal visit. How much of a concern is that for you?
Well, I think the pattern that has emerged over papal visits to different countries is that in the period immediately prior there is intense criticism of the Church in the media. There’s no doubt that issues to do with the Catholic Church are being given more attention at this present time.

And the pattern in Australia, in New York, in other places is that the period immediately prior to a papal visit is very cloudy and a few thunderstorms and a bit unpleasant. But what seems to happen is that when the Pope arrives, as it were, the sun comes out and the rains are forgotten and people actually concentrate and welcome the Pope and are prepared to listen to what he has to say.

And I think that is particularly true in a special way with Pope Benedict. Pope John Paul II was a great presence on the stage. Pope Benedict is a much more gentle and refined person, and I think he benefits greatly from the television close-ups because he wants to engage in a dialogue, in conversation. He wants to put forward his views in a measured, eloquent rational way. And I think those qualities will be much appreciated here and people will engage with him.

Do you think the visit will enhance the Church’s status in Britain?
I think the status of the Church in society is not my prime occupation. I think it will help the Catholic Church to be understood in our society. So for example, a very major part of this visit is to illustrate and strengthen relationships between on the one hand the Holy See, the work of the Catholic Church worldwide and the United Kingdom government. That is why this is a state visit.

And there are clear areas in which I think people will be surprised to learn that there is serious cooperation between the government and the Holy See in the provision of primary health care, for example, in the provision of primary education, in the fight against poverty, in the care of the environment.

I mean these are major political arenas, policy areas in which the UK government wants to engage more fully with the Catholic Church, and ministers of state are already talking very positively about those things.

So I hope that aspect of what the Catholic Church is and what it stands for will be more clearly understood. So for example, I don’t think many people know that the first ambassador appointed by the UK monarch to the Holy See was appointed in 1476. And in fact, the UK embassy to the Holy See is the oldest overseas embassy in the diplomatic history of this country.

Now there was a big gap and then those contacts were only established again in 1914. But this visit helps us to look at our deeper history a bit more clearly. And I hope that will be understood as well.

British ministers and Prime Ministers issued invites to the Pope to come – so was it a surprise when its organisation was so badly handled?
The discussions that we have had since January/February have not always been easy. And I think the fact that it was clear a general election was coming up and that a government was coming to the end of its time didn’t help.

But since the election, since a new government has been in place, and especially since the appointment of Lord Patten, then our work with the government particularly through the Foreign Office and Cabinet Office has been very good indeed. And even though we might say at this point we got started a bit late, the work has been really of a very high standard that is why with two weeks to go I really feel quite relaxed.

Things are in place, there is good cooperation with local authorities … and central government and the Church. We are pulling together very well. So while it was difficult to get going, once we have got going it has been very good.

We are told the Pope is aware of the planned protests and media coverage, will it affect him?
I don’t think they will affect him deeply. No. Because I think he is a man who intelligently studies the world, and he knows the ebb and flow of opinion, and he knows the rootedness of the Catholic Church and of the Christian faith. And I think he is also a man of quite remarkable peace.

When I was in the Vatican in January for our five-yearly visit of bishops, one thing that struck me and some of my fellow bishops too, is that the people accompanying the Pope seem to smile most of the time. And it is almost as if a certain peacefulness radiates from him.

One of my fellow archbishops said here is a man who is at peace with himself, and at peace with his faith, and at peace with his theology. Now that doesn’t mean to say he is complacent, but he’s as it were quietly, deeply rooted and willing to face any challenge or any problem, and to attack it, consider it, intelligently and rationally and with perspectives of faith very clearly worked out in his heart and in his mind.

How big an impact do you think the child-abuse scandal will have on the Church and the pope and Britain?
Over the last 15-20 years in this country we have had to face issues of abuse of children by priests and the mishandling of those things and we have had to deal with that. We have had to look at it directly, and not pretend that it is anything other than horrific, try and learn about the effect that abuse has on youngsters and how profoundly it affects them, try and understand how best to respond to the needs of those who have been abused, which is not always easy for the Church because it is precisely their relationship with the Church that is one of those things that has [been] very severely damaged.

But I think over those 15 years we have learnt quite a lot, I am not saying we haven’t got much more to learn, but I also think on the stage of the Church as a whole, it is Cardinal Ratzinger and Pope Benedict who has actually led the understanding and the reforms that are needed, and probably still needed, in order to tackle this problem in a way that is both thorough and fair.

And I think one of the most interesting things to me is in this country we have had two independent panels investigating how we react and respond to these things. Now both of them put to us the challenge of being an example of good practice.

And slowly what we hope is that what we learn in the Catholic Church can be of service wider in society because incidents of abuse of children occur tragically throughout society. That is not something which in anyway minimises or excuses what has been dreadful in the Catholic Church, but it does mean that we are slowly coming into a position of being able to cooperate with public authorities over the general care of children and the general response to abuse.

Why do you think your procedures have not been adopted by other countries.
Some countries do similar things and I think we do learn quite a lot from other churches. For over 6 or 7 years now there has been an annual meeting of bishops and those responsible for the protection of youngsters and vulnerable adults across the English-speaking Catholic world. So in the English-speaking scene we have been exchanging experiences quite a lot over the past 6-7 years.

I think what is difficult though is that the different cultural and legal frameworks in which the Church operates make a profound difference. So here for example we have full and open cooperation with the police and the social services, in other countries that might not be possible.

There might not be the same level of trust, with reason, between a body like the Church and public bodies. The legal systems will be different in each country. Here, what we do fits an English legal system. I don’t know enough about legal systems in Africa, or in the Philippines or in big Asian countries. I doubt what we have learnt is immediately applicable there.

So there are attempts to exchange experience, I think they could be approved but there are also differences that have to be taken into account.

Are you suggesting that might be why some Churches have not passed files to the police.
I do not know about other circumstances. Here we do always share information with the police, and I have only heard that in some situations it might be the police who are involved in the offences as well, and there are patterns of mutual protection that go profoundly into the world of sexual abuse.

And it is a fact, and it is a difficult fact to face, that the sexual abuse of children is the most hidden crime of all, and it takes great integrity and sometimes courage to surface these things and to bring them properly into the courts of justice.

Do you think cases around the world will impact on the Church in Britain, despite the work it has done?
The Church is a big family… and has to pull together, and we have to try and understand the different circumstances that the branches of this vast family operate in. Certainly we carry each other’s problems. That is part of being a family, and if scandals in other parts of the countries have their impact here we have to learn to bear that and work with it.

And I think most Catholics certainly understand that, and they understand the good efforts that are being made. I think in this country most Catholics have great esteem and affection for their priests.

Do you think there may be tensions with the Church of England during this trip, especially with the planned symbolic events such as the beatification of the leading Anglican convert Cardinal John Henry Newman, visiting the Queen at Holyrood, the palace of Mary Queen of Scots, and speaking in Westminster Hall where the Catholic martyr Thomas More was condemned to death?
I think we have to distinguish between, if you like, the historical and cultural reverberations of some of those moments, which are as you mention are quite symbolic, quite iconic almost, on the one hand and on the other hand the present relationships between the churches.

I think it is very fascinating, and who knows what resonances these images will set, but among them as well as Holyrood, the figure of Thomas More in Westminster Hall, we also need to put in first place the prayer of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope at the tomb of Edward the Confessor because together they reach back to a common heritage and to the deep roots of who we are and who we are together.

So that is an important perspective that needs to be brought to bear on the way we read our history since then. We have to be able to read the events of conflict between the churches in the light of those shared profound roots symbolised by Edward the Confessor.

The question of our appreciation of history is terribly important and actually a real concern of Pope Benedict because he wants to say ‘without deep roots, plants wither’, and his kind of appeal to us and to Europe in general is not to forget who we are through the length of our history and the depth of our roots.

Because when a people forget who they are, forget what their origin, their shape, their deep-rooted culture is, they are kind of left open to all sorts of influences. And I would hope that this visit will help people to be perhaps less apologetic about their Christian past and about their Christian identity, and to be less apologetic about being a Catholic and to actually say "Well, no: to live this faith puts me in a deeper long line that has shaped this nation, shaped such goodness right round the globe and is an important resource for the future".

So that is on the general, historic, cultural setting. Now in particular, to do with our relationship with the Church of England. There is a very important moment when Pope Benedict goes to Lambeth Palace to meet personally with the Archbishop of Canterbury. That obviously is reciprocal because the Archbishop of Canterbury has been to Rome to talk privately with the Pope.

But that will be an important moment because there are delicate, difficult issues between our two churches at the moment, which start, we need to remember, by the fact that groups of Anglicans, maybe people on the edge of the Anglican Communion, have persistently asked the Pope for a response to their request for special provisions to be made for them to come into full communion with the Catholic Church.

The initiative has been with members of the Anglican Communion and the Pope’s Ordinariate is a response to those requests. Sometimes people want to say "oh, this is the initiative of the Pope who is going fishing for Anglicans".

That is not true. He is responding to requests that he has received, and those requests we have to handle sensitively on both sides. I think it is quite remarkable actually that Pope Benedict has a sense of the variety of ways in which it is possible to be a Catholic. I think he is more comfortable with a plurality of expressions of Catholicism in different rites, traditions than many of us are.

In the Ordinariate he is offering a way of being a Catholic which retains some elements of an Anglican patrimony which are consistent with Catholic faith. Now that’s not always easy for the Catholic community to come to terms with and understand as well as for the Anglican community.

We have work to do, but we will do it together and that meeting of Pope Benedict and the Archbishop of Canterbury will symbolise the way we will tackle these things together.

But with the background of the Ordinariate and the way it was handled, do you expect the meeting to be tense?
It’s certainly a very real issue between us but I believe…that such is the strength and now the habitual nature of the relationship between bishops of the Roman Catholic Church and bishops of the Church of England in the UK…that we will deal with these things. [Besides, this is not the first time they are meeting aftr Anglicanorum coetibus. They met at the Vatican earlier this year, so any tnesions should have been diffused, at the very least, at that time.]

It will not break that relationship, it will give us a sensitive issue to deal with. And we have a regular pattern of meetings together. We will not be having harsh words with each other.

Any idea when or how many might convert?
No I don’t. I think this is still something that is being explored particularly on the side of the Church of England and certainly on our side. But please, it is important to remember that this Ordinariate, and this response of the Holy See is not just to do with England.

In fact the larger, stronger requests came from America and to some extent Australia. So this is something that goes around the world but is also finding a place, we don’t know the extent of that, in this country as well.

Will there be any fallout from the Pope’s comment on the previous government’s equality legislation.
The Pope’s comments on equality legislation were about one line long. And I think what he was doing was saying two things. One was an appeal to what we call natural law. Now there is nothing Catholic about natural law. It is simply an attempt to understand human nature and to see what are the patterns that emerge out of the way that we find ourselves to be. So that was a perfectly reasoned voice and a contribution to a debate.

The other thing I think he was saying, and I think this is important to keep in mind, and it would certainly be a view that I would reflect here in Britain at this point, I do not think we have the balance of equality legislation right. That’s not surprising.

The unfolding of human rights legislation has been speedy and it has been concentrated in a comparatively short time. I don’t think we’ve got the balance of those rights correct yet. To some extent the pattern has been to develop them from the point of view of minorities which is perfectly understandable and perfectly proper.

But majorities have rights too, and I’m not sure that we’ve got that balance correct yet. So for example, that a human rights court would say it is offensive to a minority that a crucifix should stand in a town school seems to minimize the rights and expectations of the majority. So I think equality legislation has a long way to go. I think the Pope is perfectly entitled to make a reasoned contribution to that debate.

Is the Pope to meet aabuse victims during his trip to England and Scotland?
What is perfectly clear is that over the last four or five visits that the Pope has made - don’t forget he’s made 16 overseas visits, so we are the 17th, and it is a privilege for us to be receiving him - but over the last four or five, when he has met victims of abuse it has never been announced beforehand, it always takes place in private, and that’s how it should be.

So whether that happens now, those same rules would apply. It will not be announced beforehand, and it will take place in private, if that is going to be the case. But precisely because of those rules, it is not clear.

Catholic Voices said the pastoral cost of the visit had gone up from 7 million pounds to 9 million pounds. Is that correct?
I would think that is probably a slightly conservative estimate, it will be in that region, maybe a bit more. But you know, I’m not anxious about that. If you think that there are 5 million Catholics in this country, it is about 1.50 pound each.

But in fact that we have been fundraising before the visit has even taken place, has shown that there is a real willingness in the Catholic community to support the Pope in this official visit to this country. We are up to 6 million (pounds), we will manage it.

Media reports said there was a lack of interest in the public Masses.
I was told this morning that they are are pretty well packed now.

Here is a beautiful tribute to Cardinal Newman, who is an integral element of the Pope's visit to the UK - indeed, the immediate motivation for it and a tailor-made occasion for the Holy Father to confirm his flock in the British Isles in their faith.


Cardinal Newman:
A great Christian, a great Englishman
by Conrad Black

September 4, 2010


Many Canadians may not have noticed the ascent of John Henry Cardinal Newman up the exacting heights of the blessed and toward the officially saintly, a progress that will bring Pope Benedict XVI to England this month.

But the event is worth our attention: It will make Newman the first Englishman recognized by the Roman Catholic Church as a saint since the 17th century, pretty thin canonical gruel for a country whose Roman Catholics still whisper hopefully about England as “the dowry of Mary.”

This occasion underlines that Newman must rank among the very greatest Englishmen of any time or faith. His distinction as a man, intellect, writer and philosopher would be no less if there were no thought of his possession of saintly and miraculous powers.

It rests on his moral and intellectual courage, genius and worldwide influence as a writer, educator and theological philosopher, and his personification of many of the most admired characteristics of the English people, as both they and the world perceive them.

In his years in the Church of England, Newman did his best to justify its claim to be part of the “One, holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church,” and conceived, with Keble, Froude and other Tractarians, the Via Media, which understood the Church of England as a halfway house between Rome and popular Protestantism, between what Protestants traditionally regard as Rome’s exaggerated claim to authority and the Non-Conformist view of spontaneous religiosity.

When attacked by the Anglican bishops for the Popish tendencies exhibited in his 1841 pamphlet Tract 90, Newman agreed to refrain from further controversial tracts. Nevertheless, at the age of 40, he was effectively cast out, and violently attacked throughout Protestant Britain as a papist agent.

He became a Roman Catholic in 1845 at the age of 44, but was at first mistrusted in much of the Roman world as an exotic and tempestuous itinerant, from a country that was apostate, and whose Roman Catholic community had endured 300 years of fluctuating but almost unbroken discrimination.

Newman found himself a party almost of one, isolated and despised. “Blessings of friendship to my door, unasked, unhoped, came. They came and they went. They came to my great joy. They went to my great sorrow. He who gave took away,” he wrote.

Yet over time, Newman made Catholicism respected in Britain by his refusal to join the ranks of reactionary Catholics or to be less conspicuously English in his attitudes. More than anyone else, he de-fanged the widely believed English caricature of the grasping, insidious, alien papist monster.

He changed the widespread impression in England of Catholics from a rag-tag of drunken, priest-ridden, proliferating Irish labourers and a few respectable ancient recusant families, to an intellectually distinguished and patriotic pillar of the nation.

Moreover, he fought the battle of faith on behalf of all Christians, and provided the greatest and most rigorous Christian argument for the existence of God since Thomas Aquinas. He wrote not only with burning expressions of faith, surer of God’s existence “than that I have hands and feet,” and with intellectual arguments of great refinement and elegance, but also with sudden lurches into the secular, as when he quoted “the great man who so swayed the destiny of the nations of Europe in the early years of this century.”

Napoleon, the defeat of whose navy at Trafalgar Newman well remembered from the age of four, in 1805, was then invoked, in the last pages of Grammar of Assent (on the authority of the not always reliable Lacordaire), to the effect that Christ, having “died the death of a miscreant … had accomplished (in general veneration) what Alexander, Caesar and I have not begun to accomplish. Can he be less than divine, to whom our eyes turn as to a father and a God?”

Newman’s faith was accessible to everyone. “Lead kindly light … lead thou me on … One step enough for me,” he wrote while still an Anglican, and becalmed in the Straits of Bonifacio off Sicily in 1833.

I believe that he was, with Abraham Lincoln, the most elegant writer of English non-fiction prose of the 19th century. (The Idea of a University, Apologia Pro Vita Sua and The Second Spring were particularly but not uncharacteristically brilliant.)

Though often ill-tempered, Newman was not vain. And his writing, a colossal volume of work spanning 70 years, never sought to dazzle the reader. Like the greatest 20th-century writers, such as Joseph Conrad or George Orwell, his prose was spare and simple, stirred to adjectival or polysyllabic climaxes only by the gravity or intensity of his thought.

His effort to found a Catholic university in Dublin was sabotaged by the very parties who had most to gain from it: the narrow-minded custodians of insular Irish victim-Catholicism, which are not extinct, even today. Yet the project produced Newman’s educational concepts, luminously written, and a beacon for all subsequent educators in every land.

Likewise, his effort to establish an Oratory at Oxford was sabotaged by his fellow Catholics, whose every declared purpose should have motivated them to support such an initiative.

Cardinal Manning, his talented but devious rival, who tried to prevent his elevation to the cardinalate, obstructed almost everything he did for 30 years, and then eulogized him in the Brompton Oratory as “my friend and mentor of 50 years”.

Despite decades of disappointment, Newman never yielded to public anger, offended or disappointed ego, envy, defeatism or lagging faith. As he told the bishops in his sermon The Second Spring, when the Roman Catholic Church of England was reconstructed on a diocesan basis in 1850, after a lapse of 300 years:

---

Spring passes into summer and through summer and autumn into winter, the more surely by its ultimate return to triumph over that grave towards which it resolutely hastens from its first hour.

We mourn for the blossoms of May because they are to wither. Yet we know withal, that May shall have its revenge upon November, in the revolution of that solemn circle that never stops and that teaches us in our height of hope ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation never to despair.

---

For almost an entire century, until his death in 1890, Newman was the unflagging champion of intellectual and intuitive Christian faith, who revealed the inconsistencies of the Established Church, yet was a force for Christian reconciliation, and always dissented from what was trendy and opportunistic.

He was as representative of the highest form of the English character as Samuel Johnson or the Duke of Wellington. The same man who opposed the Crimean War, as besmirching British integrity by propping up the Ottomans, who rendered unto the Pope what was his, “could not imagine being or wanting to be anything but English.”

When he died in his 90th year, the whole Christian world mourned him. There is a Cardinal Newman School in almost every community in the once-Christian world.

Pope Benedict XVI is one of the greatest intellects who has held that office in several centuries, a man of great philosophical scholarship, rigour and originality, as well as an accomplished writer, linguist, practical administrator and musician.

His visit to Britain this month is to render homage to a man he regards as an intellectual giant, endowed with a character of comparably exceptional quality, which he believes, on the evidence of ecclesiastical scrutiny, has been recognized and amplified by divine blessings.

Those who share that faith are uplifted by Newman’s intelligence and character. Those who do not should at least be aware that in his lifetime and in the 120 years since his death, Newman has carried the British colours in his spheres of endeavour with a brilliance, panache and durability that has put him in, or close to, the company of history’s most distinguished Englishmen, the exalted realm of Shakespeare and Churchill.

John Henry Newman is being elevated for a rare fusion of genius and virtue that does great honour to his country, but transcends nationality, denomination and religion itself.


.

Tomorrow Benedict XVI pays homage
to Leo XIII in Carpineto Romano

Sept. 4, 2010



From left: Palazzo Pecci, the ancestral home of the Pecci counts in Carpineto; the mayor of Carpineto; a formal portrait of Papa Pecci; and Rerum Novarum.

On the bicentennial year of the birth of Pope Leo XIII, Benedict XVI will visit his hometown of Carpineto Romano, some 80 kms from Rome, tomorrow. The Holy Father will preside at Holy Mass at 9:30 a.m., and will return by helicopter to Castel Gandolfo in time for the noon Angelus. Amedeo Lomonaco reports:

Many historic dates are associated with Carpineto but doubtless, the most important so far is February 20, 1878, when Gioacchino Pecci, born in Carpineto to a family of counts on March 2, 1810, became Pope Leo XIII.

It was an era marked by radical social and economic changes in the world. These profound transformations of modern society would be the basis for Leo XIII's historic encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891.

In what was the first encyclical to enunciate the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, Leo XIII, among other things, urged Catholic workers to organize and called for greater state intervention in social issues.

In Carpineto itself, numerous social works were undertaken under Leo's Pontificate, such as an orphanage and children's home, a school, a hospice for the aged, a water system that brought water down from nearby Monte Carpino; and public lighting through electricity, which made Carpineto one of the first in Italy to benefit of that development.

Today, in Carpineto, there are markers to Leo XIII in various streets, squares and roads.

This will be the third visit of a Pope to this little city on Monte Lepini in the mountains of Lazio. Paul VI came in 1966 for the 75th anniversary of Rerum novarum, and John Paul II in 1991.

The visit of Benedict XVI - whose last encyclical Caritas in Veritate continued the tradition of social encyclicals begun by Leo XIII - is a source of great pride and joy for Carpineto, which wakes up each day to the sight of a monumental Cross on the peak of nearby Monte Capreo.

We spoke to Mons. Lorenzo Loppa, Bishop of Anagni-Alatri and principal host for the papal visit tomorrow:

MONS. LOPPA: This is a grace for us, an unearned gift, and as I have often told our people, our clergy and religious, we must seek to earn this gift not just before the Pope's visit but after. The great hope is that he may provide new impulse to the renewal of the conditions that face us today.

Rightly and surely, Leo XIII is remembered for Rerum novarum which is fundamental for governing relations between employers and workers, and for a human society that must be shaped in the light of the Gospel.

Just as certainly, there is a rainbow that goes from Rerum novarum to Caritas in veritate. The Gospel is yeast for a human society built on love that is illuminated by reason but above all, by faith.

In this pastoral trip honoring Leo XII, in fact, we see a conjunction. Though the historical circumstances are different, but what unites the two Popes is their important contribution to the social doctrine of the Church...
Of course, the circumstances are different, but the principles of the Gospel do not change. In constructing a new world, we Christians do not have specific tools. But we do have radical principles which we can contribute and make concrete ourselves. This was true in the time of Leo XIII as it is today.

Let us dwell on Leo XIII: Gioacchino Pecci was elected Pope in 1878, after the Breach of Porta Pia [when Italian troops entered Rome by opening a breach next to the historic gate and conquered Rome to complete the unification of Italy] and during a time of great social and economic changes. What do you think is the legacy of his Pontificate to us today?
The commitment to look at the world and society without prejudice. What strikes me most about Leo XIII is that he was able to unite his clarity of principles and language to his gentle and comprehensive look at modernity, at the advance of the new. This is fundamental for enabling the Church to be in dialog with the world. [One could say exactly the same of Benedict XVI, who must, however, confront a secularization undreamed of in the time of Leo XIII - and has done so constantly, consistently and in no uncertain terms.!]

Drawing from Leo XIII's Magisterium, and particularly, from Rerum novarum as a milestone for the social doctrine of the Church, what challenges does the Church face today?
I think, first of all, of so many issues inherent in Catholic education, but above all, in the formation of priests and seminarians. Then, lessons from his many writings about families, and his encouragement for Catholic associations, including labor unions.

Rerum novarum also makes clear the critical relationship between faith and history, between the Gospel and society. Which constitutes in part the novelty of Christianity - it brings together the mystery of God with the mystery of man. The Gospel is for man to follow in constructing a society more worthy of the Creator, adn therefore, more worthy of man.

Carpineto was one of the first places in Italy to have public lighting through electricity, thanks to Leo XIII...
Papa Leone always had sincere affection for his hometown, and that is why so many places here are named after him. But I think the most beautiful gift he brought to Carpineto was the presence of some religious orders whom he wanted to operate in his hometown [principally, the Carmelites, who have a monastery in Carpineto]. This virtuous consequence can be felt tangibly even today.

How did you prepare for this visit?
With enthusiasm, with affection, with great serenity. Above all, we want to welcome the Pope and his visit as a gift. This is a community of 5,000 inhabitants in a mountain location, therefore the logistical and organizational preparation was considerable. But the most beautiful has been the spiritual preparation. We want to tell the Pope that we love him and that we pray daily for him to continue being a courageous witness to the sovereignty of Jesus Christ, Lord of history and Lord of the world.

The presence of religious orders in Carpineto is discussed by Augustinian Fr. Ludovico Centra:

FR. CENTRA: Carpineto was always a blessed place. Today, we have the convent of the Carmelite nuns and two convents of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. And we Augustinians along with the Franciscans have been here for many centuries. In fact, the principal patron saint of Carpineto is St. Augustine.

We can say that almost every family here has a member who is a priest, a nun, or a consecrated person. This is definitely a blessing from the Lord. People always tell me that the principal reason for this is Marian devotion - the Immaculate Conception is the other patron saint, since Dec. 6, 1657.

And I like to think that Carpineto is particularly blessed by God and the Virgin Mary, especially since it also had the great honor of giving birth to a Pope of the stature of Leo XIII. For us, these are all great signs that remind us to keep our faith and loyalties strong...

When the Italian state upon reunification suppressed religious orders and convents, Leo XIII personally reacquired the lands and properties of the Franciscans and Augustinians in Carpineto, and gave it back to them. This was not just a spiritual and cultural benefit, but also assistential, because one of the first consequences was the establishment of a hospital.

Fr. Ludovico, you are a native of Carpineto yourself. How would you describe your hometown to others?
I love the mountain that 'overlooks' Carpineto - Monte Capreo. In 1900, Leo XIII had the monumental Cross built on its peak. I remember that once, when it was being restored, it was taken down from its pedestal - and promptly, there were urgent calls from all the surrounding localities wanting to know what had happened - as though, without the Cross, Monte Capreo had ceased to be! It has been a reference point for all the area.

In autumn it is particularly beautiful, with the diverse coloring of foliage in its chestnuts, hornbeam birches ['carpino' in Italian, from which the place gets its name] and beeches. It is a sight that has always lifted my spirits, towards the Cross.

Then, we have this beautiful traditions connected with the harvest of chestnuts and olives. They are simple things that provide an occasion for the community to get together and to work together, thus maintaining a family atmosphere that is almost impossible to keep in larger towns. On every street and pathway, you can experience this 'familial' feeling, and even a stranger immediately feels he, too, is a Carpinetano. Plus, the air is always fresh and clean. It is a small town, but its heart is warm and strong.


Mons. Loppa says Carpineto awaits
Benedict XVI with joy and hope
by GIANNI CARDINALE
Translated from

Sept. 4, 2010




"This visit by the Holy Father is something we have dreamed about that is finally taking place." Mons. Morenzo Loppa, 63, Bishop of Anagni-Alatri since 2002, cannot hide his joy for Benedict XVI's visit tomorrow to Carpineto Romano,the historical town in his diocese which gave birth two centuries ago to a predecessor of Papa Ratzinger, Leo XIII, who was born Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci, and was Pope from 1878-1903.


Excellency, tell us how this dream materialized.
On November 12, 2008, I took part with some local authorities and the faithful of Carpineto at the General Audience of the Pope. We took the opportunity to invite him to come for teh bicentennial celebration of Leo XIII's birth. Following that, we discreetly followed up on the invitation.

Then, on December 7 last year - I still remember the moment with great emotion - I got a telephone call from the Pontifical Household to inform me that the Pope would come to Carpineto for the celebration. Imagine the joy with which we received the news!

Why do you think the invitation was accepted?
First, it's an easy trip from Castel Gandolfo. I believe Benedict XVI has great esteem for Leo XIII, and besides, as a cardinal, he was quite linked to our diocese by ties of sympathy and affection. As a cardinal, he was the titular Bishop of Velletri-Segni; he is very familiar with the Cathedral and other historical places in Anagni [seat of the diocese, and a city of Popes, in its own way, because in the 13th century, it gave the Church four Popes, each of them quite historical, and because before Castel Gandolfo, it had been the summer residence of the Popes] and at least twice, he visited the Pontifical Collegio Leoniano. Then, it was in Subiaco where he delivered on April 1, 2005, that unforgettable lecture on Europe, just 18 days before he would be elected Pope.

Not to mention that two of his immediate predecessors had visited Carpineto...
Yes. In 1966, Paul VI came to Carpineto for the 75th anniversary of Rerum novarum, and in 1991, John Paul II came to celebrate its first centennial.

What is the ecclesial picture that the Pope will see?
Ours is a fairly small diocese, with a long history of the faith, but always committed to keep it fresh and lively in all its 56 parishes and in its religious life, among which I must cite three monasteries of cloistered nuns - the Carmelites in Carpineto, the Poor Clares in Anagni, and the Benedictines in Alatri.

Then we have more than 40 confraternities as well as Catholic Action units in half of the parishes. It is a diocese that breathes, so to speak, with special lungs. It has the Shrine of the Most Holy Trinity in Vallepietra which receives some 400,000 pilgrims yearly during the pilgrimage period from May 1-November 1, who go to confession and receive communion as part of the pilgrimage.

Then, there is the Collegio Leoniano which I mentioned earlier - it is the major seminary for the suburbicarian and southern dioceses of the Lazio region. And Fiuggi, despite the economic crisis, remains a first-rank conference venue with facilities that are highly appreciated not just by church organizations.

What is the social situation in the diocese?
Of course, we feel the crisis. Especially since our territory became strongly industrialized, at the expense of its rooted agricultural tradition and its natural touristic potential. Many factories have closed, dismissed workers are on unemployment benefits, and many are on the move to seek greener pastures.

How have you prepared for the Pope's visit?
We are a small community but we love the Pope. We have not prepared anything extraordinary. The diocese decreed a Leonine Year to commemorate Papa Pecci's bicentennial, and Pope Benedict's visit is the climax. We prepared our faithful by exposing them to selected expositions of the Word of God and to testimonials of faith which can impress even young people by their beauty and power.

What are your expectations?
We are awaiting the Pope with joy, with enthusiasm and with hope. The civilian authorities also hope for greater attention to be shown to our region. For the Church, we expect most his words of comfort and support to confirm us in our faith.

Like the other dioceses in Italy, we face a demanding decade in which we must confront the educational crisis, which concerns not just the new generations but we the adults who must be their educators.

A final word about Carpineto?
It is a special place. It is filled with community works that began with Leo XIII. Things like the water system, or the monumental Cross that he had constructed for the Jubilee Year of 1900. But also his spiritual legacy. he wanted a strong presence in Carpineto of the consecrated life.

One other thing is that the communal council of Carpineto dedicated the town to the Immaculate Conception on Dec. 6, 1657, two centuries before the dogma was proclaimed.

When Popes concern themselves
with labor and the economy
by Aldo Maria Valli
Translated from

Sept. 4, 2010

There is a solid thread that links Benedict XVI to his predecessor Leo XIII. That is why the Holy Father's visit tomorrow to Carpineto Romano, Papa Pecci's birthplace, will be an occasion for him to reiterate some principles which are particularly dear to him concerning social and economic issues.

Just as Leo XIII did with Rerum novarum in 1891, Benedict VI with Caritas in veritate in 2009, did not limit himself to an analysis of the times, but proposed principles for facing the problem squarely.

For Ratzinger as for Pecci, man is not made to serve the economy, but economy must serve man. It follows that the economy, in order to serve both the individual and the community, must be anchored in values that are universally recognized as natural law, resulting in principles such as: the primacy of the person over the State, the principle of subsidiarity (things must be worked out at the local levels first), the value of intermediary agents, freedom of enterprise, condemnation of the exploitation of man by man, the dignity of labor.

Papa Ratzinger, like Papa Pecci, is an anti-perfectionist: There are no ideal worlds on earth, and man must be wary of those who announce such utopias. Christian realism certainly does not propose sinking into apathy, either, but warns against palingenetic illusions that promptly reduce men into instruments of those who are stronger than they are.

Against such a background, Benedict XVI is firmly grounded in reality. Where Leo XIII denounced on the one hand Marxism and on the other, savage capitalism, Benedict sounds the alarm against more contemporary foes:
- The paper (currency-based) economy has shown all its dangers and how it can easily lead to disaster.
- The concentration of key decisions in the hands of a few supranational aggrupations leads to new forms of exploitation.
- Finance is an instrument, but if it becomes an end in itself, then it will collapse.
- Responsibilities must be broadened and shared.
- A new world order is necessary with man at the center.
- And even the economy, like any other human activity, must be nourished on truth. When truth is ignored, then injustice results.
- Globalization offers opportunities, but it must be regulated.
- Economy must be civilized and humanized.

In Italy, the alarm by the Pope and his bishops over the economic crisis is well known. Even recently, the bishops have denounced the lack of a true economic and social policy that is integral and coherent, that nothing has really been done for families and the youth.

Cardinal Bagnasco had explicit words of appreciation for President Napolitano's words on Fiat, and Avvenire was clear in denouncing a recent case about three workers wrongly fired and then not re-hired as having been a 'deliberate and conscious' act.

The president of the Italian bishops' conference has said repeatedly that unemployment is a national emergency and denounced the lack of reforms that are able to produce economic growth. Just as forcefully, he has declared that Italy continues to lack a ruling class that is able to meet current problems and produce the necessary transformations.

All these points may well be underscored by Benedict XVI to underscore the contemporary relevance of Leo XIII, the pastor who led the Church while the Industrial Revolution was changing the world with a speed never before seen.

Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, president of the Vatican bank IOR, and one of the economic advisers most listened to by Benedict XVI, has written that there is no Catholic economy, but Catholics in the economy. It is they, above all, whom the Pope addresses when he asks for a moral leap, since only that which is truly moral can also be truly logical and rational.

Sept. 5, 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

BLESSED TERESA OF CALCUTTA (b Macedonia 1910, d India 1997) - Founder, Missionaries of Charity, 1979 Nobel Peace Prize Winner
The world recently marked what would have been her 100th birthday. Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born to Albanian parents in Skopje, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire. She joined the Loreto Sisters of Dublin as a teenager, and at age 18, she was sent to the Loreto novitiate in Darjeeling, India, where she chose the name Teresa and taught at a high-school for upper-class children. Surrounded by the overwhelming poverty of many Indians, she says she heard an inner call one day to 'follow Christ into the slums and serve him among the poorest of the poor'. She left the Loreto community, took a nursing course for several months, and got permission to start a new religious community. She chose to work in Calcutta (Kolkata) where she opened a school for poor children in a slum area, while visiting her neighbors to know their needs. Before long, volunteers joined her work, some of them former students, and became the core of her religious community founded in 1950. They carried out their work with contributions in food, clothing, supplies, and use of buildings. In 1952, the city gave her a hostel which became a home for the dying destitute. As her order expanded, services were extended to orphans, abandoned children, alcoholics, and street people. And for the next four decades, she took her mission worldwide. soliciting material support for the work of her sisters and inviting the world to see Jesus in the poorest of the poor. Her order has become global, a she herself was considered a living saint and was one of the most famous persons on the globe by the time she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. She died of natural causes on Sept. 5, 1997. John Paul II, who met her several times, waived protocol and started the cause for her beatification immediately, and beatified her in October 19, 2003. She is buried in the Mother Teresa Center in Calcutta.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/nab/readings/090510.shtml


OR today.

A Page 1 story on the Holy Father's pastoral trip today to Carpineto Romano, and in the inside pages, an essay about the visit by the Bishop of Anagni-Alastri, and a tribute to Leo XIII from the Bishop of Perugia, the city Leo XII served as bishop for some time before he became an Apostolic Nuncio and then Pope. There is also a story recalling the 10th anniversary today of the beatification of John XXIII. Other Page 1 items: A report on Darfur's continuing civilian toll from factional wars; a puff piece on the US-sponsored resumption of Israeli-Palestinian direct talks; China divests itself of more US bond holdings; and a feature on the reopening later this month of the Vatican Library and Archives after three years of renovation.


THE POPE'S DAY

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[

PASTORAL VISIT OF THE HOLY FATHER

BENEDICT XVI TO CARPINETO ROMANO

on the bicentenary of the birth of

POPE LEO XIII

Sunday, September 5, 2010

P R O G R A M




08:30 The Pope leaves by helicopter from the Pontifical Villas in Castel Gandolfo

08:45 The helicopter lands at the Galeotti sports field in Carpineto.
The Holy Father will be welcomed by
- Mons. Lorenzo Loppa, Bishop of Anagni-Alatri
- A representative of the Italian government
- Mme. Renato Polverini, President of Lazio Region
- Dr. Giuseppe Pecoraro, Prefect of Rome Province
- H.E. Antonio Zanardi Landi, Italian ambassador to the Holy See
- Mons. Giuseppe Bertello, Apostolic Nuncio to Italy
- Quirino Briganti, Mayor of Carpineto
- Hon. Nicola Zingaetti, President of Rome Province
- Fr. Giuseppe Ghirelli, parish priest of Carpineto

The Holy Father will transfer to the Popemobile to proceed to Largo dei Monte Lepini

09:15 At Largo dei Monte Lepini, the Holy Father will be formally welcomed by Mayor Briganti and Mons. Loppa.
There will be an exchange of gifts.

09:30 CELEBRATION OF HOLY MASS
- Homily

11:00 After Mass, the Holy Father will greet a delegation representing the civilian and religious community.

11:30 The Pope departs Carpineto by helicopter from the Galeotti sports field.

11:45 He arrives back in Castel Gandolfo.

CASTEL GANDOLFO

12:00 Angelus

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The poster also pictures Pope Paul VI and John Paul II, who visited Carpineto in 1966 and 1991, respectively.

BENEDICT XVI IN CARPINETO

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Dear brothers and sisters,

First of all, allow me to express my joy to be among you here in Carpineto Romano, in the footsteps of my beloved predecessors Paul VI and John Paul II.

And the occasion that brings me here is equally joyful: the bicentennial of the birth of Pope Leo XIII, Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci, born in this beautiful place on March 2, 1810. I thank you all for your welcome.

In particular, I thank the Bishop of Anagni-Alatri, Mons. Lorenzo Loppa, and the Mayor of Carpineto, who formally welcomed me before the Mass, along with all the other authorities present.

I address a special thought to the young people of the diocese, particularly those who have completed the annual diocesan pilgrimage.

Unfortunately, my visit will be brief but it is focused on this Eucharistic celebration - in which we find everything: the Word and the Bread of life, which nourish faith, hope and charity, and we renew the link of communion which makes us the only Church of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We have heard the Word of God today, and it is natural to listen to it under these circumstances, by thinking about the figure of Pope Leo XIII and the legacy he has left us.

The main theme that emerges from the Bible readings today is the primacy of God and Christ. In the Gospel passage taken from St. Luke, Jesus himself states frankly three conditions necessary in order to be his disciple: to love him more than any other person and life itself; to carry one's own Cross and follow him; and to renounce all of one's possessions.

Jesus saw a great crowd following him and his disciples, and he wanted it clear to everyone: Following him is a demanding task and cannot depend on enthusiasm and opportunism - it must be a well-considered decision, taken after having asked one's conscience: Who is Jesus for me? Is he truly 'the Lord', does he occupy the first place, like the Sun around which all other planets revolve?

The first Reading from the Book of Wisdom indirectly suggests to us the reason for the absolute primacy of Jesus Christ: In him are found the answers to the questions man asks in every time when seeking the truth about God and about himself.

God is beyond our reach and his designs are inscrutable. But he wished to reveal himself in creation, but above all, in the story of salvation, until he fully manifested himself and his will in Christ.

Even if it remains true that "no one has ever seen God" (Jn 1,18), now we know his 'name', his 'face', and even his will - because these have been revealed to us by Jesus, who is the Wisdom of God made man.

"You had given wisdom and sent your holy spirit from on high," writes the author of the first Reading, "And thus were the paths of those on earth made straight" (Wis 9,17-18).

This fundamental statement in the Word of God makes us think of two aspects of the life and ministry of your venerated compatriot whom we commemorate today, the Supreme Pontiff Leo XIII.

Before everything, it must be underscored that he was a man of great faith and profound devotion. For every Christian, including the Pope, this always remains the basis of everything.

Without prayer, that is, without interior union with God, we cannot do anything, as Jesus said clearly to his disciples at the Last Supper (cfr Jn 15,5).

The words and actions of Papa Pecci reveal his intimate religiosity - and this found a correspondence in his Magisterium: Among his numerous encyclicals and Apostolic letters, like the thread of a necklace, are those of a specifically spiritual character, dedicated above all to increasing Marian devotion, especially through the Holy Rosary. These constitute a veritable catechism that spans his 25-year Pontificate from its beginning to the very end.

But we also find documents on Christ the Redeemer, on the Holy Spirit, on consecration to the Sacred Heart, on devotion to St. Joseph and to St. Francis of Assisi. Leo XII was particularly linked to the Franciscan family, and he himself had belonged to its Third Order.

I like to consider all these diverse elements as facets of a single reality: love of God and Christ, before which nothing must be placed. This first and principal quality was assimilated by Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci here, in his birthplace, from his parents, from his parish.

There is also a second aspect that derives from the primacy of God and Christ, which can be found in the public activities of every Pastor of the Church, particularly, those of the Supreme Pontiff, with the characteristics proper to each individual personality.

i would say that the very concept of 'Christian wisdom', which already emerged in the first Reading and the Gospel today, offers us the synthesis of Leo XIII's vision - which, not accidentally, also constitute the first words of one of his encyclicals.

Every pastor is called on to transmit to the People of God not abstract truths, but a 'wisdom', that is, a message that unites faith and life, truth and concrete reality.

Pope Leo XIII, with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, was able to do this in a historical period that was one of the most difficult for the Church, remaining faithful to Tradition, and at the same time, measuring up to the great open questions of the day.

And he succeeded precisely through 'Christian wisdom', based on Sacred Scripture and the immense theological and spiritual patrimony of the Catholic Church, as well as on the solid and limpid philosophy of St. Tomas Aquinas, whom he appreciated very highly and whose thought he promoted throughout the entire Church.

At this point, after considering the basis - namely, the faith and spiritual life, and therefore, the general context for the message of Leo XIII - I can now emphasize his social magisterium, made most famous and timeless by the encyclical Rerum novarum, but rich with many other interventions that make up an organic body, the nucleus of the social doctrine of the Church.

Let us take note of St. Paul's letter to Philemon, which happily the liturgy also proposes today. It is the briefest text in the entire Pauline epistolary. Once when in prison, the Apostle had transmitted the faith to Onesimus, a slave originally from Colossus who had escaped from his mater Philemon, a rich inhabitant of that city, who had become Christian along with his family, thanks to Paul's preaching.

Now, the Apostle writes Philemon inviting him to accept Onesimus back, not as a slave but as a brother in Christ. The new Christian brotherhood overcomes not only the separation between slaves and freemen, and triggers off in history the principle of promoting individuals that would lead to the abolition of slavery, but also overcomes all other barriers that separate men even now. Pope Leo XIII, in fact, dedicated his encyclical Catholicae Ecclesiae of 1890 to the issue of slavery.

From this experience of St. Paul with Onesimus, we can start an ample reflection on the impulse for human promotion that Christianity has contributed to civilization, and even on the method and style of this contribution, along the evangelical images of the seed and yeast.

Within the reality of history, Christians, acting as individuals or as a group, constitute a beneficial and peaceful force for profound change. This is the form of presence and activity in the world that is proposed by the social doctrine of the Church, which always aims at the maturation of conscience as a condition for valid and lasting transformations.

Now we must ask ourselves: What was the context into which, two centuries ago, was born the child who would become, 68 years later, Pope Leo XIII?

Europe was still undergoing the consequences of the great Napoleonic upheaval which followed the French Revolution. The Church and numerous expressions of Chinese culture were held severely to question. One thinks, for instance, of the attempt to set the date no longer counting from the birth of Christ but from the start of the revolutionary era, or of the mass removal of saints' names from calendars, from streets, from towns and villages...

The people of the countryside were certainly not in favor of such radical changes and remained linked to their religious traditions. Daily life was harsh and difficult - health conditions were terrible and food was scarce.

Meanwhile, industry was developing, and with it, the labor movement, which became ever more politically organized. The Church Magisterium, at its highest level, was impelled and aided by reflections on local conditions to elaborate a comprehensive overview and perspective of the new society and its common good.

Thus, when Leo XIII was elected Pope in 1878, he felt called on to bring this to completion, in the light of his wide knowledge with its international breadth, but also of so many initiatives already achieved 'in the field' by Christian communities and by men and women of the Church.

There were, in fact, dozens of saints and blesseds, from the end of the 18th century to the start of the 20th, who sought to find, simply with the imagination of charity, multiple ways to realize the Gospel message within the new social realities.

Doubtless it was these initiatives, with the sacrifices and reflections of these men and women, who prepared the ground for Rerum novarum and Papa Pecci's other social documents.

Already, from the time that he was Apostolic Nuncio in Belgium, he understood that the social question could be met positively and effectively through dialog and mediation. In an era of bitter anti-clericalism and inflammatory demonstrations against the Pope, Leo XIII was able to lead and sustain Catholics along the path of constructive participation in society - rich in content, firm in principles and capable of openness.

Shortly after Rerum novarum was published, there was an authentic explosion of social initiatives in Italy and other industrial countries: associations, rural banks, workers' banks, newspapers - a vast 'movement' which, in Italy, had an enlightened animator in the Servant of God Giuseppe Toniolo.

A Pope who was quite old, but wise and far-sighted, was thus able to bring a rejuvenated Church into the 20th century, one that had the right attitude to face the century's new challenges.

He was a Pope who was still politically and physically 'imprisoned' in the Vatican [under the terms imposed by the state of Italy upon its reunification and constitution in 1860], but in fact, with his Magisterium, he presented a Church capable of confronting, without any complexes, the great questions of contemporary society.

Dear friends in Carpineto Romano, we do not have time to go deeper into these statements. The Eucharist that we are celebrating, the Sacrament of Love [sacramentum caritatis], calls our attention to what is essential: charity, the love of Christ which renews men and the world.

This is the essential, and we see it well - we can almost perceive it - in the expressions St. Paul uses to Philemon. In that brief letter, one can, in fact, feel all the gentleness and, at the same time, the revolutionary force of the Gospel. We can observe the discreet and irresistible style of charity, which, as I wrote in my own social encyclical Caritas in veritate, is "the principal driving force behind the authentic development of every person and of all humanity" (No. 1).

With joy and affection, I leave with you the ancient but ever new commandment: Love each other as Christ loved us, and with this love, you will be salt and light for the world. Thus, you will be faithful to the legacy of your great and venerated compatriot, Pope Leo XIII.

May it be so in all the Church. Amen!

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'Everyone, including Popes,
is called to prayer'


Carpineto Romano, Italy, Sep 5, 2010 (Adapted from CNA).- “Without prayer … we can do nothing”, said the Pope while honoring the legacy of Leo XIII today in his predecessor's hometown.

Joining this year's Leonine Year celebrations marking the 200th anniversary of Leo XIII's birth, Benedict XVI recalled his predecessor's faith, devotion and social teaching, saying that all people, including Popes, are called to pray and to love.

Using the chalice and the pectoral cross of Leo XIII himself, Pope Benedict XVI celebrated the Eucharist with 5,000 people in the center of the small mountain town of Carpineto Romano on Sunday morning.

The town, founded nearly a millenium before Christ, provided a stunning backdrop as well as a familial atmosphere, further augmented by the many townspeople followed the Mass from the balconies of their hillside stone houses.

In his homily, Benedict XVI reflected on two aspects of the late-Pope's life brought to mind by Jesus's call in the Sunday Liturgy to love Him above all others, to take up one's cross, and to leave behind material possessions.

The first element, he said, is the faith and devotion of Leo XII, whose papacy from 1878 to 1903 made him the last Pope of the 19th century and the first of the 20th.

“This,” he explained, “always remains the foundation of everything, for every Christian, including the Pope. Without prayer, that is, without interior union with God, we can do nothing.”

The call to social action for every priest, “in particular the Supreme Pontiff,” was the second aspect he noted. He said that each pastor is called to do so according to his individual personality and characteristics.

Each one, he said, has the vocation of transmitting 'wisdom' to the People of God, “a message that conjugates faith and life, truth and concrete reality.”

This, the Pope pointed out, is what Leo XIII did through his life and especially in writing the “first nucleus” of the social doctrine of the faith, the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum.

Benedict XVI referenced it in his own 2009 encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, in which he updated the Church's social teaching, as other Popes have done since Leo XIII.

Concluding his homily, Pope Benedict XVI insisted that through the Eucharist humanity continues to be urged to love for our neighbor. "The Sacrament of love,” he said, ”calls us back to the essential: charity, love of Christ that renews men and the world …”

Calling on the residents of Carpineto to practice the “ancient and always new” commandment of loving each other as Christ has done, he said, “(i)n this way you will be faithful to the inheritance of your great and venerated co-citizen, Pope Leo XIII.”

Echoing this call to the world, he said, “May it be so in all the Church!”

ANGELUS TODAY




The Holy Father, after acknowledging his visit to Carpineto Romano earlier in the day, paid tribute to Leo XIII's Magisterium, then proceeded to speak about his message for World Youth Day 2011 which was released by the Vatican yesterday. In English, he said this:

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Having just returned from Carpineto Romano, the birthplace of my Predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, I greet all the English-speaking pilgrims and visitors present for this Angelus prayer.

May Pope Leo’s social magisterium continue to inspire the efforts of the faithful to build a just society rooted in the teachings of Christ. Upon you and your loved ones, I invoke the abundant blessings of Almighty God.

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

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Dear brothers and sisters,

First of all, I beg your pardon for the tardiness! I have just come back from Carpineto Romano where, 200 years ago, Pope Leo XIII was born as Vincenzo Goacchino Pecci. I thank the Lord that for this important anniversary, I was able to celebrate the Eurcharist among his townmates.

Now I would like to present briefly my message, recently published, to the youth of the world for the 25th World Youth Day which will take place in Madrid in less than a year.

The theme that I chose for this message is taken from the Apostle Paul's letter to the Colossians: "Rooted and built upon Christ, and firm in the faith" (2,7).

It is decidedly a proposition that goes against the grain! Who, indeed, proposes to young people today to be 'rooted' and 'firm'? Rather, what is exalted are uncertainty, mobility, volubility - all aspects which reflect a culture that is undecided about its fundamental values, about the principles upon which to orient and regulate one's life.

In fact I myself, with my experience and the contacts I have had with young people, know quite well that every generation - better still, every individual - is called on to pursue for himself the course of finding meaning in life.

Precisely because of this, I wished to offer a message which, in the Biblical style, evokes the images of the tree and of home. The young person is, in fact, like a growing tree: In order to develop, he needs deep roots which, in the event of storms or high winds, will keep him firmly held to the ground. Thus, too, the image of a building in construction evokes the need for valid foundations in order that the house may be solid and secure.

And the heart of the message is in the expressions 'in Christ' and 'in the faith'. A person's full maturity, his interior stability, are based on his relationship with God, a relationship which takes place through his encounter with Jesus Christ.

A relationship of deep trust, of authentic friendship with Jesus, can give the young person that which he needs in order to face life well: serenity and interior light, the attitude to think positively, greatness of spirit towards others, a willingness to pay in person in order to achieve good, justice and truth.

Another very important aspect: To become a believer, the young person is sustained by the faith of the Church. If no man is an island, then the Christian is even less so, who finds in the Church the beauty of a faith that is shared and borne witness to along with others in brotherhood and in the service of charity.

My message to the youth carries the date of August 6, Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord. May the light form the Face of Christ shine in the heart of every young person! And may the Virgin Mary accompany with her protection the journey of the communities and groups of young people towards the great gathering in Madrid in 2011!

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