The commentaries are coming in fast and nicely afurious, at least in the Italian media, to the Pope's visit to Lebanon, so I will have to pick only the most interesting and substantial ones to translate.. Here firet is one from Fr. Camisasca, the Superior-General of the Missionaries of San Carlo Borromeo, the priestly arm of Comunione e Liberazione.
Benedict XVI, 'Lion of the Church'
by Massimo Camisasca
Translated from
Sept. 17, 2012
The more time passes with this Pontificate, the more I am convinced of the similarity between Benedict XVI and that great 5th-century Pope and Father of the Church, Leo the Great.
Both Popes have passed and will pass into history for their simple but profound preaching that is able to reveal the permanent quality of the Christian mysteries.
Like Leo the Great, Benedict XVI will pass into history for having sought to put a halt to barbarism. Leo the Great, beyond what did take place historically, did not simply stop with halting Attila at the gates of Rome. He laid down the premises for the positive inclusion of new elements
[the positive potential of harnessing barbaric forces?] in the Church's itinerary.
In the same way, Benedict XVI is seeking to stop the forces of evil and to give new energy to the positive factors of history. It is not therefore accidental that he is fighting this battle on two fundamental fronts: by unveiling the true face of God, and by affirming the true task of reason.
First, the true face of God. Against intolerance, Pope Benedict continues to emphasize, since his first encyclical, that God is love, he who seeks out man, who wants to renew him by forgiving him and continually creating communion with him on earth.
His battlecry against fundamentalism, which marked the start as well as the entire course of his just completed visit to Lebanon, is emblematic from this viewpoint.
In the footsteps of St. Augustine, Joseph Ratzinger has fought every attempt to identify faith with politics, and sees all the evil that can come from affirmations today of a God who is invoked for - and thus sought to be identified with - wars, and ultimately, with death.
On the other hand, the Pope is firmly aware that respect for one another's identity is necessary in order to live together peacefully. Nothing could be more contrary to that than a supposed tolerance that would reduce to insignificance the contribution that faith has made to human history.
That is why he says: "When one denies or rejects God, then that is like killing man. When God is excluded from society, not just from the hearts of men, then the premise is laid for hatred, violence, war, destruction. When reason pretends to be the instrument for man's affirmation to be the lord of history against God, the history of the death of mankind begins".
That is also why the Pope proposes Lebanon - a land where coexistence and reciprocal respect are still possible
[and largely practised] - as an example for all of the Middle East. An example, however, that both the West as well as the intolerant sectors of Islam have sought to destroy.
[I'm not sure how 'the West' has sought to destroy Lebanon - after all, its multicultural, multi-faith society was well-established during its colonial years under France. And it's certainly in the interests of the West today to keep Lebanon's unique pluralism alive.]
All these are reasons why Benedict XVI tirelessly seeks dialog with those communities who are most open to the reasons for living together peacefully and for common edification of society.
Islam occupies a very relevant part of the worldwide political scene, especially after the end of the Cold War. It is capable of offering entire populations the reasons for living and for opposing untimely deaths imposed by wars and violence. It can also offer work and important affective bonds.
But like every human reality, it carries in itself contradictions and wounds. And so we see millions of Muslims disputing the promises of happiness offered by capitalism and seeking a way that is more respectful of man and of the existence of God.
At the same time, however, we see important fringes of the Muslim world that are nonetheless capable of influencing the Muslim majorities in entire nations by preaching violence and unleashing wars and mass assassinations.
The future of the world depends on such a tragic context - within which we must see the preaching and the work of Pope Benedict XVI, for whom the trip to Lebanon was a particularly significant event.
P.S. Fr. Camisasca is not the first commentator to have compared Benedict XVI to Leo the Great. I believe Sandro Magister and Fr. Schall have done so on various occasions. OK, so contemporary Islamist extremism would be the equivalent of Attila the Hun, who, like Islam, was intent on conquering the West and thus dominating the world. It occurred to me to wonder what, in Pope Leo's time, would have been the equivalent of the hostile media and dissident Catholics that are the bane of Benedict's Pontificate. A quick read of the Wikipedia entry on the great Pope shows he did have to deal with the continuing rivaly from Constantinople, with a few outright heresies, which he firmly handled in various ways, and with willful bishops to whom, by then many papal powers had been delegated. And how he dealt with that problem appears to have been his major achievement. (The story with Attila the Hun is apparently more hagiographic than factual - it has not been established exactly what other factors contributed to Attila backing off in 452 after that famous meeting, but he did come back in 455 to sack Rome, though Leo's influence suppressed arson and murders.)
The significance of Leo's pontificate lies in his assertion of the universal jurisdiction of the Roman bishop, as expressed in his letters, and still more in his 96 extant orations. This assertion is commonly referred to as the doctrine of Petrine supremacy.
According to Leo and several Church Fathers, as well as certain interpretations of the Scriptures, the Church is built upon Peter, in pursuance of the promise of Matthew 16:16–19. Peter participates in everything which is Christ's; what the other apostles have in common with him they have through him. What is true of Peter is true also of his successors. Every other bishop is charged with the care of his particular flock, the Roman pontiff with that of the whole Church. Other bishops are his assistants in this great task.
I'd say any dissident in the Church today who thinks the Pope has too much power, or worse, that every bishop has as much power as the Pope, ought to review his history of Leo the Great - and the Gospel, because Christ was unequivocal in handing the keys of the Kingdom to Peter alone!
I can't help note that there still has to be any commentary in the Catholic Anglophone media or the Catholic Anglophone blogosphere about the Lebanon trip, other than John Allen's running commentary while covering the visit - whose last 'analysis' was devoted to faulting Benedict XVI in a most unwarranted way for failing to publicly address the problem of inter-sect rivalry among the major Catholic Eastern Churches based in Lebanon. [Surely, any such internal problems are hardly material for a Pope to discuss in public during an apostolic visit, and surely, he would have addressed any such problems privately with the Church leaders themselves!]... CNS and CNA did cover the trip, thank God, even if it fell on a weekend as the Pope's trips usually do, perhaps because it was a trip to Lebanon, as they did not think it fit to assign any reporter to work the weekend of the Pope's visit to Milan for the World Meeting of Families.
I must interpose the delayed reportage by Giacomo Galeazzi in La Stampa/Vatican Insider of the Papal Mass in Lebanon, which is better than the run-of-the-mill accounts of yesterday's Mass and picks out the highlights from the statements made by the Pope on his third and final day in Lebanon.
Seeking 'practical solutions'
for the Syrian conflict, etc
by Giacomo Galeazzi
Translated from the Italian service of
Sept. 17, 2012
Like Papa Wojtyla during the Cold War, so Benedict XVI stands in the forefront, this time against Islamist escalation. The new 'Church of silence' speaks through him.
"Bring peace to a violent Middle East" - He is entrusting to Christians what seems to be a 'mission impossible'.
[Of course, he wasn't placing the entire burden on them, but they have to set the Christian example, against all odds. He has repeatedly called on the international community and the leaders of the region to do what they can as responsible public authorities to seek a workable solution that can lead to 'a lasting stable peace'. That seems to be the more 'impossible' mission, for which neither the Church nor the Pope can offer concrete solutions! Christ did not come as a political Messiah nor did he intend his Church to be.]
Benedict XVI celebrated Mass with 300 patriarchs and bishops on Beirut's waterfront in three languages (Arabic, French and Latin). Seventy-five thousand faithful were expected to attend - 400,000 came
[Galeazzi's figure is above the 350,000 given by the Vatican, citing local authorities].
Not content with the mega-screens, the Massgoers sought to get as close as they could to the altar, and many suffered from the day's suffocating heat.
And from the Pope's pulpit, a cry for freedom: "Dignity and rights for all men. They understand they are all brothers under God".
Benedict XVI encouraged the oppressed minorities in the countries with overwhelming Muslim majorities: "Your sufferings are not in vain. Christ is close to those who suffer - he is present beside you and will not abandon you".
Even in the most ephemeral traces, Beirut is the symbol of the contradictions and coexistence of opposites. Not far from the military standing guard for the Mass were the weekend visitors coming to enjoy a swim in the Mediterranean. In the mass media and in the streets, tragic tones and light ones alternate during these days full o new tension.
The Pope, at the Angelus, noted the continuing 'din of weapons' and called on the international community to 'stop the hatred'. From the Arab countries he asked for respect for human dignity and religious freedom because "whoever wants to build peace must stop to see in the other an evil to be eliminated".
It is indispensable, he said, that "everyone can live peacefully and with dignity". This the "essential testimony that Christians must give here, collaborating with all men of good will", Benedict XVI said, echoing words said years ago by John Paul II visiting Lebanon.
To stop the bloodbath in Syria, 'practical solutions' are needed. And so, he turned over to the patriarchs and bishops, and through them, to all Christians in the Middle East, the text of the document that he signed shortly upon arriving in Beirut Friday, which he called "a road map for the future' of Christians in the Middle East.
On Saturday, he gave copies of this Apostolic Exhortation on the Middle East to the civilian and religious leaders he met at the Presidential Palace, including the four leaders of the Sunni, Shiite, Alawite and Druze Muslim communities in Lebanon.
The message is clear: There can be no future without 'the silence of the weapons and the cessation of all violence". And so, it is up to Christians "to draw from the original lifeblood of salvation that was realized in this very land".
"Fraternal communion and the example of the saints" are helpful, he said, speaking on the waterfront which is a landfill area built up with the rubble from the destruction of the 15-year-long civil war in Lebanon which also gave birth to the present institutional system that ensures representation in all the branches of government for all the religious and ethnic groups in the Lebanese population.
"The vocation of the Church and of Christians is to serve, as Jesus did, freely and for all, without distinction", the Pope underscored, decrying what he called today's 'procession of deaths'.
In his farewell address at the airport, he cited Solomon, that man needs to construct "a shrine to God for eternity", whatever one's origin or faith - namely, "a space in which men can live harmoniously, protected from all destructiveness".
P.S. On his blog, Galeazzi has a piece entitled 'Benedict of the Orient', in which he says the Holy Father's example was the model for the final statements made by the Greek Catholic patriarchs who met in Canada last week. I will translate later.
And now, Restan...
Friend of God,
friend to men
Translated from
Sept. 17, 2012
A long line of seasoned men, well on in age, with garments indicating their respective traditions. Each of them came up to the Pope, very close, face to face, to receive from his hands a copy of his Apostolic Exhortation
Ecclesia in Medio Oriente.
Benedict XVI takes time for each of them, looks them fraternally in the eye, clasps their hands, and exchanges words with them that will never be reported.
These are the Patriarchs and bishops of some of the most ancient Christian sees who proudly and jealously conserve their respective churches' memory of martyrdom and glory - along with the presidents of the bishops' conferences of other Middle Eastern nations, including Turkey and Iran, nations in which the Christian faith today is as tiny and threatened as the proverbial mustard seed in the Gospel stories.
The Pope was not giving out a guide on how to be Christian in the Middle East and not to die while being so. It is not a strategic plan for a desperate undertaking, but the outlook, full of wisdom and passion, of the pastors themselves of peoples who have been long and sorely tested - an outlook, an embrace and an invitation, all of it urgent: Stay in the land of your fathers, be witnesses for the Crucified One, build together with your compatriots a peace based on justice and reconciliation.
Shortly before this presentation, an apotheosis of songs and waving flags gave way to the fervent depth of the Eucharistic celebration. And once more, as he did twenty centuries ago, Peter spoke. Not the instinctive fisherman who was as prompt to speak a truth he could not comprehend as he was to protest indignantly against the Master's words that he was going to his death.
Today, Peter knows, through the experiences of sorrow and love, that "to decide to follow Jesus is to take his Cross, in order to accompany him on his way, an arduous way, which is not that of power or earthly glory, but which leads necessarily to a renunciation of oneself, to loss one's life for Christ and the Gospel in order to gain it".
The Gospel yesterday says that Jesus explained himself to his own disciples "with all clarity" - the same clarity that Benedict XVI deployed during his 48 hours on Lebanese soil.
The Christians of the Middle East cannot entertain vain illusions. It will not be the Western powers, nor the communications media, nor even the typical astuteness associated with the region, that will assure them o a future. Like Jesus, they can only put their trust in God who called them to this particular mission in company with the universal Church. That Church which only the Pope, with his personal sacrifice, his clarity, and his patent faith, is able to embody these days.
He came to Beirut on the Feast of the Exalttion of the Holy Cross, an inconvenient reminder for many. In the Basilica of St. Paul in Harissa, upon signing the document summarizing the conclusions of the 2010 Synodal Assembly on the Middle East, he expressed aloud the tragedy of our Middle Eastern brothers:
"[Through the Synodal assembly] the entire Church was able to hear the troubled cry and see the desperate faces of many men and women who experience grave human and material difficulties, who live amid powerful tensions in fear and uncertainty, who desire to follow Christ – the One who gives meaning to their existence – yet often find themselves prevented from doing so".
Many were brought to tears upon hearing the Successor of Peter affirm that this is not a time for defeat (so easy to say amid the shortcomings of the world] but the time "to celebrate the victory of love over hatred, of forgiveness over vengeance, of service over domination, of unity over division".
That is the language of the glorious Cross, the Pope underscored, the folly of the Cross "capable of changing our sufferings into a declaration of love for God and mercy for our neighbour; a folly capable of transforming those who suffer because of their faith and identity into vessels of clay ready to be filled to overflowing by divine gifts more precious than gold".
Gathered around the Pope were bishops who had come from hermetic Iran, from remote Armenia, from an uneasy Egypt in transition, from martyred Iraq, from Syria which is being exsanguinated, and from Jerusalem, the mother Church.
Along with them, in respectful silence and with friendly faces, the religious leaders of the Sunni, Shiite, Alawite and Druze Muslims of Lebanon. Old and well-known faces to their Christian neighbors, rarely in comfortable situations, perhaps, but here they were, agreeing with the gentle but firm words of the Bishop of Rome: Build the peace, do not let the poison of violence contaminate your religiosity, unmask the lies of fundamentalism.
To the political leaders and the representatives of Beirut's civilian society, Benedict XVI called strongly for respect of religious freedom. "The freedom to profess and practise one’s religion without danger to life and liberty must be possible to everyone. The loss or attenuation of this freedom deprives the person of his or her sacred right to a spiritually integrated life".
What nowadays passes for tolerance does not eliminate cases of discrimination, and at times it even reinforces them. Without openness to transcendence, which makes it possible to find answers to their deepest questions about the meaning of life and morally upright conduct, men and women become incapable of acting justly and working for peace.
And he notes that mere tolerance is not enough, that it does not eliminate discriminations but even reaffirms them at times. He also warned against the falsity of coexistence based on marginalizing man's religious openness, without which he cannot find answers to his heart's questions about the sense of life and how to live life correctly, and without which he becomes incapable of acting with justice or of committing himself for the sake of peace.
In multi-faith Lebanon, crossroads for centuries between the East and the West, Benedict XVI dwelt on one of his essential themes: Living together, a good life, for all peoples, cannot be sustained either under fundamentalism which is militantly working for Islamic domination, nor under the aggressive secularism which has manifested itself openly in the European democracies.
What is needed is a new understanding and appreciation of religious freedom and its social and political projections - in which, perhaps, Lebanon could prove to be a good laboratory to test it out.
The meeting with youth representatives of Lebanon and the entire Middle East was a cause for special joy to the Pope. The young people were the carnal demonstration of the two central messages in his visit: Christians must not fear the future but involve themselves in building it, and civilian friendship between Christians and Muslims is possible and is a platform on which to build a new type of communal coexistence in the Middle East.
We cannot forget that just as tens of thousands of young Christians and Muslims were applauding the Pope, Islamist-instigated violence was spreading throughout the Middle East. It will require a great educational effort and actual coexistence so that the seed sown by the Pope may germinate, but there is no other way.
Let us return to our opening scene. After the clear papal statements heard in Lebanon, these patriarchs and bishops had to return home - to places where many Christians are tempted to 'castle up' in an effort at some security, rather than to work at coexistence, which may be difficult, or to face the challenge of being actors in the history of these days which have the potential eruptiveness of a volcano.
The people who lined up before the Pope are heirs to a millenary history of heroic witness, of countless sufferings and they bear on their faces and in their spirit the scars of their peoples.
"Fear not, little flock", Benedict XVI enjoined them earlier. But this was not just about sentiments. Peter came to mark out a mission and a pathway. With much to be done: to strengthen unity and the common witness, to abandon attitudes that are merely defensive, to improve the formation of lay faithful
[and of the clergy!], to take risks on inter-faith dialog, which is always difficult - but which can also bear much fruit) - with ordinary Muslims, "the Islam of the people", as Cardinal Angelo Scola likes to call them.
Cedars and olives marked the stages of this beautiful visit - the majesty and freshness of a presence which brought much promise to this land, and the oil of welcome, of friendship and of sharing.
Both need to be watered and cared for with wisdom and patience. As Benedict XVI has done without calculations nor reservations. He came as a friend of God and a friend to all men, and everyone ought to have recognized that, in the midst of our daily informational apathy and paralysis, something truly new happened in Lebanon.
Sandro Magister has also popsted his commentary, with its English translation on
chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1350326?eng=y
I will post my translation later, for the record.
A shoutout from Sollers
Meanwhile, an unusual video-tribute on the blog pf Philippe Sollers, the French writer, novelist and critic whose reviews of Benedict XVI's JESUS OF NAZARETH-2 I translated and posted for the Forum, and who is a most unlikely 'fan' of the Pope, of any Pope, having been one of the leaders of the French intellectual movement of the 1960s on the eve of the 1968 counterculture revolution. He is married to atheist philosopher Julia Kristeva, who represented the non-believers at Benedict XVI's Assisi assembly in October last year.
Sollers runs a brief videoclip taken from the Pope's arrival in Beirut and the Mass yesterday with the following message:
Viva Benedict XVI in Beirut! Shame on all murderers, whoever they are!
Courage, old man, as you guide your boat through the unrestrained ocean of human folly!
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 18/09/2013 01:34]