BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Under Benedict XVI, the Church
is resolutely fighting abuse of minors -
but what is the rest of the world doing?
Editorial
by Salvatore Mazza
Translated from

February 6, 2013

It's difficult to even try to imagine a more horrific act than sexual abuse of a minor. Even more horrendous is when such a crime is committed by a priest - a minister of God who, by nature and vocation, must have a protective and caring attitude towards the smallest and most helpless among us.

This is an idea that Benedict XVI has expressed in every way on every occasion possible, not just in words but with decisive and precise actions.

And he has been doing so, not out of media pressure because of the scandals that have rocked the Church in the United States and Ireland, Germany and Belgium, but even, more importantly, before and after these 'scandals' blew up.

Anticipating public opinion, and in fact, catching the world by surprise - as in the case of Fr. Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, whom he banned in 2006 from practising his ministry in public - and urging everyone 'not to let their guard down' even after, with the TV cameras gone, no one seems worked up about the problem. at least for now.



The presentation yesterday of the book containing the acts of the first Internatioonal Symposium on child abuse held at the Pontifical Gregorian University one year ago, and the activities carried out in its first year by the Center for the Protectionof Minors that resulted from it, are part of the 'after' phase, during which, silently but tenaciously, with respect to this problem, Papa Ratzinger has been 'remodelling' the Church with absolutely rigorous criteria starting with the formation of men aspiring to be priests to concrete actions taken about both the victims and the offenders, after the crimes are done.

These criteria have been described as 'tolerance zero', but in fact they are much more than that, since they combine at once the inseparable duty of justice and the commandment of love. Always placing the needs of the victim in first place, the duty to cooperate with civilian authorities, and laying down the bases for preventing what has happened so often in the past, when a misguided desire to protect the Church as an institution, led to errors, under-estimation of the problem and outright anomalies in the handling of priest offenders and their crimes.

On the basis of general criteria laid down by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, all the national bishops' conferences in the world, have been asked to prepare country-specific guidelines for dealing with sex abuses committed by priests on minors, as part of their routine duties in the day to day, in a Church which must be renewed after having been soiled by the 'filth' of sex abuse. This, too, is part of the 'after' in Papa Ratzinger's actions.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is still reviewing the guidelines submitted by the bishops, drawn up to be in accordance as well with the existing laws in each country.

This painstaking scrutiny confirms the enormity of the effort needed to turn the page, doing everything so that the awareness, pain and shame for the evil that has been committed may not be forgotten and be the motivation for a fresh start.

What is strikingly evident, in contrast - which must be pointed out - is that no civilian institution anywhere in the world has shown (or even tried to) the same determination in confronting the problem of sex abuse of minors.

And yet this is a phenomenon that, as this newspaper (Avvenire), regularly documents, is all too widespread outside the Church, not sparing any environment, being the pervasive center of a criminal economy raking in huge profits from activities that include sexual tourism and child pornography.

Pope Benedict XVI has shown that it does not matter if, statistically, the Church as an institution only has a 'minor' part in this global phenomenon. He has always said that one case of priest abuse against a minor is one too much especially since the offender is supposed to be a man of God.

But it is desirable, nonetheless, and high time, that entities other than the Church show the same determination to place themselves unconditionally on the side of the youngest, the most defenseless, and the weakest members of our society in order to aggressively fight the problem at its roots, wherever and in whatever way it manifests itself.

Cuban government approves new churches in Santiago-
including one to commemorate Benedict XVI's visit
by Domenico Agasso jr
Translated from the Italian service of

February 6, 2013



Less than a year after Pope Benedict XVI's historic visit to Cuba comes the news from that Caribbean island that a church will be built in Santiago, eastern Cuba, to commemorate the event.

The city of Santiago de Cuba, not far from the site of the Marian shrine in Cobre to Cuba's patroness, Nuestra Senora de la Caridad (Our Lady of Charity), was the first place in Cuba visited by the Holy Father last March. The altar of the new church will be that built for the Papal Mass celebrated by the Pope in Havana's Plaza de la Revolucion on March 26, 2012.

This is considered one of the 'fruits' borne by the seed sown with the courageous visit of John Paul II in 1998, as the first Pope ever to visit Cuba, which took place when Fidel Castro was still in charge.

[NB: The first concrete outcome of Benedict XVI's visit last year was that the Communist government declared Good Friday a national holiday, just as it decided to make Christmas a holiday once again after John Paul II's viist.]

The provincial council of Santiago de Cuba announced the news, along with the equally important development that the government has returned two churches and a parish house to the Archdiocese of Santiago.

These properties had been confiscated shortly after the Communist regime was installed in the early 1960s, and the archdiocese has always asked for their restitution. The construction of new churches on these sites has also been approved.

In the district of Abel Santamaria, a church dedicated to St. Joseph the Laborer will replace a chapel which was converted by the Communists into the local seat of the Academy of Sciences.

The parish of La Purisima Concepcion will build a new church dedicated to St. Benedict on a church site that became commercial property now occupied by a bakery.

And a building that belonged to the parish of Our Lady of Charity, and that the Communists converted into an elementary school, will be turned back to parish purposes after the end of the schoolyear.

A statement from the Archdiocese of Santiago de Cuba calls on all Christians "to thank God and all those who contributed to make these measures possible for the good of the community".

It expresses regret that a parish church in Cobre, site of the shrine to Nuestra Senora de Caridad, still has to be returned. The church was turned into the local headquarters of the Ministry of Commerce.

The archdiocese is hopeful it will eventually be returned in view of its historical and cultural significance. Constructed in 1601, it was the third parish church in eastern Cuba, and the starting point for the pilgrimages on foot to the Marian shrine.

Thursday, February 7, Fourth Week in Ordinary Time

ST. COLETTE (France, 1381-1447), Virgin, Founder of Colettine Poor Clares
Colette joined the Franciscan third order as a teenager and at age 21, became an anchoress [walled into a cell whose only opening is a window
facing the interior of a church]. After 4 years, in response to visions of St. Francis who urged reforms in his order, she joined the Poor Clares
to initiate a return to the primitive rules of the order. The Colettines lived in extreme poverty and perpetual fasting and abstinence. She went on
to found 17 monasteries following her reform, which took place during the Great Western Schism (1378-1417) when three men laid claim to the
Papacy. With St. Vicente Ferrer, the great Dominican theologian and missionary from Valencia, she worked to end the schism by persuading
two of the claimants to withdraw so that a new Pope could be elected, then getting the King of France to withdraw his support from the holdout,
Benedict XIII. (Ironically, as the Pope in Avignon, Benedict had authorized Colette's reform of the Poor Clares and her new monasteries; and
St. Vincent himself had been an avid supporter of this Pope.) It is said that all her life, Colette was plagued by demons who assailed her in
terrible physical forms, such as dragging corpses into her cell, but she was also eventually endowed with many graces including raising
the dead to life. She was canonized in 1807.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/020713.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

The Holy Father met with

- Madame Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Minister President of the State of Saarland (Germany), and her delegation

- Cardinal Fernando Filoni, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples (weekly meeting)

- Participants in the Plenary Session of the Pontifical Council for Culture. Address in Italian.

The Vatican Press Office also released the text of the Holy Father's remarks yesterday to members of
the Priestly Fraternity of San Carlo Borromeo, the priesthood arm of the Comunione e Liberazione movement.

This is a most enlightening look at the Vatican II Constitution on 'The Church in the Modern World' which progressivists have at the very least, considered the 'open sesame' to 'liberalizing' (and therefore, weakening and diluting) Church teachings and practices, and at worst, the founding document of a 'new church'.

Professor Tracey Rowland is Dean and Permanent Fellow of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Melbourne, Australia. She earned her doctorate in philosophy from Cambridge University and her Licentiate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome. She is the author of Culture and the Thomist Tradition after Vatican II (2003), Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (2008) and Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed (2010).

Vatican II 50 years later:
The good and the bad in 'Gaudium et Spes'
Historical and theological context are crucial for interpreting
the Council’s document on the Church in the modern world.
by Tracey Rowland

February 2013 issue

It is easy to be critical of Gaudium et Spes as a document pushed through at the end of the Second Vatican Council when the Holy Spirit was out to lunch or the Conciliar fathers had eaten rather too much lunch and were not fully awake. As one of my students once remarked, “Were they all on Prozac?”

In 1965, however, people didn’t need to take Prozac. There was a general optimism about the world. Medical advances were made every day, material standards of living were the highest they had ever been, and unemployment was very low. A dog had been sent into space and successfully returned to earth, and there was John F. Kennedy’s project to land human beings on the moon by the end of the decade.

The Vietnam War had only just begun and, apart from some members of the Catholic Worker Movement who had organized a couple of demonstrations and some students at UC Berkeley who had started burning draft cards, the world was not too concerned about the events in Indochina.

Lyndon B. Johnson had given his “Great Society” speech in which he promised an elimination of poverty and racial injustice, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland was at last speaking to the President of the Republic of Ireland, and 'The Sound of Music' was the movie of the year.

Communism was still a problem, but the Council fathers were precluded from spending too much time on this. A deal had been done between the Vatican’s Secretariat of State and the Soviet leaders, to the effect that the Conciliar documents would not make any specific condemnations of Communism. In return the Communist leaders would graciously allow members of the Russian Orthodox Church to attend the Council as observers.

In general it was felt that the Church and “the Free World” were at last “on the same page” and that the Communist leaders on the other side of the Iron Curtain would soon figure out that, however nice it is in theory, Marxism doesn’t actually work well in practice.

As a consequence of this generally optimistic mood, there are sections of the document which do sound as though they have been written by people who have forgotten about evil, sin, and atheistic ideologies. The young Joseph Ratzinger, writing in 1969, described some of the document’s sections as “downright Pelagian” in tone. [Pelagianism is a fourth-century heresy according to which original sin did not taint human nature and that mortal will is still capable of choosing good or evil without special Divine aid.]

However, there are other sections that are highly sober.

It is no surprise, therefore, that there ended up being two dominant interpretations of this document. In shorthand terms one can call them the Wojtyła interpretation and the Schillebeeckx interpretation. [Fr. Edward Schillebeeck was a Dutch theologian who was one of the most influential progressivist theological consultants at Vatican II, and whose teachings were later critically examined by the CDF, which asked him three times, between 1974-1986, to explain personally and in writing certain teachings in his books that questioned, among other things, the empty tomb and Jesus's post-Resurrection appearances, as well as the sacramental nature of the priesthood. He died in 2009.]

The Wojtyła interpretation zeroed in on paragraph 22, according to which human persons only understand themselves to the extent that they know Christ. According to Blessed John Paul II — who attended Vatican II as Bishop Karol Wojtyła of Cracow - Christ is the answer to all the legitimate hopes and desires of persons of good will throughout the world. He read Gaudium et Spes with a Christocentric accent.

However, as Ratzinger noted, the “daring new” Christocentric anthropology embedded within the document was not well expressed. There is a tension between the first section, where the human person is merely “theistically hued” or in some general way. made in God’s image, and the second section, which is specifically Trinitarian.

The Schillebeeckx interpretation zeroed in on paragraph 36, which recognized a “legitimate autonomy of the world”:

---

If by the autonomy of earthly affairs we mean that created things and societies themselves enjoy their own laws and values which must gradually be deciphered, put to use, and regulated by men, then it is entirely right to demand that autonomy.

Such is not merely required by modern men, but harmonizes also with the will of the Creator. For by the very circumstances of their having been created, all things are endowed with their own stability, truth, goodness, proper laws, and order.

---

On its face this sounded like the ecclesial leaders were “bowing out” from any involvement in world affairs. According to a superficial reading of this paragraph, taken out of its context with other qualifying paragraphs, the world did not need Christian revelation.

Paragraph 36 uses language borrowed from St. Thomas Aquinas, which appears in turn to have been borrowed from St. Augustine. It does allow for a non-secularizing interpretation.

However, getting the interpretation “right” requires reading rather a lot of background theology into it—and the background theology relates to the most difficult areas of the relationship between nature and grace and soteriological [referring to the study of the doctrine of Christian salvation] issues about the place of the world in the economy of salvation.

One can read this paragraph in a number of different ways depending on one’s theological foundations, and the so-called “plain person” who reads it without any theological formation is likely to struggle.

With reference to some of the interpretations this paragraph has been given, Cardinal Angelo Scola has suggested that it might be right to ask if the Catholic world, called to address the great contemporary anthropological and ethical challenges, has not been co-responsible — whether by naïveté, delay, or lack of attention — for the current (that is, secularist) state of things.

According to Scola, there is a “latent ambiguity” around the interpretation of the principle of the autonomy of earthly affairs. He reads paragraph 36 as an acknowledgement that there is a realm of life that is the responsibility of the laity. He doesn’t read it as authority for the proposition that there might be aspects of life that have no intrinsic relationship to the Creator.

A concrete illustration of the ambiguity fostered by the use of the word “autonomy” may be found in the following paragraph of Robert A. Krieg’s Catholic Theologians in Nazi Germany. Speaking of two different species of Catholics, Krieg concluded:

---

On the one hand, insofar as they stand in the theological orientation of Pope Pius XI and Catholic Action, they are intent on transforming secular society into a Christian one, dedicated to Christ the King.

On the other hand, to the degree that they are inspired by the Second Vatican Council, they are guided by a respect for the “rightful autonomy” of human affairs and a commitment to what Pope Paul VI identified as “the progress of peoples,” anchored in a pledge to defend human rights. (1)

---

Krieg is certainly right to identify these two mentalities as popular alternatives among Catholic laity. The idea, however, that this is an either-or option is based on a false dichotomy.

The choice offered is between a Christian society or one “committed to the progress of peoples anchored in a pledge to defend human rights.”

The whole point of John Paul II’s interpretation of the Council is that the progress of peoples runs on a Christocentric trajectory. The human dignity that human rights are supposed to defend is based on the notion of the Imago Dei. Removing that, and in particular, removing Christ, is a recipe for secularism. We can’t marginalize Christ for reasons of social acceptability without putting Christianity out of business.

On this theme and with a high degree of prescience, the great French Jesuit Yves de Montcheuil (who was murdered by the Gestapo in 1944) wrote:

---

Jesus does not speak of the evils in the social order as springing from a social disorder that could be overcome by means proper to that social order. He refers them to the idea of sin, that is, to an interior evil, an offence against God.

The prophet Amos, when he roared out against the abuses of his time, was not protesting in the name of human dignity, which was being violated, but in the name of the sanctity of God which sin outraged. Human dignity and human justice, separated from God, end by being corrupt. (2)

---

As Benedict XVI was to write some six decades later, “a humanism that excludes Christ is an inhuman humanism.”

At its worst, Gaudium et Spes became an excuse for correlating, and even accommodating, the faith to the culture of modernity. It became, in other words, the license for what we now call the “spirit of the Council” — the practice of identifying fashionable trends in the secular culture and tying the faith to them in a pathetic marketing ploy.

This is what Ratzinger called the practice of presenting the Church as a poorly managed haberdashery shop constantly changing its windows to lure more customers. As he was later to write:

---

…a Christianity and a theology that reduce the core of Jesus’s message, the “kingdom of God” to the “values of the kingdom” while identifying these values with the main watchwords of political moralism, and proclaiming them, at the same time, to be the synthesis of all religions — all the while forgetting about God, despite the fact that it is precisely he who is the subject and the cause of the kingdom of God - does not open the way to regeneration, it actually blocks it. (3)

---

At its best, on the other hand, Gaudium et Spes served as a foundation for the theological anthropology advanced in John Paul II’s Trinitarian encyclicals — Redemptor Hominis, Dives in Misericordia, and Dominum et Vivificantem — and his more famous catechesis on human love [otherwise known as his 'theollogy of the body'[.

After Gaudium et Spes, we no longer have Catholic marriage manuals that speak of marital dues and rights and address the sacrament of marriage in the idioms of contract law.

It is well known that it was the young Archbishop Karol Wojtyła from Kraków who was largely responsible for this development. It laid the foundations for what was to become John Paul II’s theology of the body — an overtly scriptural presentation of the meaning of human sexuality with reference to a fundamentally personalist anthropology, not narrowly focused on any particular faculty of the soul but on the entire person.

As a consequence of this shift in Gaudium et Spes, Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968) spoke of contraception with reference to “the person of the woman” and “mutual personal perfection.”

Some five decades after the Council began, the world is much less receptive to Christian revelation. Christians in the Middle East are being martyred almost daily, Christians in the western liberal democracies are under pressure to privatize their faith [and to overturn the institutions of marriage and the family, not to mention universal concepts of anthropology that have held through all of recorded history!], and Christians in the Communist parts of Asia have been oppressed for decades. It is difficult to imagine how hard life must be for Chinese Catholics, when couples are forced to comply with the one child policy or suffer persecution, including forced abortions.

If one examines the social changes in the western world over the past half-century, one can conclude that we have been living through a period in time when the “mythos” of Christianity has been systematically undermined and replaced with an alternative, explicitly anti-Christian mythos.

The substance of this new foundational myth is that religion is the source of evil in the world. It therefore needs to be tamed and managed by the modern post-Christian state. This state pretends to offer its citizens nothing other than efficiently run public utilities like airports, telephone and Internet services, gas and electricity, and protection from the aggression (including all manner of negative “value” judgments) of other citizens.

However it also controls taxation and, to a large degree, it regulates the education sector. Its taxation policies are rarely ever “family friendly” and its educational institutions serve as a vehicle for the promotion of the post-Christian mythos.

Standing in the front lines against this evil there is, however, a new generation of Catholics weaned on the encyclicals of John Paul II and brought up to think of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI as a theological superhero.

They are much better prepared than the generation of the 1960s to fight “the wars of love,” because they at least recognize that they have been born during a war. [In the midst of these wars, which are nothing less than civilizational!]

The New Jerusalem is still a long way off, but at least it is becoming increasingly visible which people are in favor of it and which ones are opposed.

People are either members of the City of God or the City of Man, or even perhaps what Plato called “the city of pigs” — that is, a city whose inhabitants have no higher goal that staying alive and being confident and competitive.

As the Australian poet James McAuley concluded: “There is no promise that we shall not suffer, no promise that we shall not need to fight, only the Word that Love is our Redemption, and Freedom comes by turning to the Light.” [i.e., Jesus never said that following his way would be easy - and liberal Catholics, those who would impose 'Catholicism lite' on the Church, appear more concerned that the practice of the faith should be 'easy and convenient' to suit the personal preferences of the individual, rather than being the full and unconditional expression of his belief in what Jesus taught.]

NOTES:
(1) Krieg, R, P, Catholic Theologians in Nazi Germany (London: Continuum, 2004), 175.
(2) Yves de Montcheuil, La Royaume et ses exigencies (Editions de l’Epi, 1957): 47-49. As quoted in English translation in Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1984): 164.
(3) Ratzinger, J, ‘Europe in the Crisis of Cultures’, Communio: International Catholic Review, 32 (2005), 345-56 at 346-7.

Pope says the Church looks to young people
to revitalize the Church in her mission
Adapted from

February 7, 2013

The Holy Father received participants in this year's plenary session of the Pontifical Council for Culture today, and reaffirmed that "the Church has confidence in young people, she hopes in them and in their energies, she needs them and their vitality, to continue to live the mission entrusted her by Christ with renewed enthusiasm”.

The theme of the three-day plenary session which opened yesterday afternoon is "Emerging youth cultures".

The Pope spoke of the current difficulties facing young people today, such as rising unemployment, marginalization from society, the dangerous obsession with celebrity cultures and growing tendencies towards individualism.

These phenomena he said are “effecting people on a psychological and relational level”, the result of several factors, such as social media, that are leading to an increasingly “fragmented, cultural landscape”.

Thus, the Pope noted “the uncertainty and fragility that characterize so many young people, often pushes them to the margins, rendering them almost invisible and absent in the cultural and historical processes of societies” and even “the religious dimension, the experience of faith and membership in the Church are often experienced in a private and emotional perspective”.

At the same time the Holy Father warned against a stereotype view of youth cultures and noted their many “decidedly” positive aspects, such as young people's generosity and courage in helping those most in need.

Yesterday's opening event for the plenary was a 'first' at the Vatican, as it was in the form of a rock concert performed by an Italian pop group that now specializes in Christian music.

The Italian group “The Sun” entertained the audience - cardinals and bishops who are members of the Council, led by its president, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, council consultors and various lay participants - in the Aula Magna of LUMSA university [Libera Universita di Maria Santissima Assunta - Free University of the Most Holy Mary of the Assumption]. They later also took part in a round table discussion led by French anthropologist David le Breton.

In an attempt to further encourage new channels of dialogue between young people and the Church, Cardinal Ravasi, is inviting young people to send questions and comments on emerging youth cultures to him, for the duration of the Plenary, using the twitter hashtag # Reply2Ravasi.

Here is a full translation of the Pope's address:

---

Dear friends,

I am truly happy to meet you as you begin your work in the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Culture, during which you will seek to understand and analyze, as your President said, from different perspectives, 'the emerging youth cultures'.

I greet your President, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, and thank him for the kind words he addressed to me in your behalf. I greet the members, consultors and all the collaborators of the dicastery and wish you profitable work that will offer a useful contribution to what the Church does in confronting the concerns of young people.

As it has been often said, it is a complex and highly articulated reality that cannot be understood only within a homogeneous cultural culture, but rather in a horizon that can be called 'multiversal', which is defined by a plurality of views, of perspectives, of strategies.

That is why it is correct to speak of 'youth cultures', considering that the elements that distinguish and differentiate cultural phenomena and environments prevail over those they have in common.

Indeed, a number of factors concur to shape a cultural panorama that is increasingly fragmented and in continuous and very rapid evolution, in which the social media are not extraneous - those tools of communication that favor and sometimes provoke precisely the continuous and rapid changes in mentality, in customs and in behavior.

Thus, there is a widespread atmosphere of instability in the cultural sphere, as in the political and economic - the latter marked by the difficulties young people have in finding work - that has an impact above all on the psychological and relational level.

The uncertainty and the frailty that mark so many young people not uncommonly push them towards the margins, make them almost invisible and absent in the historical and cultural processes of society. Ever more increasingly, this frailty and marginality are expressed in phenomena like drug dependency, deviance, and violence.

The affective and emotional sphere - that of sentiments - and that of corporality (the body) are strongly conditioned by this atmosphere and by its consequent cultural outcomes, expressed, for example, by apparently contradictory phenomena, such as the spectacularization of intimate personal lives and individualistic, narcissistic self-enclosure in one's own needs and interests. Even the religious dimension - the experience of faith and belonging to the Church - is often lived in a private and emotional perspective.

But decisively positive phenomena have not been lacking. The generous and courageous initiatives of so many youth volunteers who dedicate their best efforts to their less fortunate brothers; the sincere and profound experience of faith of so many young men and women who bear joyous witness to their belonging to the Church; the efforts they have shown, in many parts of the world, to help build societies that respect the freedom and dignity of everyone, starting with the youngest and the weakest.

All this is comforting and helps us to draw a more precise and objective picture of the youth cultures today. Therefore, one cannot be content with reading youth cultural phenomena according to consolidated paradigms that have since become commonplaces, or to analyze them with methods that have become useless, starting with cultural categories that have become dated and inadequate.

We find ourselves facing a reality that is as complex as it is fascinating, that must be understood profoundly and with a great spirit of empathy, a reality whose fundamental bases and lines of development we must be able to grasp.

For instance, looking at the young people in so many nations of the so-called Third World, we become aware that with their cultures and their needs, they represent a challenge to the globalized society of consumerism, to the culture of consolidated privilege that benefits only a limited circle of people in the Western world.

Consequently, youth cultures are 'emerging' even in the sense that they manifest a profound need, a plea for help or even, outright 'provocation', that cannot be ignored or overlooked either by civilian society or by the ecclesial community.

For instance, I have manifested several times my concern and that of the whole Church for what we call the 'educational emergency', alongside other 'emergencies' that affect the various dimensions of the individual and his fundamental relationships - emergencies that cannot be answered in ways that are evasive or banal.

I think of the growing difficulty in the field of employment, and the effort at the same time to meet responsibilities that they have taken on. This would result - in terms of the future of the world and all mankind - in an impoverishment that is not just economic and social, but above all, human and spiritual.

If young people can no longer hope and progress, if their energies, their vitality, their capacity to anticipate the future, are not harnessed in the dynamics of history, then we will have mankind folded in on itself, devoid of confidence and a positive look at tomorrow.

While we are aware of so many problematic situations which directly touch the faith and belonging to the Church, we wish to renew the expression of our trust in young people, reaffirm that the Church looks at their condition, their cultures, as a reference point that is essential and unavoidable for her pastoral action.

For this, I wish to state anew some significant passages from the Message that the Second Vatican Council addressed to young people sd s motivation for reflection and stimulus for the new generations.

First of all, this Message stated: "The Church looks at you with trust and love... She possesses that which constitutes the strength and the beauty of youth - the capacity to be joyful about any beginning, for self-giving without expecting a return, for self-renewal in order to be able to set off on new conquests".

And the Venerable Paul VI addressed this appeal to the young people of the world: "It is in the name of this God and his Son Jesus that we call on you to widen your hearts to the dimensions of the world, to listen to the appeals of your brothers, and to ardently place your youthful energies in their service. Do battle against every kind of selfishness. Refuse to give free rein to instincts of violence or hatred which generate wars and their sad procession of woes. Be generous, pure, respectful, sincere. And with enthusiasm, build a world that is better than the present".

I too would want to reiterate it forcefully: The Church has confidence in young people, she places her hopes in them and their energies, she needs them and their vitality in order to continue with renewed impulse the mission entrusted to her by Christ.

I therefore sincerely wish that the Year of Faith may be, even for the younger generations, a valuable occasion to recover and reinforce their friendship with Christ, which will give rise to joy and enthusiasm for the profound transformation of cultures and societies.

Dear friends, in thanking you for the commitment that you have generously placed in the service of the Church, and for the special attention you are giving to young people. I impart to you from the heart my Apostolic Blessing. Thank you.

---

Vatican Radio's translation may be found here:
http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2013/02/07/pope:_the_church_has_faith_in_young_people/en1-662747



CNS has a background story on the pop group that opened the plenary session - a Christian rock band that is not exactly typical of the contemporary music scene but does reflect an emerging trend... The story of the group's conversion is inspiring. Band leader Lorenzi's informal survey of his blog followers also reveals a lot of what young Italians today think about the Church.

Cardinal Ravasi asks rock band to perform
so Council members can have a 'feel'
for contemporary youth culture
By Carol Glatz



Left, Cardinal Ravasi at the news conference on Wednesday to present the plenary; and right, with the Italian band 'The Sun' before they performed for the Council last night.

VATICAN CITY , February 6 (CNS) -- When the head of the Pontifical Council for Culture said he wanted to listen to what today's young people had to say, he wasn't afraid to hear it belted out at 100 decibels.

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi invited members of the Italian rock group, The Sun, to speak their minds through music to the cardinals, bishops, lay members and advisers of the council, as well as to a large contingent of foot-stomping, cheering young fans.

The band's 30-year-old lead lyricist and singer, Francesco Lorenzi, confessed that despite being used to playing stadiums with tens of thousands in the audience, knowing "we'd be playing for cardinals, bishops, ambassadors and journalists, we didn't get any sleep last night."

It was the first time a Vatican dicastery had a rock group as the "opening act" of its plenary assembly -- usually a routine, speech-filled, sit-down affair where members come together a few days days to discuss a relevant theme.

But if the culture council was going to discuss "Emerging Youth Cultures" for their plenary at the Vatican Feb. 6-9, then what better way to get a feel for the subject than by inviting young people in, the cardinal said.

"We adults, older generations, and we priests have to make an effort to not put (young people) under a sort of microscope, but go to their level and begin to listen a little to what the rhythm of their mind, their heart is like," Cardinal Ravasi told Vatican Radio.

The Sun's rhythm, created by two guitarists, a bass player and drummer, shook the walls of Rome's LUMSA University Feb. 6 as the group delivered songs about their Catholic faith such as "Onda Perfetta" ("Perfect Wave") that says: "I have a whole world full of hopes and dreams, they're illusions only if you don't believe."

While Vatican VIPs weren't dancing in the aisles, many read through the lyrics and applauded with smiles.

In between songs, Lorenzi explained the band's evolution from its birth in 1997 as Sun Eats Hours, which is an Italian saying equivalent to "time is fleeting, so get as much out of life as possible," to being voted the "best Italian punk band" in 2004.

They lived up to their name, he said, traveling the globe, opening for world-famous acts like The Cure and Ok Go and experiencing enormous success.

But instead of feeling happy, the band members were angry and barely spoke to one another, Lorenzi said, losing themselves and each other in a nonstop revelry of "alcohol, drugs and women."

Lorenzi started to turn his life around in 2007 when a night out with friends fell through, and his mother suggested he instead go to a faith formation course being held that week at the local parish.

"I know you love me," he said he told his mother, "but I want to be happy and I don't go to church to be happy." [Now there's a Catholic mother who has kept the faith, even if, from her son's age, she must be from the generation born in the 1960s. And a grown-up son who listened to his mother, despite his reservations!]

But he agreed to just see what it was like, even though he was certain it would be miserable and they'd make him "sing awful songs."

Instead, the warm welcome and genuine joy he saw on people's faces "really struck me."

"I saw a joy I never saw before and at a place I thought was for nerds. But it was the kind of joy I needed more than ever," he said.

Bolstered by a new community, prayer, Mass and eucharistic adoration, Lorenzi's life changed completely, he said. The other band members saw the transformation and slowly -- over a period of five years -- followed suit, wanting to discover the source of Lorenzi's contagious happiness.

The band members had a new mission in life and on stage, Lorenzi said. They cut the band name down to The Sun "because it shines forever" and focused the lyrics on "what matters most in life," like love, friendship, "life after life" and faith in God.

He told Catholic News Service that people don't need to "hit bottom" before they discover the beauty of salvation.

"Jesus will come and get you, trying up until the very end, but that doesn't mean you have to hit bottom, because he'll take you even when you're doing fine," he said.

Telling council members The Sun wanted to help the Church bridge the gap with young people, Lorenzi offered a booklet summarizing the results of an informal survey he took with readers of his blog, www.francescolorenzi.it. Over two weeks, some 25,000 people read the post, and hundreds sent responses to his three questions.

Asked "what helps attract young people to the Church?" the responses included, "credible and enthusiastic witnesses," but also pilgrimages to the Holy Land, a chance to have a personal spiritual guide and outlets for artistic expression, the booklet said.

"What do you want from the Church?" evoked responses like greater trust in laypeople, putting the great questions of life front and center, and clear, sincere honest dialogue where formality and abstract ideas get set aside now and then, it said.

"What keeps the Church and young people apart?" elicited replies like not understanding the reasons behind positions the Church takes, "ostentatious wealth," a lack of answers to people's questions and poor communication skills.

[It may just be possible that Lorenzi's informal survey has elicited more useful, actionable information from his followers than the Pontifical Council on Social Communications has done so far from the inchoate mass of reactions it has been getting so far to the Pope's Twitter messages. The newsmen at yesterday's press conference should have asked Lorenzi what he thinks of the papal Twitter initiative so far.]

"The Church has lots of beautiful things to say" about things young people care about, "but it needs to find a way to say it" and have that message reach young men and women everywhere, Lorenzi said.

But even the most stirring speech or web post can't answer people's hunger for human contact and understanding, Lorenzi told CNS.

"A great speech without contact is at risk" of going nowhere, he said, while if it's coupled with warm and genuine outreach, "the incredible can happen."

[Well, Mr. Lorenzi, our 86-year-old Pope is doing his best to provide his own 'credible and enthusiastic witness' as well as his personal outreach whenever he can, and we must hope and pray that the bishops of the world and their priests are doing their part and providing the same witness, outreach and guidance to their own flock.]

I do not remember the last time it was that I was moved to tears by a contemporary commentary about the Church other than by Benedict XVI's words. But this column by George Weigel did, because he has encapsulated so well the message that Benedict XVI daily sends out about what it means to be Catholic today and how the faith must be lived. Perhaps his words are so powerful to me, because they convey the impression that they are written by someone who does live his faith in the way he describes it. Which is precisely why Benedict XVI's words are so powerful - one cannot say and write so simply and directly about the faith and holiness unless one has lived the experience.

The rise of evangelical Catholicism:
In the 21st century, we have no choice
but to be fulltime Catholics

February 6, 2013

For more than 30 years it’s been my privilege to explore the Catholic Church in all its extraordinary variety and diversity. I’ve traveled from inner-city parishes to the corridors of the Vatican; from the barrios of Bogota to the streets of Dublin; across the United States and throughout Europe, Latin America, Oceania and the Holy Land.

I’ve spoken to Catholics of all states of life and stations in life, from popes and heads of state to cloistered nuns and campus ministers and literally thousands of clergy; with political activists of all stripes and the wonderful people of the parish in which I’ve lived for almost three decades; with modern Catholic confessors and martyrs and with men and women who are troubled in their faith.

The experience has been exhilarating, sometimes exasperating, occasionally depressing; I’ve been immeasurably enriched by all of it, in ways I can never adequately repay. But I’ve tried to make a small down-payment on a large debt with the publication of “Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church” (Basic Books).

In the book, I’ve tried to focus what I’ve learned in more than 30 years of Catholic thinking, writing and activism through two prisms: a new interpretation of modern Catholic history linked to a fresh proposal for how we should understand the Catholic possibility in the third millennium, and a detailed program of Gospel-centered reform that will equip the Church for its evangelical responsibilities in a time of great challenge.

The challenge can be defined simply: Throughout the western world, the culture no longer carries the faith, because the culture has become increasingly hostile to the faith. Catholicism can no longer be absorbed by osmosis from the environment, for the environment has become toxic.

So we can no longer sit back and assume that decent lives lived in conformity with the prevailing cultural norms will, somehow, convey the faith to our children and grandchildren and invite others to consider entering the Church.

No, in our new situation, Catholicism has to be proposed, and Catholicism has to be lived in radical fidelity to Christ and the Gospel. Recreational Catholicism — Catholicism as a traditional, leisure-time activity absorbing perhaps 90 minutes of one’s time on a weekend — is over.

Full-time Catholicism — a Catholicism that, as the Second Vatican Council taught, infuses all of life and calls everyone in the Church to holiness and mission — is the only possible Catholicism in the 21st century.

The Evangelical Catholicism of the future is a Catholicism of radical conversion, deep fidelity, joyful discipleship and courageous evangelism.

Evangelical Catholics put friendship with the Lord Jesus at the center of everything: personal identity, relationships, activity.

Evangelical Catholics strive for fidelity despite the wounds of sin, and do so through a daily encounter with the Word of God in the Bible and a regular embrace of Christ through a frequent reception of the sacraments.

Evangelical Catholics experience dry seasons and dark nights, like everyone else; but they live through those experiences by finding their meaning in a deeper conformity to the Cross of Christ — on the far side of which is the unmatchable joy of Easter, the experience of which gives the people of the Church the courage to be Catholic.

And evangelical Catholics measure the quality of their discipleship by whether, and to what extent, they give to others what they have been given: by the degree to which they deepen others’ friendship with the Lord Jesus Christ, or bring others to meet the unique savior of the world.

Evangelical Catholics enter mission territory every day, leading lives of integrity and charity that invite from others the question, “How can you live this way?”

That question, in turn, allows the evangelical Catholic to fulfill the Great Commission by offering others the Gospel and the possibility of friendship with Jesus Christ.

Having responded to the Risen Lord’s call to meet him in Galilee, evangelical Catholics go into the world in witness to the Christ who reveals both the face of the Merciful Father and the truth about our humanity.

Strong truths generously lived: that’s Evangelical Catholicism.

The US bishops have finally responded to the Obama administration's most recent response last week to the objections raised by the Catholic Church and other religions to the health care mandate that would force them and their institutions to take out health insurance for their employees that would provide contraceptive and abortifacient services. And their answer is that the Obama proposal is no answer at all...

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Statement of Cardinal Timothy Dolan
Responding to Feb. 1 Proposal from HHS

For almost a century, the Catholic bishops of the United States have worked hard to support the right of every person to affordable, accessible, comprehensive, life-affirming healthcare.

As we continue to do so, our changeless values remain the same. We promote the protection of the dignity of all human life and the innate rights that flow from it, including the right to life from conception to natural death; care for the poorest among us and the undocumented; the right of the Church to define itself, its ministries, and its ministers; and freedom of conscience.

Last Friday, the Administration issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) regarding the HHS mandate that requires coverage for sterilization and contraception, including drugs that may cause abortions.

The Administration indicates that it has heard some previously expressed concerns and that it is open to dialogue. With THE release of the NPRM, the Administration seeks to offer a response to serious matters which have been raised throughout the past year.

We look forward to engaging with the Administration, and all branches and levels of government, to continue to address serious issues that remain. Our efforts will require additional, careful study. Only in this way can we best assure that healthcare for every woman, man and child is achieved without harm to our first, most cherished freedom.

In evaluating Friday's action regarding the HHS mandate, our reference remains the statement of our Administrative Committee made last March, United for Religious Freedom, and affirmed by the entire body of bishops in June 2012.

In that statement, we first expressed concern over the mandate's "exceedingly narrow" four-part definition of "religious employer," one that exempted our houses of worship, but left "our great ministries of service to our neighbors, namely, the poor, the homeless, the sick, the students in our schools and universities, and others in need" subject to the mandate.

This created "a 'second class' of citizenship within our religious community," "weakening [federal law's] healthy tradition of generous respect for religious freedom and diversity." And the exemption effectuated this distinction by requiring "among other things, [that employers] must hire and serve primarily those of their own faith."

On Friday, the Administration proposed to drop the first three parts of the four-part test. This might address the last of the concerns above, but it seems not to address the rest.

The Administration's proposal maintains its inaccurate distinction among religious ministries. It appears to offer second-class status to our first-class institutions in Catholic health care, Catholic education, and Catholic charities.

HHS offers what it calls an "accommodation," rather than accepting the fact that these ministries are integral to our Church and worthy of the same exemption as our Catholic churches.

And finally, it seems to take away something that we had previously —the ability of an exempt employer (such as a diocese) to extend its coverage to the employees of a ministry outside the exemption.

Second, United for Religious Freedom explained that the religious ministries not deemed "religious employers" would suffer the severe consequence of "be[ing] forced by government to violate their own teachings within their very own institutions."

After Friday, it appears that the government would require all employees in our "accommodated" ministries to have the illicit coverage — they may not opt out, nor even opt out for their children—under a separate policy.

In part because of gaps in the proposed regulations, it is still unclear how directly these separate policies would be funded by objecting ministries, and what precise role those ministries would have in arranging for these separate policies.

Thus, there remains the possibility that ministries may yet be forced to fund and facilitate such morally illicit activities. Here, too, we will continue to analyze the proposal and to advocate for changes to the final rule that reflect these concerns.

Third, the bishops explained that the "HHS mandate creates still a third class, those with no conscience protection at all:individuals who, in their daily lives, strive constantly to act in accordance with their faith and moral values."

This includes employers sponsoring and subsidizing the coverage, insurers writing it, and beneficiaries paying individual premiums for it.Friday's action confirms that HHS has no intention to provide any exemption or accommodation at all to this "third class."

In obedience to our Judeo-Christian heritage, we have consistently taught our people to live their lives during the week to reflect the same beliefs that they proclaim on the Sabbath. We cannot now abandon them to be forced to violate their morally well-informed consciences.

Because the stakes are so high, we will not cease from our effort to assure that healthcare for all does not mean freedom for few. Throughout the past year, we have been assured by the Administration that we will not have to refer, pay for, or negotiate for the mandated coverage.

We remain eager for the Administration to fulfill that pledge and to find acceptable solutions — we will affirm any genuine progress that is made, and we will redouble our efforts to overcome obstacles or setbacks.

Thus, we welcome and will take seriously the Administration's invitation to submit our concerns through formal comments, and we will do so in the hope that an acceptable solution can be found that respects the consciences of all.

At the same time, we will continue to stand united with brother bishops, religious institutions, and individual citizens who seek redress in the courts for as long as this is necessary.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York
President, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
February 7, 2013

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Here's an explanation of what the latest Obamacare proposal is:

Only a sliver of affected organizations
would be covered by the proposed exemptions
By Alliance Defending Freedom
Feb 1, 2013

Today HHS released a new iteration of its proposed exemption to the abortion pill mandate. The new exemption is simpler than before but continues to cover only a sliver of religious organizations.

As before, the new exemption cross-references and relies upon an unrelated section in the tax code that exempts certain church-related organizations from filing annual returns with the IRS.

The church-related organizations covered by the unrelated section, and therefore by the new exemption, are (i) churches, (ii) conventions or associations of churches, (iii) integrated auxiliaries of churches, and (iv) religious orders. See I.R.C. 6033(a)(3)(A)(i), (iii).

The terms “churches” and “conventions or associations of churches” are self-explanatory (think First Baptist Church and Southern Baptist Convention). The term “integrated auxiliaries of churches” refers to organizations that are affiliated with and predominantly supported by a church (such as a food pantry that is controlled and funded by a church). See 26 C.F.R. 1.6033-2(h). The term “religious orders” refers to church-controlled orders normally consisting of monks, nuns or missionaries. See Rev. Proc. 91-20.

Still not covered by the new exemption are virtually all non-church religious nonprofit organizations, such as schools and colleges, food pantries and shelters, crisis pregnancy centers, publishers of religious literature, foreign mission organizations, and relief and development organizations.

Those organizations may qualify for HHS’s proposed insurer-provided accommodation under which insurers are required to provide contraception and abortifacients to religious organization employees at no cost to anyone .

[How is that an accommodation at all, since the insurers - whether it's the health plan itself or the employer - still are required to provide the objectionable services? And how can that possibly be 'at no cost to anyone'? If the employer pays, it's at his cost; and if the health plan pays, it will subsidize the imposed cost out of increased rates for other users, which is clearly unfair. It's insulting that the Obama people think any sensible person could be duped into swallowing their recycled poison!]

Unfortunate debut for the new president
of the Pontifical Council for the Family



I've been skirting this story in the past few days, since I believed it was a tempest in a teapot, provoked deliberately by media who wanted quick and cheap headlines, based on deliberate misreporting of what a Vatican official said. From all the information I have read about it so far, that's just what it is.

But equally important, the episode should serve as a lesson to prelates occupying senior positions in the Roman Curia to think long and hard about what they say, especially at a news conference, to make sure that there is no possibility their statements could be misrepresented. Yet another lesson, that is, after quite a few in recent memory, from which no one seems to have learned, It's all very well to speak out your mind, but not when doing so becomes counter-productive, and almost a disservice, not only to yourself but to the Church. As this episode shows...

The story first came to my attention because of a headline in the PewSitter headline summary on February 4 that said in bold red letters (their headlines are usually in black): "Head of Pontifical Council for the Family endorses gay civil unions", which was truly alarming, so I naturally followed the link, which was to the following story with the headline that it carries. After reading the story itself, I found the headline truly misleading, since 1) that is not at all what it quotes the Vatican official to have said, and 2) as usual, a statement by a Curial official is attributed to 'the Vatican', even if it clear from the story that he was expressing his personal position.

In any case, I did not post about it at the time because I had not even done a comprehensive post on the news conference which was called first of all to present the book anthologizing the proceedings of the VII World Meeting of Families in Milan last year, and secondly, to present the activities of the Pontifical Council for the Family for what remains of the Year of Faith.

Anyway, here's the story, as first reported in the Anglophone media by an Italian reporter who is the Rome correspondent for Religion News Service.

Vatican signals options
for protecting gay couples
by Alessandro Speciale


VATICAN CITY, Feb 4, 2013 (RNS) - A high-ranking Vatican official on Monday (Feb. 4) voiced support for giving unmarried couples some kind of legal protection even as he reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s opposition to same-sex marriage.

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, also said the Church should do more to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination in countries where homosexuality is illegal. [But the Church can't do anything against any sovereign country's laws, no matter how barbaric, other than moral support for the victims of discrimination.]

In his first Vatican press conference since his appointment as the Catholic Church’s “minister” for family, Paglia conceded that there are several kinds of “cohabitation forms that do not constitute a family,” and that their number is growing.

Paglia suggested that nations could find “private law solutions” to help individuals who live in non-matrimonial relations, “to prevent injustice and make their life easier.”

Nevertheless, Paglia was adamant in reaffirming society’s duty to preserve the unique value of marriage.

“The Church must defend the truth, and the truth is that a marriage is only between a man and a woman,” he said. Other kinds of “affections” cannot be the foundation for a “public structure” such as marriage.

“We cannot surrender to a sick egalitarianism that abolishes every difference,” he warned, and run the risk of society becoming a new “Babel.”

France is in the process of legalizing same-sex marriage despite fierce opposition from the Catholic Church; a similar fight is brewing in Britain with the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches sharply opposed to the move.

In a September 2012 document on gay marriage, French bishops recognized the value of France’s current civil unions law, which grants heterosexual and homosexual couples some benefits, such as tax breaks.

In November, voters approved gay marriage in Maine, Maryland and Washington state, and the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments this spring over federal and state bans on gay marriage.

Responding to journalists’ questions, Paglia also strongly condemned discrimination against gay people, who he said “have the same dignity as all of God’s children.”

“In the world there are 20 or 25 countries where homosexuality is a crime,” he said. “I would like the Church to fight against all this.”

Now, where in Speciale's story is anything that supports the headline given to it? His lead paragraph quotes Paglia as speaking of 'unmarried couples', which in the usage of Catholics and even of secular persons, means unmarried heterosexual couples, not homosexual couples.

Anyway, since it was unlikely that I would find a transcript of Mons. Paglia's complete statements, I googled to see if there was any other Anglophone story out there about it, and sure there was, from AFP, although it based its story on what had been reported by an Italian newspaper. Here is AFP's story, which at least, did not attribute Mons. Paglia's statement to 'the Vatican' but still got it wrong in that he was not advocating 'gay union rights'. The story itself makes it clear that the bishop was suggesting that lawmakers consider granting some individual rights (regarding property, principally), not 'marriage-like' joint rights, for co-habitating partners, both heterosexual (so-called common-law marriages) and homosexual (unions which are not considered 'marriage' even under common law). Here's the AFP story...

Vatican official opens
to gay union rights


VATICAN CITY, Feb. 5, 2013 (AFP) = The Vatican's top official on family policy has opened slightly to the possibility of rights for gay civil unions, although he also stressed that marriage should remain between a man and a woman.

The remarks from Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, were made at a Vatican press conference on Monday and were quoted in Italian press on Tuesday.

"Marriage is a clear legal dimension. There are then multiple other types of non-family cohabitation for which solutions should be found in terms of individual law and in my view also in terms of property law," Paglia said.

His comments were widely seen as a reference to gay couples. [Which is a misleading conclusion since he was apparently speaking about de facto heterosexual unions, and was only asked about gay couples later.]

"I think this is a terrain that politicians should begin to approach," said the archbishop, adding that legal rights for non-traditional families would "prevent injustice against the weakest".

The Italian prelate also spoke out against homophobia in the Middle East and Africa, saying that in countries where being gay is considered a crime "this should be fought against".

Gay rights activists gave mixed reactions to his comments.

"For the first time a senior prelate recognises that there should be rights also for gay couples and that there are many countries in the world where being gay is a crime," said Franco Grillini, the head of Gaynet. [Except, of course, that 1) Paglia did not say there should be rights for 'gay couples', and 2) Catholic prelates starting with the Pope have always spoken out against discrimination because of sexual oprientation and the criminalization of homosexuality.]

But Aurelio Mancuso, head of Equality Italia, said the type of legal protection that Paglia was talking about would mean "keeping the status quo, in other words, an absence of rights".

"The only chance is a clear law that recognises the rights and duties of gay couples, in terms of property and inheritance, medical assistance, social welfare," he said. [Mancuso clearly understood what Paglia was saying and therefore opposes it!]

Paglia has been in charge of his Vatican ministry for a year and is considered more open and modern than his predecessors, particularly on accepting the reality of the daily lives of many Catholics.

The British and French parliaments are currently examining draft laws to legalise gay marriage.

The Catholic Church considers homosexuality sinful but is opposed to any discrimination against gays. [No, the Church does not consider homosexuality 'sinful' but 'disordered' - what it considers 'sinful' is the sexual practice of homosexuality which is clearly unnatural (in the sense that Nature/Providence/God did not evolve/provide/create two complementary sexes for the purpose of physical indulgence. but for procreation - to perpetuate the human species, in this case. The Church expects that homosexual Catholics should and can be celibate, in the same way that priests and other consecrated persons should and can be celibate. And that is a standard that a hedonistic, pleasure-driven society finds preposterous and unacceptable.]

It seems clear to me from both the RNS and AFP reports that Mons. Paglia was saying lawmakers should start considering how to give some rights to the individual members of a co-habitating partnership, as individuals, not joint rights as partners.

And yet, an ultra-trad site like Rorate caeli, whose posts about traditional liturgy I have used occasionally on this Forum, and when they have some advance news about the FSSPX that has not yet been reported in the Anglophone media, I follow their link to their original source. Their first reaction to the Paglia story was a post entitled: "In Dire Need of Clarification - Abp. President of Family Council calls for recognition of same-sex civil unions and adulterous unions", basing this statement on a tendentious but unfounded story in the relentlessly anti-Church Italian newspaper La Repubblica, entitled "First opening in the Church: Rights for gay couples", - whose lead paragraph by its veteran Vaticanista, Orazio La Rocca (he should wash out his brain with truth serum), was downright false and dishonest:

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"No to gay marriage, but yes to the recognition of rights for de facto couples and homosexuals according to the (Italian) Code of Civil Law and, to the admission of remarried divorces to Communion". In the Catholic Church there is an atmosphere of revolution regarding the family and gay rights. And surprisingly, it is Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the new president of the Pontifical Council for the Family who has made himself the spokesman for it, at the presentation of the acts of the latest international meeting of families that took place in Milan last year....

---

So reads the lead paragraph of a despicably dishonest piece of journalism. First, the writer, and his editors, shamelessly put quotation marks to their summation of what Mons. Paglia supposedly said. Quotation marks can only be used for direct quotations attributed to someone, not to a wishful statement of what you would have wanted him to say, much less to things he never said. #2 - Mons. Paglia certainly did not 'make himself the spokesman' for the Vatican on this supposed 'revolution'. #3- The story goes on to quote what Mons. Paglia said about remarried divorcees, which is that the Pope himself has said this is a difficult problem that requires further study. He did not say - and the body of the story does not quote him as saying so, as the lead sentence purports - that he thinks they should be readmitted to Communion.

Be that as it may, Rorati Caeli's reaction (in a post written by the blogger New Catholic) to the story as reported by La Repubblica) was to pontificate =that "the division in the very top of the Catholic hierarchy, the clear disobedience in the heart of the Roman Curia, is becoming untenable", citing a statement by Benedict XVI in 2006 that

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It is a serious error to obscure the value and roles of the legitimate family founded on marriage by attributing legal recognition to other improper forms of union for which there is really no effective social need.

---

But Mons. Paglia was never quoted as saying he was for legal recognition of other improper forms of union, only to consider what individual rights could justly be given to partners of such unions.

The more appropriate rejoinder to Paglia is to remind him that during the debate accompanying the failed initiative by the Prodi government 4-5 years ago to legislate rights for such couples analogous to rights that married couples have, Cardinal Camillo Ruini said that the individuals in these non-marriage partnerships already have individual rights guaranteed under Italian law, and that no new laws were needed, existing laws simply had to be applied. That's a discussion I leave to those who are familiar with Italian law, but Cardinal Ruini is not someone who speaks falsely.

I had only a vague awareness about Mons. Paglia before now - only that he was one of those Italian bishops generally in line with the thinking of Benedict XVI - and his nomination by the Holy Father to succeed Cardinal Antonelli at the Pontifical Council for the Family was definitely our of the blue. (Strangely, there were no advance stories in the Italian media about Cardinal Antonelli's retirement, and no speculation on who would succeed him.)

It turns out Mons. Paglia has been the spiritual adviser to the Sant'Egidio Community all along, as well as a Biblical scholar who has been president of the International Federation of Catholic Biblicists since 2002, and the author of many books on religion and pastoral work. Now, Sant'Egidio has a reputation for taking liberal positions on social issues, but I don't know where they stand on same-sex unions or remarried divorcees, nor that they take their cue for these social positions from Mons. Paglia.

Whatever it is, surely the Holy Father was well aware of Mons. Paglia's biodata when he appointed him, and it is absurd to even think, as some Italian commentators have done, that he was influenced by Sant'Egidio to name Paglia to the Curia even if Paglia might be unsuitable for the position because he holds views on the family and marriage that are not what the Church advocates! (Even if, I must note personally, he apparently has been behind Sant'Egidio's annual international inter-religious meetings for peace promoting the kumbaya 'spirit of Assisi'. Rather pointless, IMHO, except symbolically, and innocuous, but what have these annual meetings really done to improve inter-religious dialog beyond personal relations that may have developed among the delegates who are veterans of this yearly exercise?)

All in all, the Paglia story is utter drivel, especially as reported by La Repubblica, and one must judge how unfounded it is by the fact that no one else in Italian MSM appears to have bothered to report about this part of the news conference (and few picked it up later), concentrating instead on the more pertinent news that Mons. Paglia's Council has planned a two-day pilgrimage of families from around the world to Rome next October to mark the Year of Faith with the Holy Father.

And the latest development on this comes today in this report from Avvenire, which quotes Mons. Paglia speaking to the Italian service of Vatican Radio (a story I cannot find online, so I am using the Avvenire account):

"First of all," Mons. Paglia said, "I am totally with the bishops of the United Kingdom for the position they took in opposing the legislative proposal [legalizing same-sex 'marriage'], just as I was with the French bishops who were unanimous, and joined by Jews, Muslims, and secular humanists, in opposing what has been called 'gay marriage'."

Asked about his reported statements regarding rights for homosexual couples, Mons. Paglia replied: "Obviously I was much surprised by what was reported in some media outlets. It is not just that they did not understand my words, but that, in fact, and probably with deliberation, they chose to derail them. Allow me this railway imagery: they ran my words off the tracks. When a trail is derailed, it does not reach its station and it could even fall off a precipice. The fact is that it can be verified if existing laws and regulations contain elements that protect the individual rights of the partners in non-marriage unions. That is not to say that one approves such unions".

One must say Mons. Paglia does not exactly have a way with words! The above was hardly the most effective response to the misleading reports. He sounded far more cogent in what the reports quoted him to have said at the news conference. And why did he not rebut their falsehoods right away? How could he have missed absorbing the fundamentals of PR during all his years with Sant'Egidio, a community that, of all the post-Vatican-II ecclesial movements, is the master of PR!

So that's my latest tale of malicious media mayhem, and even if it is not directed at the Pope, it was meant to reflect on him unfairly somehow because he named Paglia to the Curia to begin with.

Unfortunately, as is almost always the case, the few commentaries that have popped up in the Anglophone blogosphere so far have all been based on the misleading headlines, which is an integral element of the mechanism that generates widespread perpetration of original lies sown by irresponsible and/or malevolent newsmen.


2/8/13
CNS has come out with this story to help clean up the mess:

Mons. Paglia says his defense
of gay rights was misunderstood
By Cindy Wooden


VATICAN CITY, February 8 (CNS) -- The president of the Pontifical Council for the Family said his defense of the dignity of homosexual persons and their individual rights was misinterpreted, perhaps intentionally.

"It is one thing to verify whether in existing laws one can find norms that would safeguard individual rights. It's another thing to approve certain expectations," Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, council president, told Vatican Radio Feb. 6.

At a Vatican news conference Feb. 4, Archbishop Paglia had insisted that only a lifelong union of a man and a woman could be termed a marriage.

The archbishop also said the Church's affirmation of the full dignity of all human beings lead him to oppose laws that outlaw homosexuality. In addition, he said that "to promote justice and to protect the weak," greater efforts were needed to ensure legal protection and inheritance rights for people living together, though not married. "But do not call it marriage," he said.

His remarks from the news conference were reported around the world under headlines such as "Vatican recognizes the rights of gay couples."

"Obviously, I was very surprised by how some media reported" those comments, he told Vatican Radio. "Not only were my words not understood," he said, "they were derailed, perhaps even knowingly."

While reaffirming his opposition to so-called "gay marriage" and his full support of the British and French bishops currently fighting proposed legal recognition of homosexual unions, in the interview he also reiterated Church teaching against unjust discrimination toward homosexual persons.

Archbishop Paglia quoted from a 1986 document on the pastoral care of homosexual persons signed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger: "It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action."

"Such treatment deserves condemnation from the church's pastors wherever it occurs," the document said. "It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law."

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/02/2013 23:33]

Delayed post on a Wednesday event. The Vatican posted the text of the Pope's remarks Thursday. It is unusually personal in tone, reflecting his close ties to the Comunione e Liberazione movement.

A very personal message from Benedict XVI
to the top officials of C&L's priestly arm
Translated from

February 7, 2013



After the General Audience on Wednesday, the Holy Father met with the officials of the Priestly Fraternity of San Carlo Borromeo who had just held a General Assembly to choose a new Superior-General, don Paolo Sottopietra.

[The fraternity is the priestly arm of the movement Comunione e Liberazione, founded in 1985 by don Massimo Camisasca, who was its Superior-General until he was named last September by Benedict XVI to be the Bishop of Reggio Emilia-Guastalla. The fraternity specifically trains priests to be sent to dioceses abroad which request for long-term pastoral assistance.]

Here is a translation of the Holy Father's remarks:

---

Excellencies,
Dear brothers,

It is a great joy for me to be with you. I remember very well my visits to the Palazzo Borromeo near Santa Maria Maggiore where I personally got to know Don Giussani Luigi Giussani, founder of C&L, and now proposed for beatification].

I came to know his faith, his joy, his strength and the richness of his ideas. the creativity of faith. A true friendship developed, and so, through him, I also came to know the community of Comunione e Liberazione quite well.

I am happy that his successor is here today, that his great work can continue to inspire so many persons, so many lay men and women, as well as priests and consecrated persons, to collaborate in spreading the Gospel and to the growth of the Kingdom of God.

I also got to know Massimo Camisasca quite well. We would speak of a variety of topics, and I appreciated his creativity in art, his ability to see and interpret the signs of the times, his great gifts as an educator and priest.

I also had the honor to ordain some priests of the Fraternity at Porto Santa Rufina, and so, it has been a pleasure to know that a new priestly fraternity has been growing in the spirit of San Carlo Borromeo, who remains a great model of a Pastor who was truly stimulated by his love for Christ, who sought out the lowliest of people, loved then and thus truly created faith and made the Church grow.

Today, your Fraternity is large, and it is a sign that vocations exist. But we also need to be more open to seek out, to accompany, to guide and help vocations to maturation.

For this, I am thankful to Don Camisasca who did such work as a great educator. Today, education is even more necessary for the truth to flourish, for our development as children of God and brothers of Jesus Christ.

Thanks to God, I have also known for some time your new Superior General, who has also had some contact with my theology. So I am glad that even spiritually and intellectually, I can be with you, and that together, we can reciprocally make our work fruitful.

May the Lord bless you. I thank the Lord for the gift of your Fraternity - may it grow more and deepen its roots ever more in the love of Christ, in the love that men have for Christ. May the Lord be with you.

I give you my blessing, certain that you pray for me and accompany me with your prayers. I thank you all.

---

Friday, February 8, Fouth Week in Ordinary Time

Photos on extreme right: Poster for TV movie shown on RAI-TV in 2011, by the producers of the Augustine miniseries; and an English biography of Bakhita.
ST JOSEPHINE BAKHITA (b Sudan ca 1869, d Italy 1947), Former slave, Canossian nun
Our saint of the day has the distinction that her biography was cited in a papal encyclical. Here is what Benedict XVI said of her in Spe salvi: "She was born around 1869 — she herself did not know the precise date — in Darfur in Sudan. At the age of nine, she was kidnapped by slave-traders, beaten till she bled, and sold five times in the slave-markets of Sudan. Eventually she found herself working as a slave for the mother and the wife of a general, and there she was flogged every day till she bled; as a result of this she bore 144 scars throughout her life. Finally, in 1882, she was bought by an Italian merchant for the Italian consul Callisto Legnani, who returned to Italy as the Mahdists advanced. Here, after the terrifying 'masters' who had owned her up to that point, Bakhita came to know a totally different kind of 'master' — in Venetian dialect, which she was now learning, she used the name paron for the living God, the God of Jesus Christ. Up to that time she had known only masters who despised and maltreated her, or at best considered her a useful slave.

"Now, however, she heard that there is a paron above all masters, the Lord of all lords, and that this Lord is good, goodness in person. She came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created her — that he actually loved her. She too was loved, and by none other than the supreme Paron, before whom all other masters are themselves no more than lowly servants. She was known and loved and she was awaited. What is more, this master had himself accepted the destiny of being flogged and now he was waiting for her 'at the Father's right hand'.

"Now she had hope — no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope: “I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me —I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.” Through the knowledge of this hope she was 'redeemed', no longer a slave, but a free child of God. She understood what Paul meant when he reminded the Ephesians that previously they were without hope and without God in the world —without hope because without God.

"Hence, when she was about to be taken back to Sudan, Bakhita refused; she did not wish to be separated again from her Paron. On 9 January 1890, she was baptized and confirmed and received her first Holy Communion from the hands of the Patriarch of Venice. On 8 December 1896, in Verona, she took her vows in the Congregation of the Canossian Sisters and from that time onwards, besides her work in the sacristy and in the porter's lodge at the convent, she made several journeys round Italy in order to promote the missions: the liberation that she had received through her encounter with the God of Jesus Christ, she felt she had to extend, it had to be handed on to others, to the greatest possible number of people. The hope born in her which had 'redeemed' her she could not keep to herself; this hope had to reach many, to reach everybody." She died in 1947, and steps for her beatification began in 1959. She was canonized in 2000.
Readings for today's Mass: www.usccb.org/bible/readings/020813.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

The Holy Father met with

- Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk, Archbishop of Utrecht (Netherlands)

- Ten Italian bishops of the Lazio region on ad limina visit

- Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Dean of the College of Cardinals

This evening, the Pope will make his traditional visit to Rome's Major Seminary for a lectio divina
to the seminarians from the Diocese's four seminaries.




R.I.P. Cardinal Giovanni Cheli, 94
The Vatican released the text of the Pope's telegram of condolence on the death of Cardinal Giovanni Cheli,
emeritus president of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care pf Migrants and Itinerant Workers. He was 94.
His funeral Mass will be held in St. Peter's Basilica tomorrow at 5 PM, with Cardinal Angelo Sodano
as principal celebrant. The Pope's telegram was sent to the Bishop of Asti, where Cheli had begun his
priestly career.

---

Most Reverend Excellency
MONS. FRANCESCO RAVINALE
Bishop of Asti

I learned with sadness the news of the passing away of the venerated Cardinal Giovanni Cheli and I wish to express my deep condolence to your diocesan community which counts him among its most illustrious sons, as well as to his family and all those who knew and esteemed him.

I recall with gratitude the valuable and diligent collaboration he lent for so many decades to the Apostolic See in various Nunciatures, in the Secretariat of State, then as observer of the Holy See at the United Nations, and finally as president of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant Workers.

He leaves the testimony of a life spent in consistent and generous adherence to his vocation a a priest who was always solicitous of the needs of the faithful, but especially for the Christian formation of young people.

I raise fervent prayers that the Lord may welcome in joy and eternal peace this zealous Pastor who was ever faithful to the Gospel and the Church. I send a comforting Apostolic Blessing to Your Excellency, to all your priests, and all those who mourn his passing.

BENEDICTUS PP. XVI

---

Cardinal Cheli was considered one of the great postwar Vatican diplomats and an expert about eastern Europe in the Communist era. He served as the Vatican's permanent observer to the United Nations from 1973 to 1986, when he was named by John Paul II to head the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Itinerants, a post he held till his retirement in 1998 at age 80. Surprisingly it was not until 1998, a few months before he turned 80, that he was named a cardinal. Later, he became an outspoken critic of the age limit for cardinal electors, as well as a critic of Benedict XVI for failing to use 'more diplomats' in the Curia.






Two other fresh 'controversies' I have not posted about involve two persons closely associated with Benedict XVI - one as a personal friend of long standing, the other as a member of the Curia and president of the institute that is publishing his Collected Writings before he became Pope. In both cases, I will wait till there is a clear resolution that also indicates the Pope's thinking on these two unrelated issues.

- The first is Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne, who expressed support for the use of a 'morning after' pill for rape victims, based on his understanding that such a pill can prevent the fertilization of an egg by sperm and therefore acts before new life has been created. Some Catholic doctors now point out that these pills also prevent nidation (attachment of the embryo to the lining of the uterus) and are therefore directly contraceptive.

[The objective problem with Cardinal Meisner's position is that there is no way of telling when fertilization occurs after sperm reaches the woman's fallopian tube, where the process takes place. Theoretically, sperm can survive as long as 72 hours in the tube, but an egg is fertilizable only for 24 hours after it is ovulated, which provides a window of at least 24 hours for fertilization to take place. Assuming that the rape occurred during a woman's fertile days (when she is likely to ovulate), fertilization could theoretically occur before the rape victim gets the morning-after pill, in which case it would act as a contraceptive. Of course, if the rape occurs well outside the victim's ovulatory period, then there would be no egg for the sperm to fertilize, and she would not need any pill at all. These physiological facts apply, of course, regardless of whether the sexual act was rape or consensual.]

- The second is Mons. Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who has apparently contradicted both Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone and the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima, Peru, conservative Cardinal Luis Cipriani, in the matter of disciplining the 'Catholic University of Peru', which Cardinal Bertone last year directed to drop 'Catholic' from its name but has been ignored, and which Cardinal Cipriani, as ex officio president of the University's Executive Board, prohibited from teaching Catholic theology. Mueller has apparently written the university that, for the moment and until further instructions, it can go on teaching Catholic theology.

There has been no reaction from anyone in the Vatican to the above news reports.

- John Allen has written a comparison of how the Vatican has reacted in the case of Cardinal Schoenborn's accusation against Cardinal Sodano in 2010 of blocking Cardinal Ratzinger from ordering a canonical trial of Schoenborn's predecessor in Vienna for committing sexual abuses against seminarians, and the more recent case of Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez publicly censuring his predecessor, Cardinal Mahony, for decades of covering up for erring priests.
http://ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/gomez-mahony-and-sodano-rule
Although he says his purpose is to point out the obvious differences in the two cases, his conclusion is, in effect, that Pope Benedict XVI is acting arbitrarily in the matter of censuring or sanctioning cardinals, with the cynical and flippant formulation of what he calls 'the Sodano rule': "Only the pope can judge a cardinal -- unless there are good reasons to let somebody else do it."

- Yesterday, Fr. Federico Lombardi denied news reports from Bulgaria saying Pope Benedict XVI would be visiting that country in 2014. He said that while the Pope gets invitations to visit all the time, a foreign trip is only arranged, provided the Pope agrees and his schedule allows it, after both the national bishops' conference and the government of the host country formally send an invitation.

Apropos, for the first time since 2006, the Vatican has not announced any foreign trips for the Pope for the current year, other than that for WYD in Rio de Janeiro in July, first announced in 2011 after WYD in Madrid. It probably means that, barring any significant occasion that may warrant a papal trip abroad, he will not be making any other foreign trip this year.

The possibility has been raised that he may visit a Spanish-speaking country in Latin America before proceeding to Rio, but there have been no concrete indications for this so far. He turns 86 in April. The long trans-Atlantic trip to Rio alone will require him to have at least 24 hours of rest and readjustment of his daily biorhythm before he begins his official schedule (as he did when he travelled to Mexico last year; in Australia, where the time difference from Rome is 18 hours, he needed 3 days). Do his doctors - and he himself - think that he can withstand a visit to another country (where he would have to spend the period of readjustment) before the actual visit, and then proceed to Brazil and the tough schedule of a WYD?

Another belated post looks back to a recent controversy that appears to have been resolved on the level of principle (even if the related lawsuit is still pending): A Catholic hospital sought to use a Colorado law which does not recognize the fetus as a person to defend itself against a wrongful death suit filed by a husband who lost his wife and twin unborn chlidren in an obstetric case gone wrong. Rightly, the Catholic blogosphere in the USA reacted with outrage, forcing the company running the hospital to withdraw that part of its defense. Here's the hospital press release announcing its acknowledgment that its lawyers committed a moral wrong (though they may have been legally right), so it is understandably self-serving, but the basic facts appear to be presented fairly:

Catholic hospital says lawyers should never
have used Colorado law declaring the fetus
a non-person to defend the hospital in a suit


ENGLEWOOD, Colorado, Feb. 4, 2013 -- There has been considerable attention and controversy recently involving the lawsuit over the tragic death in 2006 of Lori Stodghill and her twin unborn sons at St. Thomas More Hospital in Canon City, which is sponsored by Catholic Health Initiatives CHI).

Four senior CHI executives, including Kevin Lofton, president and chief executive officer, met last week with Colorado’s three top Church officials -- the Most Rev. Samuel J. Aquila, Archbishop of Denver; the Most. Rev. Michael Sheridan, Bishop of Colorado Springs; and the Most Rev. Fernando Isern, Bishop of Pueblo
.
In the discussion with the Church leaders, CHI representatives acknowledged that it was morally wrong for attorneys representing St. Thomas More Hospital to cite the state’s Wrongful Death Act in defense of this lawsuit. That law does not consider fetuses to be persons, which directly contradicts the moral teachings of the Church.

The representatives also unequivocally affirmed CHI’s strict adherence to one of the Church’s most basic moral commitments– that every person is created in the image and likeness of God and that life begins at the moment of conception.

It is an unfortunate and regrettable point of fact that Colorado law, as it now stands, fails to adequately protect the rights of the unborn.

Further, CHI expressed support for and solidarity with Lori Stodghill’s husband, Jeremy, and the couple’s daughter, Elizabeth. The prayers of CHI and the Catholic Church have always been with he Stodghill family throughout a heartbreaking ordeal that has now lasted more than seven years.

In their review of the facts in this case, the bishops also affirmed the exceptional care provided to Lori Stodghill at St. Thomas More Hospital. In fact, two courts of law – the Circuit Court in Fremont County and the Colorado Court of Appeals – have supported the position of CHI and St. Thomas More Hospital that nothing done by doctors, nurses and other staff members would have changed this horrible outcome.

Indeed, District Court Judge David Thorson dismissed the case before trial, ruling that the evidence did not “present a triable issue of fact.” While cited as a point of law by attorneys for St. Thomas More Hospital, the Wrongful Death Act, which both CHI and Church officials consider to be unjust, has played no role in the appeal process. This case is now being considered for review by the Colorado Supreme Court.

If the justices agree to hear the case, the Wrongful Death Act would not be among their considerations. The legal argument rests on “causation” – that is, whether or not the medical personnel at St. Thomas More Hospital were negligent in caring for the 31-year old Lori Stodghill, who was 28 weeks pregnant with her twin unborn sons. The Circuit and Appellate courts have overwhelmingly concluded otherwise.

CHI has agreed that attorneys for St. Thomas More Hospital will not cite the Wrongful Death Act, which does not allow fetuses to sue, in any future legal hearings of this case. Although the argument was legally correct, recourse to an unjust law was morally wrong.

Further, CHI officials corrected erroneous information about sanctions against Jeremy Stodghill. CHI and St. Thomas More Hospital did not file a lien or pursue a claim in bankruptcy court against Jeremy Stodghill. One of the physician co-defendants, who is not an employee of Catholic Health Initiatives or St. Thomas More Hospital, did pursue garnishment. Mr. Stodghill filed bankruptcy to stop the garnishment.

Under Colorado law, St. Thomas More Hospital was entitled to recover actual costs incurred in the case, including such expenses as deposition charges and payments to expert witnesses. St. Thomas More Hospital and CHI were awarded approximately $47,000 but have not pursued collection of those costs.

CHI pledged its firm commitment, as always, to the best interests of patients and its adherence to the moral obligations of the Church, which were not strictly followed in this case by attorneys for the hospital.

Last year, it took a full week before the Vatican Press Office released the transcript of the Holy Father's 'lectio divina' to the seminarians of Rome. I hope it won't take as long this time. [P.S. This time, it only took them overnight, thank God.] Meanwhile, a report from the Italian service of Vatican Radio is all we have to go on, with its limitations in terms of random quotes that do not seem to follow Benedict XVI's thought flow...

Benedict XVI to seminarians:
Christians must accept martyrdom
Translated from the Italian service of

February 8, 2013

"No one can be a Christian without following the Cross, without accepting martyrdom". So said the Pope, recalling the many persecutions that the followers of Christ have undergone through the centuries, during his lectio divina Friday evening to the seminarians of Rome.






The Bishop of Rome spoke to 150 students for the priesthood from Rome's five seminaries - the Pontificio Seminario Maggiore, the Seminario Romano Minore, the Almo Collegio Capranica, the Collegio Diocesano Redemptoris Mater and the Seminario della Madonna del Divino Amore - at the chapel of the Major Seminary next to the Lateran Basilica, on the feast day of Our Lady of Trust, patroness of the seminary.

As he has done for the past five years. he gave the lectio divina extemporaneously, reflecting on a phrase from the First Letter of Peter (1,3-5): "safeguarded through faith by the power of God".

[The entire passage: "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in his great mercy gave us a new birth to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by the power of God, are safeguarded through faith, to a salvation that is ready to be revealed in the final time."]

Benedict XVI expressed his joy at seeing "so many young men on the way to priesthood, seeking how to serve the Lord in our time".

Reflecting on the Letter of Peter, he called it "the first encyclical... full of the passion of someone who had found the Messiah, then sinned, but remained faithful to Christ".

He noted the elevated language used, words, he said, "that do not seem to be the words of a fisherman". But, he pointed out, "Peter wrote this in Rome, where he had the help of other brothers in the faith, the help of the Church".

"Peter does not speak as an individual, he speaks ex persona ecclesiae, as a man of the Church - certainly as a person too, with his personal responsibility, but he is not speaking individualistically. He speaks in the communion of the Church".

He said Peter knew he would meet with martyrdom in Rome, but that did not keep him back - he went toward the cross indicated by Christ, and in this way, he invites contemporary man to welcome the martyrological aspect of the faith.

He dwelt on the aspect of election by God - the unique and individual choice that God makes for each man. "To be chosen by God to know the face of Christ, to be Catholics, is a gift".

"We must rejoice that God has given us this grace - the beauty of knowing the fullness of God's Truth, the joy of his love".

He said the word 'chosen' was one that denoted 'privilege and humility' at the same time, but not 'triumphalism'. He noted how today, Christians are the most persecuted group in the world, because "we don't conform... we are against the tendencies to selfishness and materialism", and although Christians had contributed much to the formation of Western culture, they have always lived in 'a condition of minority and extraneousness'.

"Let us pray to the Lord so that he may help us accept this mission of living like dispersed people, like a minority in a way, living like strangers in society while being responsible for others, reinforcing goodness in the world."

Finally, the Holy Father decried the 'false pessimism' of those who are saying today that Christianity is 'finished', calling instead for 'healthy realism':

"There have been grave and dangerous failing in the Church," he said, "and we must recognize with healthy realism whenever bad things are done that these things cannot go on. But we must also keep our certainty that even if here and there, the Church dies a little because of the sins of men, because of their lack of faith, that it will always be born anew. The future is truly God's - this is the great certainty of our life, the great and true optimism that we know. The Church is the tree of God which lives eternally and carries in herself eternity and the true legacy: eternal life".

The Pope was welcomed to the seminary by the Cardinal Vicar of Rome, Agostino Vallini, and by the rector of the Major Seminary, don Concetto Occhipinti, and warmly greeted by the seminarians, along with 16 young men enrolled in a preparatory year of discernment.

After the lecture, the Pope spent a few moments praying before the image of Our Lady of Trust, then had dinner with the seminarians before returning to the Vatican.





Here is a translation of the Holy Father's lectio divina delivered extemporaneously to the seminarians of Rome.

---

Eminence,
Dear brothers in the episcopate and in the priesthood,
Dear friends:

Every year, it is a great joy for me to be with you and to see so many young men who are preparing for the priesthood, who listen to the voice of the Lord, and wish to follow his voice and find the way to serve the Lord in our time.

We heard three verses from the First Letter of St. Peter (cfr 1,3-5). Before entering into this text, I think it is important to be attentive to the fact that it is Peter who speaks here.

The first two words of the letter are 'Petrus apostolus' (cfr v 1): he is speaking, and he is speaking to the Churches of Asia and is calling the faithful "chosen sojourners of the dispersion" (ibidem).

Let us reflect a bit on this. Peter is speaking, and he does so - as we hear at the end of the Letter - from Rome, which he calls 'Babylon' (cfr 5,13). Peter speaks: It is almost like a first encyclical, through which the first Apostle, Vicar of Christ, speaks to the Church in all ages.

Peter the apostle: He who speaks is someone who has found in Christ Jesus the Messiah of God, who spoke first among all in the name of the future Church: "You are Christ, Son of the living God" (cfr Mt 16,16) He who introduced us to this faith is speaking, the man to whom the Lord said: "I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven" (cfr Mt 16,19), to whom he entrusted his flock after the Resurrection,telling him three times, "Feed my sheep" (cfr Jn 21,15-17).

But this is also the man who fell, who denied Jesus, but had the grace to see the look of Jesus, and to be touched in his heart, and to find forgiveness and a renewal of his mission.

It is above all most important that this man, full of passion, of the desire for God, the desire for the kingdom of God,the desire for the Messiah - that this man found Jesus, the Lord and the Messiah, but he is also the man who sinned, who stumbled, but still remained under the Lord's eyes, and so, he is now responsible for the Church of God, he has been given the responsibility by Christ, he remains the bearer of his love.

It is Peter the Apostle who speaks, but exegetes would tell us: It is not possible that this letter could have been Peter's, because the Greek is so good that it cannot be the Greek of a fisherman from Galilee.

Not only is the language, the structure of the language, excellent, but even the thought is already quite mature, it already expressed concrete formulations in which the faith and the reflection of the Church are condensed.

And so they say, "It is a stage of development that cannot be that of Peter". How to answer this? There are two important positions to take: First, Peter himself - that is, the Letter - gives us a key, because at the end, it says, "I write you dia Silvano, through Silvanus".

This 'dia' can mean different things: It can mean that he, Silvanus, transports, transmits. It can mean that he helped in writing the letter. It can mean that he himself was the actual writer.

In any case, we can conclude that the letter itself tells us that Peter was not alone in writing this Letter, but that he was expressing the faith of a Church that had already set off on its journey of faith, a faith that was increasingly maturing.

He does not write it by himself, as an isolated individual - he writes with the help of the Church, of persons who were helping each other to deepen their knowledge of the faith and therefore entered the depth of his thought, of his rationality, of his profundity.

This is very important. Peter does not speak as an individual, he speaks ex persona Ecclesiae, he speaks as a man of the Church - certainly as an individual too, with his personal responsibility, but also as a person who speaks in the name of the Church. These are not just private thoughts, not like a 20th century genius who wished only to express his personal and original ideas, that no one could have said before him.

No. he does not speak as an individualistic genius, but he speaks within the communion of the Church. In the Apocalypse, in the initial vision of Christ, it says that the voice of Christ is the voice of all the waters in the world )cfr Ap 1.15).

This means to say that the voice of Christ reunites all the waters of the world. it carries all the living waters that give life to the world. This is the very grandeur of the Lord who carries in him all the rivers of the Old Testament, of the wisdom of peoples.

And what is said here about the Lord also goes, in another way, for the apostle, who does not intend to say a single word that is his alone, but truly carries in himself the waters of the faith, the waters of the whole Church, and therefore, of fertility, of fruitfulness - a personal testimony that opens to the Lord, it becomes open and wide. That is why this is important.

It also seems important that in the conclusion of this letter, Silvanus and Mark are named, two persons who also were among the friends of St. Paul. So through this conclusion, the worlds of St. Peter and St. Paul come together:

It is not a theology that is exclusively Petrine against a Pauline theology, but it is a theology of the Church, of the faith of the Church, in which there is diversity - certainly - of temperament, of thinking, of the style of speaking, between Peter and Paul. And it is good that there is such diversity, even today, of various charisms, of various temperaments, but nonetheless, not contradictory and which are united in the common faith.

I wish to say one more thing: St. Peter writes from Rome. It is important, Here we have the Bishop of Rome, we have the start of the succession, we have the start of the primacy concretely situated in Rome, not just sent from the Lord, but also situated here in this city, in what was the capital of the world.

How did Peter come to Rome? This is a serious question. The Acts of the Apostles tell us that after his escape from the prison of Herod, he went to 'another place' (cfr 12,17) - eis eteron topon - and we are not told which place. Some have said Antioch, some say Rome.

In any case, in this chapter, it is also said that before escaping, he entrusted the Judeo-Christian Church, the Church of Jerusalem, to James, but entrusting it to James, he nonetheless remained Primate of the universal Church, of the Church of the pagans, but also of the Judeo-Christian Church.

Thus we see that in Rome, we find both parts of the Church - the Judeo-Christian, and the pagan-Christian, united, an expression of the universal Church. And here in Rome, he found a large Judeo-Christian community.

Liturgists tell us that in the Roman canon, there is a trace of typically Judeo-Christian language. We see that here in Rome, where both parts of the Church were found, united, an expression of the universal Church.

For Peter, certainly, the passage from Jerusalem to Rome was the passage to the universality of the Church, to the Church of the pagans and of all times, and to the Church of the Jews, as well. I think that, going to Rome, St. Peter was not thinking only of this passage - Jerusalem/Rome, Judeo-Christian Church/universal Church.

That of course, he also recalled the last words that Jesus addressed to him, reported by St. John: "When you grow old... you will go where you do not want to go... someone else will dress you... will extend your hands" (cfr Jn 21,18).

It is a prophecy of the crucifixion. Philologists show us that this is a precise expression, a technical term, 'to extend the hands' for the crucifixion.

St. Peter knew that his end would be martyrdom, it would be the Cross. And thus, he would be completely following Christ. So going to Rome certainly meant going to martyrdom - in Babylon, martyrdom awaited him.

Thus, the primacy has this content of universality but also of martyrology. Going to Rome, Peter accepts anew the word of the Lord - go towards the Cross - and invites us, too, to accept the martyrological aspect of Christianity which ca have diverse forms.

The Cross too can have very diverse forms, but no one can be Christian without following the Cross, without accepting that martyrological moment.

After these words about the communicator, some words also about the persons to whom the letter was written. I have already said that Peter defines those whom he is writing to, as 'chosen sojourners of the dispersion' - eklektois parepidemois (cfr 1 Pt 1,1).

Once again we have this paradox of glory and Cross. chosen, but dispersed as strangers. 'Chosen' is Israel's title of glory: we are the chosen ones, God elected this small group of people not because we are great, it says in Deuteronomy, but because he loves us (cfr 7,7-8).

We are chosen: this is what St Peter transmits to all who are baptized, and the contents of the first chapters in his First Letter is that those who are baptized enter into the privileges of Israel - they are the new Israel.

'Chosen' - it is worth reflecting on this word. We are chosen. God has always known us, before we were even born, before we were conceived. God has wanted me to be Christian, to be Catholic, he was wanted me to be a priest.

God thought about me, he sought me out from among millions, from so many - he saw me and he chose me, not for my merits which I do not have, but out of his goodness. He wanted me to be the bearer of his choosing, which is also always mission, above all, mission - and responsibility for others.

'Chosen': We must be grateful and joyful for this fact. God thought of me, he chose me to be Catholic, as a bearer of his Gospel, as priest. I think it is worthwhile reflecting on this several times, and to enter once more into the fact of having been chosen - he chose me, he wanted me, and I am responding.

Perhaps today, we might be tempted to say - we do not want to be joyful for having been chosen, it would be triumphalism. But triumphalism would be thinking that God chose me because I am great - that would be mistaken triumphalism.

To be joyful because God has chosen me is not triumphalism, but gratitude, and I think we should re-learn this joy: God wished that I be born so, in a Catholic family, that has known Jesus from the start.

What a gift it is to be wanted by God, so that I have been able to know his face, I have come to know Jesus Christ, the human face of God, God's human history in the world.

To be joyful because he chose me to be Catholic, to be in his Church, in which subsistit Ecclesia unica, in which the only Church subsists. I must be joyful because God has given me this grace, this beauty of knowing the fullness of the truth of God, the joy of his love.

'Chosen' - a word of privilege and humility at the same time. But 'chosen', as I said, is accompanied by parapidemois - dispersed, strangers. As Christians, we are dispersed and we are strangers. We see that in the world today: Christians are the most persecuted group, because he do not conform, because Christianity is a stimulus, against the tendencies to selfishness, to materialism, all these things.

Of course, Christians are not just strangers. We are also a Christian nation. We are proud to have contributed to the formation of culture. There is a healthy patriotism, a healthy joy in belonging to a nation that has a great history of culture, of faith.

Nonetheless, as Christians, we are also always strangers - which was the destiny of Abraham described in the Letter to the Hebrews. As Christians, today we are always strangers. In the workplace, Christians are a minority - they find themselves in a situation of extraneousness: others wonder that today anyone could still believe and live as Christians do.

This is part of our life. It is a way of being with the crucified Christ. Being a stranger, not living according to how everyone else lives, but living - or at least seeking to live = according to his Word, very much different with respect to what everyone else says.

We may all say, "Everyone does this, why not me?" But no, not I, because I wish to live according to God. St. Augustine once said, "Christians do not have their roots below like trees, but they have their roots above, and they live in this gravitation, not in the natural downward gravitation".

Let us pray to the Lord that he may help us accept this mission of living in dispersion, as a minority, in a certain sense; of living like strangers but nonetheless responsible for others, and thus reinforcing goodness in this world.

So now we come to the three verses for today's reflection. I would like to underscore, and interpret a bit, as far as I can, three words: 'given new birth', 'inheritance', and the phrase 'safeguarded through the faith'.

Given new birth - anaghennesas, in the Greek text - means that to be a Christian is not just a decision of my will, an idea of mine: I see that it is a group that I like, so I make myself a member, because I share their objectives, etc.

No, to be a Christian is not to join a group to do something, it is not an act of my will alone, not primarily of my will, of my reason. It is an act of God. Rebirth does not concern only the sphere of the will, of thought, but the sphere of being.

I am reborn: this means that to become Christian is first of all passive. I cannot say, 'I make myself Christian', but I am caused to be reborn, I am remade by the Lord to the very depth of my being. And I enter into this process of rebirth - I allow myself to be transformed, renewed, regenerated.

I think this is very important. As a Christian, I am not simply carrying out an idea of mine that I share with some others, and when it no longer pleases me, then I can leave. No, it has to do with our deepest being. To be a Christian begins with an act of God, it is above all an act of God, through which I let myself be formed and transformed.

This is a matter for reflection, precisely in a year during which we are reflecting on the sacraments of Christian initiation, to meditate on this passive and active aspects of being regenerated, of living a completely a Christian life, allowing myself to be transformed by his Word, by the communion of the Church, by the life of the Church, through the signs that the Lord works in me, that he works for me and with me.

T be reborn, to be regenerated, also means that I thereby enter into a new family: God my Father, the Church my Mother, other Christians my brothers and sisters.

To be regenerated, to allow oneself to be regenerated,thus implies that we allow ourselves to be willingly inserted into this family, to live for God the Father and from God the Father, to live from communion with Christ his Son who regenerates me through his Resurrection, as the Letter says (cfr 1Pt 1,3).

To live in the Church, allowing myself to be formed by the Church in many senses, in many ways, and to be open to my brothers, recognizing others as truly my brothers who, like me, are generated, transformed, renewed, in which one bears responsibility for the other. In short, a responsibility of Baptism which is a lifelong process.

The second word: inheritance. It is a very important word in the Old Testament, which says that Abraham and his seed would inherit the earth. This has always been God's promise to his people: You will possess the earth, you will inherit the earth.

In the New Testament, this word becomes a word for us: we are the heirs, not of a specific nation, but of God's land, the future of God. Inheritance is a thing of the future, and so this word says above all that as Christians, we have a future: the future is ours, the future is God's.

And so, being Christians, we know that the future is ours, that the tree of the Church is not a dying tree but the tree that always grows anew.

We thus have a reason not to let ourselves be moved, as Pope John said, by the prophets of doom who say, "The Church may well be a tree that came from a mustard seed, that has grown in two millennia, but now, its time is past, now it is time for it to die". No, the Church always renews herself, she is always reborn. The future is ours.

Of course, there is false optimism and false pessimism. A false pessimism that says the time of Christianity is over. No! It starts anew. And false optimism is that which, after the Council, when convents closed, seminaries closed, said, "That's nothing, everything will be well". No! Not everything is going well.

There have been serious and dangerous stumbles, and we should acknowledge with a healthy realism that these things cannot be, that we must not be doing the wrong things. But also being sure at the same time, that if here and there, the Church dies somewhat because of the sins of men, because of their lack of faith, at the same time, she is reborn.

The future is truly God's - this is the great certainty of our life, the great and true optimism that we know. The Church is the tree of God which lives eternally and carrieseternity in her, and the true inheritance - eternal life.

Finally, 'safeguarded through the faith'. The text of the New Testament, of the Letter of St. Peter, uses a rare word, phrouroumenoi, which means 'watchmen', and the faith is like the 'watchman' who safeguards the integrity of my being, of my faith.

This word connotes above all the watchmen at the gates of a city, where they are stationed to safeguard the city so that it may not be invaded by the forces of destruction. In this way, the faith is the watchman of my being, of my life, of my inheritance.

We must be grateful for this vigilance of the faith that protects us, helps us, guides us, gives us security: God will not let me fall from his hands.

"Safeguarded by the faith" - that is how I will conclude. Speaking of the faith, I must always think of that sick Syro-Phoenician woman who, in the midst of a crowd, found her way to Jesus, touched him to be healed, and was healed.

The Lord asked, "Who touched me?" And they tell him: "But, Lord, everyone touches you, how can you ask, who touched me?" (cfr Mk 7,24-30). But the Lord knows.

There is a way of touching him that is superficial and external, which has really nothing to do with a true encounter with him. And there is a way of touching him profoundly. This woman touched him truly - not only with the hand but with her heart, and thus she received the healing power of Christ, by touching him truly from within, in faith.

And this is faith: to touch Christ with the hand of faith, with our heart, and thus enter into the power of his life, into the healing power of the Lord.

Let us pray to the Lord that we can always touch him in this way in order to be healed, made whole again. Let us pray that he will not allow us to fall down, that he holds us by the hand and thus safeguards us for true life. Thank you.

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WOW! Words are inadequate to react to Benedict XVI's extraordinary catecheses 'off the cuff' - perhaps the most direct way one can get to know him, when he comes through spontaneously, not pre-scripted, but as Joseph Ratzinger talking to his students. Even though, as he says of Peter above, it is not his word alone, but that of the Vicar of Christ, expressing the faith of his Church, and therefore, the voice of the Church herself. How fortunate we are to have that voice in our day... And thanks to the Vatican Press office for coming through with the transcript in record time.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 10/02/2013 14:29]