Earlier posts today (8/28) in the preceding page, including reaction - and non-reaction - in the Italian media, to Cardinal Bertone's lengthy interview in today's OR.
I thought it would be useful to re-post here some items I previously posted in the PRF on various occasions, to mark the feast of St. Augustine today:
AUGUSTINE AND BENEDICT XVI
First, from an interview by ZENIT with the Provost general of the Augustinian Order at the time of Pope Benedict's visit to the tomb of St. Augustine in Pavia on April 22, 2006:
In October 2005, with Bishop Giovanni Giudici of Pavia, we invited the Pope to Pavia precisely to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the Grand Union, the last act of the foundation of the Order of St. Augustine.
In November of the same year we received the affirmative response of the Pope through the Vatican secretary of state. The date was left to be determined.
This event was concretized in the pastoral visit to the Dioceses of Vigevano and Pavia, that would conclude in the Basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro, the place where the relics of St. Augustine have been kept since about 725, when the king of the Lombards, Liutprand, had them brought to Pavia from Sardinia...
The Pope is very close to the figure of St. Augustine. In 1953 he wrote his doctoral thesis on the Holy Doctor: People and House of God in St. Augustine's Doctrine of the Church.
In the course of his visit to the Major Seminary of Rome on Feb. 17, 2007, the Pope said that he was fascinated by the great humanity of St. Augustine, who was not able initially simply to identify himself with the Church, because he was a catechumen, but had to struggle spiritually to find, little by little, the way to God's word, to life with God, right up to the great "yes" to his Church.
This is how he conquered his very personal theology, which is above all developed in his preaching.
The Pope has made many direct references, for example the synthesis of the figure of St. Augustine presented during the Angelus on Aug. 27, 2006, the eve of the feast of St. Augustine.
He spoke of him as "the great pastor" in the meeting with the parishioners and clergy of the Diocese of Rome on Feb. 22, 2007. He recalls him in the last post-synodal apostolic exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis on the Eucharist, food of truth, gratuitous gift of the Holy Trinity, the "Christus Totus," that is, the indivisible Christ, the whole together in the image of the head and members of the body.
In the reflections of Benedict XVI we can see the apex of the re-evaluation of the Fathers of the Church, and Augustine in particular, already begun by Vatican II and present in the principal documents of the Church...
During his visit to the basilica, he blessed the first stone of the future cultural center, named for Benedict XVI, which will relaunch some initiatives already in existence, for example, "Pavian Augustinian Week," with new initiatives, giving life to a new cultural pole that has St. Augustine as its guide.
The lamp that the Pope lit before the celebration of vespers will always remain lit next to the mortal remains of the saint. This light is meant to indicate that Augustine is still alive today, in his works and in those who live his spirituality, as we Augustinians do for example. In fact, around the ark there are 50 little flames that burn, which signify the 50 countries where we friars, together with the nuns, are present.
During that visit to Pavia in April 2006, Benedict XVI shaped all his addresses, as well as the homily at Mass and at Vespers, around the figure of St. Augustine. Here is part of what he said at the Vespers he celebrated before St. Augustine's tomb:
In this its concluding event, my visit to Pavia takes on the form of a pilgrimage. It was the form in which I originally conceived it, desiring to come and venerate the mortal remains of St. Augustine, to express both the homage of the entire Catholic Church to one of its greatest Fathers, as well as my personal devotion and acknowledgement of him who has played such a great part in my life as a theologian and as pastor, but I would say, above all, as a man and a priest...
As Providence would have it, my trip has acquired the character of a true pastoral visit, and therefore, in this pause for prayer, I would like to reflect, here at the tomb of the 'Doctor gratiae', the Doctor of Grace, on a message that is significant for the journey of the Church.
This message comes to us from the encounter of the Word of God and the personal experience of the great Bishop of Hippo. We heard the brief Biblical reading for the second Vespers of the Third Sunday of Easter.
The Letter to the Hebrews has placed before us Christ as the supreme and eternal Priest, exalted to the glory of the Father, after having offered Himself as the unique and perfect Sacrifice of the New Alliance, in which the work of Redemption is completed.
St. Augustine focused his attention on this mystery and in it he found the truth that he had been looking for: Jesus Christ, Word incarnate, immolated Lamb, resurrected, is the revelation of the face of God-Love to every human being journeying along the paths of time towards eternity.
The apostle John writes in a passage that one might consider parallel to that proclaimed today in the Letter to the Hebrews: "This is love: it is not us who loved God , but God who has loved us and has sent His son as the expiatory victim for our sins."
Here is the heart of the Gospel, the nucleus of Christianity. The light of this love opened the eyes of Augustine, made him encounter the 'ancient beauty that is always new" - that alone in which the heart of man can find peace.
Dear brothers and sisters, here before the tomb of St. Augustine, I would like to symbolically re-consign to the Church and to the world my first Encyclical which contains this central message of the Gospel, Deus caritas est, God is love.
This encyclical, especially its first part, owes a great part to the thought of St. Augustine, who was a passionate lover of the Love of God, which he sang, meditated and preached in all his writings, but above all, gave witness to in his pastoral ministry.
I am convinced, placing myself in the wake of my venerated predecessors John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I and John Paul II, that mankind today needs this essential message incarnated in Jesus Christ: God is love. Everything should proceed from this, and everything should lead to it: every pastoral action, every theological treatise.
As St. Paul said: 'If I do not have love, I gain nothing' (cfr 1 Cor 13,3): all charisms lose sense and value without love, thanks to which, instead, everything concurs to build the mystical Body of Christ.
Here then is the message that St. Augustine even today repeats to the whole Church, and, in particular, to this diocesan community which guards his relics with such veneration: Love is the soul of the life of the Church and of its pastoral action.
We heard it today in the dialog between Christ and Simon Peter: "Do you love me? Feed my lambs" (cfr Jn 21, 15-17). Only he who lives in a personal experience of the love of the Lord is able to exercise the task of guiding and accompanying others on the journey in the footsteps of Christ.
At the school of St. Augustine, I repeat this truth for you as Bishop of Rome, while with joy that is ever new, I welcome it with you as a Christian."
To serve Christ is above all a question of love. Dear brothers and sisters, may your membership in the Church and your apostolate shine always through freedom from every individual interest and through an adherence without reservation to the love of Christ.
The youth, in particular, need to receive this news of freedom and joy, whose secret is in Christ. It is Him who is the truest answer to the expectations in their uneasy hearts for all the many questions that they carry within them. Only in Him - the Word pronounced by the Father for us - is that marriage of truth and love in which is found the true sense of life.
Augustine lived first-hand and explored to the very depth the questions that man carries in his heart, and he has sounded the capacity that man has to open up to God's infinity. Following in the footsteps of Augustine, may you also be a Church that announces frankly the 'good news' of Christ, His proposition of life, His message of reconciliation and forgiveness.
The Church is a community of persons who believe in God, the God of Jesus Christ, and who are committed to live in the world the commandment of love which He left us. It is, therefore, a community in which its members are educated in love, and this education takes place not despite but through the events of life.
So it was with Peter, for Augustine, and for all the saints. So it is for us...
I encourage you to proceed in bearing personal and community witness of hard-working love. The service of charity, which you rightly conceive as always linked to the announcement of the Word and to the celebration of the Sacraments, calls you, and at the same time, stimulates you to be attentive to the material and spiritual needs of your brothers.
I encourage you to follow the high road of the Christian life, which finds in charity the link to perfection and which should translate itself in a moral lifestyle inspired by the Gospel - inevitably countercurrent with respect to worldly criteria - but to bear witness to always in a humble, respectable and cordial way.
Dear brothers and sisters, it has been a gift for me, really a gift, to share with you this pause at the tomb of St. Augustine: your presence has given my pilgrimage a more concrete ecclesial sense.
NB: In January-February 2008, the Holy Father gave five catecheses dedicated to St. Augustine in his teaching cycle on the Fathers of the Church.
On the weekend of Benedict XVI's visit to Vigevano and Pavia, Carl Olson had this post in Ignatius Insight:
Benedict and Augustine
by Carl Olson
April 20, 2006
This Saturday and Sunday the Holy Father is visiting the Italian dioceses of Vigevano and Pavia, and will be visiting the tomb of Saint Augustine, the bishop of Hippo, which is located in the Basilica of St. Peters in the Golden Sky in Pavia. In an April 19th column for the
National Post (Canada), Fr. Raymond J. de Souza writes:
St. Augustine is more than the principal intellectual influence on Benedict; the greatest of the first millennium’s Christian scholars is the Pope’s constant intellectual companion. His preaching and teaching are unfailingly leavened with Augustinian quotations.
If John Paul II was a great philosopher Pope, teaching the wisdom of Saint Thomas Aquinas to the late 20th century, Benedict is doing the same for Augustine in the 21st.
“Augustine defines the essence of the Christian religion,” then-Cardinal Ratzinger once said. “He saw Christian faith, not in continuity with earlier religions, but rather in continuity with philosophy as a victory of reason over superstition.”
It is a favourite theme of Pope Benedict, one that provided the high point of his papacy thus far, the world-shaking address at Regensburg last year, when he argued that to act contrary to right reason was to act contrary to God — a critical message in an age of religiously motivated violence. ...
Benedict follows St. Augustine in seeing the Christian logos, the divine Word that rationally orders all things, an entirely different conception of God. Here is a God who is rational, whose creation reflects the order and goodness of right reason, and who can be known by human beings, made in His image and able to reason themselves.
And even more extraordinary than that, this God revealed Himself as one who was love — a love that creates, redeems and calls His creation to Himself. The logos of philosophy becomes the God who is love, as Benedict put it in his first encyclical.
The God of Judeo-Christian revelation is not merely the god of the philosophers, acting as a remote first cause or principle of motion. Rather this God is a rational person, the principle of rationality and truth. This God can be approached by human creatures in truth — both the natural truths of science, and the revealed truths of faith.
The ancient gods of the Nile or Mount Olympus, with their need for power and domination, had no standing in the world of philosophy. They belonged to a world of superstition. St. Augustine demonstrated how the God of Abraham belonged the world of philosophy, but pointed beyond it to the world of salvific love.
Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P., in his excellent book,
The Theology of Joseph Ratzinger (T&T Clark, 1988; republished in 2005 as
The Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: An Introduction to the Theology of Joseph Ratzinger [Burns & Oates]), dedicates an entire chapter, "Augustine and the Church," to examining the influence of the great Doctor on Ratzinger's thought and theology, especially his approach to ecclesiology:
Believing with Romano Guardini that the twentieth century was proving, theologically, the "century of the Church", when the idea of the Church was re-awakening in all its depth and breadth, Ratzinger chose to scour the Augustinian corpus for insight into the nature of the Christian community of faith. ... For Augustine, the Church is at once the "people and the house of God". (p. 29)
And this interesting note:
Nonetheless, the culture which Augustine brought to the exploration of the Christian faith in his early writings was largely philosophical, and so it is, naturally, from a philosophical perspective that Augustine first considered the mystery of the Church.
Here Ratzinger identifies two main elements that form the Ansätze, "starting-points" of Augustinian ecclesiology. Augustine's reflections on the concept of faith will be vital for his understanding of the Church as people of God. By contrast, his concept of love is more important for his portrait of the Church as the house of God ... (p. 33).
Ecclesiology was a primary focus in many of Joseph Ratzinger's writings, while a central theme of his pontificate, of course, has been love. As both Frs. de Souza and Nichols indicate, the effect of Augustine's thought on Benedict has been profound.
And while there are many obvious differences between two bishops who lived so many centuries apart, there are, I think, several intriguing parallels, or commonalities: the theological and philosophical erudition, the deep knowledge of both Christian and non-Christian beliefs and philosophies, the interaction with non-Christian philosophies, an ability to both be open to such systems while at the same time defending Catholic doctrine, the ability to be both theologian and pastor, a theological focus on ecclesiology, and so forth. Someday, I trust, someone will further explore much further, at book length, this fascinating relationship.
[Someone's probably working on it already!]
My own comments at the time:
When you come to think of it, Benedict XVI's challenge is not so much how to 'match' (for want of a better term) his immediate predecessor John Paul II, but how to 'live up' to the wider expectation held of him by by admirers who have a longer and broader view of history, who see in Benedict XVI not just the new Benedict of Europe as was St. Benedict of Norcia, but also the new Augustine for the Catholic Church and the Western world.
Not that Joseph Ratzinger would think of himself in these terms, but the parallels are just too obvious. Surely while he was living the awesome curriculum vitae that he has so far achieved, the thought of being the next Benedict or the next Augustine - being anybody else other than himself, in short - was farthest from his mind, even if he was promoting and developing promoting some of the themes dear to both those great saints.
In 2006, Peter Seewald quoted the eminent liberal Munich theologian Eugen Biser, then 89, as saying that, even as early as now, one can already say that Benedict XVI will be considered one of the most significant Popes in history. [And that's not the opinion of just another besotted Benaddict like us, obviously! Who might well add, "...and conceivably, future Doctor of the Church, 'Doctor caritatis', perhaps"! ]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 29/08/2009 13:43]