BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

See preceding page for my belated posts on the consistory yesterday, 2/18/12.



February 19, Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
FEAST OF PETER'S CHAIR
This feast is usually celebrated on February 22 but it has been moved up to this Sunday because February 22 this year falls on Ash Wednesday.

The feast commemorates Christ’s choice of Peter to sit in his place as the servant-authority of the whole Church. Already in the second half of the 8th century, an ancient wooden Chair inlaid with ivory was venerated and traditionally held to be the Episcopal chair on which St. Peter sat as he instructed the faithful of Rome. In fact, it is a throne in which fragments of acacia wood are visible, which could be part of the chair of St. Peter, encased in oak and reinforced with iron bands. Several rings facilitated its transportation during processions. Pope Alexander VII commissioned Bernini to build a sumptuous monument which would give prominence to this ancient wooden chair. Bernini built a throne in gilded bronze, richly ornamented with bas-reliefs in which the chair was enclosed: two pieces of furniture, one within the other. It was installed in 1666 on the altar just below the alabaster window depicting the Holy Spirit. Every February 22, the altar of Peter's Chair is decorated with dozens of lighted candles, while the familiar black sculpture of St. Peter is dressed in full papal regalia.

Left, Bernini's altar of Peter's Chair - the Church Doctors holding up the Chair are, on the left, Augustine and John Chrysostom, and on the right, Athanasius and Ambrose. Center, the altar with the lighted candles on Feb. 22; right, Arnolfo di Cambio's sculpture of St. Peter, dressed in papal regalia every Feb. 22.

Also commemorated today:

ST. CORRADO (Conrad) DA PIACENZA (Italy, 1290-1350), Lay Franciscan, Hermit
Corrado and his wife both belonged to nobility in Piacenza, central Italy. One day, during a hunt,
he accidentally set fire to a field that spread to the nearby forest. A peasant was accused and
sentenced to death for the crime. Corrado owned up and had to indemnify all the damages. This
drained his personal resources, and soon thereafter, he and his wife entered the religious life.
She joined the Poor Clares. He joined the Third Order of Franciscans, where he soon earned such
a reputation for holiness and received so many visitors that he left for Noto, in Sicily, where he
lived for 36 years until his death as a hermit. He was a reputed miracle-worker even in his solitary
life of prayer. He is said to have died on his knees before a Crucifix. For some reason, he is invoked
to cure hernias. He was canonized in 1625.
Readings for today's Mass: usccb.org/bible/readings/021912.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

Holy Mass concelebrated with the new cardinals - On the Feast of Peter's Chair, the Holy Father spoke
of the Petrine ministry and its responsibility for the universal Church. In his Angelus message afterwards,
he called on the faithful to pray for the new cardinals.


P.S. 2/20/12 - I was too distracted yesterday to remember to post my 'monthly-versary' tribute to the Holy Father:

SIX YEARS & TEN MONTHS TODAY, AND COUNTING....

AD MULTOS ANNOS, SANCTE PATER!

We can never love you enough.

Interesting sidelight: After Feb. 29 this year, Benedict XVI will overtake John Paul II as the 6th oldest Pope since 1400 - when he will be 84 years, 10 months, 2 weeks and 1 day old (JPII's age when he died). The other 5 Popes before him, with their Pontificate years and age at death) are: Leo XIII (1878-1703), 93; Clement XII (1730-1740), 87; Clement IX (167-1676), 86; Pius IX (1846-1878), 85; and Innocent XIII (1691-1700), 85. More than ever, AD MULTOS ANNOS, SANCTE PATER!

SOLEMNITY OF PETER'S CHAIR
Holy Mass concelebrated
with the new cardinals

February 19, 2012


Libretto cover: The Chair of St. Peter, sculpture by Bernini, 1665, enclosing a traditional relic, Altar of the Chair, St. Peter's Basilica.


It's a rare occasion when the Pope gets to celebrate the Feast of Peter's Chair in a public Mass!


Pope Benedict XVI concelebrated Mass this Sunday morning in St. Peter’s Basilica, on the SoLemnity of Peter's Chair, with the twenty-two Cardinals he created yesterday in the fourth cardinals' consistory of his Pontificate.

In his homily, the Holy Father stressed the centrality of the Petrine ministry – the Pope's special office of care and responsibility for the whole Church everywhere in the world as the Successor to St. Peter. Focusing on the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter, which was moved forward to Sunday from its usual calendar place on February 22nd, since this coming February 22nd is Ash Wednesday, the Holy Father explained:

Describing the great chair surmounting the Altar of the Chair in the Basilica behind the High Altar, Pope Benedict noted that it is supported by the Fathers of the Church – symbolically represented in statues that bear the chair.

“The two Eastern masters, Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Athanasius, together with the Latins, Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine, represent the whole of the tradition, and hence the richness of expression of the true faith of the one Church,” said Pope Benedict.

“This aspect of the altar teaches us that love rests upon faith. Love collapses if man no longer trusts in God and disobeys him. Everything in the Church rests upon faith: the sacraments, the liturgy, evangelization, charity. Likewise the law and the Church’s authority rest upon faith.”

It was a theme to which the Holy Father returned in his Angelus address to the thousands of faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square for the occasion.



Here is the Vatican's English translation of the Holy FaTHer's homily today:

---

Dear Cardinals,
Brother Bishops and Priests,
Dear Brothers and Sisters,

On this solemnity of the Chair of Saint Peter, we have the joy of gathering around the altar of the Lord together with the new Cardinals whom yesterday I incorporated into the College of Cardinals.

It is to them, first of all, that I offer my cordial greetings and I thank Cardinal Fernando Filoni for the gracious words he has addressed to me in the name of all.

I extend my greetings to the other Cardinals and all the Bishops present, as well as to the distinguished authorities, ambassadors, priests, religious and all the faithful who have come from different parts of the world for this happy occasion, which is marked by a particular character of universality.

In the second reading that we have just heard, Saint Peter exhorts the “elders” of the Church to be zealous pastors, attentive to the flock of Christ (cf. 1 Pet 5:1-2).

These words are addressed in the first instance to you, my dear venerable brothers, who have already shown great merit among the people of God through your wise and generous pastoral ministry in demanding dioceses, or through presiding over the Dicasteries of the Roman Curia, or in your service to the Church through study and teaching.

The new dignity that has been conferred upon you is intended to show appreciation for the faithful labour you have carried out in the Lord’s vineyard, to honour the communities and nations from which you come and which you represent so worthily in the Church, to invest you with new and more important ecclesial responsibilities and finally to ask of you an additional readiness to be of service to Christ and to the entire Christian community.

This readiness to serve the Gospel is firmly founded upon the certitude of faith. We know that God is faithful to his promises and we await in hope the fulfilment of these words of Saint Peter: “And when the chief shepherd is manifested you will obtain the unfading crown of glory” (1 Pet 5:4).

Today’s Gospel passage presents Peter, under divine inspiration, expressing his own firm faith in Jesus as the Son of God and the promised Messiah. In response to this transparent profession of faith, which Peter makes in the name of the other Apostles as well, Christ reveals to him the mission he intends to entrust to him, namely that of being the “rock”, the visible foundation on which the entire spiritual edifice of the Church is built (cf. Mt 16,16-19).

This new name of “rock” is not a reference to Peter’s personal character, but can be understood only on the basis of a deeper aspect, a mystery: through the office that Jesus confers upon him, Simon Peter will become something that, in terms of “flesh and blood”, he is not.

The exegete Joachim Jeremias has shown that in the background, the symbolic language of “holy rock” is present. In this regard, it is helpful to consider a rabbinic text which states: “The Lord said, ‘How can I create the world, when these godless men will rise up in revolt against me?’ But when God saw that Abraham was to be born, he said, ‘Look, I have found a rock on which I can build and establish the world.’ Therefore he called Abraham a rock.”

The prophet Isaiah makes reference to this when he calls upon the people to “look to the rock from which you were hewn ... look to Abraham your father” (51:1-2).

On account of his faith, Abraham, the father of believers, is seen as the rock that supports creation. Simon, the first to profess faith in Jesus as the Christ and the first witness of the resurrection, now, on the basis of his renewed faith, becomes the rock that is to prevail against the destructive forces of evil.

Dear brothers and sisters, this Gospel episode that has been proclaimed to us finds a further and more eloquent explanation in one of the most famous artistic treasures of this Vatican Basilica: the altar of the Chair.

After passing through the magnificent central nave, and continuing past the transepts, the pilgrim arrives in the apse and sees before him an enormous bronze throne that seems to hover in mid air, but in reality is supported by the four statues of great Fathers of the Church from East and West. And above the throne, surrounded by triumphant angels suspended in the air, the glory of the Holy Spirit shines through the oval window.

What does this sculptural composition say to us, this product of Bernini’s genius? It represents a vision of the essence of the Church and the place within the Church of the Petrine Magisterium.

The window of the apse opens the Church towards the outside, towards the whole of creation, while the image of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove shows God as the source of light.

But there is also another aspect to point out: the Church herself is like a window, the place where God draws near to us, where he comes towards our world. The Church does not exist for her own sake, she is not the point of arrival, but she has to point upwards, beyond herself, to the realms above.

The Church is truly herself to the extent that she allows the Other, with a capital “O”, to shine through her – the One from whom she comes and to whom she leads. The Church is the place where God “reaches” us and where we “set off” towards him: she has the task of opening up, beyond itself, a world which tends to become enclosed within itself, the task of bringing to the world the light that comes from above, without which it would be uninhabitable.

The great bronze throne encloses a wooden chair from the ninth century, which was long thought to be Saint Peter’s own chair and was placed above this monumental altar because of its great symbolic value. It expresses the permanent presence of the Apostle in the Magisterium of his successors.

Saint Peter’s chair, we could say, is the throne of truth which takes its origin from Christ’s commission after the confession at Caesarea Philippi. The magisterial chair also reminds us of the words spoken to Peter by the Lord during the Last Supper: “I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren” (Lk 22:32).

The chair of Peter evokes another memory: the famous expression from Saint Ignatius of Antioch’s letter to the Romans, where he says of the Church of Rome that she “presides in charity” (Salutation, PG 5, 801).

In truth, presiding in faith is inseparably linked to presiding in love. Faith without love would no longer be an authentic Christian faith. But the words of Saint Ignatius have another much more concrete implication: the word “charity”, in fact, was also used by the early Church to indicate the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is the Sacramentum caritatis Christi - the sacrament of Christ's love - through which Christ continues to draw us all to himself, as he did when raised up on the Cross (cf. Jn 12:32).

Therefore, to “preside in charity” is to draw men and women into a eucharistic embrace – the embrace of Christ – which surpasses every barrier and every division, creating communion from all manner of differences.

The Petrine ministry is therefore a primacy of love in the eucharistic sense, that is to say solicitude for the universal communion of the Church in Christ. And the Eucharist is the shape and the measure of this communion, a guarantee that it will remain faithful to the criterion of the tradition of the faith.

The great Chair is supported by the Fathers of the Church. The two Eastern masters, Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Athanasius, together with the Latins, Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine, represent the whole of the tradition, and hence the richness of expression of the true faith of the one Church.

This aspect of the altar teaches us that love rests upon faith. Love collapses if man no longer trusts in God and disobeys him. Everything in the Church rests upon faith: the sacraments, the liturgy, evangelization, charity. Likewise the law and the Church’s authority rest upon faith.

The Church is not self-regulating, she does not determine her own structure but receives it from the word of God, to which she listens in faith as she seeks to understand it and to live it.

Within the ecclesial community, the Fathers of the Church fulfil the function of guaranteeing fidelity to sacred Scripture. They ensure that the Church receives reliable and solid exegesis, capable of forming with the Chair of Peter a stable and consistent whole.

The sacred Scriptures, authoritatively interpreted by the Magisterium in the light of the Fathers, shed light upon the Church’s journey through time, providing her with a stable foundation amid the vicissitudes of history.

After considering the various elements of the altar of the Chair, let us take a look at it in its entirety. We see that it is characterized by a twofold movement: ascending and descending. This is the reciprocity between faith and love.

The Chair is placed in a prominent position in this place, because this is where Saint Peter’s tomb is located, but this too tends towards the love of God. Indeed, faith is oriented towards love. A selfish faith would be an unreal faith.

Whoever believes in Jesus Christ and enters into the dynamic of love that finds its source in the Eucharist, discovers true joy and becomes capable in turn of living according to the logic of gift. True faith is illumined by love and leads towards love, leads on high, just as the altar of the Chair points upwards towards the luminous window, the glory of the Holy Spirit, which constitutes the true focus for the pilgrim’s gaze as he crosses the threshold of the Vatican Basilica.

That window is given great prominence by the triumphant angels and the great golden rays, with a sense of overflowing fulness that expresses the richness of communion with God. God is not isolation, but glorious and joyful love, spreading outwards and radiant with light.

Dear brothers and sisters, the gift of this love has been entrusted to us, to every Christian. It is a gift to be passed on to others, through the witness of our lives. This is your task in particular,

dear brother Cardinals: to bear witness to the joy of Christ’s love. We now entrust your ecclesial service to the Virgin Mary, who was present among the apostolic community as they gathered in prayer, waiting for the Holy Spirit (cf. Acts 1:14).

May she, Mother of the Incarnate Word, protect the Church’s path, support the work of the pastors by her intercession and take under her mantle the entire College of Cardinals. Amen!

---

Here is a Vatican Radio translation of the address given by Cardinal Fernando Filoni, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, on behalf of the 22 newly created Cardinals, before today's Mass began:

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The scarlet bestowed on us reminds us, Holy Father, not about the greatness of the wearer nor as a symbol of power and domination, but of the profound mystery of the suffering of Jesus: Covered by his captors with a scarlet cloak, and thus presented to the crowd before Pilate, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross (Phil. 2.8).

Even today in the Church, for their loyalty to his Lord, many of its members face martyrdom, trial and persecution.

Most Holy Father, at this most meaningful moment in our life’s journey, we would like, together with our feelings of gratitude, affection and dedication, to present you as a gift, our renewed commitment of fidelity, our complete willingness in the performance of the specific tasks entrusted to us in the Roman Curia, in the particular Churches or in the service of truth and knowledge . We too wish to wear our robes usque ad effusionem sanguinis - to the point of shedding our own blood.

Our gratitude today is joined by that, no less profound and joyful, of our relatives and friends, the churches where we come from, and the peoples to which we belong.

Every vocation, in fact, is born in a human context and is practiced in the context in which our people live, with whom we build pastoral relationships that can never be erased.

They too, Holy Father, thank you and ensure their prayer for Your person (Conservet eum Dominus - Keep him, Lord) and support for Your supreme and universal ecclesial ministry (Tu es Petrus).

We entrust our service as cardinals to the protection of Mary Mother of Grace. Indeed it is Christ himself, who from the Cross places us under his protective mother, "Woman behold your son!" (Jn 19, 26). And we ask you, our Mother, come abide with us.

To God blessed for ever, will be raised with the same Marian words of our prayer: "My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior" (Lk 1.46 to 47).

---

Facts for the record
about this consistory

February 19, 2012

With the creation of 22 new cardinals in Saturday’s public ordinary consistory, the College of Cardinals now has 213 members of whom 125, being under the age of eighty, are eligible to vote in an eventual conclave for the election of a new Pope.

The non electors, that is cardinals over the age of eighty and ineligible to vote in a conclave, now number 88. Pope Benedict XVI has created eighty-four cardinals in the four consistories of his pontificate. The current members of the College of Cardinals come from seventy-one States, distributed as follows: Europe 119, North America (U.S.A. and Canada) 21, Latin America 32, Africa 17, Asia 20 and Oceania 4.

Following are the names of the 22 new cardinals and the titular churches or diaconate assigned to them:

Electors
- Cardinal Fernando Filoni, diaconate of Nostra Signora di Coromoto in San Giovanni di Dio.
- Cardinal Manuel Monteiro de Castro, diaconate of San Domenico di Guzman.
- Cardinal Santos Abril y Castello, diaconate of San Ponziano.
- Cardinal Antonio Maria Veglio, diaconate of San Cesareo in Palatio.
- Cardinal Giuseppe Bertello, diaconate of Santi Vito, Modesto e Crescenzia.
- Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, diaconate of San Giuseppe dei Falegnami.
- Cardinal Joao Braz de Aviz, diaconate of Sant’Elena fuori Porta Prenestina.
- Cardinal Edwin Frederick O'Brien, diaconate of San Sebastiano at the Palatine.
- Cardinal Domenico Calcagno, diaconate of Annunciazione della Beata Vergine Maria in Via Ardeatina.
- Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi, diaconate of Sacro Cuore di Gesu in Castro Pretorio.
- Cardinal George Alencherry, church of San Bernardo alle Terme.
- Cardinal Thomas Christopher Collins, cjurch of San Patrizio.
- Cardinal Dominik Jaroslav Duka, O.P., church of Santi Marcellino e Pietro.
- Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk, church of San Callisto.
- Cardinal Giuseppe Betori, church of San Marcello.
- Cardinal Timothy Michael Dolan, church of Nostra Signora di Guadalupe in Monte Mario.
- Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, church of San Giovanni Maria Vianney.
- Cardinal John Tong Hon, church of Regina Apostolorum.

Non electors:
- Cardinal Lucian Muresan, church of Sant’Atanasio.
- Cardinal Julien Ries, diaconate of Sant’Antonio di Padova in Circonvallazione Appia.
- Cardinal Prosper Grech, O.S.A., diaconate of Santa Maria Goretti.
- Cardinal Karl Josef Becker, S.J., diaconate of San Giuliano Martire.
[Cardinal Becker is the only new cardinal who chose not to be consecrated a bishop before being createcd cardinal. Both Cardinals Ries and Grech were consecrated as bishops in the past two week.]

ANGELUS TODAY



At noon, Benedict XVI addressed thousands of faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square, and spoke to them of the new cardinals as well as the significance of the observance of the Solemnity of Peter's Chair.

He said the cardinals are intended yo assist the Successor of Peter in leading the Church, and that like him, they are pledged to serve Christ even to death 'in truth and love'.

In this regard, he called Peter's Chair a 'sign of authority...that of Christ, which is based on faith and love".

After the prayers, he greeted English-speaking pilgrims:

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I welcome all the English-speaking visitors present for this Angelus prayer, especially those accompanying the new Cardinals.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus grants healing and life in body and soul in response to faith. May we too believe and trust in Christ, and seek from him both forgiveness of sin and the power to live a new life of grace. Upon all of you I invoke God’s blessings of joy and peace!

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Here is a translation of the Holy Father's Angelus text:

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Dear brothers and sisters:

This Sunday is especially festive here at the Vatican because of the Consistory held yesterday, at which I created 22 new cardinals.

With them, I had the joy this morning of concelebrating the Eucharist in St. Peter's Basilica around the Tomb of the Apostle whom Jesus called to be the 'rock' on which to build his Church (cfr Mt 16,18).

That is why I invite you all to join in praying for these venerated brothers who are now more committed to collaborate with me in the leadership of the universal Church and to give witness to the Gospel to the point of sacrificing their own life if necessary. That is the meaning of the color red pf their garments - the color of blood and of love.

Some of them work in Rome, in the service of the Holy See. Others are pastors of important diocesan Churches; and others have been distinguished by long and much-appreciated activity of study and teaching.

Now they are part of the College of Cardinals, those who most closely work with the Pope in his ministry of communion and evangelization. And we welcome them with joy, recalling what Jesus said to the Twelve Apostles: "Whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all. For the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mk 10,44-45).

This ecclesial event takes place with the liturgical background of the Feast of Peter's Chair or Cathedra, which we celebrate today because this year, February 22, its usual date, is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent.

The cathedra is the seat reserved for a bishop, and gives its name to 'cathedral', the place in which the bishop presides at liturgy and teaches the people.

The Chair of St. Peter, represented in the apse of the Vatican Basilica by a monumental sculpture by Bernini, is a symbol of the special mission of Peter and his successors to pasture the flock of Christ, keeping them together in faith and love.

Already at the start of the second century after Christ, St. Ignatius of Antioch attributed to the Church of Rome a singular primacy, greeting her, in a letter to the Romans, as the Church which 'presides in love'.

This special task of service comes to the community of Rome and its bishop from the fact that the Apostles Peter and Paul shed their blood in this city, along with numerous other martyrs. Thus we come back to the witness of blood and love.

The Chair of St. Peter is, therefore, a sign of authority - that of Christ - based on faith and love.

Dear friends, let us entrust the new cardinals to the maternal protection of the Most Blessed Mary, so that she may help them always in their service to the Church and sustain them in their trials.

Mary, Mother of the Church, help me and my co-workers to work tirelessly for the unity of the People of God and to announce to all peoples the message of salvation, humbly and courageously carrying out our service of truth in love.

---

New Nuncio to Ireland conveys
Pope's dismay at clergy abuse,
will pursue fight relentlessly

February 19, 2012

DUBLIN -Pope Benedict XVI was scandalised and dismayed by the abuse perpetrated by some members of the clergy and of religious congregations, his new envoy to Ireland said today.

Archbishop Charles J Brown told Massgoers at Dublin's Pro-Cathedral the Pope knows the recent years have been difficult for Catholic believers in Ireland.

The new papal nuncio said the Holy Father has been relentless in trying to make changes within the Church and help those abused by clerics.

“Again I speak from my own experience when I tell you that Pope Benedict was scandalised and dismayed as he learned about the tragedy of abuse perpetrated by some members of the clergy and of religious congregations,” said Archbishop Brown, in his homily at the Pro-Cathedral of Dublin.

“He felt deeply the wounds of those who had been harmed and who so often had not been listened to.

“From the beginning, Pope Benedict was resolute and determined to put into place changes which would give the Church the ability to deal more effectively with those who abuse trust, as well as to provide the necessary assistance to those who had been victimised.

“Pope Benedict has been relentless and consistent on this front, and I assure you that he will continue to be.”

Ireland has been rocked by several clerical abuse reports in recent years, including the sickening Ryan and Murphy inquiries which revealed paedophile priests were moved from parish to parish and protected from the law.

The Mass was the first celebrated by the US-born Archbishop since he presented his credentials to President Michael D Higgins during the week.

Representatives from Dublin parishes, church organisations and the diplomatic corps attended the service.

Archbishop Brown had worked at the congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith since 1994, and directly with Caridnal Jospeh Ratzinger when he was Prefect until he became Pope.

Pope Benedict has been asked to attend the 50th Eucharistic Congress taking place in Dublin in June.

The Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, told the congregation the Holy See and Ireland have deep-rooted links which go back long into history.

The controversial closure of the Irish embassy there will end Ireland’s 83-year diplomatic presence in Rome.

“Irish people have profound bonds of affection for the Holy See,” Archbishop Martin said at the Mass.

“The diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Ireland have been fruitful in fostering the interests of Ireland, of the Holy See and of our common interests in the good of the human family.

“International relations and diplomacy are concerned not just with the political and economic challenges of the day, no matter how vital, but with the fundamental values and aspirations of people which must then shape relations between peoples and states, and in this context the Holy See plays a vital role.”

David Cooney, secretary general at the Department of Foreign Affairs, has been nominated to take up the role of non-resident ambassador to the Holy See.

The last papal nuncio in Ireland, Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza, was recalled to Rome just days after Taoiseach Enda Kenny strongly criticised the Vatican for what he said was an attempt to frustrate an inquiry into child sex abuse cases in Cloyne.

Mr Kenny accused Church hierarchy of downplaying the rape of children to protect its power and reputation and said the Church’s inability to deal with the abuse cases showed a culture of “dysfunction, disconnection, elitism and narcissism” at the Vatican.


The site of the Archdiocese of Dublin provides this information:

Liturgical reception for
the new Apostolic Nuncio

February 19, 2012

A solemn liturgical reception was held Sunday in St. Mary's Pro Cathedral to welcome His Excellency Archbishop Charles J. Brown, Apostolic Nuncio in Ireland.

Here is a transcript of Mons. Brown's homily:

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Brothers and sisters in Christ, it is an honour and a joy for me to celebrate Holy Mass with you this morning here in this historic Pro-Cathedral.

I am deeply grateful to Archbishop Diarmuid Martin for his kind invitation and for his very gracious welcome. I would like to begin by thanking the priests, as well as the men and women religious here today, and the many members of different Catholic organizations and associations.

In a particular way, I am grateful for the presence of representatives of other Christian communities. I thank the representative of the Lord Mayor for coming and the members of the diplomatic community, my colleagues.

I am appreciative also of the presence of a representative of the Government of Ireland, officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and all the other public authorities here present. Thank you for welcoming me.

This Mass is my first public celebration of the Church’s liturgy since I was received by the President of Ireland last Thursday, and delivered to him the Letter from Pope Benedict XVI appointing me as Nuncio – which is the first public act of any new ambassador. I was grateful for the very warm welcome accorded me by the President and by the members of the Government who were there with him.

Having presented my credentials to the President, I must say that I can think of no better way of marking the beginning of my service in this country than by celebrating Mass in this place, the Pro-Cathedral of this diverse and dynamic Archdiocese.

I stand before you this morning as someone who represents various realities: I am the descendent of men and women of Ireland, who emigrated from this island, possessing little more than the treasure of their Catholic faith, which they, through the generations, have passed on to me.

Were it not for the faith of Ireland, I would not be a Catholic today. I am someone who worked for many years in the Roman Curia, the central administration of the Catholic Church, where I had the privilege of working with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI; I am a newly-ordained Bishop of the Catholic Church and as such, with all my limitations and defects, a successor of the Apostles.

This morning, however, I stand before you principally as the representative of the Bishop of Rome, the successor of the Apostle Peter, Pope Benedict XVI. In his name, I greet you all and I bring you his best wishes for all the people of Ireland, for the government, and all the members of the diplomatic community.

As I mentioned, I have worked for many years very closely with the Holy Father and I can tell you from my personal experience that he has always had – and he continues to have – a great love for the people of Ireland and a high regard for the Catholic Church in Ireland, with its history of missionary richness and tenacious faith.

Pope Benedict knows as well that these recent years have been difficult for Catholic believers in Ireland. Again I speak from my own experience when I tell you that Pope Benedict was scandalized and dismayed as he learned about the tragedy of abuse perpetrated by some members of the clergy and of religious congregations.

He felt deeply the wounds of those who had been harmed and who so often had not been listened to. From the beginning, Pope Benedict was resolute and determined to put into place changes which would give the Church the ability to deal more effectively with those who abuse trust, as well as to provide the necessary assistance to those who had been victimized. Pope Benedict has been relentless and consistent on this front, and I assure you that he will continue to be.

n our Gospel for today’s Mass, Jesus encounters a paralyzed man who is brought to him in Capernaum. The friends or family of this man bring him to Jesus in order to be healed physically. Indeed, they go to great trouble in carrying their friend to Jesus, lowering him down from the open roof above.

Yet the curious thing about this miracle story is that Jesus does not heal the man from his paralysis in his first exchange with him. Instead, he says to him: “My child, your sins are forgiven”. The scribes who were present take exception to these words of the Lord. They accuse him of blasphemy, because only God can forgive sins.

The Lord is aware of their thoughts (as he is aware of ours), and says to his critics: “But to prove to you that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”, he turns to the paralytic and says: “I order you, get up, pick up your stretcher and go off home”. At that moment the paralyzed man stands up, picks up his stretcher and leaves the house, walking through the crowd.

Pope Benedict himself commented on this Gospel passage during his Angelus talk in February 2009, and he explained that this “Gospel account shows that Jesus has the power not only to heal a sick body but also to forgive sins; indeed, the physical recovery is a sign of the spiritual healing that his forgiveness produces. Sin is effectively a sort of paralysis of the spirit from which only the power of God’s merciful love can set us free, allowing us to rise again and continue on the path of goodness”.

The reality of physical paralysis is used by the Lord as a way of teaching us what sin (which we can understand as separation from God or as rejection of God’s path for us) does to the human person. It is not the case at all that Jesus is saying that the physical paralysis of the man before him was caused by that man’s sin; instead, paralysis and subsequent healing become visible signs of the invisible reality of the effects of the Lord’s grace in our lives.

Sin should not be understood primarily as a breaking of a rule or as violating the regulations. Sin is not, in the first instance, something legal. Sin is better understood as separating ourselves from God, who is life itself, or rejecting God’s path for us, the path that gives us life and grace, spiritual energy.

And so, paralysis becomes an appropriate visual symbol of the spiritual state produced by sin, by this separation from God. Sin, of course primarily affects individuals. It is a spiritual disease which afflicts us, which can paralyze us.

It is the encounter with Christ which begins to heal us of this infirmity, and that encounter, for us, takes place in his Church, which is his body, through our proper and fruitful reception of the sacraments, principally the Holy Eucharist.

One of the most ancient texts of the Church, written just several decades after the death and resurrection of the Lord, the Letter of Saint Ignatius of Antioch to the Ephesians, speaks of the Holy Eucharist as medicine, “the medicine of immortality”.

But this separation from God or this rejection of the kind of life that he proposes for us is not only a reality that affects us as individuals. It also affects our relationships with others and the wider community.

The Church herself is wounded by the sins of her members. And just as sin produces a kind of spiritual paralysis in the individual, a radical lack of the spiritual energy which is grace, so too there can be a kind of spiritual paralysis in sections of the Church, where that energy seems to have disappeared, enthusiasm is dissipated, liturgical life grows cold.

When this happens in the Church, in a certain sense, we need to do exactly what an individual does – come again into the presence of the Lord, of Christ himself, so that he can heal and restore us to life. The Church, my friends, does not live because of offices, committees and structures (as important as these may be). She lives by the presence of Jesus Christ – our way, our truth and our life. And his presence is experienced in many ways, but most powerfully in his word and in his sacraments – above all, in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.

We need to deepen our understanding of this reality and this is the reason for the important gathering which will soon take place “close to home” we might say – here in the cosmopolitan city of Dublin.

I refer, of course, to the upcoming International Eucharistic Congress which will be held from June 10th to the 17th of this year, a very significant event not only for the Catholic Church in Ireland, but for the universal Church. It has been carefully and creatively organized and prepared.

What is the point of such a gathering? It is to renew our faith in the reality which is at the absolute center of Catholic life – the real presence of Christ himself in the Eucharist.

Ultimately, it is renewed faith and love for the Lord in the Eucharist that will renew our lives and renew the life of the Church. It is his true presence in the Eucharist which can heal our own spiritual paralysis, which fills us with light and joy, which gives meaning to our lives, and which prepares us for the life of the world to come.

It is a great joy for me to be in Ireland, beginning my time here as Pope Benedict’s representative, especially in this year of the International Eucharistic Congress. Something new is indeed happening. I am convinced that the Lord is preparing something beautiful for his Church.

May I ask your support and your prayers for my mission, as I thank you from the heart for being here with me today. Let us ask the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, to intercede for us and for Ireland as we strive to follow her s on more closely.

---

Archbishop Martin's words of welcome for Mons. Brown:

---

In our ceremony this morning we call to mind Archbishop Brown’s mission as the representative of the Holy See in Ireland: his task is to witness among us, within the Church and within society in Ireland, to the mission of the successor of Peter - a mission to foster deeper communion in the life of the Church and to foster communion, harmony and peace in the human family that is so often fragmented.

We wish you God’s blessing as you begin your ministry. We wish you personally fulfilment and happiness and we assure you of a warm welcome and support.

We welcome the help of Pope Benedict in leading our wounded Church towards repentance and healing. We desire to work together to build a different, more humble Church, but also a renewed Church, confident of the contribution of the teaching of Jesus Christ for the Ireland of tomorrow.

Some have noted that Archbishop Brown is an American and a native English speaker, as if that were something new. Archbishop Brown is actually the fourth Apostolic Nuncio to come to us from the United States. The first Nuncio in Dublin, Archbishop Paschal Robinson, though a native of Dublin grew up in the United States and worked there as a journalist before becoming a priest. Archbishop Gerald O’Hara, who was Nuncio in the 1950’s, and Archbishop Joseph McGeough, who was here in the 1960’s were also both Americans. Archbishop Emanuel Gerada, born in Malta and Nuncio in the 1970’s, was also a native English speaker.

What unites us here this morning and what distinguishes your ministry is not our native language or our ancestry but the common Catholic faith we profess in Jesus Christ and our common commitment to ensure that the Church of Jesus Christ be truly a sign of the unity of humankind bound together through the presence of God’s love among us.

The Holy See and Ireland have deep-rooted links, which go back long into our history. Irish people have profound bonds of affection for the Holy See. The diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Ireland have been fruitful in fostering the interests of Ireland, of the Holy See and of our common interests in the good of the human family.

International relations and diplomacy are concerned not just with the political and economic challenges of the day, no matter how vital, but with the fundamental values and aspirations of people which must then shape relations between peoples and States and in this context the Holy See plays a vital role.

---

The AP uses Brown's homily as an occasion to resurrect many false allegations it has been pushing about the Church on this issue, so I am posting the story for the record, part of a continuing documentation of AP's clear bias.:

Vatican's envoy to Ireland:
Pope 'relentless and consistent'
in tackling child abuse problem
by Shawn Pogatchnik


DUBLIN. Feb. 19 (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI has been "relentless and consistent" in seeking to oust child abusers from the priesthood worldwide, the Pontiff's new American envoy to Ireland said Sunday in his first homily here.

Archbishop Charles Brown, a 52-year-old Manhattan native and veteran Vatican insider, was making his first public address since officially taking up his post as Irish papal nuncio three days ago.

"From the beginning, Pope Benedict was resolute and determined to put into place changes which would give the church the ability to deal more effectively with those who abuse trust. ... Pope Benedict has been relentless and consistent on this front," Brown told worshippers and diplomatic guests at a service at Dublin's Pro-Cathedral.

The first-time diplomat faces a delicate repair job in Ireland, a traditionally Catholic nation that has seen Mass attendance plummet in line with nearly two decades of pedophile-priest scandals.

Last year Prime Minister Enda Kenny accused the Vatican of overseeing a cover-up culture that encouraged the rape of children. The Vatican took two months to issue a legalistic rebuttal that sidestepped its refusal to help a series of Irish state-ordered investigations.

Ireland then closed its Vatican embassy but insisted this was purely a cost-cutting measure, a claim widely disbelieved in Ireland since the country's ongoing struggle to stave off national bankruptcy.

Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, widely considered to be Ireland's most reform-minded Catholic leader, told reporters he expected that Ireland and the Vatican would compromise on arrangements to open a new, cheaper Irish embassy in Rome. Ireland still operates one embassy in the Italian capital, but the Vatican insists that countries fund completely separate diplomatic facilities.

Speaking to reporters outside the cathedral, Martin said he was confident that the Vatican would permit Ireland to open "a leaner embassy" that is separate but on the same site as Ireland's Italian embassy.

In his homily, Brown reiterated the Vatican's longheld line that its leaders have never obstructed Irish efforts to identify and punish several hundred child abusers in parishes and religious orders.

Brown noted his own 17-year work as an official of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the powerful Vatican body that enforces church policies — including the removal of pedophiles from the priesthood. Benedict, then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, oversaw the body from 1981 until his promotion to pope in 2005.

"I speak from my own experience when I tell you that Pope Benedict was scandalized and dismayed as he learned about the tragedy of abuse perpetrated by some members of the clergy and of religious congregations," Brown said. "He felt deeply the wounds of those who had been harmed and who so often had not been listened to."

Ratzinger in 2001 was responsible for a new church edict ordering bishops worldwide to forward all known abuse cases to the congregation, so that offending priests could be more effectively defrocked under terms of the church's own canon laws.

But that and several other key Church messages, including the Pope's 2010 papal letter to the Irish people, have ignored accusations that Vatican policies discouraged Irish bishops from telling police about crimes. To this day, official Vatican policy remains ambiguous on the matter, stressing the need to observe he Church's own rulebook. [This is flat-out false. The official Vatican response last year to the Irish government's demand for explanations goes into ample detail to disprove this loose allegation, also addressed in various ways by the recent symposium on child abuse at the Gregorian!... You see how insidious media is about peddling the myths they create - this one ploy: sheer repetition of false information in supposed background data, so that the repeated mistruths come to be considered 'facts'!]

A decade of Irish fact-finding commissions into the scandals has determined that Church officials did not tell police of any crimes until the mid-1990s [which is still much better than the state of Irish law at the time which did not require mandatory reporting!] and only because Irish abuse victims had started to sue the Church [Very much a misleading and even non-sequitur post-facto interpretation!], challenging decades of Irish deference to Church authority. One bishop was found to have continued to cover up crimes as recently as 2008. [One bishop out of 26, and that bishop, who was private secretary to the last three Popes before Benedict XVI, apparently thought his 'extraordinary biodata entitled him to ignore canon law about reporting!]

The Vatican refused to respond to letters sent by Irish investigators seeking access to the church's secret files on abuse cases in Rome. The Vatican later said it couldn't respond because the investigators had failed to file their information requests through the Irish government. [This, too, is amply addressed in the official Vatican response, but the AP chooses to ignore it and insists on its version of events!]

More than 14,000 people have received abuse settlements in Ireland exceeding euro1.2 billion ($1.6 billion). The payouts have been funded largely by taxpayers rather than the church, another source of continuing church-state tensions. [Excuse me? I need to check out this statement!]

Did Paolo Rodari of Il Foglio and Giacomo Galeazzi of La Stampa agree between themselves to write today that Georg Gaenswein is practically the only person Benedict XVI trusts in the current intra-Vatican wars? Or are their articles published on the same day just a case of synchronicity? Probably the latter, as their respective arguments are not alike. In any case, here's Rodari's presentation first:

In the Palace wars,
they say the Pope trusts
only Don Giorgio
by Paolo Rodari
Translated from

February 19, 2012

One of the consequences of Vatileaks - the publication of confidential documents from the Secretariat of State - is that no one is sure right now about where they stand where their jobs are concerned.

No one except the Pope, of course, whose resignation is out of the question. But recent events have upset various equilibria and it is not ruled out that in the coming months, many administrative changes will follow.

The other day, at the pre-consistory assembly of cardinals, Ouse Dei Cardinal Julian Herranz, who was one of Cardinal Ratzinger's leading electors in the 2005 Conclave, surprised his colleagues by openly seeking clarification of the current muddle.

The confrontation between supporters of Cardinal Angelo Sodano - the so-called Vatican 'Old Guard'- and those of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone remains open, and the impression seems to be that anything is possible between now and December when Bertone turns 78 [the same age at which Cardinal Sodano retired, that is, three years beyond canonical retirement age].

Benedict XVI in recent days has indirectly appealed for calm amid the tempest, and typically, he apparently wants no hasty moves.

One thing is certain. There is one person whom Benedict XVI trusts, with increasing conviction, one with whom he can play off his ideas about important decisions.

That person is Georg Gaenswein, the Pope's private secretary. German like the Pope, he is reserved and has generally stayed in the background - perhaps in a conscious attempt to be different from his predecessor, now Cardinal Stanislas Dziwisz who played a considerable political role as John Paul II's private secretary.

Gaenswein has increasingly been the indispensable funnel through which men of the Roman Curia must go through if they wish to have direct contact with the Holy Father. And it's a measure that is decisive as it has never been at the Apostolic Palace. [If only to spare the Pope unnecessary expenditure of time and energy at his age!]

Obviously, Papa Ratzinger is different from Papa Wojtyla, who delegated much of his powers of governance to Dziwisz and allowed a group of close Polish friends, among them the pyschiatrist Wanda Poltawska, to take part in planning his missions and achieving his objectives.

Gaenswein and Ingrid Stampa, the Pope's housekeeper-confidant when he was a cardinal (along with her fellow German and Schoenstatt lay member Birgit Wansing, she continues to oversee the integrity of the Pope's texts for publication), by no means have the same 'influence' over the Curia that John Paul II's trusted friends had.

But something apparently has been changing in recent months. Gaenswein is believed to have played an important role in some recent appointments made by the Pope. Not, of course, that he has proposed candidates of his own, but to make sure that the entire range of opinions get to the Pope.

He has apparently made sure that the Pope is informed of all the possibilities in play within the Roman Curia and the College of Cardinals. More so since the recent 'troubles' began.

Part of Gaenswein's relatively modest background role in the first years of the Ratzinger Pontificate may be due to the fact, far from secondary, that he was supposed to be a transitional private secretary until Cardinal Ratzinger retired.

He became his private secretary replacing Mons. Josef Clemens, who had been the cardinal's private secretary since 1984, when in 2003, the cardinal, anticipating his impending retirement, moved to have Mons. Clemens named secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, a post he continues to hold.

Gaenswein therefore knew when he was appointed that it was not a long-term job. Instead, the unexpected happened in April 2005 - Clemens would say afterward that the possibility of Cardinal Ratzinger becoming Pope had 'never' been imagined - and Gaenswein found himself in a whole new game, in a truly key role, but one in which he had hoped to continue being in the background.

In a profile on Gaenswein entitled "The man behind the Pope" at the time of the papal visit to the UK,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/16/georg-ganswein-pope-papal-secretary
John Hooper of London's Guardian newspaper wrote of Gaenswein's upbringing in the "idyllic Catholic environment of the Black Forest", the son of a blacksmith who became the proprietor of a firm selling agricultural machinery.

In his years as private secretary to the Pope, Hooper says, Gaenswein has been seen to gain enough influence as to earn him not a few 'enemies'. Every time he says No to a request from some people who insist on having a private appointment with the Pope, Hooper says, "he makes a new enemy, especially among those who work in the Roman Curia".

Hooper also wrote: "Formerly a lecturer at a papal university [the Pontifical Santa Croce University] funded by the theologically conservative Opus Dei fellowship, Gänswein has been blamed by some for reinforcing the Pope's conservatism". [How silly! That's like saying Benedict XVI consults his private secretary about theology!]

The writer is quick to note that any role Gaenswein plays around the Pope has to do with practical decisions, some of them decisive - and such a role may have become more important in these days of loose lips and questionable loyalties.


Mons. Gaenswein with new Cardinal Edwin O'Brien. GG rep[resented the Pope at the receptions held by each of the new cardinals for their wellwishers the afternoon after the consistory.

Giacomo Galeazzi, who has a tendency sometimes to overstate the situation, goes as far as to call GG the 'grey eminence' in this Pontificate. Which is a mistaken use of the term. Originally coined to describe the right-hand man of France's 17th-century Cardinal Richelieu who rose to become Louis XIII's Chief Minister., the term has since been used to designate a highly influential behind-the-scenes unofficial adviser to an important personality. One would have to be delirious to think of GG in such terms. Besides, truly great men like Benedict XVI do not have and do not need a 'grey eminence'. From what Galeazzi decribes, GG is more like a super-secretary who has the initiative to act above and beyond what is expected of a secretary but without over-stepping certain bounds.


The grey eminence who protects the Pope:
Mons. Gaenswein emerges as mediator
among warring factions in the Vatican
by GIACOMO GALEAZZI
Translated from

February 19, 2012

VATICAN CITY - He is 56 and he has been the private secretary of Joseph Ratzinger for the past ten years. Son of a blacksmith-turned-small-entrepreneur from the Black Forest, he is a great fan of Pink Floyd {Really???] and has a doctorate in canon law from the Pope's Alma Mater, the University of Munich.

When Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope, Avvenire, the Italian bishops' newspaper, was quick to note his secretary's physical assets: "Blond, six feet tall, athletic physique, and decidedly a good-looking man".

For the most past, he has been the man in the black cassock and pink sash who primarily looks after the Pope's daily appointments. More than a majordomo, but hardly a spin doctor.

But since the dossier wars erupted in the Vatican between the Old Guard close to Cardinal Angelo Sodano and the current leadership of the Secretariat of State who are loyal to Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the role may have changed.

Don Georg Gaenswein has become, like his predecessor Don Stanislaw Dziwisz in the later years of the Woytyla Pontificate, the baricenter and mediator of equilibria within a Curia in which, amid anonymous fliers and poison letters [the Italian term is very picturesque and a great wordplay 'velina e veleni'], crows have been cackling and and moles are hard at work. [Unfair to attribute the skulduggery to the entire Curia, when so far, only people at the Secretariat of State appear involved in Vatileaks. Even Vigano was ex-Secretariat of State, and his main targets were people uspposedly close to Cardinal Bertone.]

Someone who has been described in the UK press as 'a cross between George Clooney and Hugh Grant, but more beautiful than either', the most serious family disagreement he recalls was over the length of his haircut. He was fascinated by stock trading until he found his true love - the priesthood.

After earning his doctorate in canon law from the University of Munich, he came to the Vatican to work at the Congregation for Divine Worship, to end up after a year, at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Meanwhile, he taught canon law at the Pontifical University of Santa Croce. In 2003, Cardinal Ratzinger decided to make him his private secretary, and since then, he has only shown total devotion to him.

Now, it seems that the Pope's private secretary is no longer just his 'guardian angel' screening out non-essential appointments, but has also become the dominus or virtual master of the Sacri Palazzi [Italian term meaning literally 'holy buildings' for the Apostolic Palace; 'palazzo' in Italian primarily means 'building'].

Shortly after the 2005 Conclave, he had described his new environment to the German media with some trepidation and distance: "The Vatican is also a sort of royal court with the gossip and small talk that characterize courts. However, there are also arrows that are aimed deliberately at specific targets. It's one of the first things I had to learn to live with".

Then he confides something that now sounds almost prophetic in the incandescent atmosphere following publication of the Vigano letters (with its accusations of financial wrongdoing against friends of the Secretary of State), to confidential notes about IOR and a bizarre memorandum alleging a plot to kill the Pope: "Definitely a weakness are the indiscretions. Unfortunately, there seem to be constant leaks about prospective appointments, preliminary drafts of documents, or planned disciplinary measures. It is not just unpleasant, but there's the risk of bringing in external influences that can only aggravate the situation".

Having been at home in Santa Croce as a professor, he appeared as the very antithesis of of John Paul II's very influential private secretary, Mons. Stanislaw Dziwisz, now Cardinal and Archbishop of Cracow.

Of the thousands of decisions on routine administration that John Paul II ignored, his right-hand man had the decisive voice. Papa Wojtyla reigned, but he governed. He was never absent from any important meetings that the Pope had, formal or informal.

But with Papa Ratzinger, Gaenswein, almost timid, has been a discreet presence and certainly not a surrogate of the Pope. The German Pope always speaks one on one with his important guests (except when he needs an interpreter).

But now, it seems that Don Giorgio is involved in many practical decisions, smoothing out edges where necessary. A preview of his 'baptism of fire' as a behind-the-scenes worker came during the Boffo case in the summer of 2009. He was the peacemaker in the confrontation between Cardinals Bertone and Ruini. [Dino Boffo, the talented former tri-media executive for the CEI, was a Ruini appointee; and it was alleged that Bertone's men were responsible for initiating the false media expose that led to Boffo's resignation. The newspaper editor responsible for the falsehood retracted three months later, but the damage was done.]

He appears to be coming closer to the Dziwisz model. Dziwisz became the most powerful man in the Vatican because of his sheer proximity to the Pope. [But one doubts that Benedict XVI will ever allow that to happen. He has never given carte blanche, for instance, to Cardinal Bertone, formally the #2 man at the Vatican, and his friend since 1994 - opposing him on many important appointments, and making him withdraw important decisions he took on his own, such as the attempt to get controlling interest in Milan's San Raffele Medical Center].

In 2007, Gaenswein deplored 'clerical envy' at the Vatican, to journalist Peter Seewald. And he confided this: "There is no school for papal etiquette. What I had was a one-on-one conversation with Mons, Dziwisz, about two weeks after the Conclave" (on the occasion of the Ratzinger team's first visit to the papal apartment).

"Don Stanislaw handed me an envelop with some documents and the key to a very old safe made in Germany. After we talked, he said, 'Now you have a task that is very important and also very beautiful but very, very difficult. My only advice is that you must not allow the Pope to be crushed by anything or anyone. And how to do that, only you will be able understand from experience".

Gaenswein won't say what the documents in the envelop were. "They are things that a Pope's secretary hands down to the next one". An example of useful discretion - in a Curia with its share of disobedients, Don Stanislaw may have something to teach, after all.

Why all the carping over
the Pope's new cardinals???

I continue to be perplexed and frustrated that almost every Italian Vaticanista, including Andrea Tornielli, and Anglophone commentators like John Allen keep harping on 1) the lack of proportional representation in the College of Cardinals, and 2) too many Italians and too many Curial officials named cardinals - when there are very obvious reasons for both of these circumstances. And yet, the same complaints are raised every time there is a consistory or when the composition of the College of Cardinals is under discussion - so tiresome already - without anyone attempting to look at these obvious reasons, none of which are arcane or ideological, but sheer and practical common sense!

Also, any way you look at it, the objections are a direct reproach to Benedict XVI whom no one could possibly accuse of acting irrationally!

The latest article of this kind is from the arch-fiend Marco Politi who, as usual, unhesitatingly blames it all on this Pope [whom he said in a recent article, 'should never have been elected at all', as though his will were more decisive than the Holy Spirit!).

To Objection #1, the simple answer is that the College of Cardinals was never meant to be a representative assembly.
a. The Church is not a democracy - if it were, she would be subject to change at every shift of the 'democratic' whim, and it would no longer represent faith, which is supposed to be constant.
b. The College of Cardinals is a meritocracy, or so it has been in modern times, after the kings and emperors of Europe lost the right to name bishops and cardinals.
c. Because of this, the churches who have been playing a principal role the longest still have the advantage of merit and a deeper bench to draw from than the younger churches have. In time - and not too far in the future - the churches of the Third World will come to have the quality and quantity of bishops eligible on an equal footing with those of the First World, and their numbers will start to reflect better the proportion of Catholics they represent.

NB: If the present membership of the College of Cardinals represents only 72 of the 180 or so countries with which the Vatican has relations, will Politi et al argue that the Church should name a cardinal from each of those countries not yet 'represented'?

At the Sunday Angelus, Benedict XVI mentioned the three criteria by which cardinals are named: they have served important dioceses with distinction; they have served the Holy See with distinction in offices other than that of being a diocesan bishop; or they have led a distinguished life of study and teaching in the service of the Church. Quod erat demostrandum!

To Objection #2, expressed as 'troppi Curiali, troppi Italiani" (Too many Curial officials, too many Italians) - as if Benedict XVI should have known better, or that he somehow succumbed to Cardinal Bertone's scheming - the answer is:
a. Heads of Curial offices need to deal with bishops around the world to enforce their directives in the name of the Pope. So many bishops are arrogant enough already to consider themselves Pope in their respective domains, that a Curial head of office needs to outrank them ecclesially to be plausible. This is a practical consideration that must have been the original rationale for associating Curial leadership with a cardinal's rank.

No one questioned the practice when it was done by Paul VI and John Paul II (The Curia sort of metastasized in scope and size under them). Why is Benedict XVI being faulted now?

b. Heads of Curial offices are not lightly chosen by the Pope, who names people with special competence in the sector they are assigned to. There is no particular reason why Benedict XVI would choose Italians for the Curia over other nationalities, all else being equal.

It just so happens that this time around, there is an unusual number of new Curial appointees (10 out of 22 Curial heads) which reflects the final turnaround from John Paul II appointees to an almost fully Benedictine curia. (It took seven years for most of the JPII appointees to reach retirement age).

Five of the 10 new Curial Cardinals are Italians who head 'technical' offices concerned with administration and finance - mostly internal to the Vatican and necessarily involving much dealing with the Italian state bureaucracy.

One could understand that Benedict XVI is working on the practical assumption that this is best done by hard-nosed Italians who have had prior diocesan and administrative experience of consequence, and who are also eminently qualified for the sector they are being named to (Legislative Texts, Patrimony of the Holy See, Economic Affairs, and the Governatorate). In their case, too, a cardinal will carry more clout than an ordinary bishop.

The three other new Italian cardinals occupy premier positions - prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, Fernando Filoni, whose long experience as Nuncio to mission countries and five-year service as Sostituto at the Secretariat of State qualifies him eminently for the job; Antonio Maria Veglio, president of the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Refugees; and the Archbishop of Florence, Giuseppe Betori.

Four of the ten new Curial cardinals are of different nationalities: the Brazilian Joao Braz de Aviz, prefect of Religious Orders; the Portuguese Manuel Monteiro de Castro, Major Penitentiary; the Spaniard Santos Abril y Castello, Arch-Priest of Santa Maria Maggiore; and the American Edwin O'Brien, Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre.

How silly and irresponsible it is to suggest that Benedict XVI elevated the Curial 'technical' chiefs just to gratify Cardinal Bertone and 'pack' the College of Cardinals with persons indebted to Bertone and therefore ready to do Bertone's will! That implies that the Pope is allowing himself to be used as an instrument to influence the next Conclave, and it's a grave insult to Benedict XVI who has never been accused or even suspected of playing political footsies.

If Politi, Allen et al can name any Curial head appointed by Benedict XVI who is incompetent or unqualified for his job, or any extraordinarily outstanding bishop of the Third World whose work and merit the Vatican has ignored all these years and failed to acknowledge with a red hat, then say so. Obviously they can't.

********

So there are now 30 Italian cardinal electors out of 125. Although Pius XII internationalized the College of Cardinals so that for the first time in centuries, Italians were no longer the majority, Italian cardinals never voted as a bloc in the decades that they were an overwhelming majority or had a virtual monopoly of the Conclave. For the simple reason that each faction put up its own candidate for Pope. Their failure or inability to unite resulted in John XXIII's unheralded election in 1968, and the election of both John Paul I and John Paul II as the compromise candidates who broke the deadlock between competing conservative and progressive Italian bishops. (Paul VI, like Pius XII before him, was the prohibitive favorite during the Conclave that elected him).

In 2005, the Italians did not have a really strong candidate, and the progressives Martini and Tettamanzi ended up getting 9 and 2 votes, respectively, in the first balloting, knocking them out of contention - while the influential Italian conservative cardinals went into the Conclave supporting Joseph Ratzinger, so one can hardly accuse the Italians of jingoism.

It baffles me whose candidacy Bertone might be preparing for in the next conclave [if he is, I find it distasteful of him to even be thinking about it or making so obvious that he is!] - it certainly can't be his own. He'll find himself like Tettamanzi, whom the Italian media sought to sell - to me, inexplicably - as the shoo-in candidate for Pope in 2005 and ended up getting no more than two votes!

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/02/2012 22:06]

Monday, February 20, Seventh Week in Ordinary Time

The Shrine at Fatima celebrated the centenary of Jacinta's birth in 2009r (photo, extreme right), and of Francisco's birth last year; second from right, a Portuguese newspaper's
coverage of the Sept. 1917 apparition and 'miracle of the sun'.
BLESSED JACINTA AND FRANCISCO MARTO (Portugal, 1910-1920 and 1908-1919, respectively), Visionaries of Fatima
The story of the three peasant children of Fatima - Jacinta and Francisco, and their older cousin Lucia Dos Santos - is the best-known and best documented
20th-century story of divine favor on the humble. Three apparitions of an angel in 1916 preceded the six apparitions to them of the Virgin Mary on the 13th
day of each month, from May to September 1917, the last of them attended by 90,000 people who attested to seeing the 'miracle of the sun'. The two younger
children died shortly after the apparitions, victims of an influenza epidemic that swept Europe after the First World War. But the lives they led in that short
time were so exemplary in holiness, to the point of practising stringent self-mortification, that it was obvious these two pre-teen children had undergone
an experience of divine grace. When their bodies were exhumed in 1935 and again in 1951 (for re-burial in the Basilica of Our Lady in Fatima), Jacinta's face
was found to be incorrupt. They were beatified by special decree in 2000, and John Paul II presided at their beatification rites in Fatima, attended by their
cousin Lucia (who died in 2005 after spending most of her life as a Carmelite nun in Coimbra). February 20 is the day Jacinta died.
Readings for today's Mass: usccb.org/bible/readings/022012.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

The Holy Father received the new cardinals, with their families and well-wishers, at the Aula Paolo VI.
Address in various languages.


No OR today.

Pope meets new cardinals
with their families and guests
February 20, 2012


Right, Cardinal Dolan and his mother Shirley; and left, the new cardinals and their family members and delegations stand for the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI into Aula Paolo VI.

Pope Benedict held the traditional post-consistory audience today with newly created Cardinals and the family members and pilgrim delegations who came to Rome for the consistory.

Some 4,000 people gathered in the Aula Paolo VI to hear the Holy Father’s greetings. He addressed the assembly in the native languages of the new cardinals.

After the Italians (7 new cardinals), the next largest language group were the Anglophones (6), followed by German (2), Portuguese (2), and Spanish, French, Czech, Dutch and Romanian (1 each).



Here's a translation of the Holy Father's greeting:

---

Dear Cardinals,
Dear Brothers in the Episcopate and Priesthood,
Dear Brothers and Sisters:

He started out in Italian:

It is with great joy that I meet you, family members and friends of the new cardinals after the solemn celebrations of the Consistory, during which your beloved Pastors were called to become part of the College of Cardinals.

I therefore have the opportunity to express in a more direct and intimate manner my sincere greeting to everyone, and in particular, my felicitations and bests wishes to the new cardinals.

May this important and evocative event be for those of you present and for all who are linked in various ways to the new cardinals, a reason and further motivation for you to be closer to them in affection.

May you feel even closer to their heart and their apostolic concern. Listen with hope to their words as fathers and teachers. Be united with them and among yourselves in faith and in charity in order to be more fervent and courageous witnesses for Christ.

I greet you, dear cardinals from the Church in Italy - Cardinal Fernando Filoni, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelizsaqtion of Peoples; Cardinal Antonio Maria Vegliò, President of the Pontifical Council for Ministry to Migrants and Itinerant Workers; Cardinal Giuseppe Bertello, President of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State, and of the Governatorate; Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, President of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts; Cardinal Domenico Calcagno, President of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See; Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi, President of the Prefecture of Economic Affairs of the Holy See; and
Cardinal Giuseppe Betori, Archbishop of Florenze.

Venerated brothers, may the affection and prayers of so many persons dear to you sustain you in your service to the Church, so that each of you may render generous witness to the Gospel of truth and love.

In French, he said:

[I greet the French-speaking pilgrims, especially the Belgians who accompanied His Eminence Julien Cardinal Ries. May your loyalty to Christ remain firm and determined in order to make your witness more credible.

Our society, which has known moments of uncertainty and doubt, needs the clarity of Christ. May each Christian bear witness with faith and courage, and may the coming season of Lent allow a return to God. I wish you all a happy pilgrimage.

In English, he said:

I am pleased to extend a warm greeting to the English-speaking Prelates whom I had the joy of raising to the dignity of Cardinal in Saturday’s Consistory: Cardinal Edwin Frederick O’Brien, Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem; Cardinal George Alencherry, Major Archbishop of Ernakulam-Angamaly of the Syro-Malabars (India); Cardinal Thomas Christopher Collins, Archbishop of Toronto (Canada); Cardinal Timothy Michael Dolan, Archbishop of New York (the United States of America); Cardinal John Tong Hon, Bishop of Hong Kong (the People’s Republic of China); Cardinal Prosper Grech, O.S.A., Emeritus Professor of various Roman Universities and Consultor of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

I also extend a cordial welcome to the family members and friends who join them today. I ask you to continue to support the new Cardinals by your prayers as they take up their important responsibilities in the service of the Apostolic See.

In German:

I address a heartfelt greeting to the two new German-speaking cardinals - the Archbishop of Berlin, Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, and Cardinal Karl Josef Becker of the Society of Jesus.

O assure you of my closeness and prayers for the special service that has been entrusted to you in the universal Church, and call on the protection of Mary, Mother of the Church.

I also greet with joy the family members and friends, as well as the pilgrims from the cardinals' home dioceses of Berlin and Cologne, their collaborators in various Church institutions, the representatives of political and public life as well as their regional compatriots who have come to Rome for this consistory.

I also ask you to offer your prayers for the new cardinals so that, by the symbol of the red color they now wear, they may be sacrifice-ready witnesses to truth and loyal co-workers of the Successor of Peter.
In Spanish:

I affectionately greet Cardinal Santos Abril y Castello, Arch-Priest of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, along with his family members, and the bishops, priests, religious and laymen who came especially from Spain for this occasion.

I ask you all to accompany with your prayers and spiritual closeness the new members of the College of Cardinals, in order that, filled with love of God and closely united to the Successor of Peter, they may continue their spiritual and apostolic mission with total faithfulness to the Gospel.

In Portuguese:

I greet the new Portuguese-speaking cardinals who along with their family members, friends and co-workers, as well as the various representatives of the civil and ecclesial communities who share the joy of the honor just conferred on Cardinal João Braz de Aviz, who leads the Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life and the Societies of Apostolic Life, and of Cardinal Manuel Monteiro de Castro, who presides over the Apostolic Penitentiary.

I entrust them to the Virgin Mary that their lives may be dedicated to the unity and sanctity of the People of God.

In Czech:

My affectionate greeting to Cardinal Dominik Duka and to all of you, dear faithful who have come here from the Czech Republic to share his joy. May these days of feasting and praying inspire in you a renewed love for Christ and his Church. My blessing to everyone. Praised bye Jesus and Mary.

In Dutch:

I gladly greet Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk, Archbishop of Utrecht, and the faithful who are with him. I hope that these days of fervent spirituality may inspire in each of you a renewed love of Christ and his Church. Continue to sustain your Archbishop with prayer so that he may continue to guide with pastoral zeal the people who have been entrusted to him.

In Romanian:

With joy I greet His Beatitude Lucien Muresan and all of you pilgrims from Romania, who wished to join your beloved Pastor whom I have created a cardinal. Through you, I greet all the Romanian people and your homeland which is now more bound to the See of St. Peter. May my blessing sustain you always.

He ended in Italian:

Dear friends, thank you once more for your significant presence. The creation of new cardinals is an occasion to reflect on the universal mission of the Church in the history of men: In human affairs, especially when they are as troubled and conflicted as today, the Church is always present to bring Christ - light and hope for all mankind.

To remain united to the Church and to the message of salvation that she disseminates, means to be anchored to the truth, to reinforce our sense of true values, and to be serene in the face of every event.

And so, I call on you to remain always united with your Pastors, as to the new Cardinals, in order to be in communion with the Church. Unity within the Church is a divine gift that must be defended and made to grow.

To the protection of the Mother of God and of the Apostles Peter and Paul, I entrust you, venerated brother cardinals and the faithful who are with you. With these sentiments, I impart my Apostolic Blessing from the heart.

---

Not a few voices in the Italian media have been writing lately that the Vatileaks ploy - ostensibly directed against Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, whether it was the Vigano letters, the IOR document leaks and the assassination plot memo - has boomeranged against the moles and their masterminds, because it has reportedly only served to strengthen Bertone's position with the Pope. One of these voices is Luigi Accattoli in this analysis for Corriere della Sera, but he makes one point that any objective Vatican news junkie - let alone a Benaddict - must dispute to high heavens!

The battles of the longest
living Pope in the past 100 years
by Luigi Accattoli
Translated from

February 20, 2012

In April, Benedict XVI will turn 85 and by then [as of February 29 this year, in fact], he will have become the longest living Pope in the past 100 years. Which means that the Catholic Church faces a season of objective trepidation which historical circumstances may make quite dramatic.

However, during the three days connected with the last consistory, the theologian Pope made it clear that he is not thinking of retiring, and that he will carry on his ministry.

We shall therefore have a second case of sacrificial witness by a Pope after that of John Paul II - and this will probability be a strong advantage for the Church, as achievements matured in suffering generally are, where faith is concerned.

The kind face and the occasionally sad eyes Joseph Ratzinger showed during the consistory celebrations indicate the spirit in which he is facing his battles.

He may be old but he has big objectives in mind to meet what he calls bluntly 'the crisis of faith' which weighs most heavily on Europe.

Next month, he will be travelling to Mexico and Cuba; in the autumn, he will probably be going to Lebanon in the midst of the 'Arab spring' [that has since turned quite inclement]. In October, he has called a General Assembly of the Bishops' Synod to discuss the New Evangelization, at which time he will launch the Year of Faith to mark the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council.

It is against this background of important events that one must consider the recent consistory as an occasion to confront the great challenge of the abandonment of the faith in so many sectors of Europe's traditional Christianity. This is what ought to be the primary concern.

But in the corridors, during the breaks, over meals, the cardinals also chatted about current events and apparent curial troubles.

The Pope seems very remote from any interest in these rather base levels of discussion about internal battles within the Vatican. Nor is he really interested in Curial 'reforms' that are trotted out and re-proposed every so often.

What he thinks about structural reforms is clear, and he said so to the Roman Curia last December: "If we do not find an answer to the crisis of faith, all other reforms will remain ineffective". [He has, of course, formulated this positively many times in the past: "First we must convert, transform ourselves - then all else will follow." And yet, the leading 'reform movements' in Austria and Germany, for 3xample, advocate radical reforms in Church practices with hardly ever a mention of God in their manifestos!

As for the Curia, it seems clear that the Pope does not intend to do without the consolidated collaboration of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, though there is no doubt that the orchestrated document leaks in the past four weeks were intended to force him out. But now, Bertone seems to be a support for him in the same way that he himself had been the support for John Paul II.*** {Excuse me! Let's not get carried away here! This is no time to be delusional. I will interpose my full objection below.]

Obviously, after such a tempest, the first task for any Secretary of State is to restore order to the Curia.
[No, he must restore order to the Secretariat of State, first and foremost. No one has so far faulted the other dicasteries of the Curia for dereliction of duty nor outright treachery, so leave them alone, OK? And I am disappointed that Accattoli like other Vaticanistas is so loose with language. Clearly, the hijinks of the past four weeks were all from SecState and within SecState, so why tar the entire Curia with the same contempt? It's not fair and it is wrong, to begin with. It unnecessarily reinforces the overall bad impression that the public has of the 'Roman Curia' collectively, and it is a gross offense to the Curial heads who have been above reproach so far and their hard-working fairly minuscule staffs (compared to the elephantine bureaucracy at SecState). After the Williamson fiasco - a co-production of ineotitude by SecState and the Congregation for Bishops under Cardinal Re, the only exception one might mention in recent memory is Cardinal Turkson's Note proposing recommendations for global financial reform, in which he was in far over his head.]

For the Popes, relationships with the 'court' and the Curia have always been a fount of trouble. A non-Italian Pope has the advantage of keeping a strategic distance from the personalities involved, but this advantage becomes an obstacle if the Italians who work in the Vatican - and who constitute the great majority - fail to find a suitable counterweight.

***Now to my hot and heavy rejoinder to Accattoli's startling assertion that Bertone is fulfilling for Benedict XVI what Cardinal Ratzinger did for John Paul II, an assertion that makes me see red and furious as a raging bull:

There is absolutely no comparison, nor any basis for one. Cardinal Ratzinger - in addition to whatever advice he may have given John Paul II in over two decades of meeting twice a week [There's a reason one Vatican observer recently described Papa Ratzinger's Pontificate thus far as the 30-year Pontificate] - was also the indispensable lightning rod who deflected much if not all the ideological opposition to the Catholic orthodoxy of Papa Wojtyla's Pontificate.

One cannot see any similar contribution by Bertone - it is clear Benedict XVI's doctrinal and pastoral initiatives have all been positions he has developed over the past decades of his career (obviously, becoming Pope gave him the chance to finally carry out all the intentions he has been maturing for years and that he probably thought would simply remain on paper). Surely, Bertone had nothing to contribute to that.

Even worse, Bertone has not been a lightning rod in any way for the attacks against Papa Ratzinger - in fact, the greatest reproach one might make against him is that he has always been missing in action in the initial stages of any assault on the Pope, surfacing only after the shrapnel has all fallen out and it's safe to show himself!

This has been consistent, from the Wielgus fiasco onwards. He was only a few days in office when the Regensburg affair exploded, so whatever he did then was superficial and ministerial, not substantive in any way. He was lucky the Turkish visit a few weeks after Regensburg gave Benedict XVI the sterling chance to] turn the situation around in a most dramatic and unexpected way! I doubt that any behind-the-scenes remedial action by the diplomats of the Secretariat of State could have done as much and so soon.

So, let us concede that Bertone provides the Pope with unquestioned friendship and loyalty - he owes him that in any case; that he's a literal warm body who happens to live in the Apostolic Palace himself, and is therefore available to be on hand when necessary; that he has an engaging bonhomie that can easily help keep the Pope's spirits up on his off days, if he has any; that he may even do valuable administrative work unknown and unperceived to the outside world, including Vaticanistas. None of that makes him 'Ratzinger's Ratzinger'. Only Ratzinger's Bertone at best.]

The following interview didn't turn out to be so good at all after I had translated it, but here it is anyway...


Vatileaks and power plays:
The media operate on worldly logic,
the Church and Christians should not
Interview by Leone Grotti
Translated from

20 Feb 2012

The supposedly difficult relationship between Benedict XVI and his Secretary of State. The Pope's supposed ailment which could lead to his resignation shortly. The supposed internecine wars within the Vatican which has spurred bishops to leak out classified documents to the public.

Amid such a background Pope Benedict XVI held the fourth consistory of his Pontificate, and delivered new and powerful re-statements of his basic message to the faithful, and still, the media "talked about everything except the faith", as the Pope himself noted to the seminarians of Rome at midweek last week.

The media have insisted on framing the Consistory within the context of recent controversies [trivial and petty power games, after all is said and done] that have been grossly blown up to create scandal.

"Fortunately, the Pope does not act in the light of such disputes so dear to secular culture, which is increasingly on the decline [One hopes so, but is it really????]. Rather, he considers everything from the perspective of God's action in human history", so says Pippo Corigliano, former spokesman for Opus Dei, who writes the column 'Cartolina dal Paradiso' (Postcard from Paradise) for Tempi. He also gave us this interview :

Of the 22 new cardinals, 16 are European, and of them, seven are Italian. Then there are three North Americans, one Brazilian, and two Asians. Does that mean, as Il Fatto Quotidiano says [specifically, Marco Politi, in his latest obsessively rabid attack to discredit and denigrate Benedict XVI], 'the triumph of the Church of the past - Eurocentric, with her North American outliers'? [What did I say two posts above about this media monomania of looking for 'proportional representation' in the College of Cardinals? The MSM are so wrapped up in their self-imposed mental straitjacket that their brains have become incapable of thinking anything else]
No. It confirms the unity of the Church. It is universal but Roman at the same time. [That's evasive and does not answer the question!]

Has this Consistory succeeded, as Corriere della Sera says, in shelving the silent war between the Italian bishops conference and the Secretariat of State"?
The newspapers have described this Consistory with the old exhausted logic of the world, but the logic of Christ is not that of the world, as the Pope explained so well in his allocution and homily to the new cardinals. {Again, the interviewee does not address the question. The reference is to the fact that in the meantime, Mario Monti's government has moved to remove long-standing tax exemptions form the Church in Italy for commercial activities undertaken in Church-owned buildings. Presumably this gives common cause to the Italian bishops as well as the Secretariat of State. I must get it straight, and I will post a good wrap-up when I see one that's not confusing to non-Italians.]

Which is?
'Logic' was the key word. The Pope warns us against the temptation that has always eaten away at man's soul. The same temptation to power and glory that Jesus faced in the desert. The temptation of the worldly mind that seeks ephemeral glory and inconstant human power.

We are all tempted, as was the the mother of Zebedee's sons asking Jesus to reserve the place to his right and left for James and John. Jesus took advantage of the impertinent request to give a fundamental lesson: "You know that those who are recognized as rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones make their authority over them felt. But it shall not be so among you. Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all" (Mk 10,42-44).

To serve to the point of shedding your blood - Benedict XVI reminded cardinals of the symbolism of their red garments. He went back to the Old Testament prophets. For Daniel, the Son of Man is he who would receive dominion, splendor and kingship from God (cfr Dn 7, 13n). And how will he exercise this power? According to the figure of the suffering servant, described in Isaiah (cfr Is 52,1-12).

"He receives power and the glory only inasmuch as he is 'servant", the Holy Father said, "but he is servant inasmuch as he welcomes within himself the fate of the suffering and the sin of all humanity. His service is realized in total faithfulness and complete responsibility towards mankind. In this way the free acceptance of his violent death becomes the price of freedom for many, it becomes the beginning and the foundation of the redemption of each person and of the entire human race."

Why then did the mass media apply the Pope's discourse to recent events?
Because they are in disarray. They represent to us even more clearly the agony of secular culture: A culture that slavishly follows a contrary 'logic' - that of power and fleeting glory. A culture that has reached the end of the line. [I don't know what makes this man so sure of this. If secular culture is really in decline, that decline is probably a barely germinating tip, whereas the main force pf secularism is going full speed ahead because by definition, it follows the path of least resistance. ("Whatever is possible is allowable")]

None of the earthly Paradises promised in the past two centuries has materialized. Rather, they have turned out to be hell. And the last act of self-sufficient capitalism is playing out.

But when the Pope asks the faithful to pray for him "that I may continually offer to the People of God the witness of sound doctrine and guide holy Church with a firm and humble hand", was he not perhaps alluding to the serious leaks of confidential documents that have occupied the media?
No, because I do not think the Pope follows all this silliness. [He may not follow it the way he follows, say, the situation in Syria, but he would be made aware of it from the mainstream newspapers he does read every day and the primetime newscasts and whatever is passed on to him by GG or Cardinal Bertone as something it would be useful for him to know.]

That expression "gentle firmness' is beautiful because it is almoet a self-portrait: 'Gentle' because he is good. And 'firm' because he is the shepherd who must be firm.

The only alternative to the earthly logic used by the media is the perspective proposed to us by the Pope: that of faith and eternal life.

As for the social situation, the Holy Father urges us to look at the Social Doctrine of the Church that has been so ignored or even mocked all these years. Now it seems like the only reference point upon which one can construct a new civilization, one that avails of the positive conquests of modernity but also places man at the center of all development.

Here is a very useful article by John allen. I am in no position to check out the statements Allen makes, as I am unable to do any more than the most superficial fact checks about the IOR and its activities, but we must assume that the facts he cites are mostly correct... What I find to be a striking omission however is that on February 9, Fr. Lombardi issued the second of two statements he made on successive days about allegations made in Italian media about IOR. At the start of the Feb. 9 statement, he wrote:

---

The statement that IOR is a bank does not correspond to the truth: IOR is a foundation established under civilian and canon law that is regulated by its own charter. It does not maintain reserve funds nor does it make loans as a regular bank does.

Much less is it an offshore bank. In fact, this term was used in the said broadcast not to show the true character and function of IOR but to create an impression of illegality.

The IOR is located inside a sovereign state and operates in a normative and regulated context, which includes the recent anti-money laundering law promulgated by Vatican City State - Law CXXVII, which was adopted precisely in order to be in line with international standards.

---

In fairness, Allen ought to have cited it, since the question was addressed directly by the Vatican itself - for the first time during this Pontificate, and I don't know what statements were made about the IOR at the time of the genuine and huge scandals it was involved in back in the 1980s and 1990s.

Getting the facts right about IOR
by John L Allen Jr

Feb. 19, 2012

ROME -- Over the years, few Catholic outfits have generated intrigue quite like the “Vatican Bank.” Speculation about its inner workings has boomed again in recent days, with a series of leaked Vatican documents about purported shady transactions, claims of stonewalling of Italian inquests, and alleged loopholes in anti-money laundering laws.

The current issue of l’Espresso, Italy’s most widely read newsmagazine, captures the mood with an eye-catching cover story under the headline, “God’s Bank: Dossiers, Accusations, and Venom.”

Whatever one makes of those reports, there’s a slight problem with the premise: The “Vatican Bank,” as such, doesn’t actually exist.

To be sure, there is something inside Vatican walls called the “Institute for the Works of Religion” (often referred to by its Italian acronym, IOR). While it supports papal initiatives and the pope’s ambassadors in various nations, the IOR also takes deposits, makes investments, and moves money around the world, mostly on behalf of Catholic entities such as dioceses and religious orders.

According to the l’Espresso piece, the IOR has roughly 33,000 clients, most of them located in Europe, though some 3,000 are in Africa and South America. All told, the value of its holdings, known as its “patrimony,” is estimated at roughly $6.5 billion.

The IOR has been caught up in more than its share of scandals over the years, from the Banco Ambrosiano meltdown of the 1980s to Italy’s political bribery scandals in the 1990s, and the latest newspaper reports suggest to some that not much has changed.

Insiders, however, insist the bad old days are gone, that today the place is run by sophisticated lay professionals committed to playing by the rules.

That’s not just for the moral reasons laid out by Benedict XVI, they say, but also because compliance with secular benchmarks of transparency brings down transaction costs, and permits the IOR to compete on a level playing field with other financial institutions in Europe.

In light of the place’s history, outsiders may be forgiven some skepticism. To evaluate it accurately, however, requires a grasp of what the IOR really is.

Here, according to experts who are familiar with the legal history and current practice of the place, is why the IOR is more akin to a “foundation”than the common sense definition of a bank. [No need for the quotation marks - It is, in fact, a foundation, as Fr. Lombardi stated!]

First, and most basically, the IOR operates as a “non-profit” institution, whereas most banks are for-profit commercial enterprises. As with nonprofit organizations generally, any surplus revenue is supposed to be used to achieve the IOR’s aims (defined as support of charity and pious works) rather than distributed as profit or dividends.

Second, a bank is usually defined as a financial institution which takes deposits and makes loans. IOR, however, is barred by its by-laws from using the money of depositors to extend credit.

Rather than make loans or issue mortgages, it puts money in relatively low risk investments. For this reason, although it reportedly took a hit like everybody else during the economic meltdown, it never foundered like the banking systems of Europe and the United States.

(The IOR will occasionally issue something called, in Italian, a pegno {literally and actually, a collateral], but it’s not so much a loan as a way to resolve a short-term cash flow problem. Basically, it happens if a client, such as a religious order, needs a quick infusion of cash and is willing to put up property of equivalent value as collateral. It’s not a “loan,” as banks define lending, because it’s short-term, risk-free, and does not use depositors’ money.)

Third, because the IOR does not do any lending, it also doesn’t hold any reserves. It doesn’t maintain a stockpile of currency, or gold, to cover loans and to guard against runs, which real banks are legally required to do. (Cover art for the “God’s Bank” piece in l’Espresso depicted bars of gold stacked inside the cupola of St. Peter’s Dome. It’s a great visual, but not literally true.)

Fourth, the IOR is not a private entity like most banks. It’s a public entity created by a sovereign, in this case the Pope. While its operational side is recognizably modern, with a general manager and board of directors (a five member group including senior bankers, as well as Carl Anderson, head of the Knights of Columbus), sitting on top is a government oversight commission of five cardinals appointed by the Pope.

Financial wonks will note that directors of real banks can sit on the board of directors of the IOR, something that would create a fatal conflict of interest if it were really itself a bank.

Fifth, the IOR is not open to the general public. In a normal bank, virtually anybody can walk in and open an account. To put money in the IOR, you must be a Vatican or Holy See employee or official, a representative of a Catholic institute or order, a diocese, or one of the "gentleman assistants to the Pope" who serve at ceremonial functions around the Apostolic Palace.

Each person is interviewed, a valid government document showing proof of identity must be provided, and then the general manager of the “Institute” (as it is called around the Vatican), must literally sign off on the application.

Sixth, technically speaking, the IOR doesn’t even have what are called “accounts” in common parlance. When someone deposits money in the IOR, the internal argot is that it’s being deposited in a “fund,” not an “account.”

The depositor gets a number, recorded under his or her name, and retains control over the assets, but the idea is that rather than making a normal bank deposit, the depositor is participating in a fund.

(The question of “accounts” is a sensitive one, since the IOR has been fighting off the idea that there are "ciphered" accounts as remnants of a more opaque past. The IOR insists that not only do such secret accounts not exist, but that their computer systems do not even have the possibility to create such a thing.)

Seventh, the IOR, unlike European or American banks, has no networks of clients and subsidiaries throughout the world. In fact, it prohibits the common banking practice of permitting banks to open accounts with it in Italy or elsewhere else.

Why does all this matter?

Without a doubt, $6.5 billion is not chump change, and it’s perfectly reasonable to expect the Vatican to manage that money honestly and responsibly. That’s especially so since much of it comes from ordinary Catholics who support religious orders, charitable associations, and other church institutions.

Moreover, because IOR has been a source of scandal in the past, even fair-minded people are likely to receive its assurances of reform with a stance of “trust but verify.”

Good oversight, however, begins with correctly identifying the nature of the beast. Whatever else the IOR may be, a “bank” it’s not.

A history lesson delivered in simple and clear terms by George Weigel provides a deeper context for the newfound Catholic resistance to the totalitarian tyranny of Obamacare.

How American liberal Catholics
have betrayed religious freedom,
crown jewel of their patrimony
By George Weigel

February 20, 2012

It was not surprising that ill-educated Catholics in Congress rushed to embrace President Obama’s “accommodation” on the HHS [the US Department of Health and Human Services] mandate on sterilization and contraception (including possible abortifacients), or that the faux accommodation was defended, if risibly, by another embodiment of Catholic Lite, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

One does not look to Senator Patty Murray [Wahsington state], or to Representative Rose DeLauro [New York] or Nancy Pelosi [San Francisco], or to Secretary Sebelius, to learn anything about Catholic doctrine or the history of the Church’s teaching on moral issues. Nemo dat quod non habet, as the scholastic philosophers used to say: No one gives what (s)he does not have.

The willingness of the Catholic Health Association and its president, Sister Carol Keehan, to embrace the Obama shell game was also unsurprising; CHA is a trade association far more concerned about a friendly relationship with HHS and access to federal largesse than about Catholic solidarity on a question of first principles.

CHA’s role in helping to pass Obamacare clarified for all with eyes to see what the association understands to be its primary interests. These interests define its true loyalties, which were on full display when Sister Carol helped the White House roll out the Obama “accommodation” ruse and sell it to an eager-to-be-sold press.

But what about the intellectuals? What about the insistence of self-identified “liberal Catholic” commentators, op-ed columnists, and journals that the HHS mandate had nothing to do with religious freedom, or, later, that the “accommodation” met any legitimate religious-freedom concerns?

What is going on when these Catholics provide intellectual and political cover for the Sebeliuses, DeLauros, Murrays, and Pelosis in their insistence that this is all about “preventive services” necessary for “women’s health”?

Many of these liberal Catholics had, of course, provided similar cover for Obama during the 2008 campaign, so in that sense it was less than startling that their partisanship trumped their religious loyalty once again.

Still, there was something different, something tragic, about this particular trahison des clercs (intellectual treason). In throwing a robust concept of religious freedom over the side, liberal Catholics were betraying their own noblest heritage.

It took the Catholic Church the better part of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to develop a robust Catholic concept of religious freedom. In that process of doctrinal development, the key experience was that of the Church in the United States, and the key intellectual figure was an American Jesuit, Father John Courtney Murray.

Murray embodied an older form of liberal Catholicism, and he deployed it with intellectual virtuosity to midwife a new Catholic understanding of the modern state and of the democratic project, which eventually reshaped the thinking and practices of the entire Church.

At the intellectual center of that development was Murray’s work on religious freedom. And at the empirical center of this evolution of Catholic self-understanding was the Catholic experience in the United States.

The American arrangement on church-and-state relations was a novelty for the Catholic Church. When it was deemed appropriate to appoint a bishop for the new republic after its founding, the Holy See sent a representative to learn the U.S. government’s wishes through the American minister in Paris, Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin replied that this was none of the government’s business, and that the Church could appoint whomever it liked — a response that caused astonishment along the Tiber, where the Pope, in those days, had a free right of appointing bishops in, at best, 20 percent of the world’s dioceses.

Beyond this freedom of appointment, however, was the undeniable fact that the institutional separation of church and state, and the Constitution’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion, was good for Catholicism in America: an empirical refutation of the then-regnant assumption that religious freedom (meaning disentangling the church from “establishment” by the state or from some other form of state preference) would inevitably lead to religious indifferentism, and perhaps even to hostility to religious conviction.

Yet here was this novus ordo seclorum [new secular order], as America proclaimed itself, and unlike the Catholic Church in Europe, the Church in America was holding the loyalty of the working class and growing by leaps and bounds throughout the 19th century — by the time a Catholic girl born in Detroit in 1880 became an adult, the number of parishes around her had quintupled. Clearly, there was something here worth exploring.

Impressed by the American experience and tired of the ancient church–state quarrels of Europe, Pope Leo XIII began that exploration in the late 19th century. In a series of encyclicals on political modernity, Leo gingerly began to ease the Church away from its entanglement with the old regimes, and just as gingerly began to explore the foundations of a Catholic theory of religious freedom.

Some 40 years after Leo’s death, John Courtney Murray began to analyze Leo’s writings with an eye to articulating a fully embodied Catholic theory of religious freedom.

When Murray began to work on the church–state problem in the mid-1940s, the regnant Roman theory — which many simply identified with Catholic tradition tout court — was that the preferred arrangement was state recognition of the prerogatives of the Catholic Church, and state support of the Church’s work.

In the Roman theological parlance of the time, this was the “thesis,” and any other arrangement, like that in the United States, was a mere “hypothesis.” This thesis/hypothesis schema was underwritten by another claim that many in Roman theological circles simply identified with Catholic “tradition”: the claim that “error has no rights.”

Unraveling this thick knot of seemingly settled “tradition” was no easy business, either intellectually or politically, in terms of stepping on ecclesiastical and theological toes. Murray’s careful analysis of Leo XIII’s texts suggested that the thesis/hypothesis business might not be as settled as it seemed.

And, in a brilliant move, Murray reached beneath the thesis/hypothesis schema into a much older stratum of Catholic tradition, where he found, in the fifth-century writings of Pope Saint Gelasius I, a clear distinction between priestly authority and political authority — which suggested that the conflation of those two authorities in the “thesis” was, in fact, not the Catholic tradition (a suggestion buttressed, of course, by reference to Christ’s own distinction between what is Caesar’s and what is God’s in Matthew 22:21).

Here was a true “liberal Catholicism” at work: a Catholicism that reached back into history to retrieve a long-forgotten element of the authentic tradition that, recovered, could be the engine of future development.

To make a long story short, Murray’s work on religious freedom was vindicated at the Second Vatican Council. There, two compelling arguments came together in a powerful synthesis: Murray’s historical work and his exegesis of Leo XIII, which put paid to the thesis/hypothesis schema, and European personalist philosophy, which showed the Council that, while “error” might have no rights (whatever that meant), persons had rights, whether their opinions were erroneous or not.

That settled the question intellectually for most of the Council fathers. The politics of defining religious freedom as a basic human right were managed by another interesting coalition: Bishops from the Communist world, who wanted the Church to defend religious freedom so that they might use it as a new weapon in their own struggles, joined with U.S. bishops, who wanted the American constitutional arrangement vindicated, and Western European bishops, who were tired of ancien régime politics, formed a critical mass of support, resulting in Pope Paul VI’s promulgation of Vatican II’s landmark Declaration on Religious Freedom on December 7, 1965.

Thus began the Catholic human-rights revolution, which would play a major role in the collapse of European Communism and in democratic transitions in Latin America and East Asia. At the heart of the Catholic human-rights revolution was religious freedom, and the Church’s embrace of religious freedom owed no small debt to liberal Catholicism in America.

Thus “liberal Catholics” who refuse to grasp the threats to religious freedom posed by the Obama administration on so many fronts — the HHS mandate, the EEOC’s recently rejected attempt to strip the “ministerial exemption” from employment law, the State Department’s dumbing-down of religious freedom to a mere “freedom of worship” — are betraying the best of their own heritage.

And some are doing it in a particularly nasty way, trying to recruit the memory of John Courtney Murray as an ally in their attempts to cover for the Obama administration’s turning its de facto secularist bias into de jure policy, regulations, and mandates.

More than 50 years ago, Murray warned of the dangers that deracinated secularism posed to the American democratic experiment: a warning that seems quite prescient in the light of the Leviathan-like politics of this administration, aided and abetted by baptized secularists who insist that they are “liberal Catholics.”

I daresay Murray, who did not suffer fools gladly, would not be amused by those who now try to use his work to shore up their own hollow arguments on behalf of the establishment of secularism.

The HHS-mandate battle is bringing to the surface of our public life many problems that were long hidden:
- the real and present danger to civil society of certain forms of Enlightenment thinking;
- the determination of the promoters of the sexual revolution to use state coercion to impose their agenda on society;
- the failure of the Catholic Church to educate the faithful in its own social doctrine;
- the reluctance of the U.S. bishops’ conference to forcefully apply that social doctrine — especially its principle of subsidiarity — during the Obamacare debate.

To that list can now be added one more sad reality, long suspected but now unmistakably clear: the utter incoherence of 21st-century liberal Catholicism, revealed by its failure to defend its own intellectual patrimony: the truth of religious freedom as the first of human rights. That liberal Catholics have done so in order to play court chaplain to overweening and harshly secularist state power compounds that tragedy, with deep historical irony.

Benedict XVI: The pillar that sustains
Interview with Cardinal Cottier
by Salvatore Mazza
Translated from

February 21, 2012

A great feast of the Church. A moment of joy, in which "the Church closed ranks around the Pope" to show him "their affection".

"In the great perplexities of our time, he is the pillar that holds us up. And he does it simply, without fuss".

Cardinal Georges Cottier, who turns 90 in April, and who was the theologian of the Pontifical Household in John Paul II's time for almost 20 years, recalls the four days of Benedict XVI's fourth consistory for new cardinals.

Which confirmed, he says - with disillusion at the polemics about the Vatican in recent days, "that his principal concern is that Christians turn back to the central questions of the faith".

What did you think of the Pope these days?
I was struck by his serenity. He must suffer from all these things that are being said in the media these days, but he is serene at heart. It's the power of the Holy Spirit that guides his life. It is his faith. And the specific vocation of Peter is to sustain the faith of his brothers. And so, here through all the difficulties, and all these great perplexities, he is the pillar that sustains.

He may appear a bit tired, but these days, he presented a stupendous synthesis of of what the believer's attitude should be - never to seek power and glory but only to serve, to serve till martyrdom if necessary, following the example of Jesus.

Public opinion is interested in certain things, but the interests of the Church that professes her faith in Jesus is something else. And it is beautiful to see the witness of this man - humble, simple and modest - who has this spiritual power that is so great that it can bring peace.

One can say that, for him, it is a way to 'go beyond', to transcend. He allows these 'waves' to pass which are supposed to rock the Church, this great agitation of the waters, because he knows that the fundamental movement is different.

I had occasion to reflect on all this in the past four days. And discussing it with my brother cardinals, I found I was not alone in what I think. Which is that in all this agitation around the Church, one can see to the malignant one at work. In the sense that if the Church were to be swamped by mediocrity and occupied by intrigues, then the devil would have little to do.

But if the waters are being agitated this way, then it also means that there is vitality in the Church, which the devil wants to oppose. This vitality is the power of faith. It is the Christian life which is manifest all over the world.

Where can this vitality be seen?
Recently I was talking to a friend who travels a lot. And he was telling me how, everywhere he went, it seems that young people have somehow reinvented the sense of Eucharistic Adoration. That is one sign of this great vitality - and the reality of the Church is in such phenomena that should not be obscured by the sins of Christians.

The mystery of the Church is that she is holy but her members are sinners who are called upon to be saints. If we are all called to holiness, we are also called on to bear witness, to have a life consistent with what we profess.

This Pope often cites the words of Paul VI who said that men of our time will respond more to witnesses than to teachers, and even more, to teachers who are also witnesses. [Of which Benedict XVI is a shining example!] So this should be the plan for everyone of us. Of all Christians, and for us Pastors, especially those who are entrusted to our care.

What example does Benedict XVI set?
A great example, every day. He is 85, and sometimes, he may look tired, which is normal at that age, and the false tales circulating about him will certainly make him feel bad. But we have seen how he succeeds at doing extraordinary things. We saw that in Madrid, we saw it in Germany, where he reminded us that the most beautiful structures are worth nothing if there is no faith.

We saw it when he visited the prisoners in Rebibbia. And very soon, he will be going to Mexico and Cuba. His Wednesday catecheses are extraordinary.. These are the things we ought to look at.

Everything he does is always with the basic guideline that the fundamental problem, especially in Europe and the Wes,t is the need for re-evangelization, to recover a faith that has been lost or is being lost.

This is also the strong point of his Pontificate - this invitation to
reconsider anew the love of Christ, the Eucharist, all the central points of Christian faith. This is what the Pope speaks of, because this is what the world needs.

Quite by coincidence, around this time last year - on February 19, 2011, in fact - Cardinal Cottier was the resource person at a round-table discussion sponsored by the Vatican publishing house on LIGHT OF THE WORLD [See account onPage 188 of this thread] at which time he said this about Benedict XVI, at the end of his talk on 'How to read Joseph Ratzinger":

---

"What is most amazing about Benedict XVI is that he remains a happy man. The theme of joy is very much present in his work, and even in his preaching. So many readers have been struck by the authenticity and simplicity of many things the Pope says in Light of the World.

Readers may well ask, 'Is this the same person we read about in the newspapers? The same person who has been transformed by the media into a caricature, in an amazing display of bad taste?

In many pages of the book, one encounters a Pope who is relaxed, confident, and who expresses himself freely, holding back nothing. He takes note without censure of secularization and relativism which prevail in the experience of so many today.

In the face of all this, his serenity does not seem to rely on something he has discovered, or on any particular formula. Rather, he simply reiterates it is Jesus himself who keeps the living flame of faith lit in the Church.

---

How remarkably consistent Cottier is with what he says one year later!

P.S. A follower of Lella's blog cites another comment made by Carinal Cottier about Benedict XVI, this one on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 2007:

---

World-class in his use of the unparalleled word, master of catechesis, he is great because he does not impose, humble as only the greatest ones are, attentive and respectful of the opinion of others even if from the heights of his knowledge and culture, he can outclass anyone...

---

Tuesday, February 21, Seventh Week in Ordinary Time

ST. PIER DAMIANI (Peter Damian) (Italy, 1007-1072)
Professor, Benedictine monk, Abbot, Papal Legate, Cardinal, Doctor of the Church
Benedict XVI dedicated a catechesis to the saint on September 9, 2009.
benedettoxviforum.freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=8527...
Born to an impoverished noble family in Ravenna, his brother Damian (from whom he takes his second name) put him through school where he excelled in languages and the law. A renowned professor in Parma and Ravenna by age 24, he decided to join the Benedictine monastery founded by St. Romuald in Fonte Avellana. Always an ascetic himself, he championed a return to the rules of early monasticism, and all his life, would champion reforms in the Church promulgated by the Popes of his time. Although he considered a hermit's life as 'the peak of Christian existence', he found himself being assigned to arbitrate local disputes and other missions from the Vatican, in addition to being a prolific writer (he is considered one of the greatest of medieval Latin writers). He became abbot at Fonte Avellana and founded five other monasteries. In 1057, he reluctantly accepted a papal appointment as Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, where he served for ten years, then obtained papal dispensation to return to Fonte Avellana. He carried out more missions for the Pope, and was returning from one when he fell ill and died. In the Divine Comedy, Dante called him the precursor of St. Francis. He was never formally canonized, but in 1878, Pope Leo XII made him a Doctor of the Church (Doctor of Reform and Renewal), the last of the Early Church Doctors.
Readings for today's Mass:
usccb.org/bible/readings/022112.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

No events announced for the Holy Father.


After talks between Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone and the rector of Peru's Catholic University,
The Vatican issued a ststement saying it has requested the University to present revised statues by Easter Sunday
that willfollow the guidelines laid down by John {aul II in his Apostolic Constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae
regarding therequirements for a Catholic Unviersity. This follows months of dispute between the University and
the ARchdiocese of Lima, and a visitation by Cardinal Peter Erdo on behalf of the Pope after the University
ignored an earlier order in July 2011.


OR for Feb. 20-21:

Right photo: The Pope greets Cardinal Fernando Filoni after his greeting in behalf of all the new cardinals before the Mass on Sunday.
Benedict XVI celebrates Mass with new cardinals on the Feast of Peter's Chair
'The entire Church rests on faith'
This issue contains the coverage of the Sunday Mass and Angelus as well as the Pope's special audiences yesterday for the new cardinals, their families and guests. Page 1 international news: As anti-protest repression continues in Syria, Egypt recalls its ambassador; German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that the major political parties have agreed on Joachim Gauck, 72, a Protestant minister and human-rights activist in Communist East Germany, as the new Federal President; G20 foreign ministers meet in Los Cabos, Mexico to discuss development and security concerns. In the inside pages, two articles about the Holy Father's JESUS OF NAZARETH Vol II from the conference held about the book at the University of Turin.

For the first time I find myself objecting vehemently - and appalled - at a commentary by Giuliano Ferrara. My problem begins with his assumption that Benedict XVI's Papacy has been 'interrupted' in any way at all! An interruption short of death or permanent disability would be constituted by force majeure in which the Pope is forcibly taken from the Vatican, exiled somewhere and completely disabled from exercising his Petrine ministry. None of that has happened or is ever likely to happen,

So where is the interruption here? Is it the never-ending bloodsport by the media who consider the Pope as just another politician to be treated more mercilessly even than politicians because he is supposed to be the Vicar of Christ? Did the malice and targeted persecution of the Jewish establishment in his time 'interrupt' Jesus's ministry at all? Not even his death did! Which is the whole point of the faith handed down to us from Calvary and the garden tomb.

I don't understand this article at all, and Ferrara's rather bizarre picture of despair and defeat in the Church that is not what Benedict XVI sees at all, and which is indirectly a judgment on Benedict, and a most unfair one. In the light of Ferrara's eulogy of John Paul II's singlehanded achievments, it amounts to accusing Benedict XVI of bringing the Church he inherited to despair and defeat!

The most charitable explanation I can think of for this anti-Benedict aggression from a most unexpected quarter is that the idea of an 'interrupted' Papacy popped into Ferrara's head as he sat down to write his weekly column for Panorama, and he decided to flesh it out, no matter how mentally tortuous it would be... I wish Marcello Pera would dispute this article!



The true scandal: The 'interrupted'
Pontificate of Benedict XVI
by Giuliano Ferrara
Translated from

February 21, 2012
There is nothing extraordinary about the fact that there should be squabbling about finances at the Vatican Governatorate or at the IOR. Nor about the creation of a malicious, gossipy and anonymous document on the health of the Pope, in which a ranking prelate travelling to China is said to have oblique thoughts about the succession to the Papacy and the fighting around the Vatican Secretary of State.

The Church of men has always known such things, and in themselves, recent news reports do not constitute a scandal beyond that of the usual tragicomedy of blunders, in this case fueled by burning rivalries over rank and power.

But what is an enormous scandal is that these things end up chronicled in the newspapers, on TV, in the media, the more so because the scandal encumbers a stagnant Church and a Curia that is once again the center of gossip,

The stale stuffy atmosphere, the unease over the future of the Pope, repeated speculation about his imminent resignation even by some emeritus bishops [actually by one bishop, reported so far],, the very idea itself of a papal resignation - this is, in fact, terrible for the Catholic Church. [Maybe I am less cynical than I thought, but why would anyone take these resignation talk seriously? Especially about a Pope who has been the first one in modern times to have ever confronted the issue out in the open and made clear his views about it so unequivocally! Who has shown in recent days, in word and deed, that he is far from being 'phyically, mentally and psychologically unable to carry out his ministry' - the criterion he defined as the only grounds for a Pope to resign!]

John Paul II was reproached for failing to govern the Curia with the reformatory attention it needed. In fact, he virtually abolished it.He was the Curia, with his great prophetic and charismatic work in travels and pilgrimages. The Curia in his time was his policy as the anti-Communist Pontiff, as the agent of European resurrection and of religious freedom, of eradicating the 'Third-Worlder' equivocations of liberation theology

[About the anti-Communism: Pius XII was no less anti-Communist, and John Paul II himself was constrained to adopt in part - except in his own homeland - the Ostpolitik of a compromise modus vivendi between the Church and the Communist regimes of eastern Europe, as had been advanced by Vatican diplomacy under John XXIII and Paul VI! I know great intellects like Ferrara can often be pardoned for their audacious generalizations, but this one is not helpful at all!]]

The Curia was his Christlikeness on the go that was able to dance in churchyards, enchant the young people of half the planet, express the universal mission of the Church by bringing youth to the aged Church of Rome, in a way that was 'athletic', one of perennial movement, and with a program of ideas counter to the dominant current of thought, not coddling the contemporary politically correct ideology, scientistic immoralism, a pan-sexual culture incapable of appreciating his theology of the body, soul and human responsibility.

[Gee, I'm out of breath. That does not leave anything much for anybody else to do or to achieve, does it? I admire Blessed John Paul II for a great many things, but I find this an unnecessary apotheosis, that Ferrara uses to dramatize his audacious proposition that the Polish Pope needed no Curia because he was the Curia all by himsel, that his Pontificate was completely a one-man show! Yet, as much as the media admired John Paul II to the point of being almost captive, that did not stop them from chronicling all the peccadillos and major sins of his Curia, and even his great charism could hardly cover up or obfuscate redhot scandals like Banco Ambrosiano or Father Maciel!]

With the decisive help of theologian Joseph Ratzinger [Finally, an afterthought that is more in the nature of a footnote to break all that effusion!], Karol Wojtyla was modern and combative, preached the splendor of his truth [His truth? Not Christ's?] and he 'manufactured' saints [[That's a terrible misrepresentation, because the Congregation for Saints could not have 'fabricated' the documentation of hundreds of sainted lives and their corresponding miracles to 'turn them out' for undeserved beatification and canonization! What on earth has happened to seriously disturb Ferrara's usual intellectual equilibrium?]].

But he was also capable of making millenary apologies for the deviations the Church had made throughout history - he embodied the anxieties of the Western world regarding the lack of any meaning for life in a mass society, even as he gave light, color and sense to the emergence to Christianity of mission lands and of new local churches in every part of the world.

Benedict XVI intended to firmly 'fix' in place the achievements of his predecessor, placing them on secure theological tracks to measure up to modern history and reasoning, while seeking to occupy more firmly a public space that had been conquered forcefully by his predecessor, who had a strength that seemed to me gentle as well as massive, and full of a non-reactionary romanticism.

Benedict XVI's speeches about Vatican II to the Curia, at Regensburg, the Bundestag, along with his homilies, were part of his inviting and promising approach. But something seriously went wrong - beyond anonymous leaks and questionable job contracts awarded to Vatican cronies.

[And that's it? That's what Ferrara would now reduce Benedict's Pontificate to? After all the eloquent eulogies he has written in the past about it? And yet, nothing has changed for the worse. He has just undergone yet another ordeal by media fire, with his personal reputation enhanced by showing yet again, serenity and grace under pressure.]

Crucial in all this was the campaign to highlight the sins and crimes of the clergy. Malicious and carefully crafted to strike at the very basis of priestly relations with the people entrusted to their care, this great neo-Protestant wave of denunciation has reduced the Church to its bare bones, and her identity as separate, sacred and sacramental to the dimensions of a secularized supercongregation.

[While that may be the impression of the secular world - to which Ferrara belongs, even if he is a self-identified 'devout atheist' who is doubtless sincere - but that is hardly the self-image of the Church today, represented by Benedict XVI. The Church is holy as ever, even if her members are sinful and in constant need of purification. The 'bare bones' she has been 'reduced to' are the essentials of the faith. never more catechized by the Successor of Peter than today! [/G\To succumb to the image that the outside world has of the Church today is to surrender that faith and admit defeat for a Church about which Christ himself said "the gates of Hell shall not prevail!".

Furthermore, Ferrara does not even acknowledge the fact that the anti-Church campaign that has used priestly sex offenders as a convenient pretext began at a time when John Paul II was already visibly in the late stages of Parkinson's, but perhaps compassion for him helped the fact that after two years of hyper-exposure and hyperventilation of public and private rages at the scandal, it died off with only occasional traces and did not rekindle significantly even after 2004 and the public unmasking of the Pope's friend, Fr, Maciel, started.

But with Jon Paul II gone and someone who had been a favorite media target for decades was installed in his place, it took the pretext of a decades-old situation of abuse in a Berlin Jesuit boarding school to start a raging media-stoked conflagration. This criminal arson aimed openly at discrediting Benedict XVI personally and through him, the Church he leads. Suddenly, all the sins committed by treasonous men of the Church for decades and decades were all visited upon Papa Ratzinger as though he had been responsible for each and every offense, as in fact vengeful lawyers have tried to show in court. With little said about the two decades of inaction under the previous Pontificate that preceded the US disclosures!/G]]

[And so the Church has been placed in a state of victimhood, as a defensive minority against the secularism that is increasingly active and dominant in her own ranks. In which the enchantment of thinking, of the faith, of the spirit has been replaced by an incubus over her pastoral light and an intellectual morale been weakened by the burdensome need for penitence and expiation.

This, I believe, is the problem and the scandal of Benedict XVI's interrupted Papacy, not the gossip.

Quite a lot of assumptions which, IMHO, are careless generalizations. And certainly, that is not at all what one feels and thinks listening to Benedict XVI's words - whereby he stands firmly and constantly for the saving truth of Christ's message that will prevail over worldly setbacks, as long as Christians testify to Christ with their lives. The Christian hope he preaches is the very antithesis of worldly despair, as Christian truth is the ultimate antithesis of all worldly ideologies

The Church as victim? Yes, but as Benedict XVI himself pointed out, persecuted more by the sins of her members than by what the outside world can manage to do - and equally important, she has never wallowed in victimhood. Through the ages, her saints, righteous Popes and honest hardworking men of God have guarded her against that to inspire a positive response that can overcome persecution.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 10/03/2012 23:43]

The OR has documented the lecture- discussions on Volume II of JESUS OF NAZARETH last Monday at the University of Turin. Here is the first of three essays they published. Ernesto Ferrero (born 1938) is a writer and literary critic who currently directs the Salone Internationale del Libro of Turin. He also psecializes in linguistics and history, and in his past career as editorial director at Einaudi, worked with authors like Italo Calvino, Norberto Bobbio and Natasha Ginzburg.


Joseph Ratzinger's JESUS OF NAZARETH:
A thriller that is both
physical and metaphysical
by Ernesto Ferrero
Translated from the 2/20-2/21 issue of


I wish to focus on the word in these notes on this book by Professor Ratzinger. Allow me to call him thus because in these pages, he is acting not as the head of a community of believers, but as a scholar who works with instruments and rationales and logic, as a historian, and even before that, as a philologist.

Philology is an activity that presupposes the verification and restoration of an order, of a course to be completed, the recomposition of pieces that are part of an organic design.

It is an activity that, like the exact sciences, is not done cold, as may be supposed commonly, or by those who do not really understand how it works. Yes, it requires 'cold' instruments, as are the cold and precise instruments with which surgeons or physicists work, or even cooks.

But those who manage words are persons who are impelled, one might say, by a pneuma, a spirit, by strong cognitive and creative tensions.

There is a most beautiful thought in Professor Ratzinger's book that every writer - but even every true reader - will quickly subscribe to: "The word is more real and lasting than the entire material world".

It is a thought that is analogous to a famous statement by the Man of Nazareth: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words will never pass away".

On a more modest literary plane, this is also the rather ingenuous ambition, unconfessed and unconfessable, or every writer.

Words, of course, comprise the documents which Professor Ratzinger proceeds to weigh and evaluate with scientific scrupulousness to demonstrate that the historical Jesus and the Jesus of faith are one and the same, and that the Gospels represent reliable testimony on which the historian may work.

But precisely in order to arrive at this de facto observation, each word must be verified, analyzed under an electron microscope, as it were, compared with possible synonyms, immersed in the context of its time, but also unveiled with the patrimony of history that it carries within.

Every word is a miniature world, the way millions of digitalized information bytes can be kept on a silicon chip. For example, the word 'Adam" in Hebrew contains in it the concept of 'red earth', therefore, 'born of the earth", referring to the clay from which we were fashioned.

I was most struck by the calmness - I would say the humility - with which Prof. Ratzinger has carried out his preliminary investigation. Laden with his years of study and reading, he never avails of his auctoritas, of the institutional role he embodies.

Rather, he presents himself as a researcher who, in the quiet of some remote university library, carries out his work, confronting documents, crosschecking proofs, seeking to give a solid equilibrium to the theses that he proposes and argues.

He treats scholars who sustain theses that are perhaps opposed and contrary to his with a rare respect, in scientific debate, even when those theses turn out to be scarcely founded even to readers who are not specialists in this area, among whom I count myself.

He does not hide, obscure or set aside such theses - rather, he excavates them one by one, but he does not seize them by the ears, as one might to with some pesky scholars, but rather with an almost fraternal sensitivity, a Franciscan levitas (lightness). The voice that speaks to other scholars is gentle, but this gentleness simply reinforces its firmness.

The French writer Philippe Sollers wrote in Le Monde rather original things about JESUS OF NAZARETH. He called it an extraordinary metaphysical detective story, a crasis (merger of forms) between the police thriller and a mystery.

Of course, that is a rather strong term, almost irreverent, but I imagine it is a description that the author himself would receive with a smile. As a writer, Sollers as acknowledging in the author of this thriller a true narrative talent, and he is right.

More than narrative talent, because this is no fiction, I would speak of expositional ability and elegant writing (but an elegance that is not smug about its effects). Were it not that he comes from a completely different background, one might almost say that Prof. Ratzinger belongs to the illustrious tradition of Italian essayism, perhaps superior to regular literary essayism, and which boasts of exemplars who are able to join profundity of thought with elevated writing qualities = from Benedetto Croce to Luigi Einaudi, Roberto LOnghi and Giovanni Macchia.

JESUS OF NAZARETH, Sollers went on for the benefit of the general public, is the opposite of a film because it is all internalized. The author works on exegesis, on interpretation. Of course, there is the political context of the times, but he deconstructs the theses that describe the execution of Jesus by the Gauleiter of Galilee as an episode in a guerrilla resistance to a brutal occupation force. a struggle we know was carried out by the Zealots. In the same way, he goes about addressing the accusation of deicide levelled against the Jews, in a way that goes beyond mere historiographic intention.

In this regard, I am pleased to cite Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, who observe that the attempt to define the 'real' Jesus is much more ambitious and demanding than simply to define the historical Jesus. Because, he writes, for every personage and even for each of us, that which is historiographically documentable, in an unexceptionabkle way, is much less than what each of us is, in reality.

In this respect, we can focus our attention on the polarity created between words which belong to a millenary tradition and the innovative and even revolutionary use of them in JESUS OF NAZARETH.

The revolution that Jesus represented is not a collective one, not a movement in the public squares, nor one that was delegated to anyone. It is one that each of us must complete in solitude within ourselves in order to bring about radically new behavior. A revolution carried out under the sign of the Word.

What Jesus instituted is a strong discontinuity that is rather daunting, because it not only abolishes the old codes of retaliation and vengeance, the practice of an eye for an eye, of returning blow for blow - in short, the entire code of tribal feuding - replacing it with love of neighbor and even of one's enemies, and placing man in the center of what we now call his 'plan' of salvation.

Jesus takes away from man his mechanical duties of sacrificing the best goats from his flock to an imaginary god, a megapower who is fabulously rich, and restores him to the mission of regenerating himself, transforming love of God into love for other men.

And the place of worship is no longer only the temple, not even the temple par excellence in Jerusalem. Every man is called on to be a temple himself, the temple for his own elevation.

And it is precisely because Prof. Ratzinger manages perfectly the instruments of philology that he is able to attribute metaphorical and figurative valences to the words that emerge from his 'laboratory'.

For instance, one sees his intuition, that of a true writer, which brings him to say that the words 'eternal life' do not mean, as the reader may well think, the life that follows after death, whereas the present life on earth is rightly fleeting and provisional.

For him. 'eternal life' is the same life that we are called on to live here and now, which does not conclude with physical death, if we are able to live it with the fullness we are asked to do, if we can activate within us that palingenesis which immerses us in a dimension that goes beyond simple temporal limits.

It is to look in life at the eternity of goodness. The true victory over death, which brings down the walls of time, is a worthy and full life, rich with human values, which continues in those who inherit them. Don't we in fact say that persons dear to us who have left us continue to live in us?

One can likewise see how the author is able - when he speaks of resurrection - because of his critical and philological abilities, to operate a subtle but acute distinction between the words in the evangelical texts and the profession of faith - expressed in precise formulation that imposes loyalty among believers - and those words that constitute the narrative modality of the apparitions of the Risen Christ which, he points out, come from various traditions (of expression, we might say) between Jerusalem and Galilee.

And it is this very variety of narrative canons which explains the diversity of the accounts of the Resurrection in the four Gospels. From which Prof Ratzinger offers us various pearls, as when, for example, he analyzes the metaphorical use of the word 'salt' in Mark and in Luke, writing in the Acts of the Apostles.

The word used by Luke, sunalizòmenos, literally means "eating salt with them", referring to the custom then of distributing bread and salt at a banquet to symbolize the cement of solid community alliances. The practice of conserving material things against corruption and the putrefaction that threatens them in turn points to the conservation of non-material goods such as the pact of loyalty that binds a community together.

We are immersed in the darkness of a long night - the demon does flourishing business, and he does not waste opportunities. The Church herself, writes Pope Benedict, navigates against the headwinds of history through the agitated ocean of time, and often, one has the impression that it is about to sink.

But, as Sollers writes, it comforts us to know that somewhere in Rome, a small light burns during the night, and an old scholar, with white vestments and white hair, continues patiently to write out with a pencil a thriller that is both physical and metaphysical.

Ash Wednesday, February 22, Seventh Week in Ordinary Time
Normally, February 22 is the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter which was celebrated last Sunday instead.


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

General Audience - The Holy Father spoke on the significance fo Lent, which begins today, as a time
of repentance, conversion and renewal.

In the afternoon, he led the traditional Ash Wednesday services on the Aventine Hill, starting with
the ceremonial precession from the benedictine Church of Sant'Anselmo to the Dominican headquarters Church
of Santa Sabina, the first of the 40 'station churches' of Rome (a lenten pilgrimage church for every day
of the season). Homily.


Sorry for another very late start.

Lent and the many Biblical
resonances of its 40 days
i601.photobucket.com/albums/tt96/MARITER_7/RV-NEW.jpg
February 22, 2012



The forty days of Lent, reflecting Christ’s forty days in the desert, were the focus of Pope Benedict XVI’s catechesis this Ash Wednesday. Speaking to pilgrims in the Paul VI audience hall, the Holy Father reflected on the condition of the pilgrim Church in the "desert" of the world and history.

Here is how he synthesized the catechesis in English:

---

Today the Church celebrates Ash Wednesday, the beginning of her Lenten journey towards Easter. The entire Christian community is invited to live this period of forty days as a pilgrimage of repentance, conversion and renewal.

In the Bible, the number forty is rich in symbolism. It recalls Israel’s journey in the desert, a time of expectation, purification and closeness to the Lord, but also a time of temptation and testing.

It also evokes Jesus’s own sojourn in the desert at the beginning of his public ministry, a time of profound closeness to the Father in prayer, but also of confrontation with the mystery of evil.

The Church’s Lenten discipline is meant to help deepen our life of faith and our imitation of Christ in his paschal mystery. In these forty days may we draw nearer to the Lord by meditating on his word and example, and conquer the desert of our spiritual aridity, selfishness and materialism.

For the whole Church may this Lent be a time of grace in which God leads us, in union with the crucified and risen Lord, through the experience of the desert to the joy and hope brought by Easter.

---

Here is Vatican Radio's translation of the main catechesis:

---

Dear brothers and sisters,

In this Catechesis I would like to dwell briefly on the season of Lent, which begins today with the Liturgy of Ash Wednesday. It is a journey of forty days that will lead us to the Paschal Triduum, memorial of the passion, death and resurrection of the Lord, the heart of the mystery of our salvation.

In the early centuries of the Church this was the time when those who had heard and accepted the message of Christ began, step by step, their journey of faith and conversion to receive the sacrament of baptism.

It was a drawing close to the living God and an initiation of the faith to be gradually accomplished, through an inner change in the catechumens, that is, those who wished to become Christians and thus be incorporated into Christ and the Church.

Subsequently, penitents, and then all the faithful were invited to experience this journey of spiritual renewal, to conform themselves and their lives to that of Christ.

The participation of the whole community in the different steps of the Lenten path emphasizes an important dimension of Christian spirituality: redemption is not available to only a few, but to all, through the death and resurrection of Christ.

Therefore, those who follow a journey of faith as catechumens to receive baptism, those who had strayed from God and the community of faith and seek reconciliation and those who lived their faith in full communion with the Church, together knew that the period before Easter is a period of metanoia, that is, of inner change, of repentance, the period that identifies our human life and our entire history as a process of conversion that is set in motion now in order to meet the Lord at the end of time.

In an expression that has become typical in the Liturgy, the Church calls the period in which we are now entering "Quadragesima," in short a period of forty days and, with a clear reference to Sacred Scripture, it introduces us to a specific spiritual context.

Forty is in fact the symbolic number in which salient moments of the experience of faith of the People of God are expressed. A figure that expresses the time of waiting, purification, return to the Lord, the awareness that God is faithful to his promises. This number does not represent an exact chronological time, divided by the sum of the days.

Rather it indicates a patient perseverance, a long trial, a sufficient period to see the works of God, a time within which we must make up our minds and to decide to accept our own responsibilities without additional references. It is the time for mature decisions.

The number forty first appears in the story of Noah. This just man because of the flood spends forty days and forty nights in the ark, along with his family and animals that God had told him to bring. He waits for another forty days, after the flood, before finding land, saved from destruction (Gen 7,4.12, 8.6).

Then, the next stop, Moses on Mount Sinai, in the presence of the Lord, for forty days and forty nights to receive the Law. He fasts throughout this period (Exodus 24:18).

Forty, the number of years the Jewish people journeyed from Egypt to the Promised Land, the right amount of time for them to experience the faithfulness of God: "Remember how for these forty years the LORD, your God, has directed all your journeying in the wilderness... The clothing did not fall from you in tatters, nor did your feet swell these forty years," says Moses in Deuteronomy at the end of the forty years of migration (Dt 8,2.4).

The years of peace enjoyed by Israel under the Judges are forty (Judg. 3,11.30), but, once this time ended, forgetfulness of the gifts of God begins and a return to sin.

The prophet Elijah takes forty days to reach Horeb, the mountain where he meets God (1 Kings 19.8). Forty are the days during which the people of Nineveh do penance for the forgiveness of God (Gen 3.4).

Forty were also the years of the reign of Saul (Acts 13:21), David (2 Sam 5:4-5) and Solomon (1 Kings 11:41), the first three kings of Israel. Even the biblical Psalms reflect on the meaning of the forty years, such as Psalm 95 for example, of which we heard a passage: "If you would listen to his voice today! Oh, that today you would hear his voice: Do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as on the day of Massah in the desert. There your ancestors tested me; they tried me though they had seen my works. Forty years I loathed that generation; I said: “This people’s heart goes astray; they do not know my ways" (vv. 7c-10).

In the New Testament Jesus, before beginning of his public life, retires to the desert for forty days without food or drink (Matt. 4.2): he nourishes himself on the Word of God, which he uses as a weapon to conquer the devil. The temptations of Jesus recall those the Jewish people faced in the desert, but could not conquer.

Forty are the days during which the risen Jesus instructs his disciples, before ascending to heaven and sending the Holy Spirit (Acts 1.3).

A spiritual context is described by this recurring number forty, one that remains current and valid, and the Church, precisely through the days of Lent, intends to maintain its enduring value and make us aware of its efficacy.

The Christian liturgy of Lent is intended to facilitate a journey of spiritual renewal in the light of this long biblical experience and especially to learn how to imitate Jesus, who in the forty days spent in the desert taught how to overcome temptation with the Word of God.

The forty years of Israel’s wandering in the desert present us with ambivalent attitudes and situations. On the one hand, they are the first season of love between God and his people when He spoke to their heart, continuously indicating to them the path to follow.

God had pitched his tent, so to speak, in the midst of Israel, He preceded it in a cloud or a pillar of fire, ensured its daily nourishment showering manna upon them, and bringing forth water from rock.

Therefore, the years spent by Israel in the desert can be seen as the time of the special election of God and adherence to Him by the people. The time of first love.

On the other hand, the Bible also shows another image of Israel's wanderings in the desert: it is also the time of the greatest temptations and dangers, when Israel murmured against God and wanted to return to paganism and build its own idols, as a need to worship a closer and more tangible God. It is also a time of rebellion against the great and invisible God.

This ambivalence, a period of special closeness to God, of first love and of temptation, the attempted return to paganism that characterized Israel in the desert, we find once again in a surprising way even in Jesus's earthly journey, of course without any compromise with sin.

After his baptism of repentance in the Jordan, in which he takes upon himself the destiny of the Servant of Yahweh, God who renounces himself and lives for others and places himself among sinners, to take upon himself the sins of the world, Jesus went to stay in the desert for forty days in deep union with the Father, thus repeating the history of Israel and all these rhythms of forty days a year.

This dynamic is a constant in the earthly life of Jesus, who always seeks moments of solitude to pray to his Father and remain in close and intimate communion with Him alone, and exclusive communion with Him, and then return among the people.

But in these times of "desert" and special encounter with the Father, Jesus is exposed to danger and is assailed by temptation and the seduction of devil, who offers him another messianic way, far from God's plan, because it passes through power, success, dominion and not through the total gift on the Cross.

This is the alternative messianism of power, of success, not messianism of gift and love of self.

This ambivalence also describes the condition of the pilgrim Church in the "desert" of the world and history. In this "desert" we believers certainly have the opportunity to profoundly experience God, an experience that makes the spirit strong, confirms the faith, nourishes hope, animates charity; an experience that makes us partakers of Christ's victory over sin and death through the Sacrifice of love on the Cross.

But the "desert" is also the negative aspects of the reality that surrounds us: the aridity, the poverty of words of life and of values, secularism and the materialist culture, which shut people within a horizon of mundane existence, robbing them of all reference to transcendence.

And this is also the environment in which the sky above us is obscured, because covered by the clouds of egoism, misunderstanding and deception. Despite this, even for the Church of today, the time of the desert can be transformed into a time of grace, because we have the certainty that even from the hardest rock God can bring forth the living water that refreshes and restores.

Dear brothers and sisters, in these forty days that will lead us to Easter may we find new courage to accept with patience and with faith situations of difficulty, of affliction and trial, knowing that from the darkness the Lord will make a new day dawn.

And if we are faithful to Jesus and follow him on the way of the Cross, the bright world of God, the world of light, truth and joy will be gifted to us once more: it will be the new dawn created by God himself. May you all have a good Lenten journey!

---

ASH WEDNESDAY SERVICES


Libretto cover: St. Stephen distributing alms, Fresco, Fra Angelico (1448). Capella Nicolina, Vatican Apostolic Palace.


The rites at Santa Sabina. I have seen no news agency photos so far of the Procession from Sant'Anselmo.

On Wednesday evening, Pope Benedict XVI led the traditional Ash Wednesday services on Rome's Aventine Hill, following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Blessed John Paul II who revived this practice in 1979.

The liturgy starts with prayers at the Church of Sant'Anselmo, main church of the Benedictine order in Rome, before a solemn procession towards the nearby Basilica of St. Sabina, headquarters of the Dominican Order in Rome, where both St. Dominic and St. Thomas Aquinas had lived in their time.

The Holy Father celebrated the Eucharist in St. Sabina, during which he received the ashes on his head, and in turn, imposed the ashes on the cardinals and bishops present.

Here is Vatican Radio's English translation of his homily:

---

Ash Wednesday is a day of fasting and penance on which we begin a new journey towards the Easter of Resurrection, the journey of Lent.

I would like to reflect on the liturgical sign of the ashes, a material sign, a natural element that, in the Liturgy, becomes a sacred symbol, so important on this day that marks the start of our Lenten journey.

In ancient times, in the Jewish culture, it was common to sprinkle one’s head with ashes as a sign of penance, and to dress in sack-cloth and rags. For us Christians, there is this one moment which has important symbolic and spiritual relevance.

Ashes are the material sign that brings the cosmos into the Liturgy. The most important signs are those of the Sacraments: water, oil, bread and wine, which become true sacramental elements through which we communicate the Grace of Christ who comes among us.

The ashes are not a sacramental sign, but they are linked with prayer and the sanctification of the Christian people. Before the ashes are placed on our heads, they are blessed according to two possible formulae: in the first they are called “austere symbols”, in the second, we invoke a blessing directly upon them, referring to the text in the Book of Genesis which can also accompany the imposition of the ashes: “Remember that you are dust and unto dust you shall return”.

Let us reflect for a moment on this passage of Genesis. It concludes with a judgement made by God after original sin. God curses the serpent who caused man and woman to commit sin.

Then He punishes the woman saying she will suffer the pains of giving birth. Then He punishes the man, saying he will suffer the fatigue of labour and He curses the soil saying “accursed be the soil because of you, because of your sin.”

The man and woman are not cursed directly as the serpent is, but because of Adam’s sin.

Let us reread the account of how God created man from the Earth. “God fashioned man of dust from the soil. Then He breathed into his nostrils, a breath of life. Thus man became a live being. Then God planted a garden in Eden, which is in the East, and there He put the man He had fashioned.”

Thus the sign of the ashes recalls the great story of creation which tells us that being human means unifying matter with Divine breath, using the image of dust formed by God and given life by His breath, breathed into the nostrils of the new creature.

In the Genesis account, the symbol of dust takes on a negative connotation because of sin. Before the fall the soil is totally good: through God’s work it is capable of producing “every kind of tree enticing to look at and good to eat.”

After the fall and following the divine curse it produces only thorns and brambles and only in exchange for the sweat of man’s brow will it surrender its fruits. The dust of the Earth no longer recalls the creative hand of God, one that is open to life, but it becomes a sign of death: “Dust you are and unto dust you shall return.”

It is clear from this Biblical text that the Earth participates in man’s destiny. In one of his homilies, St. John Chrysostom says: “See how after his disobedience, everything is imposed on man in a way that is contrary to his previous life style.”

This cursing of the soil has a “medicinal” function for man who learns from the resistance of the earth to recognize his limitations and his own human nature.

Another ancient commentary summarizes this beautifully: “Adam was created pure by God to serve Him. All creatures were created for the service of man. He was destined to be lord and king over all creatures. But when he embraced evil he did so by listening to something outside of himself. This penetrated his heart and took over his whole being. Thus ensnared by evil, Creation, which had assisted and served him, was ensnared together with him.”

As we said earlier quoting John Chrysostom, the cursing of the soil had a “medicinal”, or healing, function: meaning that God’s intention is always good and more profound, even than His own curse.

The curse does not come from God but from sin. God cannot avoid inflicting the curse because he respects human freedom and its consequences even when they are negative. Thus, within the punishment and within the curse, there is a good intention that comes from God.

When He says, “Dust you are and unto dust you shall return”, He intends inflicting a just punishment, but also announcing the way to salvation. This will pass through the Earth, through that same dust, that same flesh which will be assumed by the Word Incarnate.

This is the context in which the words of Genesis are reflected in the Ash Wednesday liturgy: as an invitation to penance, humility, and an awareness of our mortal state.

We are not to despair, but to welcome in this mortal state of ours the unthinkable nearness of God who opens the way to Resurrection, to paradise regained, beyond death. There is a text by Origen that says: “That which was flesh, earth, dust, and was destroyed by death and returned to dust and ashes, is made to rise again from the earth. According to the merits of the soul that inhabits the body, the person advances towards the glory of a spiritual body.”

The merits of the soul about which Origen speaks are important, but more important are the merits of Christ, the efficacy of his Paschal Mystery.

St. Paul gives us a good summary in the second reading: “For our sake God made the sinless one into sin so that in Him we might become the goodness of God.” For us to enjoy divine forgiveness depends essentially on the fact that God Himself, in the person of His Son, wanted to share in our human condition, but not in the corruption of sin.

The Father resurrected Him through the power of His Holy Spirit and Jesus, the new Adam, became the spirit who gives us life, the first fruits of the new creation.

The same spirit that resurrected Jesus from the dead can transform our hearts from hearts of stone to hearts of flesh. We said as much in the psalm: “A pure heart create for me O God, put a steadfast spirit within me, do not cast me away from your presence, nor deprive me of your holy spirit.”

That the same God that exiled our first parents from Eden, sent His own Son to this Earth devastated by sin, without sparing Him, so that we, prodigal children, can return, penitent and redeemed through His mercy, to our true homeland.

So it be for all of us, and for all believers, and for all those who humbly recognize their need to be saved. Amen.

---

Having missed the EWTN direct telecast of the Santa Sabina rites, I also missed the 6 pm replay because EWTN had a signal dropout in my area till 9 pm... so I did not know the Pope had used an electric cart for the procession...to which AP devoted a story by itself, without being snide about it, for a change. Must be the Lenten spirit at work!

Pope marks start of Lent
using a light Popemobile
for traditional procession




ROME. Feb. 22 (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI rode on a motorised cart in an Ash Wednesday procession, forsaking the traditional short walk between two Rome churches as the 84-year-old Pontiff tries to conserve his energy.

The Pope wore an ermine-trimmed crimson cape to protect him from the chilly, early evening air [It was nothing more than the winter mozzetta that was appropriate for the non-Eucharistic liturgy before the Mass!] as he stood in the cart during the brief procession atop the Aventine Hill, between St Anselmo Church and the Basilica of Santa Sabina.

The white vehicle resembled a kind of mini Popemobile he uses on trips and to get around the vast expanse of St Peter's Square. [It could have been the light electric cart he used in Piazza San Marco in Venice last May.]

But Pope Benedict walked briskly and unassisted into and out of the basilica, where he led a solemn service to mark the start of the Lenten season of penitence, including the placement of ashes on the forehead of faithful.


Last year's penitential procession.

Le ragioni dell'economia. Scritti per L'Osservatore Romano
(The reasons of the economy: Writings for L'Osservatore Romano)
by ETTORE GOTTI TEDESCHI
Vatican City, Libreria Editrice Vaticano, 2012, 167pp, euro 14

Benedict XVI and the global economy:
Man must change, not his instruments
by ETTORE GOTTI TEDESCHI
Translated from the 2/22/12 issue of


On Wednesday, February 22, a book by Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, president of the Vatican IOR, was presented at the Libreria internazionale Paolo VI, the LEV bookstore located at the ground floor of the Propaganda Fide headquarters off Piazza di Spagna. Herewith is the author's introduction to the book.

What does it mean to write for L'Osservatore Romano, the Pope's newspaper? I asked myself this when in the autumn of 2007, its new editor, Giovanni Maria Vian, asked me to do that.

The answer I gave myself was as follows: to contribute through my own competencies and knowledge,e in disseminating the messages that the Pontiff wishes to convey by to seeking to support his teachings with analyses and considerations on economic facts.

Writing for the Osservatore has also meant a new exercise for me in attempting to interpret economic facts with a reading that is consistent with Catholic social doctrine, especially the contents of the encyclicals Deus caritas est and, above all, Caritas in veritate.

My immediate temptation was to resort to moral arguments, but the editor discouraged that idea right away, asking me to be more technical in my interpretations and give minimum space to other considerations.

That is the reason for my 'technical' editorials, which are conceived and written according to the Catholic viewpoint, in the belief that natural laws are the essential premise for economic laws, and that the latter do not function if they do without the first. The reader can draw moral considerations from the analysis of facts.

My contributions to L'Osservatore, often picked up by other media, has been facilitated by the orientation that I have derived from Caritas in veritate, an encyclical on globalization written by a Pope who knows how to talk to the global audience. It is an encyclical which is, in fact, a manual for understanding and confronting the great economic problems that torment our time.

In this sense, my work was facilitated. Above all because I always had clearly in mind what Benedict XVI wrote in the introduction to the encyclical.

What are the cultural and moral conditionings that weigh upon the men of our century who are confused by the dominant nihilism that does not allow them to have any absolute references, nor to find a meaning in life, and therefore, of their own actions? And how can a man in such circumstances distinguish between means and ends, nor even to properly use the sophisticated instruments he now has at his disposition unless he can give them the necessary meaning?

In his introduction to CIV, the Pope implicitly poses a question: Which comes first - freedom or truth? Earthly life and its successes, as well as eternal life itself, depend on the answer.

Benedict XVI explains that it is not so much the instruments that should be changed but man himself. And this struck me with such force as to constrain me to change my viewpoint as an economist.

To change man himself. Every Catholic ought to have this responsibility. If we fail to understand this, we shall not succeed to prevent economic instruments from assuming a moral autonomy, escaping from man's control.

That is why I have insisted so much that the origin of the current economic crisis goes back to the decline in birthrate, according to the prospects expressed in the first chapter of the encyclical, in reference to Paul VI's Humanae vitae.

For this reason, I have often looked at the development of the economic crisis and of the errors that have been committed, drawing inspiration from that chapter, in which Benedict XVI refers to another encyclical by Paul VI, Populorum progressio.

And so, in the succeeding chapters, Benedict XVI explains how man can change, and the consequences that would accrue if he succeeded, or alternatively, if he fails.

Often, the outside world refuses to acknowledge the rationality of the Catholic faith, but they must agree that when things are going wrong as they do today, one must attribute the responsibility to man and his misuse of the instruments given to him, not to the instruments themselves which are neutral per se.

And so, to think of changing the world by changing the instruments rather than man himself is a tragic illusion.

In my editorials which are collected here, I have always referred to CIV as an indispensable manual against going wrong. In fact, my articles can be considered a summary synthesis of what the Pope has explained magisterially in the encyclical.

For this reason, I dare to offer this book to Benedict XVI, a book that his publishing house has seen fit to publish.