Google+
 
Pagina precedente | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 » | Pagina successiva

BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Ultimo Aggiornamento: 23/08/2021 11:16
Autore
Stampa | Notifica email    
23/11/2010 18:32
OFFLINE
Post: 21.511
Post: 4.147
Registrato il: 28/08/2005
Registrato il: 20/01/2009
Administratore
Utente Master



There are obviously excerpts all over the Web now from THE BOOK, so I will post them as I see them... And please bear with me. As soon as THE BOOK and reactions to it cease to the 'news of the day', I will build a thread dedicated to the book alone, in which I will include all previous posts about it, so we can have a convenient single stop for this special resource that, obviously, will be a gift that keeps on giving... This is the selection at FIRST THINGS


Excerpts From 'Light of the World'

Nov 23, 2010


The following excerpts are from Light of the World: The Pope, The Church and The Signs Of The Times, Peter Seewald’s book-length interview with Pope Benedict XVI:

On the Abuse Scandal
Yes, it is a great crisis, we have to say that. It was upsetting for all of us. Suddenly so much filth. It was really almost like the crater of a volcano, out of which suddenly a tremendous cloud of filth came, darkening and soiling everything, so that above all the priesthood suddenly seemed to be a place of shame and every priest was under the suspicion of being one like that too. Many priests declared that they no longer dared to extend a hand to a child, much less go to a summer camp with children. . . .

He [the Archbishop of Dublin] said that ecclesiastical penal law functioned until the late 1950s; admittedly it was not perfect—there is much to criticize about it—but nevertheless it was applied. After the mid-sixties, however, it was simply not applied any more.

The prevailing mentality was that the Church must not be a Church of laws but, rather, a Church of love; she must not punish. Thus the awareness that punishment can be an act of love ceased to exist. This led to an odd darkening of the mind, even in very good people.

Today we have to learn all over again that love for the sinner and love for the person who has been harmed are correctly balanced if I punish the sinner in the form that is possible and appropriate.

In this respect there was in the past a change of mentality, in which the law and the need for punishment were obscured. Ultimately this also narrowed the concept of love, which in fact is not just being nice or courteous, but is found in the truth. And another component of truth is that I must punish the one who has sinned against real love.


On the Possibility of Papal Resignation
If a Pope clearly realizes that he is no longer physically, psychologically, and spiritually capable of handling the duties of his office, then he has a right and, under some circumstances, also an obligation to resign.


On Papal Pronouns
I use both the “I” and the “we”. For on many, many matters I am not simply expressing ideas that have happened to occur to Joseph Ratzinger, but I am speaking out of the common life of the Church’s communion.

In these cases, I am speaking, as it were, in intrinsic fellowship with my fellow believers — and I am expressing what we are in common and what we can believe in common.

In this sense, the “we” has its legitimate role, not as a plural of majesty, but as a real expression of the fact of coming from others, of speaking through and with others.

But where one says something personal in the role of “I”, then the first person singular has its role to play as well. So both are used: the “I” and the “we”.


On the Tridentine Mass
Liturgy, in truth, is an event by means of which we let ourselves be introduced into the expansive faith and prayer of the Church.

This is the reason why the early Christians prayed facing east, in the direction of the rising sun, the symbol of the returning Christ. In so doing, they wanted to show that the whole world is on its way toward Christ and that he encompasses the whole world.

This connection between heaven and earth is very important. It was no accident that ancient churches were built so that the sun would cast its light into the house of God at a very precise moment. . . .

...someone didn't just one day invent the liturgy, but it has been growing organically since the time of Abraham. These kinds of elements from the earliest times are still present in the liturgy.

Concretely, the renewed liturgy of the Second Vatican Council is the valid form in which the Church celebrates liturgy today. My main reason for making the previous form more available was to preserve the internal continuity of Church history.

We cannot say: Before, everything was wrong, but now everything is right; for in a community in which prayer and the Eucharist are the most important things, what was earlier supremely sacred cannot be entirely wrong. The issue was internal reconciliation with our own past, the intrinsic continuity of faith and prayer in the Church.



On the Tridentine petition
for the conversion of the Jews

[T]his petition does not affect the liturgy in general, but only the small circle of people who use the old missal. So there was no question of any change in the main liturgy.

But in the old liturgy this point seemed to me to require a modification. The old formulation really was offensive to Jews and failed to express positively the overall intrinsic unity between the Old and New Testament. For this reason, I believed that a modification of this passage in the old liturgy was necessary, especially, as I have already said, out of consideration for our relation with our Jewish friends.

I altered the text in such a way as to express our faith that Christ is the Savior for all, that there are not two channels of salvation, so that Christ is also the redeemer of the Jews, and not just of the Gentiles.

But the new formulation also shifts the focus from a direct petition for the conversion of the Jews in a missionary sense, to a plea that the Lord might bring about the hour of history when we may all be united. So the polemical arguments with which a whole series of theologians assailed me are ill-considered; they do not accurately reflect the reality of the situation.


On AIDS and Condoms
...The sheer fixation on the condom implies a banalization of sexuality, which, after all, is precisely the dangerous source of the attitude of no longer seeing sexuality as the expression of love, but only a sort of drug that people administer to themselves.

This is why the fight against the banalization of sexuality is also a part of the struggle to ensure that sexuality is treated as a positive value and to enable it to have a positive effect on the whole of man’s being.

There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants.

But it is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection. That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality.


On the Eucharistic Drama
I wanted it to be clear: Something quite special is going on here! He is here, the One before whom we fall on our knees! Pay attention! This is not just some social ritual in which we can take part if we want to. [One of the obvious dangers of 'excerpting' is the lack of context. In this case, as we have read in other excerpts, the Pope was commenting specifically on why he encourages communion in the old style, on the mouth and kneeling.]


On the Future of Christianity
,..The Christian origins are still part of the broad cultural climate of many Western countries. But we are heading increasingly toward a form of Christianity based on personal decision. And it will decide in turn the extent to which the general Christian character remains at work.

I would say that the task today is on the one hand, to consolidate, enliven, and enlarge this Christianity of personal decision, so that more people can consciously live and profess their faith again. On the other hand, we have to acknowledge that we are not simply identical with the nation as such — and yet that we have the energy to impress upon it, and present to it, values that it can accept, even when the majority are not believing Christians.




Too add to my earlier comment about proper excerpting, a great loss in the case of this as well as the OR selection adn the Reuters selction is that they omit the questions. As we saw in Seewald's full question on the condom, the interviewer carefully contextualizes his questions, and therefore, even simply reducing his question to the substantive part of it without presenting his context, can make a great difference as to how one understands the Pope's answer.

BTW, I'm finding it increasingly hard to forgive OR for its gigantic, near-catastrophic weekend lapse of judgment: Not only did it rob the Consistory of the attention it (and the new cardinals) deserve. It also inevitably made the book launching today rather anti-climactic, and sucks the oxygen out of the room for any of the plurality of topics in the book to get any attention for now.



Here's another worthwhile commentary from FIRST THINGS:

The would-be Church
by Kevin Staley-Joyce

November 22, 2010


Pope Benedict’s clarification of the moral theology relating to condom use has produced one of those moments in media life when journalists ceremoniously remove their thinking caps and implement a hopelessly formulaic analysis of the Church’s inner politics and theological dialogue.

CNN and others have so far breathlessly noted Pope Benedict’s nuanced statement, but only with about as much subtlety as inept opinion writers reported on his equally nuanced quotation during the “Regensburg Moment.”

Others, like the Telegraph, have been positively devious, proclaiming that the Church no longer opposes contraceptive acts. And, tiresome to say, each of these articles wearily attempts to relate the condom comment to past sex abuse by priests.

The expected lines of “argument” have been drawn up: The antiquarian, stuck-in-the-mud Church is finally catching up with modern ethics, with the spirit of the age, and with progress. After all, we are at a point in human history where the vast majority of things formerly prohibited are now considered good.

There are those who see the Church primarily as a political body, which, owing only to its self-interest, tends not to change its “policies” on issues very often.

Other commentators have a somewhat more accurate understanding of the Church as a messenger with an unchanging message, but still are at pains to understand moral absolutes.

Then there are those who understand that the Church proclaims certain moral absolutes, and must therefore be consistent.

Said one of these, “If the Pope can change his stance on condoms, why can’t he also modify the Vatican’s harsh intolerant opposition to women’s rights, gay equality, fertility treatment and embryonic stem cell research?” [And this is really the underlying rationale/strategy for the alacrity and insistence with which MSM commentators have sought to depict the Pope's statements as 'a historic shift' or even a 'revolution' in 'Church thinking and practice': to advance the claim that the Pope has, as it were, 'seen the light' of secular reason, and that if he can 'change his mind' about condom use, then he can and should change his mind - and Church teaching - about everything else. George Weigel, in his NRO article, pointed out the false assumptions that underlie this prevalent MSM fallacy! Think of the chain reaction of consequences that their fallacy could lead to... as Mr Staley-Joyce carries it to its ultimate reduction ad absurdum in the next paragraph:]

If we tweak this to refer to “intrinsically contraceptive acts” as opposed to condoms in particular, this fellow would have a point. If the Church could change its position on, say, the intrinsic dignity of human life in abortion, why not change its beliefs about the divinity of Christ or life after death?

He would have a point, that is, if the Pope had indeed changed his stance – except that he hasn’t, incrementally or otherwise. But at least he’s right to point out that the Church has to be internally consistent or cease to call itself the Church.

There are others, though, who are almost risibly indifferent to such consistency. My tragic favorite is this example:

Sex worker Constance Makoni, from the town of Mbare in Zimbabwe, said she was pleased to hear the Pope’s message. She said she uses condoms to protect herself against HIV, even though it is against her beliefs.

Makoni, the story goes, is a typical victim of the Church’s scandalously consistent wisdom on contraception, who would somehow countenance ethical scruples regarding contraceptive use, while missing the point of how prostitution might brush up against the Church’s teachings as well. This odd paradox has been addressed before, as here in an analysis by First Things’ friend Michael Liccione:

I’m actually less sickened by the hue and cry over the Pope’s remarks about the perennial AIDS-condom issue. Every few years or so, the media broadcast the charge that the Vatican is guilty of mass murder for opposing the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV infection in Africa.

Now even if condom use were generally effective for that purpose, it takes only a moment’s reflection to expose the recurring charge as ludicrous. Surely anybody can figure out that the number of AIDS-infected people who take Catholic teaching seriously enough to avoid using condoms, but not seriously enough to avoid sex with uninfected partners, has got to be pretty close to nil.

In any case, all the Pope said was that passing out condoms en masse is more likely to be part of the problem than of the solution. Even the research from Harvard agrees — much to its author’s chagrin, I’m told - what is the freakin’ problem here?

It’s not that hard to understand. People who believe in what was called, during the 60s and 70s, “the sexual revolution”, can’t imagine that abstinence is a more humane and effective prophylactic than latex. That’s because they can’t imagine truly voluntary abstinence at all.

Thus, if somebody capable of sexual activity and attractive enough to have a partner is abstinent, that must be because some malign force —such as mental illness, a controlling paterfamilias, or a religious hierarchy — is coercing them to avoid sex. That view is a prejudice which explains a lot of other attitudes as well.

The latest hue and cry about the Pope, and the outrage against the Harvard report, only confirms the liveliness of the prejudice. But I’m more amused than sickened.



Well, thanks again! Someone has now brought up the other point I have been making that abstinence, not condoms, is the first alternative for Catholic coupls dealing with one of them being HIV-infected!

The problem is that the "sex-liberated' secular generations have become incapable of even thinking that abstinence is at all possible, ignoring the example of centuries of Catholic priests and nuns and consecrated persons. But then, of course, the inability to conceive of abstinence at all is also what fuels all the furor over priestly celibacy...


[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/11/2010 19:03]
Amministra Discussione: | Chiudi | Sposta | Cancella | Modifica | Notifica email Pagina precedente | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 » | Pagina successiva
Nuova Discussione
 | 
Rispondi
Cerca nel forum

Feed | Forum | Bacheca | Album | Utenti | Cerca | Login | Registrati | Amministra
Crea forum gratis, gestisci la tua comunità! Iscriviti a FreeForumZone
FreeForumZone [v.6.1] - Leggendo la pagina si accettano regolamento e privacy
Tutti gli orari sono GMT+01:00. Adesso sono le 10:57. Versione: Stampabile | Mobile
Copyright © 2000-2024 FFZ srl - www.freeforumzone.com