The B16 cure for
a return to healthy realism
6/24/10
There are three topics that Benedict XVI has been insistent upon these days: the Eucharist, the holiness of priests, and opening reason to the transcendent.
For Papa Ratzinger, they constitute three pillars that define the mission of the Church.
The first has to do with the mission of making Christ present in the world, in a real and concrete way under the form of bread and wine, in the Mass and through the Sacraments, as the Church has always done from its very beginning.
The second has to to do with priests and preparing them for that mission, as ministers and living witnesses to that presence. It was no coincidence that on the eve of the closing of the Year for Priests, when answering a question from a priest, the Pope called celibacy 'a great scandal' to the agnostic mentality because "it demonstrates that God is lived as reality".
The third point, also linked to the first two, is the mission to broaden the rational perspective, to help man go beyond positivistic rationality that is closed to the transcendent, and which as such, is merely an ugly copy of reason.
That is why he devoted three audiences to St. Thomas Aquinas and the harmony between faith and reason which, although they are independent, are linked because they are about the same reality.
This is the vision of religion that Benedict XVI is proposing: not a sentimental elevation nor a system of beliefs in search of an unreachable divinity, but a return to the reality of things:
God is present here and now, under the eyes of everyone. One only has to start by opening those eyes.