The world's only statesman:
Benedict XVI looks at a
wounded, war-weary world
by Giulio Albanese
Translated from
December 27, 2012
At a time in human history as sensitive as ours, that is marked by profound social and economic inequalities, Benedict XVI has found the right words to comfort all men and women of good will wherever they may be.
His messages for the Christmas season have had the common thread of peace running through them. In the homily at the Christmas Eve Mass in St. Peter's as well as in the traditional Christmas Day message addressed
urbi et orbi, the Pope reiterated his concern that the Christian community, and in general, civilian society on the planetary scale, may be aware of the importance of active participation in the construction of the common good, in respect for the positive value of life.
This is a task in which we are all involved personally, at the educational level, in promoting a Christian culture inspired by the social doctrine of the Church, and thus, by the Gospel.
In other words, it is possible to 'forge swords into ploughshares' and that "aid to the suffering replaces weapons of war", which is possible only if human beings are illumined by the grace of God and that educational agencies carry out their function by helping the new generations understand the absurdity of violence in all its forms.
The Holy Father's message is both theological and pastoral, and detailed according to the various scenarios that currently characterize the international panorama.
NO, above all, to the violences committed in the name of God, as, it has happened unfortunately, for the third year in a row, in northern Nigeria, where 12 Christians lost their lives in a Christmas Day attack on their church.
NO also to the absence of God: "Where God is not glorified, where he is forgotten or even denied, there is no peace either... While there is no denying a certain misuse of religion in history, yet it is not true that denial of God would lead to peace. If God’s light is extinguished, man’s divine dignity is also extinguished. Then the human creature would cease to be God’s image, to which we must pay honour in every person, in the weak, in the stranger, in the poor".
Benedict XVI's words are extremely important observations because they go beyond platitudes or banalizations of the meaning of peace by ideological prejudices whatever their origin may be.
And of course, his references to the crisis areas in the world are illuminating: from Syria to the Holy Land, from Mali to Kenya and Nigeria...
In the face of these overwhelming realities, the Roman Catholic Pontiff remains the only voice - one might say, the only statesman - on the contemporary world scene who is able to indicate a way out.
Moreover, as he himself underscores in his Message for the next World Day of Peace: "In growing sectors of public opinion, the ideologies of radical and technocracy are spreading the conviction that economic growth should be pursued even to the detriment of the state’s social responsibilities and civil society’s networks of solidarity, together with social rights and duties. It should be remembered that these rights and duties are fundamental for the full realization of other rights and duties, starting with those which are civil and political".
In fact, there is no doubt that much of the conflict in the world is determined by situations of exploitation, but also the lack of scruples among those who only and ever aim, whatever it takes, for the maximization of profit.
[I remember as a young girl in the 1960s listening to the late President Sukarno of Indonesia, denouncing at a US-sponsored ASEAN meeting in Manila, "l'exploitation de l'homme par l'homme" (he spoke in French, not English), and it was the first time I had ever come across that memorable phrase (which turns out to be the Marxist definition of capitalism, obviously incomplete but nonetheless a resounding slogan!) It certainly impressed itself on my mind. Human nature being what it is, man continually exploits other men, and not just in capitalism.]
In 2012, there was a remarkable increase in international conflicts especially in Africa, a continent where energy sources and other natural resources present under the ground represent a factor that is paradoxically and highly destabilizing for the local populations, already beset by starvation and pandemic disease.
The Pope has also made yet another call in behalf of all refugees: "In our attitude towards the homeless, towards refugees and migrants... do we really have room for God when he seeks to enter under our roof? Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself?"
Which tells us that in this time of cultural and anthropological crisis (we are not just going through a crisis of the markets) - when narrow nationalisms seem to have re-emerged even in Europe - the primacy of love can never be misunderstood or not acknowledged.
Benedict XVI at Christmas 2012:
‘The true root of violence is rejection of God’
by Massimo Introvigne
Translated from
December 27, 2012
Every year at Christmas, TV brings to our homes the words of Benedict XVI for the season. Of course, we are struck above all by the impressive setting of St. Peter’s Basilica and by the sumptuousness of the liturgy. But one must hope that many also take note of the Pope’s words, which are never just ‘ceremonial’.
Beginning with the Gospels of the Infancy of Jesus, to which he has just dedicated a slim but memorable volume, Benedict XVI also reiterated in his Christmas Eve homily, in his Urbi et Orbi message on Christmas Day, and in his Angelus reflection on December 26, a theme of growing importance in his Magisterium: denouncing the automatic exclusion of religion and God in modern ideologies and ways of thinking – a closedness to God that does not predispose to peace but to violence and war.
A violence, he notes, which is today often manifested against Christians. The Pope cited Nigeria, where anti-Church hatred was once again demonstrated on Christmas Day in the attack on a church that left at least 12 Christians dead.
In his Christmas Eve homily, the Pope took off from the ‘almost casual remark’ by the evangelist Luke that ‘there was no room at the inn’ for Mary and Joseph. In thousands of homilies around the world, this phrase from the Gospel is commented upon to refer to refugees and migrants, to poor people in general. A true interpretation, says the Pope, calling attention the next day to the refugee emergencies in Syria, Democratic Congo and Mali.
But, he adds, we cannot stop here. Why does the contemporary world find it hard to find room for the poor and for refugees? The Holy Father says that a more fundamental question is behind this: “Do we really have room for God when he seeks to enter under our roof? Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself?”
The exclusion of God from our lives begins “when we have no time for him. The faster we can move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have. And God? The question of God never seems urgent. Our time is already completely full”.
More deeply, it is not only about leading frenetic lives. The exclusion of God is ideological.
Does God actually have a place in our thinking? Our process of thinking is structured in such a way that he simply ought not to exist. Even if he seems to knock at the door of our thinking, he has to be explained away. If thinking is to be taken seriously, it must be structured in such a way that the “God hypothesis” becomes superfluous. There is no room for him.
Entire nations, 'important' ones, are organized on this ideological premise, and the Pope’s appeal on Christmas Day to the new Chinese leadership to finally accept ‘the contribution of religions to the construction of a fraternal society” was particularly significant.
Once God is excluded from one’s thoughts, he is also excluded from life itself.
Not even in our feelings and desires is there any room for him. We want ourselves. We want what we can seize hold of, we want happiness that is within our reach, we want our plans and purposes to succeed. We are so ‘full’ of ourselves that there is no room left for God. And that means there is no room for others either, for children, for the poor, for the stranger.
In Bethlehem, the angels sang – in the most precise translation, for which the Pope explains the reasons in his book on The Infancy Narratives – “Glory to God in the highest and on earth,
peace among men with whom he is pleased”.
If we make ourselves open to listening to the music and words of the angels, there is a clear indication here of the tragic consequences of rejecting God. ”Linked to God’s glory on high is peace on earth among men. Where God is not glorified, where he is forgotten or even denied, there is no peace either.”
Today, this statement may sound strange to many.
Nowadays, though, widespread currents of thought assert the exact opposite: they say that religions, especially monotheism, are the cause of the violence and the wars in the world. If there is to be peace, humanity must first be liberated from them. Monotheism, belief in one God, is said to be arrogance, a cause of intolerance, because by its nature, with its claim to possess the sole truth, it seeks to impose itself on everyone.
This is a crucial theme for Benedict XVI, which he has treated in depth during his visit to the Holy Land in 2009, in the inter-religious meeting in Assisi in 2011, and most recently, in his address to the International Theological Commission on December 7, 2012.
The Pope has acknowledged, time and again, that
in the course of history, monotheism has served as a pretext for intolerance and violence. It is true that religion can become corrupted and hence opposed to its deepest essence, when people think they have to take God’s cause into their own hands, making God into their private property. We must be on the lookout for these distortions of the sacred.
Nonetheless, “it is not true that denial of God would lead to peace. If God’s light is extinguished, man’s divine dignity is also extinguished.” The history of the past century shows this.
The kind of arrogant violence that then arises, the way man then despises and tramples upon man: we saw this in all its cruelty in the last century.
Only if God’s light shines over man and within him, only if every single person is desired, known and loved by God is his dignity inviolable, however wretched his situation may be.
Only by sincerely seeking that ‘pleasure’ of God that the angels sang about can we truly build peace. It is a message that in this season, the Pope has repeatedly offered especially to those who live in the land where Jesus and the first Christians lived: to the political factions doing battle in Syria, to the governments that have emerged from the prematurely-named Arab spring which are not necessarily tolerant of their Christian minorities, to the Israelis and Palestinians who continue to be in a seemingly endless conflict.
The Pope has prayed that “Christians in the lands where our faith had its origin may keep their homes, and that Christians and Muslims may build together their countries in the peace of God”.
But to respond best to the ideologies of violence and rejection of God, inner conversion is needed. The shepherds in Bethlehem said to each other, “Transeamus” – let us go across – to see the Baby. Conversion means ‘going over’, “daring to step beyond, to make the “transition” by which we step outside our habits of thought and habits of life, across the purely material world into the real one, across to the God who in his turn has come across to us”.
“Going across” means, ultimately, to change our ‘sick’ relationship with time.
The shepherds made haste. Holy curiosity and holy joy impelled them. In our case, it is probably not very often that we make haste for the things of God. God does not feature among the things that require haste. The things of God can wait, we think and we say. And yet he is the most important thing, ultimately the one truly important thing.
Apropos: John Paul II had the advantage that at the time when the world's most urgent priority was to bring to an end the evils of Communism, there were two 'leaders of the free world'. i.e., political leaders who were in a position to do something concrete about it, who shared his resolve and his vision in Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Today, Benedict XVI stands alone in his moral authority, and in his untiring and unfazed appeals for resolving existing conflicts through good will and negotiations that can truly bring about reconciliation, justice and peace. Other world leaders, and the ever ineffectual United Nations, occasionally pay lip service to it but have been unable to bring about any meaningful moves in that direction, although it behooves them to do so.
One might well point to Benedict XVI's fellow German, Angela Merkel, as the only other leader of consequence who has a faith-based backbone, one might say, but the world sees her less as a moral authority than as the determined leader of the one European nation that has not fallen so far into the financial quicksands of the cradle-to-grave entitlement society. (Meanwhile, the current leaders of the United Kingdom and France, in other times Europe's de facto leaders, have become so abjectly subjugated to secular ideology that both are sponsoring their respective national campaigns to destroy traditional marriage, acting grastuitously and foolishly in behalf of a trend-setting but truly insignificant minority of special interests given bogus 'rights' that would, overnight, overthrow natural law and the traditional meaning of marriage that civilized societies have always held!)
Unless I have woefully missed a significant movement in Germany to legislate same-sex unions as 'marriage', it is tempting to postulate that the two world leaders of consequence today in terms of moral authority happen to be both German - a reversal of fortune from the darkest days of that nation less than a century ago.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 28/12/2012 01:49]