October 6, 2009
"Remember that the proclamation of the Gospel and adherence to the Christian values... is not merely useful but essential for building a good society....'"
— Benedict XVI to Brazilian Bishops, Ad Limina Visit of Brazilian Prelates from West Region, L'Osservatore Romano, (September 16, 2009. Citation from Caritats in veritate, #4.)
A good society ought to be possible to man's natural reason. We wonder why it is so rare that any even passable society comes about in human history.
The answer to this question has to do with our ability to locate and define what human life as such is about. It is not primarily about building a good society, though that is of importance.
Moreover, it would seem that even if we want a good society, something else is in fact necessary, something that is not necessarily or primarily political.
This position does not contradict Aristotle's notion that a good society is what the polis is for, that man is by nature a political animal which is not complete simply by itself.
"Proclamation of the Gospel and adherence to Christian values" are said by Benedict, speaking to some Brazilian bishops, to be more than "useful." They are "necessary."
Does this view undermine the relative autonomy or secularity of politics? The fact is that it makes this relative autonomy possible. All political societies are natural institutions whose end as such is also natural. Yet man is more than a "natural" being. He is created from his personal beginning to achieve the vision of God, something beyond his nature.
If we treat man as only natural, he will no doubt end up being less than natural. This is the record of human history. This consequence must mean there is more to ourselves than ourselves. This is what revelation is about.
The principle is not, get man's natural end right and you will be happy, but get man's supernatural end right or you will not be able to get his natural or this worldly end right.
Politics is not only the highest of the practical sciences, but it is also the main temptation of man. It is the most logical enthusiasm to replace God when we refuse his invitation to the end for which he is created.
The Holy Father's short address to the Brazilian bishops contains some remarkable lines.
"God," he tells them, "does not see as human beings see! The urgent need of the good Lord is dictated by his wish that 'all men be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth'" (Tim. 2:4).
Thus, it would appear that God is not particularly concerned about the rise and fall of nations or the structures of polities except in so far as they foster or impede a purpose that is not itself political.
The pope describes our contemporaries, ourselves included. Many folks pass their "whole life in an instant and others wander in tedium and inertia or who abandon themselves to every sort of violence." He sees these lives as "desperate" for hope. They look for meaning in life.
The pope returns to the theme of what happened to the Church after Vatican II in order to alert bishops to the real issues.
"Some have interpreted openness to the world (after the Council) not as a requirement of the missionary zeal of the Heart of Christ, but rather as a passage to secularization, seeing in it several values of great Christian depth, such as equality, freedom and solidarity, and showing that they were ready to make concessions and to discover areas of co-operation." These thinkers, however, in analyzing such common ends did not always understand them in a Christian manner.
Thus, the pope is blunt here, "certain leading clerics"— no names given! — "took part in ethical debates in response to the expectations of public opinion." They talked about equality, freedom, and solidarity often enough but were silent on other matters in which the whole Christian mission to the world also consists.
"But [these same] people stopped speaking of certain fundamental truths of faith, such as sin, grace, theological life and the last things." And it was in these latter doctrines that the problems arose.
Spe Salvi had to write a complete reorientation of eschatology because those who only spoke of "equality, freedom, and solidarity" followed the ideologies into making these goals the principal purpose of man in the world.
Sin, grace, the theological virtues, and the four last things look beyond the future in this world. They intimate that the main purpose of man in the world is not the construction of some inner-worldly political order down the ages.
It is true that a correct understanding of these notions, all of them, might result in some adequate or good worldly society as an indirect effect of living well and knowing the transcendent end of each human person.
Such Catholic thinkers and "ecclesial communities" were caught up in what Benedict calls a "self-secularization." What was the result? They found their appeal to these limited interpretations was leaving the pews empty. People in great numbers began to leave the Church in which they were "deprived and disappointed" at not finding the essentials of Catholicism preached and deepened.
"When they meet us," Benedict writes in a happy phrase, "our contemporaries want to see what they see nowhere else, that is, the joy and hope that come from being with the Risen Lord."
It is the Risen Lord who grounds the particular destiny of each actual human being in history. It is not the movements of history or some future bliss down the ages.
When people look at the Church today, what do they see? "They see the abyss of differences and opposition to the Magisterium of the Church growing ever wider, especially in the field of ethics." We all know what this means, of course.
What is the result? "In this desert without God, the new generation feels a deep thirst for transcendence."
The pope, with his predecessor, meets a new youth who have not known unity in the public face of the Church. "It is the youth of this generation who knock at the doors of the seminary and need formation teachers who are real men of God."
These young men coming into seminaries, the Holy Father thinks, "participate in the Eucharist" daily. They love silence and prayer. What they seek, almost in the literal words of St. Ignatius of Loyola, is "the glory of God and the salvation of souls," including no doubt their own.
So, this short conference with a few Brazilian bishops (the photo in L'Osservatore Romano shows nine bishops), is rich in Benedict's analysis of what has gone wrong.
It is a penetrating mind at work of keeping the essentials before us. The Gospel does need to be proclaimed for what it is. Christian doctrines need to be lived. When they were not, it was not just the Church that was in trouble, but society itself, so intimately is the Gospel associated with how we live our lives.
If we never hear "sin, grace, the theological virtues, and the last things" preached and explained, we are missing what we need to hear. Paradoxically, only when we hear and live these things can we also find the "joy and hope that come from being with the Risen Lord..."
As usual, alone among all Anglophone observers of the Vatican and the papacy, only Fr. Schall takes the time and effort to scrutinize even Benedict XVI's 'routine' discourses - in this case, his address to visiting bishops of northeastern Brazil - for how the Holy Father always manages to re-state in fresh terms the essential truths of the faith and the priorities of pastoral activity today.
I found it very significant that he did so once again - extemporaneously and in a dense but clear exegesis of a hymn to the Holy Spirit - in his opening meditation for the Synodal assembly on Africa, instead of re-treading the ground he had tilled the previous day about the centrality of Africa in his homily at the opening Mass.
P.S.
My oversight...because I had a rather late start today on my Forum tasks: the editor of OR did dedicate an editorial in today's (10/5-10/6) issue to the Pope's opening meditation. Here is a translation:
The primacy of God
Editorial
by Giovanni Maria Vian
Translated from
the 10/5-10/6/09 issue of
An invocation to the Holy Spirit began the work of the Second Special Assembly for Africa of the Bishops' Synod, opened at St. Peter's Basilica Sunday by a Eucharistic celebration in which Latin chant and African song were heard.
On both occasions, Benedict XVI spoke of the primacy of God, commenting on the Biblical readings for the Mass and reflecting on the hymn
Nunc sancte nobis Spiritus, which tradition attributes to St. Ambrose.
The Pope went directly to the root of what is essential, underscoring the absolute importance of the divine design expressed in the creation of man - "In the image of God, he created man... he created man and woman" - and recalling how the coming of the Holy Spirit, descending on the Apostles at Pentecost, should not be just an event of the past but should be invoked always, as the hymn says 'nunc', now.
But today, that recognition of the lordship of God, which distinguishes African cultures, is at risk - Benedict XVI did not use half terms - to a colonialism that refuses to die and exports to Africa two dangerous tendencies: on the one hand, the practical materialism that weighs heavily on Western societies, and on the other hand, religious fundamentalism which uses God's name
to mask intolerance and violence.
['To mask'? No, to justify!]
And just as the primacy of God is contained in the original design of matrimony in the words of Christ, so it is acknowledged every time we invoke the Holy Spirit - every day, in the morning prayer with the words of the Ambrosian hymn - so that it may re-create the Church and the world.
Which also demonstrates clearly that the Church is not the product of human organization, but rather the result of man's collaboration with the divine design.
The Pope meditated in depth, explaining - in perfect continuity with Christian tradition from the first centuries, veritably like a Father of the Church - how the descent of the Holy Spirit must be implored in every fiber of our being. In order that everyone may understand his own inadequacies, as well as the evils of the world, in the light of God.
A God who is not distant, but on the contrary, dwells in our heart, as Benedict XVI likes to say tirelessly. Always remembering that acknowledging the primacy of God carries the urgency of communicating this to the world, as well as the necessity of practising charity - that must be both universal and concrete - towards our neighbor, following the Biblical parable of the good Samaritan.
Once again, then, the Pope astonishes by returning to the essential, namely, speaking of God, in relation to a continent mostly ignored in the international media, perhaps because it has been exploited, but otherwise evoked only because of its economic and social problems.
We may well ask how much of this kind and gentle homily by Benedict XVI - whose trip to Africa was overshadowed and distorted in media reporting by a prejudiced and unfounded controversy over the ways of fighting AIDS - will find space in the media, which have often been responsible for a reductive or even downright hostile representation of this Pope, as the president of the Italian bishops' conference underscored to the presidents of the Bishops' Conferences of Europe.
[Cardinal Bagnasco's address in Paris last Saturday, 10/3, on "The Media and the Pope" - posted in full on the preceding page of this thread.]
Notwithstanding all that hostility, the Pope and the Church know well that the Roman Catholic Church is not just another group among many, nor is it closed and concerned only with its own interests.
On the contrary, they are aware that Christians are called to universal charity. To make way for the primacy of the God who wants - to use an expression dear to the Greek Fathers - the divinization of man.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 07/10/2009 00:26]