BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

See preceding page for earlier entries on 10/17/12.






Pope convenes all Apostolic Nuncios
to a meeting at the Vatican next June

P.S. It turns out that the day after Cardinal Bertone annnounced to the Synodal Assembly that the Holy Fahter was sending a delegation of cardinals and bishops to Syria, the cardinal had another announcement to make Wednesday morning, when he made a regular intervention at the Assembly to speak about the task of the Apostolic Nuncios, who serve as the Pope's ambassadors to 170 nations of the world, in the New Evangelization.

15th General Congregation
Wednesday morning, Oct. 17, 2012


Today, Wednesday, October 17, 2012, Memory of Saint Ignatius of Antiochia, Bishop and martyr, at 9:00 a.m, with the chant of the Hour of Terce, the Fifteenth General Congregation began for the continuation of the interventions by the Synodal Fathers, along with some auditors.

President delegate on duty was Cardinal Laurent MONSENGWO PASINYA, Archbishop of Kinshasa (DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO).

At this General Congregation, which ended at 12:35 am with the prayer of Angelus Domini 253 Fathers were present.

Here is the Vatican's English translation of Cardinal Bertone's intervention:

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The transmission of the faith is a very fundamental task of the Church, during which she is also able to represent her very own essence: she is in fact a community that has always been involved in the double movement of receiving and transmitting the precious treasure of the faith.

This task is declined in a different way according to the situations and historical eras, and today has taken on the profile of new evangelization in an ever growing way, that is to say the renewed announcement addressed to those who, while already being in contact, in different ways, with the Christian message, find themselves - to use the image of a Gospel parable - like the rocky terrain, or the one infested by briars, or even like the open road, where evil steals the good seed of the Word (cf. Mt 13:18-22).

In this intervention, I would like to underline the contribution that the Pontifical Representatives - and all the structures of the Holy See which coordinate their mission - hope to offer to the transmission of the faith in the context of the new evangelization.

In the first place, the Pontifical Representatives render a specific service, which is that of watching over and protecting the libertas Ecclesiae - the freedom of the Church around the world.

This is a service that is necessary for the mission of the Church, wherever “the legal or social order is inspired by philosophical and political systems which call for strict control, if not a monopoly, of the state over society”, as well as in “countries which accord great importance to pluralism and tolerance, but where religion is increasingly being marginalized” (Cf. Benedict XVI, Speech to the Members of the Diplomatic Corps to the Holy See, January 10 2011).

In these context, the action of the Pontifical Representatives, through the instruments of diplomatic dialogue with the civic authorities and in accord with the local episcopacy, aims not to seek anachronistic privileges, but to guarantee to the Church, in the best way possible, that freedom in the internal government and practice of othe Church's legitimate mission, and that, when present, is reflected in benefits to others and other religious traditions, and nurtures the harmony of all society.

In a similar way, the work of the Observers and Representatives of the Holy See at International Organizations, besides serving the cause of peace and the defense of fundamental human rights, is also meant to guarantee the right of citizenship [??? - Does he mean right of representation in international organizations?] - to the Church, for her institutions and, I would say, for the Christian vision of the human person, today endangered by certain basic elements of the so-called dominant culture.

With this service, the Pontifical Representatives also are conscious of the direct responsibility they have, as members of the Episcopal College, in the proclamation of the Gospel and thereby the promotion of new evangelization.

This responsibility, first of all, is aimed at favoring communion between local bishops and the Roman Pontiff. Making present the solicitude, proper to the Successor of Peter, for the whole Church, her representatives are by nature called to being the builders of communion, which in itself is a powerful factor of evangelization (cf. Jn 13:35).

I would like to assure, before this distinguished assembly, the commitment that the Nuncios and the Apostolic Delegates intend to activate to favor, on one hand, acceptance by local bishops of the Pontifical Magisterium and any instructions from the organisms of the Holy See, and on the other hand, to help the Pope and his collaborators to better know and understand the reality of the local Churches, the assets and resources that they work with, as well as their difficulties.

Then, we must not forget the more direct work of evangelization performed by the Pontifical Representatives, when they are called to the various Dioceses for episcopal consecration, special occasions, or pastoral visits.

Through this form of ministry they make present in a very special way, among the People of God, the person of the Pope, his care and solicitude for Christ’s whole flock, a presence that is especially felt by the faithful, and which contributes to making the Church’s Catholicity more visible.

Without a doubt, the ministry of the Pontifical Representatives is part of the Church and her history, which must always renew and perfect itself to be appropriate to the needs of our times.

For this reason, the Holy Father decided to call all the Nuncios, the Apostolic Delegates and the permanent Observers in the international organizations to a meeting for reflection in Rome next June, following on from the one held more than ten years ago on the occasion of the Great Jubilee 2000.

It will be an opportunity for an exchange of experiences and to deepen the feeling of mission for the Pontifical Representatives in today’s circumstances. I am certain that I can count on your prayers for this.

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The generation of the desert
Translated from

October 16, 2012

Benedict XVI recently used an image to underscore the stakes for the Christian faith today. tested by secularization. and the pilgrimage of the People of God to be undertaken in austerity and radical trust in God.

On Thursday, October 11, 2012, exactly 50 years after the Second Vatican Council opened, Benedict XVI - surrounded by Synodal Fathers who had come from the four corners of the globe to discuss the New Evangelization - in his homily inaugurating the Year of Faith, used the image of the desert to speak of the world today.

Not that of 1962, when Christianity - or at least, its values, especially in ethics - was still the background for common references. But that of 2012, when Christianity has seen its 'exculturation', to use a term by Danielle Hervieu-Leger, at least in the Middle East where it was born and in the Western world.

The desert image is powerful. Joseph Ratzinger, who knows the Bible intimately, knows exactly what he is doing in using the image. The desert is, first of all, the place where the people of Israel spent 40 years between Egypt - which had become their land of bondage - and the Promised Land. The story of a major trial in which God's faithfulness to his Chosen People was manifested.

This is what the Pope said:

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Recent decades have seen the advance of a spiritual desertification. In the Council’s time it was already possible from a few tragic pages of history to know what a life or a world without God looked like, but now we see it every day around us. This void has spread.

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The void? Some will object to what they would consider a very negative verdict by the Pope on the world that surrounds us. Has not the Western world been humming as never before with thousands of human initiatives? But Benedict XVI thinks that this creative frenzy or media noise cannot possibly represent nourishment or refreshment for contemporary man.

The Pope reprises the critique of secularization which marks the current assembly of the Bishops' Synod. Many of the Synodal Fathers have denounced the adversity represented by secularization, the absence of transcendence that flattens all perspective.

The general rapporteur of the Assembly, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, DC, has denounced the 'tsunami' of secularization that has swept up Christians in the West. Some have criticized his rhetoric, claiming it is easy for him to accuse. But they ignore that the American cardinal lashed out not so much as the 'world' that facilitates this secularization, as much as at the Christians themselves who have allowed themselves to be 'desecrated', unable to present any spiritual resistance.

It is nonetheless true that our world has desecrated even matter itself. Fifty years ago, it was still considered a transgression of the sacred to throw away bread (but also because the privations of war were still inscribed in the bodies of those who had undergone them), But today, those who have never known hunger do not see it as a problem at all.

And all those wheat fields we saw during our summer vacation this year, in which the grain had not even matured - their crops were probably sold beforehand by the farmers to big business and are already the subject of financial speculation on the commodities markets of the world even before they have been harvested.

Without being particularly 'reactionary', one can also note that this society of click and twit no longer predisposes our contemporaries to a capacity for reflection or even reading. But the Bible, for instance, is a book whose cultural and historical density must be penetrated, and no one can know it intimately without a minimum of intellectual investment.

Secularization is not just an ideological universe that has rejected transcendence voluntarily, but it is primarily a way of life that affects all Westerners and from which Christians cannot extract themselves so easily.

Nevertheless, Benedict XVI does not condemn:

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But it is in starting from the experience of this desert, from this void, that we can again discover the joy of believing, its vital importance for us, men and women. In the desert we rediscover the value of what is essential for living; thus in today’s world there are innumerable signs, often expressed implicitly or negatively, of the thirst for God, for the ultimate meaning of life. And in the desert, people of faith are needed who, with their own lives, point out the way to the Promised Land and keep hope alive. Living faith opens the heart to the grace of God which frees us from pessimism. Today, more than ever, evangelizing means witnessing to the new life, transformed by God, and thus showing the path..

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In other words, believers - having understood that secularized society is a garden titillating with promises of happiness that can become a desert for the spirit - would be able to perceive with urgency the reality of the faith, its hope for the Promised Land and its trust in God.

The desert is a place of extreme trial and temptation. It was in the Judean desert that Christ was tempted by Satan, an echo of the temptations in the Sinai. Spiritual poverty and aridity, the fear of death, are quite real today among the Christian people of the West, in the face of the numerical decline of Christian communities and a shortage of priests.

Thus the temptation is strong to look for blame outside ourselves. One points the finger at the Church hierarchy - a very French reflex - for its incapacity to 'adapt'. But the infamous 'incurie de la Curie' (the unconcern of the Curia) is evident at all levels, often nearest to us, in our dioceses, parishes and our 'catho' movements, many dominated by power games and inertia.

The temptation is equally great to lament a mythified past - the 'integristes' (traditionalists) nostalgic for a 'pure' Church, and the progressivists bemoaning a Church that has been 'halted in its tracks' after Vatican II, because 'conservatives have regained the upper hand'.

But Benedict XVI underscores that a return to the objective content of the Conciliar texts would allow resistance to such a temptation.

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Reference to the documents saves us from extremes of anachronistic nostalgia and running too far ahead, and allows what is new to be welcomed in a context of continuity. The Council did not formulate anything new in matters of faith, nor did it wish to replace what was ancient. Rather, it concerned itself with seeing that the same faith might continue to be lived in the present day, that it might remain a living faith in a world of change.

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One does not survive in the desert unless one goes onward without being discouraged. If one stops, one dies. The Catholic Church is therefore called on to move on - it has no choice. The trials she undergoes are mysteriously allowed by God so that she can trust him more. The desert can be a divine lesson even when the travelers are in the red (relative to vocations, finances, galloping de-Christianization, media derision, etc).

And the desert represented by the secularized world is also, according to Benedict XVI, a place where those who believe in Christ and those who don't (or believe less than they did) can help each other. The former can help support the latter in the reality that is most lacking in our contemporaries, hope.

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In the desert, people of faith are needed who, with their own lives, point out the way to the Promised Land and keep hope alive. Living faith opens the heart to the grace of God which frees us from pessimism. Today, more than ever, evangelizing means witnessing to the new life, transformed by God, and thus showing the path.

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Therein one finds the essence of the New Evangelization and the Year of Faith: Christians must be signs as well as travelling companions for their thirsty and hungry contemporaries, leading them towards the oases of repose (better yet, to be the oases themselves - which is another way of saying that they must be saints).

The Pope evokes a form of wisdom in this respect:

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The journey is a metaphor for life, and the wise wayfarer is one who has learned the art of living, and can share it with his brethren... This, then, is how we can picture the Year of Faith: a pilgrimage in the deserts of today’s world, taking with us only what is necessary: neither staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money, nor two tunics – as the Lord said to those he was sending out on mission (cf. Lk 9:3), but the Gospel and the faith of the Church, of which the Council documents are a luminous expression, as is the Catechism of the Catholic Church, published twenty years ago.

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In his homily, the Pope refers to the crowds who continue to make the pilgrimage along the 'way of St. James' to the Apostle's shrine in Compostela.

The physical trials of a pilgrimage on foot evoke the need to find another relationship between the body and time, but it is also an experience of austerity, as one seeks to prove whether he can live without the comforts and security to which he has become accustomed.

It is also a way of learning to live depending on those who welcome us along the way, a metaphor for the Other, and therefore an experience of grace. (I take this reflection from the very beautiful book by François-Xavier Maigre, Sur la trace de l’Archange (In the footsteps of the Archangel), where he narrates his family's pilgrimage to Mont St. Michel).

This call for austerity is very much the line of this Pontificate. Benedict XVI sees the Church as a creative minority. She must renounce any thought of dominating consciences and of excessive bureaucratization (a leitmotif with Joseph Ratzinger).

In the desert, one must get rid of unnecessary things that will keep one from going onward, from tiring oneself out in vain, and from collapsing under their weight. Don't pilgrims experience that they can well do without things that they can get rid of in order to travel more lightly?

The poverty of the Church is a condition for her survival. (The Pope said this a year ago to the Church in Germany, which is the richest in the world.) In the desert, one must learn to depend only on the grace of God, as the image of manna suggested. And this is received in prayer and silence. The Sinai desert was the place where God drew the people to him so that they would serve him.

Ultimately, the desert is the place where one learns to be 'a child'. Where one unlearns the slavery imposed (but also often delectable) by the Pharaoh (the Israelites grieved for the food they always had in Egypt) in order to receive from God the law of life which allows man to be free, which is to say, to be a child of God. There is no true freedom without filiation.

The reference to the body of Catholic doctrine is also a Pavlovian reflex with Joseph Ratzinger, once its formal custodian. Instead of and in the place of material realities, the Pope evokes the enormous doctrinal corpus of the Gospel and the Conciliar texts, not forgetting the 'foundation' provided by the Catechism of the Church.

Does this mean carrying all that load of reading on our backs? Not quite. Benedict XVI points out that in the desert, one needs a compass in order not to get lost, especially if one also wishes to be a guide for others.

Because the subjective reality of what one lives (trust in God, based on what he has already done for us, in terms of salvation and guidance) can never be separated from an objective reality: Biblical Revelation and Tradition refined over 2000 years, a doctrinal tradition lived and embodied by the saints - men and women in every age, of every condition and origin. A pilgrim crowd that we are invited to join. Brilliant stars in the heaven of Abraham.

Thursday, Oct. 18, 28th Week in Ordinary Time
Feast of St. Luke, Evangelist

ST. LUKE (Greek, born in Antioch, Syria; died in Thebes, Greece at age 84)
Apostle and Evangelist, Patron Saint of Physicians
Companion of St. Paul, author of the Gospel considered to be the most historical of the four Gospels, and the Acts of the Apostles, recounting the history of the early Church following
the Resurrection. He met Saint Paul in Troas, and evangelized Greece and Rome with him, being there for the shipwreck and other perils of the voyage to Rome.He also stayed in Rome
for Paul’s two years in prison. Much of his Gospel was based on the teachings and writings of Paul, interviews with early Christians, and his own experiences. He is believed
to have painted an icon of Mary now kept in the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the model for icons like the Salus Populus Romanum in Santa Maria Maggiore and the Virgin
of Czestochowa. His remains have had quite an itinerary and have been kept in the Church of St. Giustina in Padua since the 12th century, to where it was taken from
Constantinople for safekeeping. In 2001, scientific testing established that the remains in Padua corresponded to what is known about Luke, and a head that had been kept in Prague
was shown to fit the Padua remains perfectly. See
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/1360095/DNA-test-pinpoints-St-Luke-the-apostles-remains-to-Pa...
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/101812.cfm
[Because they were not apostles, the evangelists Luke and Mark have somehow been left out of Benedict XVI's catecheses. They should have come after St. Paul in the series,
before Timothy and Titus, perhaps? St. Luke, strangely, is not the patron saint of any major city, while St. Mark is, of course, the patron of Venice.]


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

No events announced for the Holy Father today.

The Synodal Assembly will have an abbreviated session at noon today, after the Synodal Fathers are honored by
the Commune of Rome at the Campidoglio in the morning. There will be no afternoon session.

At noon today, a news conference was held to present the first Post-Discussion Report after the first 12 days
of the Synodal Assembly.
Present were two of the three President-delegates - Cardinal John Tong Hon, Archbishop of Hongkong; Cardinal Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya,
Archbishop of Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo); along with Mons. Ján Babjak, S.J., Metropolitan Archbishop of Presov for
Catholics of the Byzantine Rite and president of the Slovakian bishops' conferecen, who is vice-president of the Synodal Assembly's
Information Commission; and Mons. Sviatoslav Schevchuk, Major Archbishop of Kyiv-Halyč and chief of the Synod of the Greek Catholic
Church of the Ukraine.

The Vatican released the text of the Holy Father's letter to Cardinal Raúl Eduardo Vela Chiriboga, emeritus
Archbishop of Quito, his special representative to the celebration of the 475th anniversary of the first
diocese in Peru and South America, the present archdiocese of Cuzco, The celebrations will be held on
Oct. 24-28. and will also be the occasion for an International Eucharistic and Marian Congress.

As previously anticipated in Catholic media outlets, the Holy Father has named Mons. Joseph William Tobin,
C.SS.R., who has been Secretary of the Congregation overseeing religious orders around the world since 2010,
as Archbishop of Indianapolis (USA).
The usual 'conspiracy theorists' in Catholic media have been speculating that he has been 'promoted out' of the Roman Curia because of
his reported objection to the censure of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
since he has expressed sympathy for the LCWR in published interviews. The apostolic visitation of the LCWR was begun four years ago by
the Curial Congregation to which Tobin was later appointed. On the basis of results from that visitation, the CDF in 2009 ordered a
doctrinal assessment of the organization, presumably in coordination with the congregation supervising the religious orders. Doctrinal
assessment is the competence of the CDF alone, as surely, Mons. Tobin knows. Moreover, if Benedict XVI or Cardinal Ouellet had any
doubts about Tobin's doctrinal firmness, they would not have named him pastor of an important diocese like Indianapolis. Benedict XVI's
episcopal appointments have been characterized by orthodox firmness, not by doctrinal flabbiness.

Vatican II: The Yes and the No
by Robert Royal

Oct. 16, 2012

During Richard Nixon’s 1971 visit to China, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was asked what he thought about the French Revolution (1789). He reportedly said: “It is too soon to say.”

Many thought this an amusing expression of millennial, oriental perspectives – though several China experts say the interpreter badly flubbed things and Zhou (a tough modern Communist, after all, not a Confucian scholar) was referring to recent student rebellions in Paris (1968).

Some Catholic commentators have tried to hedge their views on the Second Vatican Council (1962-5) with a similar caveat. In the long perspectives of the Church, they say, it’s too soon to say what it will ultimately mean.

This past Friday, the Church “celebrated” the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Council and opened the Year of Faith, even as it had just begun a Synod on the New Evangelization – a New Evangelization necessitated, in part, by some of the negative consequences of the Council.

A half-century into the mission, it’s clear that the long-term argument is a distraction. The Council’s primary importance, for good and bad – and there was a lot of both – was what it did during the last third of the twentieth century. The long-term impact will depend on what present and future Catholics do with the Council – hence the Synod and other measures.

In many ways, the search for the True Meaning of Vatican II is a lot like the “search for the historical Jesus.” Much depends on the assumptions, especially the unconscious ones, you bring to the task, which cannot be carried out with merely historical or analytical methods anyway.

The texts, important as they are, notably fail to convince people who think that the “spirit,” not the letter, is the Council’s real meaning. John Paul II already had to convene a Synod of Bishops in 1985, which declared that spirit and letter should not be set against each other, and that Vatican II had to be interpreted in continuity with tradition and the earlier councils.

But you’d have to be virtually brain-dead not to know that, almost thirty years later, these are still very live issues in the Church. In the state of Washington at the moment, sixty-three ex-priests are publicly opposing the Church’s attempt to stop the legalization of gay marriage with a classic post-conciliar argument: it violates Jesus’s welcoming embrace of all.

For many Catholics, here and around the world, the main effect of the Council is still to have reduced Christianity to this sort of simplistic monomania.

I was in Rome last week and there was a lot of enthusiasm about the New Evangelization, as there should be, but also much unacknowledged nervousness. The bishops at the synod said some incisive and, occasionally, profound things. But talk is easy. Action, in our circumstances, much harder. And only vigorous action will bring the legacy of the Council into a different course.

The great theologian Henri de Lubac, S.J., one of the inspirations of the Council, warned after the event, “The Yes said wholeheartedly to the Council and to all its legitimate consequences must, in order to remain consistent and sincere, be coupled with a No that is just as resolute to a certain type of exploitation that is, in fact, a perversion of it.”

La nouvelle théologie brought a lot to the Church. Not only de Lubac, but Congar, Chenu, Daniélou, Boyer, von Balthasar, and others discovered something really valuable in the tradition.

It was no small thing that, at the height of its powers in the twentieth century, the Roman Catholic Church in solemn synod put forward the universal call for holiness, an increased emphasis on the role of the laity in the world, and the vision for a more pastoral and communitarian Church, rather than a juridical one.

And all of it – as Pope John XXIII intended in convening the Council – was to supplement settled Catholic theological and moral teaching and make it more effective in engaging the world.

Joseph Ratzinger, a sharp observer even as a young man, remarked at the time that two early tasks of the Council were: to dispel the notion that everything was fine in the Church and to overcome an “anti-Modernist neurosis.”

The Council certainly did both. But those who warned about where the new course would take us – and who were and are often mocked as hopeless reactionaries – were right in their dire predictions.

Specifically, the recognition that the Church needed to be a less legalistic and more pastoral community led many to think that rules were per se a sign of lack of charity. But as I’ve often said, trying to be pastoral without knowing concretely what helping people means, is like being a doctor with a good bedside manner – who is ignorant of medicine.

And the Church’s “opening to the world” was often taken to mean not only that an excessive wariness about modernity was to be jettisoned, but that modernity itself was to become the standard by which to judge things in a supposedly “mature” and engaged Church.

John Paul II and Benedict XVI have cleaned up a lot of the mess, but a lot more remains, as the Synod deliberations well show. Much of the New Evangelization is aimed at formerly Christian societies.

Benedict held a meeting Friday for the surviving bishops who had been participants in the Council, at which he virtually summed up the experience of the last fifty years:

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The Council was a time of grace in which the Holy Spirit taught us that the Church, in her journey in history, must always speak to contemporary man, but this can only happen through the strength of those who are profoundly rooted in God, who allow themselves to be guided by Him and live their faith with purity; it does not happen with those who adapt themselves to the passing moment, those who choose the most comfortable way.

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CNS starts a valuable service
featuring news and texts
from Vatican II 50 yeras ago


"Vatican II: 50 years ago today” is a step back in time to the daily activities of the Second Vatican Council. Pope John XXIII called for an ecumenical council in 1959, the first to be held since 1870.

After more than two years of preparatory work, the council convened its first session, Oct. 11-Dec. 8, 1962. After the Pope’s death the following year, Pope Paul VI reconvened the council for three other sessions. These ran Sept. 29-Dec. 4, 1963; Sept. 14-Nov. 21, 1964; and Sept. 14-Dec. 8, 1965.

A total of 2,860 bishops, referred to as council fathers, participated in one or more of the sessions. The council produced 16 documents — two dogmatic and two pastoral constitutions, nine decrees and three declarations.

The documents address everything from liturgy to Scripture, missionary activity to ecumenism and interfaith relationships, and the functions of clergy and laity to religious freedom.

During the four years of the council, Catholic News Service, then known as News Service of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the predecessor of today’s United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, or in shorthand, “NC,” provided some of the most comprehensive English-language coverage of the sessions, the council fathers and those who assisted in the work.

In 1965, it published a compilation of its reporting, the working documents and proceedings of the council in a remarkable three-volume set known simply as the Council Daybook. It was edited by then NC director and editor-in-chief Floyd Anderson, and was mainly the work of Msgr. James I. Tucek, a priest of the Diocese of Dallas-Fort Worth who was NC Rome bureau chief from 1956 to 1964.

Writing in the preface of the first volume of the Council Daybook, Bishop Albert R. Zuroweste, of Belleville, Ill., said, “The first session of the Vatican Council II created more ‘firsts’ than any previous ecumenical council. Among these ‘firsts’ and one of the most important was the establishment of the United States press panel as a source of daily news releases that gave to the session the greatest news coverage ever accorded a religious convention, meeting or council. The world today is linked by a vast network of communications media, and the press panel made the daily events of the council available to all.”

The bishop said that as the council’s first session began, journalists and writers were told that no prior texts would be made available and pre-written stories — the practice in those days since texts usually were handed out ahead — would be inaccurate. Those covering the council could only get texts at the end of the day, if available. “The rule of secrecy, more often violated than observed, added to the confusion,” he wrote. There was near revolt by the press corps.

The U.S. bishops acted quickly to create a daily press panel composed of specialists in Scripture, canon law, dogmatic and moral theology, and church history and social sciences. It was an immediate hit.

“The panel assisted and guided the [newspersons] in interpreting the daily proceedings of the council and furnished valuable background information,” Bishop Zuroweste wrote.

“It also established good will and corrected the dissatisfaction that was general in the first days of the council sessions. The satisfaction with the panel as a source of reliable information grew with each meeting, and before the first session was completed, the attitude and morale of the correspondents were excellent,” he wrote. “At the last session of the panel, the press corps publicly expressed its thanks to the United States bishops for establishing this source of accurate information.”

In this section, CNS will present the fruits of that vast labor of the bishops, panels of experts and NC editors and correspondents.

Each day CNS will post the entry from the Council Daybook, just as it was reported on the corresponding day at the council 50 years ago. The entries are unaltered from the reporting styles of those times. CNS will often include important addresses of the popes and council fathers or interventions of experts. We also will identify some of the people or issues in the dispatches when the references may not be clear to today’s reader. However, for the most part this will be a page of history as it was reported then.

CNS is grateful to the past U.S. bishops and the U.S. council fathers still with us today, the press panel experts, Floyd Anderson, other former NC editors, especially NC assistant director Burke Walsh, and to all of the past NC correspondents — James C. O’Neill, Patrick Riley and Benedictine Father Placid Jordan, who covered the council and whose contributions appear in the Council Daybook. It is an astonishing and important legacy of Catholic journalism for the church.

Several items have already been posted on this special site:
http://vaticaniiat50.wordpress.com/

On religion and politics: Benedict XVI says
'Faith takes nothing from our freedom -
it allows its full and final realization'
By James V. Schall, S. J.

October 16, 2012

At election time, we hear of an “obligation” to vote. This phrase always reminds me of our “right” to choose. Both “to vote” and “to choose” are infinitives. They mean practically nothing until we learn what we are voting for or what we are choosing. Looking at the available alternatives, we sometimes long for an obligation not to vote for this or for a right not to choose that.

The mechanisms of voting and choosing are very imperfect throughout the world. Many elections are, in practice, meaningless. Whenever we see elections decided by 98 percent of an electorate on one side, we can assume that no real election took place. How many votes in, say, Chicago, are cast by the dead remains a lively issue.

Eventually, we ask ourselves: How important are politics anyhow? Edmund Burke’s remark is well known: “The only thing that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

But evil today, as always, presents itself in the name of what is good and noble. This is why elections are so enigmatic. Tyrants, likewise, especially the ones arising out of democracies, are often attractive men telling us what we want to hear so that they can gain or stay in power.

In his book on St. Augustine, Herbert Deane reminds us: "Nowhere in the Gospels or in the Apostolic teachings is it ever suggested that Christians have any obligation to participate in the operation of the political system or that the activities of the state have any real relevance to the conduct of members of the Church or to their overriding concern – salvation and participation in the kingdom of God."

The relative importance of things needs to be kept in perspective.

Though Revelation contains a warning about absolute state power, the New Testament was not designed to teach us what we could figure out by ourselves. Politics was one of these latter things.

We sometimes have the impression today that everything is political. Indeed, many believers elevate politics to make it identical with the kingdom of God.

The chief rival to Christianity today, besides Islam, is a secular messianism designed to “liberate” us from religious practices so that we can devote all our attention to politics as our “real” good. Religion, in this view, is what holds us back from perfecting ourselves.

The modern state wants to fulfill that proposal of Marsilius of Padua whereby spiritual things have nothing to do with politics. World religions would be assigned a common parliament that would function under the aegis of the state.

Nothing truly transcendent would exist. Religion’s function would be to explain the nobility of the state’s purpose. No conflict of church and state would be possible. And what would the purpose of the state be? Basically, it would be to “take care” of everyone, in life and death, especially the poor.

In classical politics, of course, the purpose of the state was a temporal common good in which people took care of their own affairs. There is something exhilarating about “taking care” of others. It seems so noble.

In a recent talk in Loreto, in Italy, Benedict XVI said: “Grace does not eliminate freedom; on the contrary it creates and sustains it. Faith removes nothing from the human creature, rather it permits his full and final realization.”

The “full and final realization” of politics can only be understood when we acknowledge that politics is not an eschatology. Its divisions are not those of the soul that are worked out in our living and dying.

But again, politics is not nothing. The fact that the New Testament pays little attention to it – “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” – means that it has a natural importance that we can grasp with our reason.

Aristotle called politics the highest of the practical sciences. He understood that something higher than politics existed. This transcendent order is what kept politics as politics and not itself a claim to man’s ultimate allegiance.

When politics claim our ultimate attention, when it subordinates religion to the state, it transforms the natural order into its own image. Civil societies, states are not substantial beings with personal destinies of their own, as each human being is. They are arrangements of order and disorder wherein individual people work out their final destiny.

We can save our souls in the worst regime, and lose them in the best. Our politics do not automatically determine whether we reach or don’t reach everlasting life. Yet what we do and choose in politics also forms us into what we are, into what we make ourselves to be.

The polity exists so that greater and more varied goods can come about through our agency. The last judgment will include our political choices. Grace does not eradicate nature.

Fr. Schall is professor of political philosophy at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

'Blessed humility: The simple virtues of Joseph Ratzinger'

The gentleness of a simple man
Book review by Edoardo Rialti
Translated from

Oct. 18, 2012

Humility and humor. Andrea Monda starts with these two words to describe the personality of Benedict XVI, while uncovering that 'sweetness' or tenderness that is possible only for someone who is 'in the embrace of a power greater than our own'.

Andrea Monda, journalist and author of important books on JRR Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, begins his spiritual biography of Benedict XVI with those two words and two experiences that have much in common.

The author tries to read Benedict XVI's Pontificate in the light of the first words with which he presented himself to the world as Pope in 2005. Who is this 'simple and humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord'?

Monda says he has always attributed great importance to 'first things': the first impression, the first meeting, the first word said. The question was therefore whether the new Pope's words had been said in the emotion of such a solemn moment, or whether they should be considered seriously as indicative of the man.

Thus the book starts off by looking for the most impalpable and modest of all virtues, and how it relates to the words and gestures of the theologian Pope: "With the same candor and ever-fresh disposition with which the Professor in Munich responded to his students, the Supreme Pontiff today responds to small and big interlocutors, from Roman children preparing for their First Communion to the world of intellect, philosophy, and politics, and leaders of the most important international institutions".

There follows a kind of police investigation on the secret nature of humility, rich with citations and comparisons, but always spiced with a subtle irony that highlights the discreet but tenacious fascination aroused in anyone who gets to meet Benedict XVI up close.

"Unlike the mediatic vulgate which has depicted him as a cold-blooded Panzerkardinal, everyone who has met Joseph-Benedict 'live', has experienced the sweetness of this simple man who can dialog with anyone without a trace of arrogance or affectation".

Monda allows the reader to rediscover that placing oneself in the position of the 'meek', the 'humble' and 'the least', of whom the Bible and the Gospel speak, is possible only to someone who rests in the embrace of a power and wisdom far greater than ours.

That this is a Pope who basically considers himself always and only "the parish priest of the world", as Monda describes him.

"I had said, and even explained, in class, to my American students, that the very name Ratzinger could not possibly be that of a credible 'papabile'. And that was enough to shatter the halo of glory that they had surrounded me with". [The last paragraph does not state who said the preceding quotation, but the context makes it clear that Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI said it, though I have not seen the citation made before.]


Last June, when the book first appeared, I found this item which I set aside but forgot about till now, so it comes in quite handily.

'The words that best describe
this Pope are words that
hardly anyone uses anymore'
Interview with Andrea Monda
by Andrea Gagliarducci
Translated from


"I first met Joseph Ratzinger in 2000 - and in that meeting, his full humanity emerged. The stuff he's made of - it's his limpid and delicate gentleness, his joy. And to use a word that few have used about Pope Benedict XVI, his politeness. As I speak, I realize that I am using words to describe him that are almost obsolete, words that are hardly ever used these days to describe anyone."

{Reading anything about the Holy Father's life, and watching him on TV and his impeccably refined manners, I've always said a silent prayer for his parents, who must have brought up their children extremely well not just to be genuine devoted Catholics but also to observe what used to be called 'good manners and right conduct' in everything they did.]

Andrea Monda, journalist and author, describes his first meeting with the man who would become Benedict XVI. A meeting that led him first to write an article in 2007. And now to write a book published by Lindau this year.

From reading the book and a conversation with the author, one finds out soon enough that one of the words most used by the Pope in his texts is 'joy'. It underscores, says Monda, that the greatness of Benedict XVI has been in always having said Yes, of always accepting whatever life had in store for him.

"He wanted to be a theologian", Monda notes, "and he found himself a bishop, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and now Pope. His life hardly ever gave him what he really wanted for himself, but he has accepted whatever came his way, with humility".

He also points out that the beauty of Benedict XVI's personality does not lie in his wisdom but in his simplicity, whenever he is the 'parish priest of the world', meeting children, young people, seminarians, priests, responding to their questions off the cuff.

Just think of when last June, in Milan, he told the assembled families of the world, responding to a child. that "Paradise must be something like my childhood with my family".

In that statement, says Monda, "one sees the Pope's full humility. It is the trait that always fascinated me about him, since I first met him. At the time, he was called the Panzerkardinal, the German shepherd standing guard over the doctrine of the faith, the cardinal of NO. But there were also other commentaries that said he was a great theologian, crystal-clear in his thought, serious, of great depth. And yet when I met him, even this more favorable aspect became secondary".

Thus he began to reflect on Joseph Ratzinger's humility. "I realized that all truly great persons are united by the trait of humility. It is a strange virtue: the moment you think you are humble, you've lost it. Humility is a journey, one never arrives at completion. His greatness is really in the simplicity he has when he talks. I particularly find him amazing when he speaks with children".

It is then, he thinks, that the true image of the man Joseph Ratzinger emerges. "Behind the Pope there is always a man," Monda notes, "but a man about whom hardly anyone speaks."

"It is said that no news is good news. As a Christian, I speak of the Good News. I would say that my book is addressed to journalists, because Benedict XVI has been badly served by the reductive media narrative about him. A spiritual narration is the alternative."

The narration reveals Benedict XVI's filial love for the Mary, and his habit of kneeling or genuflecting, as he does often.

"Kneeling is the emblematic sign of humility," Monda points out. "Humility and Christianity are closely linked. Before Christianity, humility was described as respect for one's superior. But in Christianity, we have the paradox of God's kenosis - emptying himself - who becomes man and gets to wash even his disciples' feet. This 'scandalous' self-abasement is the summit of Christianity, and this Pope represents it.

"Benedict has reflected on it often - the more one 'rises', the more one must be humble. Service and obedience are two more words that seem to have been swept out of the Western horizon, they are hardly found in the mass media, but they are often in Benedict XVI's thoughts and words".

It is the mass media's loss that they do not know how to let themselves be 'pierced' by the massages launched by Benedict XVI in all his human kindness, Monda says.

They ignore this very human and alive aspect of Benedict XVI. In Milan last June, for example, where 2 million had assembled to be with the Pope, all they could report on was that this was a Pope who had been constrained to endure attacks from within his own household.

"I think he must have experienced all this [the Vatileaks mess] with great suffering because it involves his own affective relationships with the persons who are closest to him".

But in difficult situations, he can only exalt God. "There is Someone greater than me to whom I entrust myself".

"This is his great humility", Monda says. "In which one sees the true stature of a man who has reached as high as he can go as a priest, and the first thing he does is to ask that the faithful pray for him so that, as he would later say, he may not retreat from the wolves."

My addendum:

It is worth recalling Benedict XVI's first words to the world and the Catholic faithful when he first appeared as Pope on the central loggia of St. Peter's Basilica:

---

Dear brothers and sisters, after the great Pope John Paul II, the Cardinals have elected me, a simple, humble labourer in the vineyard of the Lord. The fact that the Lord knows how to work and to act even with insufficient instruments comforts me, and above all I entrust myself to your prayers. In the joy of the Risen Lord, confident of his unfailing help, let us move forward. The Lord will help us, and Mary, His Most Holy Mother, will be on our side. Thank you

---

It is quintessential Joseph Ratzinger.

16TH CENERAL CONGREGATION
Wednesday afternoon, October 17, 2012


On Wednesday, October 17, at 4:30 p.m, in the presence of the Holy Father, with the prayer Pro felici Synodi exitu, the Sixteenth General Congregation began for the reading of the Relatio post disceptationem (Report after the Discussion).

The President-delegate on duty was Cardinal Laurent MONSENGWO PASINYA, Archbishop of Kinshasa (DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO).

Some auditors also intervened. A period for free discussion followed.

At this General Congregation, which ended at 7:00 pm with the prayer of Angelus Domini 254 Fathers were present.

HALFTIME 'REPORT AFTER THE DISCUSSION'

Here is the Report read by Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington, DC, and Rapporteur-General of the Synodal Assembl, summarizing the first 13 days of the Assembly:

---

Holy Father,
Synod Fathers,
Brothers and Sisters in the Lord

“You will be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8).

The Synod on the New Evangelization for the Transmission of the Christian Faith began with the celebration of the Eucharistic Liturgy in Saint Peter’s Square.

Our Holy Father offered us guidance with the reminder that one of the ideas that came forth from the Second Vatican Council and that has such an important emphasis in the New Evangelization is the understanding of the universal call to holiness and how every Christian is by definition a protagonist in the work of evangelization.

“One of the important ideas of the renewed impulse that the Second Vatican Council gave to evangelization is that of the universal call to holiness, which in itself concerns all Christians (cf. Lumen Gentium, 39-42).”

The saints are evangelizers who bring the Word of God into the world through the witness of their lives. Two examples of this efficacious work of inculturation of the Gospel are St. John of Avila and Saint Hildegard of Bingen, who were declared Doctors of the Church by Pope Benedict XVI at the beginning of this synod.

As we began our deliberations in this Hall, once again our Holy Father offered us words of inspiration. In his meditation during the opening prayer, Pope Benedict reminded us that confessio is the first of the two great pillars of evangelization. We must know and proclaim the truth of Jesus Christ.

But the second of these pillars is caritas – love. It is only when we have the word inseparably lived in love that we achieve the evangelization so hoped for in this synod.

“Faith has a content: God communicates himself, but this ‘I’ of God really reveals itself in the figure of Jesus and is interpreted in the ‘confession’ that speaks to us of his virginal conception at the Nativity, the Passion, the Cross, the Resurrection” (Meditation, October 8, 2012).

Also in the October 11th celebration at which the beginning of the Year of Faith was proclaimed and the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Council was recognized, the Holy Father indicated another important direction for our work.

He said: “During the Council there was an emotional tension as we faced the common task of making the truth and beauty of the faith shine out in our time, without sacrificing it to the demands of the present or leaving it tied to the past: the eternal presence of God resounds in the faith, transcending time, yet it can only be welcomed by us in our own unrepeatable today” (Homily, October 11, 2012).

For the past several weeks, we have listened attentively to the reflections on what the New Evangelization means and how the Church might best address concerns that have led to this call by our Holy Father for a New Evangelization.

Thoughtful interventions on the part of the synod fathers, as well as the auditors, fraternal delegates and special guests, have enriched our sessions. The Ordo Synodi Episcoporum states that it is the task of the Relator General to produce a relatio post disceptationem that summarizes as best as possible the discussions so that the next step of the process can continue.

These following reflections are intended in some way to help the discussion in the language groups (circoli minori) as they prepare propositions to offer to the Holy Father at the conclusion of our work. With these observations I also include a number of points for development.

In this relatio, I will summarize some of the observations presented under the following headings:
1. The Nature of the New Evangelization;
2. The Context of the Church’s Ministry Today;
3. Pastoral Responses to the Circumstances of Our Day; and4. Agents / Participants of the New Evangelization.

1. The Nature of the New Evangelization

In the synodal discussions there emerged very clearly the understanding that the foundation of the New Evangelization for the Transmission of the Faith is above all the work of the most Holy Trinity in history.

God the Father sends his Son who brings with himself the authentic Good News of who we are in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Church is involved in this movement of Divine Self-revelation which begins with the Blessed Virgin Mary under the action of the Holy Spirit receiving in her womb the Word of God who became flesh in her to be able to be given to the whole world. It is the Word made flesh who offers his words of everlasting life to those who place their faith in him.

After his death and Resurrection, Jesus sent the Church, his Spouse and new Body, into the world to continue his evangelizing mission.
“Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations…teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:19-20).

Jesus has freed us from the power of sin and saved us from death. The Church receives from her Lord not only the tremendous grace he has won for her, but also the commission to share and make known his victory. We are summoned to transmit faithfully the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the world. The Church’s primary mission is evangelization.

In his opening reflection, our Holy Father reminded us that the Church has taken the word “evangelium” and interpreted it in a new and life-giving manner so that our proclamation of it is a share in the prophetic ministry of the apostles – of the Church.

In the same reflection, our Holy Father underlined the primacy of God in evangelization. It is God who speaks and acts in history. We, by means of the fire of the Holy Spirit, are called to work humbly with God through our profession of faith and love through which the Word of God passes through us to touch others.

The Church never tires of announcing the gift she has received from the Lord. The Second Vatican Council has reminded us that evangelization is at the very heart of the Church. In Lumen Gentium, the fundamental text and nucleus of the Council’s reflection on the life of the Church, the Council fathers emphasized “the Church has received this solemn mandate of Christ to proclaim the saving truth from the apostles and to carry it out to the very ends of the earth” (17).

The duty to announce the saving truth is not just the responsibility of clergy and religious. On the contrary, this synod highlighted the important role of every disciple of Christ in the mission of spreading the faith. The discussion accentuated the crucial and vital participation of every Catholic, especially through the eager dedication and gifts of the lay faithful to the mission of evangelization.

Question 1. Through baptism, all Christians are given a personal calling which gives them the dignity of being evangelizers. How can the Church foster greater consciousness among all the baptized of their missionary and evangelizing responsibility?

“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever” (Heb 13:8) and as such, he makes “all things new” (Rev 21:5). This Good News involves the many moments of evangelization. One is the mission ad gentes, that is, the announcement of the Gospel to those who have never heard of Jesus Christ.

Another moment in evangelization is the ongoing catechesis and growth in the faith that is a normal part of Christian development. Then there is also the New Evangelization which involves the pastoral outreach to those who have heard of Christ and began once to practice the faith but for one reason or another discontinued.

Question 2. One urgent activity, usually part of parish life, involves the initial proclamation of the faith and its gradual development. How can the Christian community become more aware of the importance of this catechetical and educational activity?

2. The context of the Church’s ministry today

In the beginning of our efforts we were greatly aided by the reflections from bishops representing five continents who spoke to us of challenges and at the same time of the communion of the Church.

All of the interventions expressed aspects of the actual situation making reference to continental synodal documents and apostolic exhortations offered by both Blessed John Paul II and our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI.

Even as they were diverse in particulars, all of the continents manifested a need for the New Evangelization insofar as their own cultures are affected by the process of secularization, even though it is displayed differently in diverse geographic areas.

Signs of the New Evangelization in Africa, America, Asia, Oceania and Europe include the small Christian communities in a variety of forms that have become living centers of evangelization. Revitalized parishes continued to be the focal point of Church renewal. The action of the laity is an essential and fruitful development.

Some also highlighted the mega-trend of globalization and its effects, especially on the young. At the same time, all emphasized that at the heart of the New Evangelization is Jesus.

One particularly delicate situation emerged in the interventions regarding the Middle East. We were reminded of the importance of the presence of Christians in that area and that those Catholics have great gratitude for the recent exhortation, Ecclesia in Medio Oriente, and particularly for the visit for our Holy Father to Lebanon that was a greatly appreciated testimony to the Church in that part of the world dominated now by Muslim influence. There was a clear effort to promote inter-religious dialogue as an instrument of peace. There was also recognition of the difficulties that Christian communities face.

The presence of the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams and the fraternal delegates, demonstrated the strong ecumenical commitment of the Catholic Church. This was also noted by a number of synod fathers.

Question 3. Many interventions made clear that there is a consensus that this is a moment of reappraisal of the ministry of the Church in a way that recognizes the new situation in which the Church exercises her perennial ministry of bringing the Gospel of Christ to the world. What have been some fruitful experiences of this activity?

Many fathers spoke of the secularism and indifference to religion that are a part of the culture in many parts of the world. Therefore the Church needs to face the challenges of a world that looks elsewhere for its inspiration.

Many interventions noted the great ignorance of the faith – even of the most basic elements of the faith – that is prevalent throughout even those countries that have a long Christian history.

Question 4. In view of the diminished knowledge of the content of the faith and the lack of appreciation for the Gospel message, what new steps have been taken to promote clear, engaging and complete teaching, particularly to the young?

Globalization also presents unique challenges. The emigration and immigration of large numbers of people have caused dislocation of them from the cultural, social and religious context of their faith. Many religious and human values have been overshadowed by secularism.
Much of culture today presents a vision that weakens the social fabric of society.

Some fathers offered examples of local violence and others of a diminished religious freedom. All of this is a challenge the Church faces in many parts of the world.

Many fathers spoke of the importance of the means of social communications, particularly new electronic media, as the Church attempts to carry out her ministry of proclaiming the Good News.

Some pointed out that it is not enough simply to present Christianity and Christian values on the internet or in religious films. It is necessary to enter into the language of the new media. The Church needs to learn the art of communication from the actual practice of modern social communication.

Question 5. The synod highlighted the seriousness of the challenges facing the Church today that hinder the transmission of the faith, among them an absence of the transcendent in a secularized culture. What are some of the challenges of secularization and what are some potential and existing remedies?

3. Pastoral Responses to the Circumstances of Our Day

There is a need to reinforce the idea of ecclesial communion, a bonding with God and therefore among ourselves as Church. We heard of the need to address the sacraments, particularly the Sacraments of Initiation, the Sacrament of Penance, and above all the focus on the Eucharist.

The overriding need of this age is a spiritual renewal that is the task of the Church to proclaim and effect. Spiritual renewal is the most important element of the New Evangelization insofar as it involves the renewal of a personal encounter with Jesus Christ and a catechesis that fosters our spiritual growth.

Question 6. The proclamation of the Gospel is primarily a spiritual matter rooted in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through the Church. How can the Church better create spaces and moments for an encounter with Christ, and better foster a spiritual renewal, conversion and faith formation among all the baptized?

Our personal commitment does not rest on our own individual resolve alone. The First Letter of Saint Peter reminds us, “You have been born anew, not from perishable but from imperishable seed, through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Pt 1:23).

The Holy Spirit enlivens our commitment as we seek to rediscover the truths expressed in the creed. The Spirit strengthens us as we entrust ourselves to the life of grace and virtue promised in the sacraments. The Spirit bolsters our confidence as we open the deepest places of our hearts so that his gifts might strengthen us to live our faith.

The New Evangelization should overflow into the very society in which we live. Culture is the field of the New Evangelization. Culture refers to the daily ethos, the various networks of understanding and meaning that give rise to the many, everyday connections between the person, community and society.

Culture forms the vital link that relates the person to the community and the community to society.
Along these lines the opportunity to promote the “Courtyard of the Gentiles” was highlighted as a great contribution to the evangelization of culture.

Still others reminded the synod that care of the sick and those who suffer participates in the very essence of evangelization. The sick, those who have disabilities and those with special needs are also able to be agents of evangelization.

One of the repeated themes is the need to highlight the role of the Church as the very presence of Christ in the world today. The Church is not extraneous to the plan of Christ for salvation. A number of bishops spoke of the need to reinforce the role of the Magisterium of the Church when dealing with all of those who are engaged in teaching the faith, whether at the level of theological speculation or teaching at the elementary, secondary or university levels, and in all the expressions of catechesis.

Question 7. The Christian life is characterized by the transformation of the whole person in response to the call to holiness. How can the Church assist all the baptized to live the Christian faith and serve as a witness to the transforming power of God in our history?

Among the pastoral responses that received considerable mention were the works of social justice and the works of charity as an identifying part of the life and ministry of the Church. The ability of the Church to carry out her many works of love, whether in the area of social justice, service, health care or education were seen as part of her identity and a sign for others to recognize the presence of God working in our world.

Question 8. Testimony to Christ’s charity, through works of justice, peace and development, is part of the New Evangelization. How can the Church’s rich social doctrine better proclaim and bear witness to the faith?

Many synod fathers called for a new Pentecost. They spoke of seeing the action of the Church today, enlivened by the Holy Spirit, as a reflection of the energy in the early Church when the apostles set out to bring the first disciples to the Lord.

Many of the fathers spoke of the similarity between those early days of the Church and our moment in time today. In this context, it was suggested that there be a formal consecration of the world to the Holy Spirit.

Parishes throughout the Church are the recognized place where for the most part the life of the Church unfolds. Many times the significance of parishes in the unfolding of the New Evangelization was highlighted since this is the “locus” of so much of the experience of people with the Church.

At the same time, the need was affirmed to emphasize the importance of small faith communities as foundational to the work of the Church today in effecting a new Pentecost.

Several synod fathers drew attention to small communities and made the point that they should not become detached from the larger parish
family. Each pastor has to be able to work with all of the people entrusted to his care and not be limited to one small part of it.

Question 9. Parishes and small Christian communities occupy a key place in the New Evangelization. How can the parish and these small faith communities better foster and coordinate pastoral initiatives for the New Evangelization? How can the customary pastoral practices in the day-to-day life of these Christian communities be moments in the New Evangelization?

We heard of education into the faith as the starting point for renewal or reinforcement of the New Evangelization, the reintroducing of the world to Jesus Christ. Some fathers highlighted the educational element, especially of the young, as constitutive of the New Evangelization and how we will be able to move into the future bringing people back to the experience of Christ.

Synod fathers pointed to the need to find practical and concrete ways to provide young people the proper education in the faith. It is particularly apparent that these moments include instruction of children and adolescents.

Question 10. Since the release of The Catechism of the Catholic Church, great progress has been made in catechetical renewal. How can the Church devise a program of catechesis which is both basic, complete and inspiring in the search for truth, goodness and beauty?

The youth are the future of the Church. How can the Church better educate and catechize the youth to the greatness of a relationship with Jesus Christ through the Church, challenging them to commit their lives more fully to Him?

In this perspective, there were those who spoke of putting a renewed emphasis on the minister of catechesis. Catechists can be of great help in the New Evangelization and particularly in the context of families as they communicate the faith to their children.

Question 11. Catechists play a crucial role in the transmission of the faith. Is now the time to give the catechist an instituted, stable ministry within the Church? How can the Church better assist catechists in their important ministry?

Synod fathers spoke of the need to reclaim the Catholic kerygmatic tradition in order to speak the Word of God boldly, in season and out of season, to reclaim the prophetic voice of the Church, to discern the signs of the times that call for the New Evangelization and to engage in proclaiming and living a Catholic response to these signs of the times.

In the same light, a number of synod fathers highlighted the importance of popular piety as an expression by the people of God of their faith.

There was considerable consensus around the value of pilgrimages, especially to Marian shrines. This phenomenon offers a great possibility for evangelization.

Finally, the New Evangelization was recognized as not just a program for the moment but a way of looking at the future of the Church and seeing all of us engaged in inviting, first ourselves to a renewal of the faith and then all those around us into the joyful acceptance of life in the Risen Christ.

4. The Agents/Participants in the New Evangelization

Attention was given to the role of the family. It represents the instrument by which the faith is passed on, even in the most difficult situations. Encouragement has to be given to family life and particularly today when it is suffering so much under the pressures of the new secular vision of reality.

Question 12. As the domestic Church, the family is indispensable not only to the transmission of the faith, but also to the formation of the human person. How can the Church better support and guide the family in its crucial ministry to proclaim the Gospel and take a more active role in the transmission of the faith and human values?

The synod also spoke about the fundamental role of women in the life of the Church and the place of the mother of the family in the transmission of faith.

Systemic and coherent pastoral outreach requires the ongoing permanent formation of priests in the understanding of the joyful proclamation of the Gospel to an age that has little formation into the mystery of Christ.

Those who are preparing for priesthood have to be formed in an understanding of the uniqueness of their ministry and its relationship to evangelization. They also need to be formed in a recognition that they will be dedicating their lives to the service of the Church as celibate priests.

Question 13. The priest occupies a unique place in evangelization and the transmission of the faith. How can the Church foster a renewed missionary imperative to the ministry of priests?

The Church has been blessed by the ministry and witness of women and men in the consecrated life who continue to bring Christ’s love to the world through a great variety of activities. Consecrated life is itself a sign that points out to others the truth of the Gospel.

Many highlighted the role of the laity in the work of the New Evangelization. At every level, whether in the professional areas of education, law, politics, business or in all of the areas of engagement of lay people, it is the task of the individual Catholic to invite people back to the practice of the faith. This is done in word but also and primarily in deed, action and our way of living.

Question 14. The laity are indispensable to the New Evangelization. How can the Church more fully integrate the laity in the organization of the local Church, so that both laymen and laywomen are involved with priests in the evangelization of the community?

A certain number of interventions also highlighted the phenomenon of migration, which is so widespread in our time. It often happens that Catholics arrive in a new environment and are no longer active in their faith. Welcoming and embracing them in the community can be a form of New Evangelization.

The emphasis on Mary, Mother of the Church and of the New Evangelization as a model and patron for our efforts was highlighted a number of times. Above all, her faith prompts us to respond in the same way. It was because of her faith that the Word of God entered into our world. In imitation of Mary, we can bring about through our faith and witness to the life of the Spirit, a change in the world in which we live.

As we begin our work now in determining the propositions that will guide the efforts of this synod in presenting to the Holy Father a frame of reference for his reflection, it seems appropriate therefore to list a number of points among many possible themes:

1. The gratuitous intervention into our existence of God’s love expressed in various ways, but finally and fully in his Word made flesh – Jesus Christ;

2. The gift of the Holy Spirit that enlightens our minds and strengthens our hearts to accept God’s Word and live it;

3. Christ is the subject of our faith and the personal encounter with him invites us to become disciples;

4. We encounter Christ in and through his Church which is his new Body;

5. Christ and his Gospel are at the heart of the Church’s proclamation;

6. All the faithful, laity, religious, and clergy are called to be open to a new Pentecost in their lives;

7. Passing on the content of the faith, the creed, is the task of everyone, but especially in families, in parishes and small communities.

8. The parish is the place where most experience the life of the Church;

9. Some themes of the New Evangelization include the family, marriage, faith formation, religious freedom, care for the poor and the role of the laity; and

10. Mention should be made of practical expressions of the evangelizing work of the Church that seem to be successful

Conclusion

The growth of the seed takes time. The intentional and deliberate action of diligent and consistent outreach to inactive Catholics on a personal level will plant new seeds as we renew our efforts to proclaim God’s Word and repropose it to those who are now distant from the Church.

The Sower entrusts the seeds to us. We already know our difficulties, the tensions, our restlessness, our faults and our human weakness. Nonetheless, he calls us and places the seeds in our hands and entrusts them to our stewardship. The seed is the beginning of fruitfulness. Planting the seed calls us to live the Word of God and share it with joy.

May Mary, Star of the New Evangelization and example for every disciples, missionary and evangelizer, intercede for us that the work of this synod may result in abundant fruit for the glory of God and the salvation of all men and women.
Thank you.

---

Friday, Oct. 19, 28th Week in Ordinary Time

SAINTS ISAAC JOGUES AND COMPANIONS (d mid-17th century), Jesuits and Martyrs
Isaac JogueS and seven fellow Jesuits were the first martyrs of North America in Church history. In 1636, Jogues was with a Jesuit mission led by Jean de Brebeuf who arrived in Quebec in 1838 to evangelize the native American tribes. Working among the Hurons, Jogues was captured in 1642 by their rival Iroquois, tortured and imprisoned for 13 months. He was able to escape back to France with hands so mutilated - his fingers had been cut, chewed or burnt off - that Pope Urban VII had to give him a special dispensation to celebrate Mass. In 1646, he returned to Canada with Jean de Lalande, this time to evangelize the Iroquois themselves because of a recent peace treaty. Almost immediately upon arrival he was captured by a Mohawk war party and beheaded by tomahawk. The next day, De Lalande met the same fate near Albany, New York. Three years later, Jean de Brebeuf, who had stayed with the Hurons since Jogues's first mission, was martyred by the Iroquois. The other Jesuits martyred in the period were Rene Goupil who had been tortured with Jogues in 1642 but was tomahawked then and became the first of the Jesuit martyrs of Canada. Four others - Antony Daniel, Gabriel Lalemant, Charles Garnier and Noel Chabanel were martyred in 1648-1649. All eight martyrs were canonized in 1930.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/101912.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

The Holy Father was to meet in the afternoon with Cardinal Marc Ouellet, Prefect of the Congregation
for Bishops (weekly meeting).

No bulletin from the Synod yet, so we don't know if the Holy Father attended the sessions today.

SEVEN YEARS, SIX MONTHS AND COUNTING...

AD MULTOS ANNOS, SANCTE PATER!

It's Friday today, so I won't be back at the Forum till much later today.

The genius of women saints
by Colleen Carroll Campbell

Oct. 19, 2012

This Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI will canonize seven new saints. His honorees include four women, two of whom — Franciscan sister Marianne Cope and lay contemplative Kateri Tekakwitha have American roots. Their canonizations follow just two weeks after Benedict named German mystic Hildegard of Bingen a Doctor of the Church, a high honor bestowed on only three women before her.

Benedict’s pronouncements come amid intense media focus on the opinions of Catholic women and plight of Catholic nuns. More significantly, the Pope has chosen to bestow these honors in the same month that he celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council, inaugurated a “Year of Faith” and convened a synod of bishops focused on what Blessed Pope John Paul II dubbed the “New Evangelization.”

In his homily at the October 7 Mass that combined Hildegard’s honor with the opening of the synod, Benedict noted that saints like her are the “pioneers and bringers of the new evangelization” because they “show the beauty of the Gospel to those who are indifferent or even hostile” and invite “tepid believers to live with the joy of faith.”

Benedict seems to regard saints, and particularly the Church’s canonized women, as crucial to reviving the faith of lapsed and lukewarm Catholics. Over the past two years, he has devoted nearly twenty Wednesday audiences to singing the praises of the great women saints and explaining how their experiences and insights can still speak to us today.

It’s a truth I know from experience. Like many Catholics born after the Second Vatican Council, I grew up in parishes and parochial schools where Vatican II’s “universal call to holiness” was frequently intoned but the canonized men and women who had answered it were treated with ambivalence. May crownings and feast-day celebrations took a backseat to the fashioning of felt banners and singing of Marty Haugen hymns. We heard homilies about the saints at all-school masses every November 1, but few reminders to imitate them the rest of the year.

Thankfully, my parents were voracious readers of such Carmelite luminaries as Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Thérèse of Lisieux, and their shelves brimmed with books by and about the saints. So when I found myself marooned at their new home in an unfamiliar city during a Christmas break from college, a 45-year-old biography of St. Teresa of Avila was waiting there to relieve my boredom. It took only a few pages to get me hooked.

This feisty, fiery sixteenth-century Spanish mystic and reformer captivated me for precisely the reasons that Benedict mentioned this past July, when he praised Teresa as a model for the New Evangelization whose “luminous and engaging call” remains “familiar in our own times.”

Teresa’s struggles with everything from vanity and superficiality to status-seeking and people-pleasing spoke directly to my situation as a status-conscious 21-year-old college senior. Her distracted early efforts at prayer and years of backsliding on the road to virtue sparked pangs of recognition. And her passionate longing to live for something more fulfilling than worldly pleasure or success resonated deep within me.

Unlike the secular materialists I had studied in my feminist philosophy class that semester or the exhibitionist pop divas whose reductive views of women’s liberation had shaped my generation, Teresa had something genuinely hopeful to say to me. In this social-butterfly-turned-spiritual-dynamo, I saw a woman who was both faithful and free, one whose vision of the good life felt expansive enough to accommodate my boldest desires.

Getting to know Teresa awakened me to the possibility that the haunting emptiness I had begun feeling amid my boisterous campus social life and honor-student striving might be not a dead end. I realized, curled up with her biography that frosty December, that the emptiness might actually be an invitation: the faint stirring of that universal call to holiness that, for the first time, seemed worth answering.

Over the next 15 years, as I grappled with everything from my father’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease to my own journey through infertility, I found myself turning again and again to the wisdom of the women saints. From such holy women as Thérèse of Lisieux, Faustina of Poland, Edith Stein, Mother Teresa of Calcutta and Mary of Nazareth, I reaped comfort and guidance, prodding and inspiration. I found myself marveling that these saints I once had considered too musty and simplistic to understand my contemporary concerns were, in fact, the surest guides to women’s liberation that I had ever known.

I am not alone. Recent decades have seen a revival of devotion to the saints even beyond the bounds of the Catholic Church. That revival has unfolded alongside a growing interest in John Paul II’s call in his 1995 “Gospel of Life” encyclical for “a ‘new feminism’ which rejects the temptation of imitating models of ‘male domination,’ in order to acknowledge and affirm the true genius of women in every aspect of the life of society.” As John Paul often noted, the women saints are the very embodiment of this “feminine genius” for radical openness to God and the human person.

For women dissatisfied by the stale bromides of secular feminism and the frothy, girl-power messages peddled by today’s pop culture, the wisdom of the women saints is a bracing and provocative antidote. These women offer models of feminine holiness in the flesh, in every era and every state of life. Their writings remind us that the problems we face are not nearly as original or intractable as we imagine. And in a culture of skeptics who shrug at proofs for God, their stories retain the power to inflame hearts and transform lives.

Benedict recognizes this power of the women saints, which is why he has given them pride of place at this month’s festivities in Rome. Pastors, parents, and catechists hoping to evangelize a new generation of women on this side of the Atlantic would be wise to follow suit.

The most 'significant' news report today for our purposes is a terrorist attack in Beirut, which is the worst of its kind in Lebanon since 2009.

Vatican condemns Beirut bomb attack -
8 people killed, dozens wounded

October 19, 2012

The Holy See Press Office Director Fr. Federico Lombardi SJ. released a statement Friday strongly condemning a bomb attack in central Beirut, Lebanon, earlier in the day, which left 8 people dead and dozens wounded.

---

The attack that took place in Beirut deserves the strongest condemnation for the absurd and murderous violence that it manifests and because it goes against all efforts and commitment to maintain a peaceful coexistence in Lebanon.

As the Holy Father, Benedict XVI, has frequently repeated, Lebanon is called to be a message of peace and hope for those who live there and throughout the entire region.

While expressing our compassion and grief for the death and injury of many people, we also express the hope that this horrible event will not foster further violence.

---

Lebanese state media said a senior Lebanese intelligence official was among at least eight people killed in the massive car bomb attack in central Beirut.

Wissam al-Hassan was said to be close to opposition leader Saad Hariri, a leading critic of the government in neighbouring Syria.

No group has claimed Friday's attack, which was condemned by Damascus. Dozens of people were injured. Tensions in Lebanon have been rising as a result of the Syrian conflict. But Friday's attack was the deadliest in Beirut since 2008.

Reuters places the car bomb incident in the context of the Syrian civil war and Lebanon's recent painful return from two decades of their own civil war and the picture of preaceful prosperity that the country seemed to present at the time of Benedict XVI's visit there in September...


Beirut bomb kills
anti-Syrian intelligence official
By Oliver Holmes and Mariam Karouny


BEIRUT, Oct. 19 (Reuters) - A prominent Lebanese intelligence official opposed to President Bashar al-Assad was killed in a huge car bomb in Beirut in another sign that Syria's civil war is dragging its volatile neighbor into the conflict.

Wissam al-Hassan, who led an investigation that implicated Syria and Hezbollah in the assassination of former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri, and seven other people were killed when the bomb exploded in central Beirut on Friday afternoon.

Hassan, a Sunni Muslim who was close to Hariri, also helped uncover a bomb plot that led to the arrest and indictment in August of a pro-Assad former Lebanese minister, in a setback for Damascus and its Lebanese allies including Hezbollah.

The bombing was the most serious to hit the capital since Hariri's 2005 assassination and prompted Sunni Muslims to take to streets across the country, burning tires and blocking roads in a show of sectarian anger.

Hariri's son, Saad al-Hariri, accused Assad of being behind the bombing, while Lebanon's opposition March 14 bloc called on Prime Minister Najib Mikati's government, which includes ministers from Hezbollah, to resign over the bombing.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the "acts of terrorism" and called the murder of Hassan "a dangerous sign that there are those who continue to seek to undermine Lebanon's stability."

"Lebanon must close the chapter of its past and bring an end to impunity for political assassinations and other politically motivated violence," Clinton said in a written statement.

The head of Lebanon's Internal Security Forces, Major-General Ashraf Rifi, described Hassan's death as a "huge blow" and warned that further attacks were likely.

"We've lost a central security pillar," he told Future Television. "Without a doubt, we have more sacrifices coming in the future. We know that, but we will not be broken."

Rubble and the twisted, burning wreckage of several cars filled the central Beirut street where the bomb exploded, ripping the facades and balconies off buildings.

Firefighters scrambled through the debris and rescue workers carried off the bloodied victims on stretchers. In the confusion following the blast, it took several hours before any official word emerged that Hassan had been targeted.

IRANIAN VISIT

Speaking shortly after the bombing, Lebanon's Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour told Reuters that his Iranian counterpart Ali Akbar Salehi had condemned the bombing and planned to visit Beirut on Saturday.

Iran is a powerful supporter of both Hezbollah and Syria's Assad, who is fighting a 19-month-old uprising waged by mainly Sunni Muslim insurgents. More than 30,000 people have been killed since the uprising erupted in March last year.

Lebanon's religious communities are divided between those supporting Assad and those backing the rebels, leaving it vulnerable to spillover from the Syrian bloodshed.

Two Syrian officers, including General Ali Mamlouk, the head of Syria's national security bureau, were indicted along with Lebanon's former information minister Michel Samaha in August over a plot allegedly aimed at stoking violence in Lebanon.

The indictments were an unprecedented move against the more powerful neighbor - a major player in Lebanon's affairs for decades.

As well as being the brains behind the Samaha investigation, Hassan led the investigation into Rafik Hariri's murder seven years ago and uncovered evidence that implicated Syria and Hezbollah - a charge they both deny. An international tribunal accused several Hezbollah members of involvement in the murder.

Hassan, who returned to Lebanon on Thursday night from Germany, had helped uncover many assassination attempts against anti-Syrian figures in Lebanon. He himself escaped several attempts on his life.

The bombing, which was reminiscent of scenes from Lebanon's own 1975-1990 civil war, ripped through a street near Sassine Square in Ashrafiyeh, a mostly Christian area.

Mikati said his government was trying to find out who carried out the attack and those responsible would be punished.

Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, whose party still formally supports Mikati's government although he is bitterly critical of Assad and Hezbollah, said Hassan's death left Lebanon unsafe.

"He was our protector. This is a harsh blow but we will not be scared and we should not accuse anyone inside Lebanon so we don't give Bashar an excuse to seize the country," he said.

Syria had long played a major role in Lebanese politics, siding with different factions during the civil war. It deployed troops in Beirut and parts of the country during the war and they stayed until 2005.

In Damascus, Syrian Information Minister Omran Zoabi told reporters: "We condemn this terrorist explosion and all these explosions wherever they happen. Nothing justifies them."

Khattar Abou Diab, a Middle East expert at the University of Paris, said the attack was clearly linked to the Syria crisis and Hassan was one of the few security chiefs protecting Lebanon's sovereignty and independence.

"This is now revenge against a man who confronted the Syrians and revenge against a district, a Christian district in the heart of Beirut. Regional powers are fighting in Syria and now also want to fight in Lebanon," he said.

Hezbollah condemned the bombing and called on the security forces and judiciary "to exert maximum efforts to uncover the perpetrators and bring them to justice".

The U.S. government also condemned the bombing and reiterated its concerns about increasing sectarian tensions in Lebanon and a spillover from Syria.

French President Francois Hollande urged Lebanese politicians to stay united and prevent attempts to destabilize the country. The Vatican and the European Union also condemned the attack.

Bombings were a hallmark of the civil war but the last such attack in Beirut was in 2008.

Beirut has undergone massive reconstruction to repair the war damage and in recent years has enjoyed a tourist boom, boosted by the city's pulsating nightlife. That source of revenue, crucial to Lebanon's prosperity, is now under threat.


P.S. Today, 10/20/12, The Vatican also released the text of a telegram of condolence sent in the name of the Holy Father to the Maronite Patriarch of Lebanon in the wake of the bomb attack....

Pope's telegram of condolence
to the people of Lebanon
Translated from

Oct. 20, 2012

Following the bomb attack yesterday in Beirut which resuled in many dead and wounded, the Holy Father, through Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, sent this telegram of condolence in French to the Maronite Patriarch of Antioch, who heads the largest Catholic community in Lebanon. Here is a translation:

---

HIS BEATITUDE BÉCHARA BOUTROS RAÏ
PATRIARCH OF ANTIOCH OF THE MARONITES
BKERKÉ

HAVING LEARNED OF THE TERRIBLE ATACK IN BEIRUT WHICH CLAIMED NUMEROUS VICTIMS, HIS HOLINESS POPE BENEDICT XVI UNITES HIMSELF IN PRAYER IN THE PAIN OF ALL THE BEREAVED FAMILIES AND THE SOWRROW OF ALL THE LEBANESE PEOPLE.

HE ENTRUSTS THE VICTIMS TO GOD, WHO IS FULL OF MERCY, ASKING HIM TO WELCOME THEM INTO THE LIGHT. HE EXPRESSES HIS PROFOUND SYMPATHY WITH THE INJURED VICTIMS AND THEIR FAMILIES, ASKING THE LORD TO BRING THEM HELP AND COMFORT IN THEIR TIME OF TRIAL.

AS HE DID DURING HIS APOSTOLIC TRIP TO LEBANON, THE HOLY FATHER CONDEMNS ONCE MORE ALL VIOLENCE WHICH GENERATES SO MUCH SUFFERING, AND ASKS GOD TO MAKE THE GIFT OF PEACE AND RECONCILIATION TO LEBANON AND THE WHOLE REGION.

WITH ALL HIS HEART, HIS HOLINESS INVOKES FOR THE BEREAVED FAMILIES AND ALL THE LEBANESE PEOPLE THE ABUNDANCE OF DIVINE BLESSINGS.

TARCISIO CARDINAL BERTONE
SECRETARY OF STATE TO HIS HOLINESS

---

The Church of All Nations on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem overlooks the olive grove that is traditionally thought to be the Garden of Gethsemane.

Study shows olive trees of Gethsemane
are among oldest in the world
All have the same DNA, meaning they all
originated from the same parent tree
By Naomi O'Leary


VATICAN CITY, Oct. 19 (Reuters) - Olive trees in the Jerusalem garden revered by Christians as the place where Jesus Christ prayed before he was crucified have been dated to at least 900 years old, a study released on Friday showed.

The results of tests on trees in the Garden of Gethsemane have not settled the question of whether the gnarled trees are the very same which sheltered Jesus, where the Bible says he prayed and was later betrayed by Judas, because olive trees can grow back from roots after being cut down, researchers said.

"We cannot rule out the possibility that there was an intervention to rejuvenate them when they stopped being productive or dried out," Chief Researcher Professor Antonio Cimato said at a presentation of the results in Rome.

"But let me say: plants of greater age than our olives are not cited in the scientific literature. Our olives are among the oldest broad-leaved trees in the world," Cimato said.

Carbon dating showed that samples taken from the oldest part of the trunks of three of the eight trees came from the years 1092, 1166 and 1198, according to the study by the National Research Council of Italy Trees and Timber Institute and academics from five Italian universities.

The other five trees at Gethsemane - which means "oil press" in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus - could not be tested as they are so gnarled that their trunks have become hollowed out, with only newer growth remaining.

Referred to several times in the New Testament, the grove is at the foot of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, an important site for the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths.

Yet despite their great age, the study showed the trees were in excellent health and had not been affected by lead pollution in the area.

Analysis of their DNA found they were planted from the same parent plant, possibly in an attempt to preserve a particular lineage, according to researchers.

Pierbattista Pizzaballa, who is Custodian of the Holy Land at the Franciscan order that maintains the site, said this could show a deliberate attempt to pass on a precious heritage for future generations.

"The question is not if these are the very trees, but if this is the place referred to in the gospels. And it is the place, of that there is no doubt," said Pizzaballa.

Saturday, Oct. 20, 28th Week in Ordinary Time
]
ST. MARIA BERTILLA BOSCARDIN (Italy, 1888-1922), Nun (Sisters of St. Dorothy) and Nurse
Anna Francesca Boscardin was born to a poor peasant family in northern Italy, with a violent drunk for a father. With limited schooling and often the butt of jokes because she was simple-minded and had few talents, she joined the Sisters of St. Dorothy in Vicenza in 1904, taking the name Maria Bertilla, and was assigned to work in the kitchen, bakery and laundry, In 1907, she started training as a nurse at a children's hospital run by the sisters, where she seemed to find her true vocation. During World War I, she cared for Italian soldiers in a hospital in Treviso, staying with her patients even when the hospital was bombed, for which she was commended by local authorities. A supervisor, jealous of the nun's growing reputation, reassigned her to the hospital laundry in Vicenza. But the congregation's mother-general, hearing of this, made her supervisor of the children's ward of the hospital. She died in 1922 after suffering many years from a painful tumor. Many healing miracles were reported at her tomb. She was beatified in 1952 and canonized in 1961. Many of her former patients were present at her canonization.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/102012.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

In the presence of the participants of the current Synodal Assembly on the NEw Evangelization, the Holy Father
today conferred the 2012 Ratzinger Prizes in Theology to French Prof. Remi Brague, philosopher and scholar of
the history of religions, and American Jesuit Fr. Brian Daley, scholar of Patristinc Theology. Address in Italian.

NB: I have been relying on American Catholic's 'Saints of the Day' calendar for my postings, but I have been unable to find out what is their basis for determining the 'saint of the day' on any given year, other than the 'major' saints whose feast days are universally observed. On some days, they have no 'saint of the day', and the USCCB site stopped its 'saint of the day' feature last year. Since the Church counts with thousands of canonized saints by now, not to mention Blesseds whose feasts are also observed, there is obviously more than one 'saint of the day', who must be remembered by their own places of origin. The most comprehensive online listing in English of these 'saints of the day' is on www.saintpatrickdc.org/ss/saint_a.shtml (Click on 'Saint of the day' in the menu) which used to even contain illustrations of the saints, but for some reason, they discontinued the photos a few years ago. For exmaple, all the saints whose feastdays are commemorated on Oct. 20 can be found on www.saintpatrickdc.org/ss/1020.shtml. I chose to go with sT. Marie Bertilla who was American Catholic's pick last year, because she is a modern-day saint with a most appealing story.

The following is a rare point of view about Vatican II. It comes from a Memphis newspaper called Commercial Appeal. David Dault is a Catholic convert born after Vatican II who is now professor of Catholic studies in the Memphis area, and hosts a Sunday radio program in the Memphis area called "Conversations about Culture and Faith." It is the first time I have seen a lay person describe the post-Conciliar Church as 'a Church in transition', which is what it is. And which explains why Benedict XVI always says that the Church - and the faithful - have yet to fully assimilate (much less implement) the teachings of Vatican II. And why these teachings - from the actual documents, not from ideological 'spirit of Vatican I' readings - must constitute one of the basic resources for the Church in this Year of Faith.

Vatican II's imperfect,
undeniable impact
By David Dault
October 20, 2012

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council.

Many priests here in the Memphis diocese, as well as Bishop Terry Steib himself, are old enough to remember not only the council, but what life in the seminaries and the priesthood was like before it was convened.

I was born in the 1970s, a few years after the close of the council. Indeed, I am part of the first real "Vatican II" generation of the Church. Folks my age and younger have no point of comparison, other than the stories we have been told. For us, the Mass has always been in our native language, and the priest has always faced toward us during worship.

This was the Church I joined, the Church I chose to join. As an "insider" to Catholicism now, I have to admit that it is quite different from how I imagined it when I was an "outsider," a seeker, a catechumen. Strangely, I think I imagined a Church that was simultaneously more ancient and more modern than the Church that actually exists.

I came to Catholicism in graduate school at Vanderbilt University, having spent several semesters reading St. Augustine and other Church Fathers. At the same time, I was in love with the social witness of many contemporary Catholics, from Dorothy Day and Roy Bourgeois to Fr. Richard Gross, the Jesuit chaplain at Vanderbilt who catechized me.

This mix of the conservative old and the radical new created a romantic vision of the Church for me. I wanted a worldwide body of ancient liturgy and progressive justice. Instead, I found a Church that was neither as conservative nor as modern as the one I imagined in my desires.

This is the legacy of Vatican II. I have joined a Church that is in transition. Fifty years beyond the council, the Catholic faithful worldwide are still figuring out how to live these rearrangements and new interpretations of ancient truths and revelations.

I joined a conversation. Friends my age and younger who are "cradle Catholics" were born into this conversation.

Despite the appearances, Vatican II did not change the Church. It still understands itself to be the Body of Christ, and still understands that it is protecting and passing on a set of ancient truths revealed two millennia ago in the person and ministry of Jesus Christ.

But what Vatican II gave to Catholics is a new set of tools to aid in protecting and passing on these truths. The documents of the Second Vatican Council gave us new impetus, as individuals and as a Church, to talk to one another within our communion. Moreover, these tools encouraged us to engage in serious conversations with those outside the communion of the Catholic Church.

The years following Vatican II have seen the rise of hospitality and outreach to Muslims, Jews, and those of non-Abrahamic faiths both at the institutional and, often, at the parish level.

Furthermore, Vatican II called Catholics to renewed attention to the broken communion that lies at the heart of the Christian faith itself. Separated as we are from the Orthodox Church, and the many Protestant communities, the Church is chastened toward humility and the hope of eventual healing.

This is not the Church I wished for from the outside. But it is my Church, and I embrace it fully. Though as I teach its history to my students, and as I live within its communion, I am sometimes frustrated by what I find.

Perhaps this ability to be frustrated, and yet stay in communion and conversation, in unity, is the most important legacy of Vatican II.

Contrary to facile secular opinion, ecumenical councils necessarily take time - decades, at least - to have their teachings known. This is especially true of Vatican II, which did not proclaim any new doctrines, but laid down new pastoral guidelines for transmitting the Christian message to contemporary society.

Pastoral guidelines are notoriously subject to diverse interpretations, but none more so than the documents of Vatican II, which were largely ignored in the letter by the progressivist faction that was in a position to push their views aggressively in the mass media, which have been almost exclusively not just secular but specifically anti-Catholic since the 1960s. The institutional Church simply was not ready nor did she have the tools to counteract what came to be widespread public opinion [or 'published opinion' as Mons. Georg Gaenswein appropriately calls it] about Vatican II, namely, the progressivist interpretation.

Paradoxically, the age of mass media, with their increasingly awesome communications technology, did not really facilitate 'reception' of Vatican II, but has made it more difficult - because the media have become a showcase for peddling the progressivist factional interpretations of Vatican II that claim to represent 'the spirit of Vatican II'.

Quite frankly, this expression is objectionable if only because its proponents do not at all mean the Holy Spirit - under whose patronage all Church events take place = but their own self-serving 'spirit' or interpretation of Vatican II. Equally objectionable is this citation-by-rote of a putative 'spirit of Vatican II' by many commentators who, by all appearances, have not even bothered to read the actual Vatican II documents themselves (trusting cynically that the average reader would not bother to do themselves).

That is why one of the Vatican's key recommendations for the Year of Faith is a reading of the Vatican-II documents and of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. However, as an ordinary Catholic with more than average and very active interest in Church affairs since April 19, 2005, and even having had a career as a journalist, I have to say that both the Vatican-II documents and the Catechism are not easy reading for me. It's more likely that I simply do not have the gift of grace possessed by the millions of devout Bible readers who seem to find no problem at all reading the Bible and deriving great strength from doing so. (In other words, I somehow allow my mind to get in the way of simply letting the words flood me without worrying that I do not understand much of the deeper messages that Scriptures contain, or in the case of most official Church tests, find them simply too tedious to read.)

However, as a practical measure - if the faithful are to 'discover' these texts during the Year of Faith, they need all the help they can get from their local parishes, priests and catechists - in terms not just of having ready access to the texts, but in study aids, such as presenting the Vatican-II documents in the form of a Q&A primer (whose citations they can then check out, if they wish, from the texts themselves), and utilizing the Compendium of the Catechism as the basis for study groups meeting weekly during the Year of Faith.

'To rediscover the art of living':
Pope Benedict awards the 2012
Ratzinger Prizes in Theology

October 20, 2012


Spread in the 10/21/12 issue of L'Osservatore Romano to highlight the Premio Ratzinger in theology.

Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday presided over a ceremony in which the 2012 Ratzinger Prizes for Theology were awarded to a renowned US scholar in patristics (study of the Church Fathers), Jesuit Fr. Brian Edward Daley of Notre Dame University; and the lay French philosopher and historian of cultural thought Rémi Brague.

In his remarks to the winners and the gathered guests, the Holy Father spoke of the profound and necessary connection between intellectual rigour and lived experience of the reality of God in all truly Catholic theological endeavour.

“Father Daley and Professor Brague,” said Pope Benedict, “are exemplary for the transmission of knowledge that unites science and wisdom, scientific rigor and passion for man, so that man might discover the [true] ‘art of living’.”

The Holy Father went on to say, “It is of precisely such people who, through an enlightened and lived faith render God credible and close to the man of today, what we have need.”

The Ratzinger Prize for Theology is sponsored by the Fondazione Vaticana Joseph Ratzinger-Benedetto XVI, which was founded in 2010, with the approval of the Holy Father. Its aim is to “promote the publication, distribution and study of the writings of former university professor Joseph Ratzinger.”

The Foundation also provides grants to doctorate students of theology and organizes high-level academic conferences. The activities of the foundation are financed through the publication and sale of Pope Benedict's works.

The Pope awards the prize to Fr. Daley...



And to Prof. Brague...




Here isa translation of the Holy Father's remarks after the awarding:

---

Venerated Brothers,
Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear brothers and sisters:

It is a pleasure to address my greetings to all of you who have gathered for this ceremony. ItThank Cardinal Ruini for his words, as well as Mons. Scotti who introduced the ceremony.

I heartily congratulate Prof. Daley and Prof. Brague, who, with their personalities, embody this initiative in its second edition. And I mean 'personality' in the fullest sense: their profile of research and all their scientific work; the precious service of teaching which both have carried out for long years; and also their commitment to the Church - each in his own way, of course, since one is a priest, and the other, a layman - actively offering their highly-qualified contribution to the presence of the Church in today's world.

In this regard, I have noted something which has made me reflect - which is, that the two prizewinners this year are competent and committed in two aspects of the Church that are decisive in our time: I refer to ecumenism and the face-to-face with other religions.

Fr. Daley, having studied the Fathers of the Church so extensively, was in the best school for knowing and loving the one and undivided Church in the richness of her diverse tradcitions:. And in this, he has also rendered a service of responsibility in our relationships with the Orthodox Churches.

And Prof. Brague is a great scholar of the history of religions, especially of Judaism and Islam in the Middle Ages.

Now, 50 years since the start of the Second Vatican Council, it would give me great pleasure to reread with both of them two of the Council documents: the declaration Nostra aetate on the non-Christian religions, and the decree Unitatis redintegratio on ecumenism. To which one must add a document that has shown itself to be of extraordinary importance: the declaration Dignitatis humanae on religious freedom.

Surely, it must be very interesting, dear Father and dear Professor, to listen to your reflections and even yur experiences in these fields, on which a relevant part of the Church's dialogue with the contemporary world is being played.

Actually, such an ideal encounter and confrontation already is present in your publications, many of which are available in various languages. I feel it my duty to express special appreciation and gratitude for your efforts in communicating the results of your studies. It is an effort that is serious and precious for the Church and for all who work in academic and cultural circles.

In this regard, I simply wish to underscore that both the prizewinners are university professors who have been very much engaged in teaching. This element deserves to be highlighted because it is consistent with the activities of the Foundation, which, beyond giving out the prizes, also promotes schoalrships for doctoral students of theology and theological conferences at the university level, like that which took place earlier this year in Poland, and which will take place three weeeks from now in Rio de Janeiro.

Personalities like Fr. Daley and Prof. Brague afre exemplars for the transmission of knowledge that unites science and wisdom, scientific rigor with passion for the human being, in order to discover 'the art of living'.

It is precisely through persons who - through enlightened faith and living - render God near and credible to man today, which is something that is every necessary. Men who have their eyes fixed on God to draw from him true humanism to help everyone whom the Lord places along our way, understanding that Christ is the way of life. Men whose intellect is enlightened by the light of God so that they are able to speak to the mind and heart of others.

We work in the vineyard of the Lord, to which he calls us, so that the men and women of our time can discover and rediscover the true 'art of living'. This, too, was a great passion of the Second Vatican Council, which is more than ever relevant in our efforts towards the New Evangelization.

From the heart, I renew my congratulations to the prize winners, as well as to the Scientific Committee of the Foundation and all their co-workers. Thank you.

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The saints-to-be on the facade of St. Peter's Basilica for tomorrow's rite. From left, Kateri Tekakwitha, Mother Maria del Carmen, Pedro Calungsod, Fr. Berthieu, Fr. Piamarta, Mother Marianne Cope, and Anna Schaffer.

I've not posted any of the preparatory stories for the canonizations tomorrow because all of it has been centered on the two 'American' women saints-to-be. As inspiring as their stories are, they are also among the best-known already, and I feel it is unfair to 'ignore' the other 5 in reporting on the event tomorrow. This one, for a change, gives all seven almost 'equal time' -and it has to come from a 'farflung' source. Of course, I have a parochial interest, too, because the youngest of the seven saints-to-be was a 17th-century Filipino teenage martyr...

Church to canonize
7 new saints tomorrow

Oct. 20, 2012

The Catholic Church will canonize seven new saints tomorrow, Sunday, October 21, in St. Peter’s Square.

Among the new saints, two come from the United States, Blessed Marianne Cope of Molokai and Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha.

Mother Marianne (Barbara Koob, 1838-1918) was born in Germany and grew up in Utica, New York. She joined the Sisters of Saint Francis in Syracuse in 1862 and became a leader at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Syracuse in 1869.

She led a group of Sisters from New York to the Hawaiian Islands in 1883 to establish a system of nursing care for leprosy patients. She never returned to New York, and ministered on Molokai in a place called Kalaupapa.

Blessed Kateri, daughter of a Christian Algonquin mother and a Mohawk father in upstate New York, becomes the first Native American to be canonized. She was baptized by a Jesuit missionary in 1676 when she was 20; she died in Canada four years later.

The other saints are Jesuit priest Jacques Berthieu who was born in Polminhac, France, and martyred on June 8, 1896, in Ambiatibe, Madagascar.

Pedro Calungsod, a lay catechist born in Cebu, in the Philippines, was martyred on April 2, 1672, in Guam, where he had been assisting Spanish missionaries.

Father Giovanni Battista Piamarta, Italian priest and founder of the Congregation of the Holy Family of Nazareth for men and the Humble Servants of the Lord for women. He died in 1913.

Carmen Salles y Barangueras, Spanish founder of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception. She worked with disadvantaged girls and prostitutes and saw that early education was essential for helping young women. She died in 1911.

Anna Schaffer, a lay German woman who wanted to be a missionary, but could not because of a succession of physical accidents and diseases. She accepted her infirmity as a way of sanctification. Her grave has been a pilgrimage site since her death in 1925.

At least 5,000 Filipino pilgrims are expected to attend the canonization rites for Pedro Calungsod, the news site Interaksyon reported. The pilgrims will be led by some 200 priests, cardinals, bishops, and archbishops.

Calungsod is only the second Filipino to be declared a saint. The first was San Lorenzo Ruiz of Manila, also martyred in the 17th century while serving a mission from the Philippines to evangelize in Japan.

In the United States, busloads of religious pilgrims left Syracuse on Monday, bound for flights to Rome for Sunday’s canonization of Marianne Cope.

Meanwhile, the head of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints said saints are “indispensable protagonists” of the New Evangelization, which is the focus of the ongoing synod in Rome.

“The saints evangelize by their virtuous lives,” said Cardinal Angelo Amato. “They incarnate the evangelical beatitudes. They are the mirror to fidelity to Christ,” he was quoted as saying by the Catholic News Agency.

More from Cardinal Amato's interview:

Saints are example
for how to evangelize,
says Cardinal Amato
By Matthew A. Rarey


Vatican City, Oct 17, 2012 (CNA/EWTN News).- The head of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints declared saints the “indispensable protagonists” of the New Evangelization, which is the focus of the ongoing synod in Rome.

“The saints evangelize by their virtuous lives,” said Cardinal Angelo Amato during the Oct. 15 afternoon session of the synod of bishops on the New Evangelization. “They incarnate the evangelical beatitudes. They are the mirror to fidelity to Christ.”

His comments come just days before Pope Benedict XVI canonizes seven new saints at Oct. 21 Mass in St. Peter’s Square.

Cardinal Amato, an Italian, noted that the theme of sanctity in the Church, “in her being and in the acting of her children,” permeates the working document of the synod.

This is because “in the saints the Church offers an edifying display of the Gospel lived out, witnessed to, and proclaimed sine glossa (without gloss).”

This witness is universally attractive to people in all times and places, he noted.

“Every culture is capable of being evangelized, and charity is its greatest instrument to evangelize people,” the archbishop said.

“The history of the Church…records saints of every age, country, race, language and culture, so that the grace of God the Trinity might be like the morning dew. … It is the same with sanctity which, though being unique as a Divine gift, lightly penetrates and transforms the hearts of children of the Church all around the world.”

To show the universal reach of the Gospel message, he concluded his remarks by giving the example of Devesahayam Pillai, an 18th-century Hindu convert to Catholicism whom Pope Benedict XVI declared venerable in June 2012.

“His father was a Brahman. His mother was from a warrior caste,” Cardinal Armato noted. Rather than renounce his new-found faith, Pillai suffered martyrdom and is at the second stage in the Church’s canonization process.

I shall waste my time partially translating the following item because it illustrates how Vaticanistas - even an Italian one like Galeazzi - and Catholic news media - even a noteworthy Catholic initiative by a secular newspaper (La Stampa) as Vatican Insider is - 1) can and do pander to the most widespread common denominator among media customers, namely, gullibility and a totally a-critical readiness to take anything peddled by the media, online and elswhere, to be 'gospel truth'; and 2) can and do make the most outrageous of tenuous connections between unrelated events.

In this case, the completely fallacious assumption that the two Americans to be named saints tomorrow are part of a Vatican strategy to be 'friendly' to the White House. a) The Vatican does not need to be 'friendly' to a White House that is assaulting religious freedom at its very essence; and b) the causes for the canonization of Kateri Tekakwitha and Marianne Cope began long before the current administration, and has spanned the administration of more than one US President. That their causes reached final approval at this time is totally unrelated to whoever happens to be President of the United States. Galeazzi and the Vatican Insider should be ashamed of indulging the false premise of this article. To even suggest it is preposterous enough.

The diplomacy of 'saints' between
the Vatican and the White House
by Giacomo Galeazzi
Translated from the Italian service of

Oct. 20, 2012

The canonization of Kateri Tekakwitha and Marianne Cope signal a reason for dialogue and encounter between the Vatican and the American Presidency, a signal that is important in view of the coming US presidential elections. [That is absurd. If there is anyting official to be discussed between the Holy See and the US government - not that there is anything particularly pressing right now other than the administration's assault on religious freedom via Obamacare, which is being litigated by dozens of Catholic dioceses and institutions and is therefore sub judice - it will proceed through usual diplomatic channels.]

From the New World to the glory of the altars. President Obama celebrates the two new US saints - the young Mohawk kateri Tekakwitha, and the German-born missionary to the lepers, Marianne Cope - with the official announcement of the US delegation to the canonization rites, even in the final rush for his re-election. [C'mon, his underlings saw to it that a delegation was named, and he did not necessarily have any initiative nor interest in it.]

The official announcement from the White House reads: "The preidential delegation will be led by the Ambassador of the United Sattes to the Holy See, Miguel Diaz, along with Sister Agnelle Ching and Siser Kateri MItchell".

Therefore Obama, besides being represented by his man at the Vatican, will also be represented by two sisters who are especially involved in Catholic volunteer work in health care in the states of Hawaii and Montana... [If someone at the White House had given it more thought, they might have named a ranking Mohawk and a ranking Algonquin to the delegation as well, considering that Kateri becomes the first-ever native American saint).

[The rest of the article describes a celebration held in the Vatican Gardens yesterday that featured delegations from Hawaii and New York performing songs and dances to nonor the saints-to-be, and remarks made by Vatican officials and the US ambassador.]

Vittorio Messori has never just been a journalist who writes about the Church and has published book-length interviews with two Popes, but he has primarily been a student of the Christian religion, having written many scholarly books in this respect. In fact, he has the distinction of having been cited by Benedict XVI in the second volume of JESUS OF NAZARETH, for the thesis he expressed in his book entitled 'He suffered under Pontius Pilate' on the passion and death of Jesus, in which he says that Jesus acted according to Jewish Law when he 'cleaned out' the Temple of Jerusalem.

Once again, I thank Beatrice for leading me to this article which Messori wrote for the September issue of the monthly Catholic newspaper Il Timone (she is much more conscientious than I am in checking out Messori's online site, from which this article comes). In the article, Messori calls attention to a little-remarked verse from the Prologue to the Gospel of John which, but for a single and simple historical change to the grammatical number of a verb - from singular to plural - appears to be the most direct and clearest testimonial in the Gospels to the 'triple virginity' of Mary...

The great surprise
in the Gospel of John


Jesuit Fr. Ignace de la Potterie for a long time held the professorial chair for the New Testament - rightly considered the most important academic post in the Pontifical Biblical Institute, in its turn rightly considered the most authoritative Church institution for the study of the Scriptures.

The Institute is an offshoot of the Pontifical Gregorian University (run by the Jesuits) whose Rector is named by the Pope himself, to indicate how important it is.

The 'Biblico', as it is familiarly known, was founded by St. Pope Pius X in 1909 to respond - with the same weapons of scientific rigor - to the attacks against the very foundations of the faith by so-called 'independent critics'.

Namely, those critics who parsed the texts of the Old and New Testaments, especially the latter, often concluding that the Bible was not about history but rather a collection of myths, symbols and legends, and that therefore the 'historical Jesus... the one who really lived' was an obscure person of uncertain biography who had little or nothing to do with the 'Christ of the faith'.

in short, that the Credo has inauthentic bases that are historically not sustainable, and Christianity was nothing but a fairly late construction by Hellenists and marginal elements of an obscure Judaism.

In the face of such an assault, the Church finally realized that it was not enough to be indignant and to launch invectives against the 'unbelievers' but that she must respond with the same instruments and the same quality of erudition.

And the Biblico dedicated itself to the task with positive results that, first of all, took away from Catholics the fear that the foundations of their faith were no longer defensible before Science (with the capital S that secular university professors insist on using), and took away their suspision - perhaps unexpressed but tormenting - that the very incarnation of God in history was unthinkable according to the rigorous categories of modern thought.

Prof. De la Potterie, who died a few years ago, was an eminent part most worthy of a spot among the distinguished Catholic scholars of the Biblico in the past century, among whom was one Carlo Maria Martini who was a professor and then rector of the Biblico (before being named Rector of the Gregorian University, and later, Archbishop of Milan).

Obviously highly cultured, with a mastery of several ancient and modern languages, Fr. Ignace honored me with his friendship and shared with me (at my level of being a non-specialist, though well-informed on the subject matter as much as I possibly could) what he was trying to do in order to confirm the historicity of the Gospels.

And when, at an advanced age, he retired to his native Belgium, he would surprise me now and then with a telephone call that both gladdened and saddened me. In effect, he was venting his feelings with me, disapproving of a certain 'modernism' and 'rationalism' that had affected even Catholic Biblicists, often in imitation of overly-venerated professors in the Protestant theological faculties, which still exist in German state universities.

I could only agree with him, if only because Fr. Ignace was anything but a closed traditionalist - rather he knew all the modern theories and methods, of which he accepted those that did not tend to transform the historical realism of the Gospels into myth or symbol.

On the other hand, there are professors and scholars for whom nothing in Scripture can be taken as written, and for whom the only indisputable things are their own notes and their efforts to 'demythify' the Bible.

But although he moved with mastery through all of Scripture, and especially, the New Testament, De la Potterie was known specifically as the best scholar on the evangelist John: on his Gospel, obviously, but also the three Letters attributed to him.

And it is precisely from the fourth evangelist that De la Potterie has identified, clarified and highlighted with a certainty that has not been attained before, an aspect that is as important as it is little known. Which is nothing less than this: in the famous Prologue to the Gospel ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God..."), John gives us explicit and precise testimony of the triple virginity of Mary - before, during and after the birth of Jesus.

Fr De la Potterie would tell me, as he wrote in his articles, that Biblicists today (unfortunately, even in some Catholic universities) prefer to ignore this aspect though it so important for the history of Redemption.

In some circles, whoever still speaks with conviction of the semper Virgo (ever Virgin) raises suspicion almost as though he were a 'fundamentalist', or looked on askance as one would an old and obstinate retrograde.

Instead, there was this distinguished professor of a distinguished pontifical institute scrutinizing what 'his' John wrote to discover (or rediscover, as we shall see) that at the very start of the Gospel, the text had been manipulated since early times to hide the truth by simply changing a verb from the singular to the plural form.

Prof. De la Potterie wrote about his very well-documented hypothesis in two articles of 50 pages each for Marianum. the magazine of the homonymously named pontifical theological faculty, in 1978, and then reprised the argument, enriched with new researches, in 1983.

Those hundred page, dense with footnotes and citations in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, were much read by Biblical specialists who chose, however, to pass over it in silence.

That often happens in the world of Biblical scholars: Anything that could raise questions about prevailing prejudices and thought schemes is set aside, if a definitive demolition of the argument was not possible, considering, as in this case, the rigorous critical seriousness of the research and the writer's authoritativeness.

I remember that in one of our last telephone conversations, the aged scholar expressed bitter disappointment at the silence of his peers about such an important subject. It seemed to me that he was reaching out with a tacit but otherwise explicit call for me to help him make his discovery known, which was so relevant for the faith since it placed the authority of the fourth evangelist in support of the dogma of Mary's perennial virginity.

And so, in these pages, I will try to carry out Fr. Ignace's wish, by reporting the research of which he was a very effective instrument, though it was certainly not for his own sake or his academic career, but for our faith as Catholics.

I shall obviously be able to give just an initial but correct (or so I hope) summary after having examined those hundred pages with great care and attention. But it would be best for those who wish to know more about it in depth to read the two articles by De la Potterie in Marianum, which may be acquired by requesting the magazine for a copy (through marianum@marianum.it), I assure you it is well worth your while.

This is not some sort of curiosity but a way to reinforce - based on Scripture itself - a truth about Mary that the Church has always believed and proclaimed.

Let us see what this is all about, by first reproducing the brief verse on which it is based. It is the thirteenth verse of Chapter I, the Johannine Prologue which we referred to earlie,r and which I will cite in the latest version of the Bible (2007) in the Italian translation authorized by the Italian bishops' conference.

But to understand it better, we must also look at the two preceding verses, the 11th and 12th. [I am citing the English translation from the New American Bible of the USCCB.]

---

11 He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him.

12 But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God, to those who believe in his name,

13 who were born not by natural generation nor by human choice nor by a man’s decision but of God.

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[I never really examined this line before, but looking at verses 12 and 13 now, in the English translation, it is grammatically obvious that the antecedent of 'born not by natural generation, etc' is not the preceding "children of God... who believe in his name", but 'his name' alone, and therefore, the next clause must read "(he) who was born not by natural generation, etc". Of course, I have no scientific grounds for 'deciding' this on the basis only of an English translation many times removed from the original un-manipulated text..]

In Italian, verse 13 reads (in my translation): "who were generated, not by blood, nor desire of flesh, nor human will, but by God". (Certainly more colorful than the insipid Enqlish equivalent from the USCCB's NAB!)

That has been the traditional version, whereas according to De la Potterie, the authentic version was: "who (Jesus) was generated not by bloods, nor desire of flesh, nor human will, but by God".

One can see that the verb 'generate' is in the singular form not plural as in the versions of Scripture that we know. In effect, the subject is singular: Jesus. Whereas in the traditional version, the verb is plural, since the antecedent subject is taken to be "those who believe in his name". [This grammatical point is seen much more obviously in the English NAB translation, as sub-optimal at that is in general.]

To repeat this crucial point more clearly: In the singular, the verse tells us that Jesus was divinely generated; in the plural, it refers to the transformation of believers through him.

One must also note at this point that, in all the ancient texts available to us, the word 'blood', in Greek, is used in the plural [i.e., 'bloods'), and though the Latin Vulgate respects the plural ('ex sanguinibus'), it has always been translated into the singular generic form, 'blood'.

And yet (this can be checked out even in classical dictionaries like that of the Tommaseo), 'sangui' (plural of blood) is rarely used in Italian but the form exists and has been used by many reputed writers. If the word has not been used in the Italian translations of the Gospel and is not used even today, it is not because the plural of 'blood' does not exist in Italian, as many say, but because the importance of the concept of 'blood' in the plural in John's thought was not understood by translators. As we shall see.

The first question must be: Do the ancient texts we have of the New Testament permit the use of the third person singular of the verb 'generate' (attributing it to Jesus) instead of the third person plural, attributing it to Christians?

It must also be pointed out right away that the Greek texts use the plural. But the oldest of those date back only to the fourth century, if we exclude casual fragments from papyri. On the other hand, we have texts from early Christian writers and Fathers of the Church, dating back to the second century, which cite Verse 13 in the singular.

Going back to the oldest text, St. Irinaeus of Lyons, in 190, used the singular. And more to the point, the always polemical Tertullian, around the year 200, raised a dispute over this very verse, accusing a heretical sect of having falsified the words of John by using the verb 'generate' in the plural form. But that was what became the official text of the Gospel and which is used in all our current editions of the Bible.

However, besides the Latin, the singular form is used in verse 13 even in the oldest surviving texts in Syriac, in Coptic, and in Ethiopian.

It must be pointed out for those who are not familiar with Biblical criticism: tje reconstruction of the original text of Scripture based only on surviving documents is called 'external criticism'. But all modern scholars agree that it must be complemented by 'internal criticism', which goes in deeper, and in the case we are discussing, leads to a preference for "He was generated" rather than "they were generated".

In short, the situation is such that Fr. De la Potterie could write, back in 1978, then reaffirmed in 1983 in his second essay, that precisely. research not just into ancient evangelical manuscripts but even into citations by the earliest Christian authors, seemed to make it necessary that we adopt the original "He was generated by God" with Jesus as the subject.

Let us now re-read Verse 13 in what would seem to be the original version that is finally restored according to the evangelist's intention, and we will immediately realize (as we shall see even better later) that what we have here is a most precious testimony on the triple virginity of Mary.

We are convinced that John was referring to her whom he never calls by name, but only as 'the mother of Jesus', in the episode about the marriage in Cana, and on her presence at the foot of the Cross. But now here emerges a third Marian testimonial from him, which has truly primary importance.

Let us now ask ourselves: Why was it that, by the fourth century, the reference to the divine origin of Jesus had disappeared, and the plural verb that has come down to our day was imposed on Gospel texts, but which, at closer look, seems to introduce a kind of extraneous entity?

Indeed, the whole of John's Prologue is a solemn hymn to the Incarnation of the Word, and all of a sudden, there appears in a manner that does not seem justified, "those who believe in his name", namely the members of the Church. In what way could the baptized - who are men in flesh and blood and not ethereal angels - have been generated "not by blood, nor the desire of the flesh nor human will"?

This is what seemed to have happened: In the primitive Church, the sect called the docetists - who denied the human nature of Jesus, and consequently, that he could have been conceived by Mary - were quite the rage. According to them, Mary was not the mother who had the infant Jesus in her womb, but simply a kind of watery tube through which Christ - whose human appearance was simply an illusion - had passed.

Docetism whose 'spiritualism' was particularly dangerous since it rendered Jesus not as a person but as some sort of super-archangel) relied precisely on Verse 13 of the Johannine Prologue that we are examining: Christ had come among us not just in a virginal way, as attested to by the words "not by desire of flesh or human will". But most especially, the docetist thesis was best proved, they claimed, by the phrase 'nec ex sanguinibus' (not by bloods).

But what are these 'bloods'? As I said earlier, there is no question that this plural form of the word 'blood' was the original text - all testimony says so - not just those in which Jesus is the subject, but even when his disciples are the subject.

Nut if the Messiah was the subject in John's Prologue verse, the expression could easily be used by the docetists: If he had not been 'generated by bloods', it is because he did not have a body like all human beings, he was never born, a process which is always accompanied by an effusion of blood from the mother.

Therefore, citing textually from Fr. De la Potterie, "in order to radically resolve the question and take away a weapon from the heretics, probably around the start of the third century, Church writers started to change the verb to the plural form, displacing the meaning of the verse to all Christians, but in the process, interrupting, among other things, the Johannine Prologue which is all centered on the mystery of the Logos made flesh".

The ecclesiastical 'retouch' to John's Prologue ended up editing the original of the Gospel, and it has come down to our day.

But let us reflect on that word 'bloods' in the plural, with some help from the synthesis made by Fr. Domenico Marcucci, one oftheh few scholars who had the courage to break with the conformism of his colleagues, to seriously consider the research of Fr. De la Potterie.

"In the Greek texts, aima (blood), is found only in the singular. But John uses the plural. Why? To understand this, De La Potterie turned to Hebrew, considering that the fourth evangelist was deeply enmeshed into his own culture, which was Jewish.

"In the Hebrew version of the Old Testament, the plural of 'blood' (damim) means the blood shed by a woman at menstruation and during delivery. This made her impure, for which she needed to go to the Temple afterwards to be purified. Therefore the phrase 'not of bloods' signifies that the birth of Jesus took place, unlike that of any other, without the effusion of blood, therefore, virginally".

Let us now look again at Verse 13 in the version that would have been the original and consider the consequences: Jesus was 'generated by God", and therefore, "not through the desire of flesh, nor the will of man" (virginitas ante partum, virginity before giving birth).

Moreover, his birth took place 'not with bloods', therefore without the usual human injuries, in which John implies both the virginitas in partu and post partum, since the delivery of Mary's son was achieved without any bleeding, which means the mother was left intact.

One can see that this is a conclusion of extraordinary importance - and this, simply through changing a verb from plural to the singular, which was apparently John's intention. Among other things, it is clear that the verse does not dispute the corporeal materiality, the human reality, of Jesus.

Indeed, the Prologue continues with the words: "And the Word became flesh, and came to dwell among us..."

It is a fact that, as De la Potterie points out, if the early Fathers of the Church already found in Matthew and Luke elements regarding the virginal conception of Jesus, there was not just a confirmation of it in the first chapter of John's Gospel, but also a direct reference to virginal delivery, without the loss of that which Jews considered impure as the blood of all those who gave birth.

Now then, why such apparent lack of interest, such silence over the rediscovery of the possibly precise scriptural basis for a truth such as the semper Virgo, which was already present in the Christian Tradition of the second century and which became a dogma of the Church?

It is an article of faith that is considered so important that, in the East, among the rigid rules of iconography, there is one that prohibits ever representing Mary the Theotokos (God-bearer) without three stars - one on her head, and one on each shoulder - to symbolize her triple virginity.

Fr. Ignace was right to denounce the conformism of so many among his peers, for whom such a subject is a source of embarrassment, such that, as Fr. Marcucci points out, "In many manuals of Mariology used in Catholic seminaries, Mary's virginity before, during and after the birth of Jesus is the object of an embarrassed silence rather than something to be seriously discussed".

In one of his last books, Fr. Stefano De Flores, who was probably our best Mariologist (he died recently), who was also a professor at the Gregorian, cited the studies of De la Potterie which he accepted with conviction, judging that they were based not just on documentary evidence but on the dynamic of John himself. He thought it was a truly important acknowledgment.

Fr. de la Potterie's latest essay on this subject was written in 1983. Why is it that the current Italian translation of the Bible, reviewed or updated by the CEI 24 years after that article, does not mention, at least in a footnote to John 1,13, the possibility - which seems to be close to certainty - that the original text of Verse 13 in John's Prologue had Jesus as the subject, not his people?

One thing, however, has been confirmed for the nth time: Scriptures continue to be able to surprise us, some of which, as in the case we just looked at, has to do with the Mother of God whose mystery is both simultaneously discreet and inexhaustible.

October 21, 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time
WORLD MISSION SUNDAY

Center illustration:'The Temptation of St. Hilarion' was a subject of many paintings in the 16th-19th centuries.
ST HILARION THE GREAT (Hilarion of Gaza) (b Palestine ca 291, d Cyprus 371), Hermit and Abbot
Hilarion's life is known to us from a biography of him written by St. Jerome. Born to pagan parents in Gaza, Hilarion was sent to study in Alexandria, where he converted to Christianity, gave up all worldly pleasures in favor of going to church, and at age 15, sought out the future St. Anthony Abbot in his Egyptian hermitage. After a few months there, he returned to Palestine. When his parents died, he gave up his inheritance to his brothers and decided to be a hermit himself, choosing a spot in the Gaza desert between the coast and marshland. During his 22 years as a hermit, he was beset by temptations and demonic visions and starved himself to help fight them off. In the meantime, word spread about him and people came to see him for spiritual comfort and guidance. After curing a woman who had been barren for 15 years, more people came to him for healing and he performed a number of miracles. In time, a monastery grew around his cell, which was so beset by visitors, especially females, that Hilarion fled. After numerous adventures, always beset by enthusiastic visitors seeking his help, Hilarion died in Cyprus in 371 AD.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/102112.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

Canonization of seven new saints and Mass in St. Peter's Square, followed by
the Sunday Angelus.


Sanctity and the new Evangelization


OCt. 21, 2012

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While the Synod Fathers gathered in Rome continue their often difficult and complex reflections on the New Evangelization, looking for unifying themes and threads running through the literally hundreds of speeches made in the last few days by bishops, guests and observers, the canonisation ceremony this Sunday breaks onto the scene like a powerful beam of light and joy.

No fewer than seven Blesseds are being proclaimed as models of sanctity for the whole Church. Priests, men and women religious, lay men and women. They lived in Europe, Asia, Africa, America and Oceania. From the missionary Jesuit in distant lands who died a martyr in Madagascar to the priest who was an educator of troubled youth, to the sick woman who for decades carried out the invaluable spiritual mission of suffering in her bed. There is the young Filipino lay catechist – he, too, a martyr; there is the religious sister dedicated to caring for lepers; the religious sister who spent her energy for the education of children, young people and workers. Then, there is the true flower of this wonderful group, the young Kateri Tekakwitha, an extraordinary fruit of the first proclamation of the faith among the tribes of Native Americans.

Saints have always been the most credible witnesses of the Christian faith, of the living and working Spirit of the Risen Jesus, of the transformation of humanity thanks to the mysterious power of the Gospel. Without them, the Church cannot live, cannot at all effectively spread the Gospel in a world that perhaps has trouble accepting it, even though that same world has an immense need for it.

The world needs the saints, the world needs the Gospel: in order to rediscover the gratuitousness of love, joy and hope. The New Evangelization will also start again with the saints of our time.

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Pope names 7 new saints -
models for reviving the faith
By NICOLE WINFIELD


VATICAN CITY, Oct. 21 (AP) - Some 80,000 pilgrims in flowered leis, feathered headdresses and other traditional garb flooded St. Peter's Square on Sunday as Pope Benedict XVI added seven more saints onto the roster of Catholic role models in a bid to reinvigorate the faith in parts of the world where it's lagging.

Two of the new saints were Americans: Kateri Tekakwitha, the first native American saint from the U.S., and Mother Marianne Cope, a 19th century German-born Franciscan nun who cared for leprosy patients in Hawaii.

It seemed as if a third saint, Pedro Calungsod, a 17th century Filipino teenage martyr, drew the biggest crowd of all, with Rome's sizeable Filipino expatriate community turning out in flag-waving droves to welcome the country's second saint.

In his homily, Benedict praised each of the seven as heroic and courageous examples for the entire church, calling Cope a "shining" model for Catholics and Kateri an inspiration to indigenous faithful across North America.

"May the witness of these new saints ... speak today to the whole church, and may their intercession strengthen and sustain her in her mission to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world," he said.

The celebrations began at dawn, with Native Americans in beaded and feathered headdresses and leather-fringed tunics singing songs to Kateri to the beat of drums as the sun rose over St. Peter's Square.

Later, the crowds cheered as the Pope read out the names of each of the new saints in Latin and declared that they were worthy of veneration by the entire church. Prayers were read out in Mohawk and Cebuano, the dialect of Calungsod's native Cebu province, and in English by a nun wearing a lei.

"It's so nice to see God showing all the flavors of the world," marveled Gene Caldwell, a Native American member of the Menominee reservation in Neopit, Wisconsin, who attended with his wife, Linda. "The Native Americans are enthralled" to have Kateri canonized, he said.

The canonization coincided with a Vatican meeting of the world's bishops on trying to revive Christianity in places where it's fallen by the wayside.

Several of the new saints were missionaries, making clear the Pope hopes their example — even though they lived hundreds of years ago — will be relevant today as the Catholic Church tries to hold on to its faithful.

It's a tough task as the Vatican faces competition from evangelical churches in Africa and Latin America, increasing secularization in the West and disenchantment due to the clerical sex abuse scandal in Europe and beyond. [They were disenchanted long before the sex-abuse scandals became front-page news, but it was a convenient pretext for many with shaky faith to abandon ship.]

The two American saints actually hail from roughly the same place — what is today upstate New York — although they lived two centuries apart.

Known as the "Lily of the Mohawks," Kateri was born in 1656 to a pagan Iroquois father and an Algonquin Christian mother. Her parents and only brother died when she was 4 during a smallpox epidemic that left her badly scarred and with impaired eyesight. She went to live with her uncle, a Mohawk, and was baptized Catholic by Jesuit missionaries. But she was ostracized and persecuted by other natives for her faith, and she died in what is now Canada when she was 24.

Speaking in English and French, in honor of Kateri's Canadian ties, Benedict noted how unusual it was in Kateri's indigenous culture for her to choose to devote herself to her Catholic faith.

"May her example help us to live where we are, loving Jesus without denying who we are," Benedict said. "Saint Kateri, protectress of Canada and the first Native American saint, we entrust you to the renewal of the faith in the first nations and in all of North America!"

Among the few people chosen to receive Communion from the pope himself was Jake Finkbonner, a 12-year-old boy of Native American descent from the western U.S. state of Washington, whose recovery from an infection of flesh-eating bacteria was deemed "miraculous" by the Vatican. The Vatican determined that Jake was cured through Kateri's intercession after his family and community invoked her in their prayers, paving the way for her canonization.

Cope is revered among many Catholics in Hawaii, where she arrived from New York in 1883 to care for leprosy patients on Kalaupapa, an isolated peninsula on Molokai Island where Hawaii governments forcibly exiled them for decades. At the time, there was widespread fear of the disfiguring disease, which can cause skin lesions, mangled fingers and toes and lead to blindness.

Cope, however, led a band of Franciscan nuns to the peninsula to care for the patients, just as Saint Damien, a Belgian priest, did in 1873. He died of the disease 16 years later and was canonized in 2009.

"At a time when little could be done for those suffering from this terrible disease, Marianne Cope showed the highest love, courage and enthusiasm," Benedict said in his homily. "She is a shining and energetic example of the best of the tradition of Catholic nursing sisters and of the spirit of her beloved St. Francis."

Two-hundred fifty pilgrims from Hawaii traveled to Rome for Mother Marianne's canonization, including nine Kalaupapa patients, as well as faithful from the local diocese.

"Marianne Cope means a great deal to us," said pilgrim Aida Javier, who traveled from Honolulu with her husband Romy for the Mass. "My husband and I feel blessed and honored to be part of this canonization."

Another pilgrim was Sharon Smith, of Syracuse, New York, whose 2005 cure from complications from pancreatitis, an inflammation of the pancreas, was declared medically inexplicable by the Vatican — the "miracle" needed for Mother Marianne to be named a saint.

In an interview last week, Smith recounted how she had fainted one day in her home, an allergic reaction to medication she was taking for a kidney transplant, and awoke in the hospital to find that doctors weren't giving her much time to live.

Her disease was eating away at her insides, causing her stomach to detach from her intestines. Doctors said they couldn't repair it. At a certain point, a nun pinned a bag of ashes and dirt from Mother Marianne's grave on her and prayed.

"I had never heard of her, but we continued to pray," Smith said. "And I just, I started getting better."

"I believe in miracles, but I don't know whether it was all the prayers, or the pinning of the relic, but I know that something worked, and I'm here for some reason," Smith said.

The Vatican's complicated saint-making procedure requires that the Vatican certify a "miracle" was performed through the intercession of the candidate — a medically inexplicable cure that can be directly linked to the prayers offered by the faithful. One miracle is needed for beatification, a second for canonization.

The Philippines' second saint, Calungsod, was a Filipino teenager who helped Jesuit priests convert natives in Guam in the 17th century but was killed by spear-wielding villagers opposed to the missionaries' efforts to baptize their children.

"We are especially proud because he is so young," said Marianna Dieza, a 39-year-old housekeeper working in Rome who was on hand for the Mass.

The other new saints are: Jacques Berthieu, a 19th century French Jesuit who was killed by rebels in Madagascar, where he had worked as a missionary; Giovanni Battista Piamarta, an Italian who founded a religious order in 1900 and established a Catholic printing and publishing house in his native Brescia; Carmen Salles y Barangueras, a Spanish nun who founded a religious order to educate children in 1892; and Anna Schaeffer, a 19th century German lay woman who became a model for the sick and suffering after she fell into a boiler and badly burned her legs. The wounds never healed, causing her constant pain.

CANONIZATION RITE,
EUCHARISTIC CELEBRATION
AND ANGELUS


Libretto cover: Miniature from 'Les Heures de Louis de Laval", 1469-1489, Bibliotheque Nationale de France.





For the first time, Benedict XVI today wore the fanon, a gold-striped mozetta-like capelet that is only worn by Popes at a Pontifical Mass.

New models for Christians
in the Year of Faith

Oct. 21, 2012

As the Church marks World Mission Sunday today, Pope Benedict XVI canonized seven new Saints. Tens of thousands of pilgrims from around the world gathered in Saint Peter’s Square as Jacques Berthieu (France), Pedro Calungsod (Philippines), Giovanni Battista Piamarta (Italy), Marìa Carmen Sallés y Barangueras (Spain), Marianne Cope (USA), Kateri Tekakwitha USA), and Anna Schäffer (Germany) were raised to the honours of the altar.

In his homily during the Mass, Pope Benedict noted that the canonization is taking place as Bishops from around the world are gathered in Rome to take part in the General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops: “The coincidence between this ecclesiastical meeting and World Mission Sunday is a happy one; and the word of God that we have listened to sheds light on both subjects. It shows how to be evangelisers, called to bear witness and to proclaim the Christian message, configuring ourselves to Christ and following his very path. This is true both for the mission ad Gentes and for the new evangelisation.”

The Pope gave a brief reflection on the life and works of each of the new saints. Among them is Pedro Calungsod from the Philippines. Pedro “displayed deep faith and charity and continued to catechise his many converts, giving witness to Christ by a life of purity and dedication to faith.” Saint Pedro was martyred in 1672.

Marianne Cope, also canonised today, was born in Germany but moved to the United States at a very young age. She joined the Franciscan order and became Superior General of her congregation. She eventually answered the call to serve the lepers in the Hawaiian island of Molokai. “At a time when little could be done for those suffering from this terrible disease, Marianne Cope showed the highest love, courage, and enthusiasm.”

Today also saw the canonisation of the first Native American saint from North America. “Leading a simple life, Kateri remained faithful to her love for Jesus, to prayer, and to daily Mass. Her greatest wish was to know and to do what pleased God. She lived a life radiant with faith and purity.”

Speaking in French, Pope Benedict prayed, “Saint Kateri, Protrectress of Canada and first Native American saint, we entrust to you the renewal of faith in the First Nations and in all of North America! May God bless the First Nations!”

At the end of the Solemn Mass, the Holy Father addressed the faithful before the recitation of the Angelus. In his remarks, he called upon Mary, the Queen of all the Saints, and turned his thoughts especially to the Marian shrine of Lourdes, which is experiencing heavy flooding.

“In particular,” he continued, “we wish today to entrust to the maternal protection of the Virgin Mary all missionaries – priests, religious, and lay – that in every part of the world sow the good seed of the Gospel.” He prayed, too, for the Synod of Bishops, as they continue to face “the challenge of the new evangelization for the transmission of the Christian faith.”

The Holy Father concluded his remarks with greetings in several languages to all the pilgrims gathered in Saint Peter’s Square:

“On the happy occasion of the canonizations today, I greet the official delegations and all the English-speaking pilgrims and visitors, especially those from the Philippines, Canada and the United States of America. May the holiness and witness of these saints inspire us to draw closer to the Son of God who, for such great love, came to serve and offer his life for our salvation. God bless you all!"



Here is Vatican Radio's translation of the Holy Father's homily today:

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"The Son of Man came to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (cf. Mk 10,45)

Dear Brother Bishops,
Dear brothers and sisters!

Today the Church listens again to these words of Jesus, spoken by the Lord during his journey to Jerusalem, where he was to accomplish the mystery of his passion, death and resurrection. They are words which enshrine the meaning of Christ’s mission on earth, marked by his sacrifice, by his total self-giving.

On this third Sunday of October, on which we celebrate World Mission Sunday, the Church listens to them with special attention and renews her conviction that she should always be fully dedicated to serve mankind and the Gospel, after the example of the One who gave himself up even to the sacrifice of his life.

I extend warm greetings to all of you who fill Saint Peter’s Square, especially the official delegations and the pilgrims who have come to celebrate the seven new saints. I greet with affection the Cardinals and Bishops who, during these days, are taking part in the Synodal Assembly on the New Evangelization.

The coincidence between this ecclesiastical meeting and World Mission Sunday is a happy one; and the word of God that we have listened to sheds light on both subjects. It shows how to be evangelizers, called to bear witness and to proclaim the Christian message, configuring ourselves to Christ and following his very path. This is true both for the mission ad Gentes and for the new evangelization in places with ancient Christian roots.

"The Son of Man came to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (cf. Mk 10:45) These words were the blueprint for living of the seven Blessed men and women that the Church solemnly enrols this morning in the glorious ranks of the saints.

With heroic courage they spent their lives in total consecration to the Lord and in the generous service of their brethren. They are sons and daughters of the Church who chose the path of service following the Lord.

Holiness always rises up in the Church from the well-spring of the mystery of redemption, as foretold by the prophet Isaiah in the first reading: the Servant of the Lord is the righteous one who “shall make many to be accounted as righteous; and he shall bear their iniquities” (Is 53:11); he is Jesus Christ, crucified, risen and living in glory.

Today’s canonization is an eloquent confirmation of this mysterious saving reality. The tenacious profession of faith of these seven generous disciples of Christ, their configuration to the Son of Man shines out brightly today in the whole Church.

He continued in French:
Jacques Berthieu, born in 1838 in France, was passionate about Jesus Christ at an early age. During his parish ministry, he had the burning desire to save souls. Becoming a Jesuit, he wished to journey through the world for the glory of God.

A tireless pastor on the island of Sainte Marie, then in Madagascar, he struggled against injustice while bringing succour to the poor and sick. The Malagasies thought of him as a priest come down from heaven, saying, You are our “father and mother!” He made himself all things to all men, drawing from prayer and his love of the sacred heart of Jesus the human and priestly force to face martyrdom in 1896. He died, saying “I prefer to die rather than renounce my faith”.

Dear friends, may the life of this evangelizer be an encouragement and a model for priests that, like him, they will be men of God! May his example aid the many Christians of today persecuted for their faith! In this Year of Faith, may his intercession bring forth many fruits for Madagascar and the African Continent! May God bless the Malagasy people!

In English:
Pedro Calungsod was born around the year 1654, in the Visayas region of the Philippines. His love for Christ inspired him to train as a catechist with the Jesuit missionaries there. In 1688, along with other young catechists, he accompanied Father Diego Luís de San Vitores to the Marianas Islands in order to evangelize the Chamorro people. Life there was hard and the missionaries also faced persecution arising from envy and slander.

Pedro, however, displayed deep faith and charity and continued to catechize his many converts, giving witness to Christ by a life of purity and dedication to the Gospel. Uppermost was his desire to win souls for Christ, and this made him resolute in accepting martyrdom.

He died on the second of April, 1672. Witnesses record that Pedro could have fled for safety but chose to stay at Father Diego’s side. The priest was able to give Pedro absolution before he himself was killed. May the example and courageous witness of Pedro Calungsod inspire the dear people of the Philippines to announce the Kingdom bravely and to win souls for God!

In Italian:
Giovanni Battista Piamarta, priest of the Diocese of Brescia, was a great apostle of charity and of young people. He raised awareness of the need for a cultural and social presence of Catholicism in the modern world, and so he dedicated himself to the Christian, moral and professional growth of the younger generations with an enlightened input of humanity and goodness.

Animated by unshakable faith in divine providence and by a profound spirit of sacrifice, he faced difficulties and fatigue to breathe life into various apostolic works, including the Artigianelli Institute, Queriniana Publishers, the Congregation of the Holy Family of Nazareth for men, and for women the Congregation of the Humble Sister Servants of the Lord.

The secret of his intense and busy life is found in the long hours he gave to prayer. When he was overburdened with work, he increased the length of his encounter, heart to heart, with the Lord. He preferred to pause before the Blessed Sacrament, meditating upon the passion, death and resurrection of Christ, to gain spiritual fortitude and return to gaining people’s hearts, especially the young, to bring them back to the sources of life with fresh pastoral initiatives.

In Spanish:
“May your love be upon us, O Lord, as we place all our hope in you” (Ps 32:22). With these words, the liturgy invites us to make our own this hymn to God, creator and provider, accepting his plan into our lives. María Carmelo Sallés y Barangueras, a religious born in Vic in Spain in 1848, did just so.

Filled with hope in spite of many trials, she, on seeing the progress of the Congregation of the Conceptionist Missionary Sisters of Teaching, which she founded in 1892, was able to sing with the Mother of God, “His mercy is on those who fear him from generation to generation” (Lk 1:50).

Her educational work, entrusted to the Immaculate Virgin Mary, continues to bear abundant fruit among young people through the generous dedication of her daughters who, like her, entrust themselves to God for whom all is possible.

In English once again:
I now turn to Marianne Cope, born in 1838 in Heppenheim, Germany. Only one year old when taken to the United States, in 1862 she entered the Third Order Regular of Saint Francis in Syracuse, New York.

Later, as Superior General of her congregation, Mother Marianne willingly embraced a call to care for the lepers of Hawaii after many others had refused. She personally went, with six of her fellow sisters, to manage a hospital on Oahu, later founding Malulani Hospital on Maui and opening a home for girls whose parents were lepers.

Five years after that she accepted the invitation to open a home for women and girls on the island of Molokai itself, bravely going there herself and effectively ending her contact with the outside world. There she looked after Father Damien, already famous for his heroic work among the lepers, nursed him as he died and took over his work among male lepers.

At a time when little could be done for those suffering from this terrible disease, Marianne Cope showed the highest love, courage and enthusiasm. She is a shining and energetic example of the best of the tradition of Catholic nursing sisters and of the spirit of her beloved Saint Francis.

Kateri Tekakwitha was born in today’s New York state in 1656 to a Mohawk father and a Christian Algonquin mother who gave to her a sense of the living God. She was baptized at twenty years of age and, to escape persecution, she took refuge in Saint Francis Xavier Mission near Montreal. There she worked, faithful to the traditions of her people, although renouncing their religious convictions until her death at the age of twenty-four.

Leading a simple life, Kateri remained faithful to her love for Jesus, to prayer and to daily Mass. Her greatest wish was to know and to do what pleased God. She lived a life radiant with faith and purity.

Kateri impresses us by the action of grace in her life in spite of the absence of external help and by the courage of her vocation, so unusual in her culture. In her, faith and culture enrich each other! May her example help us to live where we are, loving Jesus without denying who we are.

He added in French:
Saint Kateri, Protectress of Canada and the first native American saint, we entrust to you the renewal of the faith in the first nations and in all of North America! May God bless the first nations!

In German:
Anna Schaeffer, from Mindelstetten, as a young woman wished to enter a missionary order. She came from a poor background so, in order to earn the dowry needed for acceptance into the cloister, she worked as a maid. One day she suffered a terrible accident and received incurable burns on her legs which forced her to be bed-ridden for the rest of her life.

So her sick-bed became her cloister cell and her suffering a missionary service. She struggled for a time to accept her fate, but then understood her situation as a loving call from the crucified One to follow him. Strengthened by daily communion, she became an untiring intercessor in prayer and a mirror of God’s love for the many who sought her counsel.

May her apostolate of prayer and suffering, of sacrifice and expiation, be a shining example for believers in her homeland, and may her intercession strengthen the Christian hospice movement in its beneficial activity.

He resumed in Italian:
Dear brothers and sisters, these new saints, different in origin, language, nationality and social condition, are united among themselves and with the whole People of God in the mystery of salvation of Christ the Redeemer.

With them, we too, together with the Synod Fathers from all parts of the world, proclaim to the Lord in the words of the psalm that he “is our help and our shield” and we invoke him saying, “may your love be upon us, O Lord, as we place all our hope in you” (Ps 32:20.22).

May the witness of these new saints, and their lives generously spent for love of Christ, speak today to the whole Church, and may their intercession strengthen and sustain her in her mission to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world.

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The Pope gives Communion to Jake Finkbonner, now 11, the boy who was miraculously healed of a flesh-eating infection through the intercession of St. Kateri.




American Indian delegations celebrate St, Kateri's canonization.


Filipinos with a statue of teenage saint Pedro Calungsod; The Filipino community in Rome numbers in the tens of thousands.




Sorry I have not found enough pictures of the Mass yet....

Popes wearing the fanon. Top panel, from left: Pope Innocent III (1198-1216), Pius XII, and John XXIII.Bottom panel: Pius XII, Paul VI, and John Paul I. Note the full regalia of the earlier Popes, including the tiara and full-length liturgical gloves.

Mons. Guido Marini, in explaining the changes to the canonization rite earlier this week, failed to mention that Benedict XVI was going to revive the use of the fanon. A quick online search of Wikipedia and another source, fails to say, however, what is the ultimate significance of the fanon. A traditionalist Italian site today says it means "I am the Pope", because no one else can wear the fnaon, but that seems un-serious. A Pope does not need to underscore who he is, although I saw a picture of a dead Pope wearing the fanon.

The papal fanon returns:
Some facts about it

The fanon (old Germanic for cloth) is a vestment that around the 10th or 12th century became reserved for the Pope alone. Previously, the Pope wore it only when celebrating a solemn pontifical Mass, that is, only when all the pontifical vestments were used. Benedict XVI wore it for the first time today at canonization rites and the Eucharistic celebration that followed.

The fanon was regularly used until the Second Vatican Council but then fell into disuse. Until Benedict XVI used it today, it had not been used since 1984 when Pope John Paul II wore it during a visit to Roman convent.

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...Spread apart, the fanon is an oval close to a circle with an approximate diameter of 92 cm. It consists of two sheets of silk placed on top of each other.

The latter are only stitched together at the central buttonhole. The diameter of the upper sheet is about a hand less than that at the bottom. The fanon has no lining. Both pieces of silk are white, decorated with red and/or golden stripes and framed by a golden braid. The front piece of the fanon is embroidered with a golden cross. In order to make it easier to put the fanon on, there is a slot in the neckline at the back. Unlike the amice, there are not ribbons to tie the fanon.

Putting on this vestment: The deacon equips the Pope with the linen amice, the alb, the cingulum (rope belt) and the pectoral cross. Hereafter, he uses the neckline to pull the fanon over the Pope's head, so that it covers the shoulders, back and chest just like a collar. The part decorated with the cross is at the front.

Then the deacon pulls the back half of the upper sheet over the head of the Pope, enrobes him with his stole, tunicle, dalmatic and chasuble. Then he lets the part pulled over the Pope's head down again and pulls the front half of the upper sheet out from under the chasuble. Finally, he arranges it around his shoulders so that the vestment covers the shoulders just like a collar.

- Braun, Joseph: Die Liturgische Gewandung im Occident und Orient – nach Ursprung und Entwicklung, Verwendung und Symbolik, Herdersche Verlagshandlung, Freiburg, 1904, page 52

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As early as the end of the twelfth century the fanon was worn solely by the Pope, as is evident from the express statement of Innocent III (1198–1216). The vestment was then called an orale; the term fanon derived from pannus( cloth, woven fabric), was not used until a subsequent age.

P.S. It appears Innocent III traced the fanon to the ephod worn by Jewish High Priests in the Bible. The ephod developed from being a simple linen cloth to an elaborate cloth embroidered in gold and multicolored threads worn under the High Priest's breastplate. Originally the ephod symbolized atonement for the idolatry of the Israelites in the desert.


Sorry I have to settle for poor photos since I am simply picking them up where I can and not from a regular newsphoto service.

A big Thank You to Father Z who is wise enough to have placed the revival of the fanon today in the wide perspective in which it might be seen!

What Benedict XVI's revival
of the fanon means

October 21, 2012

...We all know that some more traditionally minded people are really into the old vestments and gear and that is about as far as it goes. The more thoughtful, however, see that the use of the older, traditional things has a deeper significance.

Our liturgical rites make a difference. Even small things have their influence. If we really believe what we say about what happens during Mass, if we we really believe that the Office is the Church’s official prayer, Christ the High Priest acting and praying through our words and gestures, then how can what we do, liturgically, not have a ripple effect through the whole Church (ad intra), through the whole world (ad extra)?

The virtue of Justice orders all our relationships so that we give to each what is his due. God is at the top of the hierarchy of all our relationships. God is qualitatively different from all other persons with whom we have a relationship. Thus, giving to God what is God’s due concerns its own virtue, the virtue of Religion.

The first one to whom we owe something is God and the first thing we owe to God is worship, both as individuals and collectively. If we screw up our relationship with God, all our other relationships will be disordered. If we do not worship God and worship Him properly, we have a hard time living properly in relation to everyone else.

Because we are wounded by Original Sin, it is hard for us to fulfill the virtues of Justice and Religion. And because we are limited mortals, we cannot offer God the worship that is His due. Our worship of God is, itself, a gift from God. God makes it possible for us to worship Him in a way that is pleasing to Him.

One of the great gifts He gave us is Holy Church, upon whom He bestowed His own authority to determine how we, the members of the Church, worship Him and, therefore, order our lives properly. Christ, God man, the one mediator, the true Head of the Church, founded His Church on Peter, upon whom He bestowed the special role of exercising the highest authority in the Church in teaching and in worship.

Where Peter goes, we follow.

Peter, in the person of Benedict XVI, is teaching us – now during a special Year of Faith – about how to recover and reorder that which has been lost. We are disordered. In order to be better ordered again as a Church and as individuals, we must bring our worship of God into continuity with the way we have always, as Catholics, worshiped God.

The use of the fanon is, itself, a small gesture. The return to use of the ferula was a small gesture. The use of older forms of vestments was a small gesture. The white mozzetta during Easter season, a small gesture. Small gestures matter. They pave the way for larger gestures.

The return of the Holy Father to a more worthy manner of distribution of Communion was a large gesture. The rearrangement of the altar with the Cross at the center, corpus toward the celebrant, is a large gesture. Summorum Pontificum was a huge gesture. More huge gestures will come, along with the small and the larger.

The Holy Father used the fanon today in a context.

First, use the fanon during a canonization. Canonizations had their own particular traditions. Some of those were restored today. For example, in the old days the Roman Pontiff was petitioned three times to enroll hitherto Blesseds in the “album of the saints”. [NB: This triple petitio was also revived today by Benedict XVI.]

Benedict XVI, and most theologians, have not considered beatifications to be infallible acts. Canonizations, however, are. The Pope has preferred to delegate the celebration of beatifications to other prelates and also to have them celebrated in a local Church, since generally only local Churches or institutes recognize beati at the altar.

Canonization has a different theological importance for the Church. Benedict has underscored the difference between beatification and canonization by the return of traditional gestures in the rite and by the use of the fanon.

Second, he used the fanon today during a meeting of the Synod of Bishops in the Year of Faith. Benedict does not teach by imposition. In his writing for decades, when talking about the damage to our Catholic identity that occurred with the imposition of an artificial, cobbled-up liturgy and the abuses of it, he also cautioned against abrupt corrections.

Pain and chaos was caused by the ripping apart of altars and the turning around of the focus during Mass. We mustn’t cause pain and chaos by an abrupt return to ad orientem worship even though it is superior.

For example, Benedict has tried to lead by example, rather than by imposition, in the matter of ad orientem worship. The so-called “Benedictine arrangement” is an intermediate measure on the way to a wider return to ad orientem worship.

He hasn’t with his own pen removed the permission to distribute Communion in the hand, but he has clearly shown what he thinks is the better way by his own example. He has hoped that prelates and priests would be with Peter in this, too, and not just give lip service to their unity.

Today, with all the participants of the Synod of Bishop present, the Holy Father used the fanon. They cannot use the fanon, but they can pick up on the spirit of what he is trying to do: restore continuity to our worship of God for the sake of the right ordering of our relationships within the Church (ad intra) and with the wider world (ad extra). The participants of the Synod will have now something to reflect on as they return home.

Pope Benedict teaches by example.

For Benedict, gestures like the restoration of the fanon have layers of meaning. His liturgical choices, even details such as pontifical garb, are not simply personal preferences. They are polyvalent signs that point to deeper things.

The other day in Detroit I told Bishop Sample that I thought that Benedict would make a dramatic gesture during the Year of Faith. No, I don’t think the fanon is that gesture. However, it may be a propaedeutic for something big.

Paul VI in 1967-68 had a special year to commemorate the centenary of the martyrdom of Sts. Peter and Paul. During that year all hell broke loose. The young Joseph Ratzinger was deeply influenced by the upheaval he witnessed that year. During 1968 Paul VI issued Humanae vitae - in a gesture that confirms those few historic moments when we have a confirmation that the Holy Spirit will not allow Peter to err in a disastrous way. At the end of that special year, Paul issued the great “Credo of the People of God”.

During this Year of Faith, when all hell is again breaking loose, I think Benedict will issue an encyclical on Faith. He has written already on Charity and Hope. However, I don’t think that this predictable encyclical will be the big gesture for the Year of Faith.

I sense, however, that the use of the fanon is a small teaching gesture that points to what that big gesture may be.

[All I am hoping for at this point in terms of 'gesture' is for Benedict XVI to celebrate the Extraordinary Form of the Mass in public - ASAP!]