Caught unaware again by the page change. See preceding page for earlier items posted on 5/4/12.
A Pope who responds
to our nostalgia for the infinite
This may explain the continuing 'boom'
in attendance at the General Audiences
by Marina Corradi
Translated from
May 3, 2012
There had been 20,000 tickets issued, but Wednesday morning at St. Peter's Square, there were at least 40,000 who came to the Pope's general audience.
In addition to the many Poles who had come to Rome for the first anniversary of John Paul II's beatification, were many others - Romans as well as persons visiting Rome perhaps only briefly, or on vacation and had not really planned to go to St, Peter's. Patiently, they all had to fall in line and go through the security checks.
Forty thousand is not a small crowd - it is the population of a city like Imperia or Alghero - to gather on a weekday to listen to Benedict XVI.
The martyrdom of St. Stephen was the subject of the day's catechesis - an event that took place at the very beginnings of Christianity. An old story, or in the journalistic perspective, no story. An event that took place 2,000 years ago? Why would a crowd of 40,000 go through what they had to in order to hear about the first Christian martyr? That's so long ago for us, too remote in time.
[Actually, no one knows beforehand what the actual subject of the catechesis will be - so they come not for the specific content of the catechesis, but to listen to what the Pope has to say, about anything - which, being Pope, would always be about confirming them in the faith.]
Why then do so many people come to listen to the Pope on Wednesdays
[and at the Sunday and holiday Marian prayers]?
Perhaps it is that in the opaque oppression of a time in which everything seems in decline, on days when we seem condemned to flying low, not to hope for much, and not expect, for us nor for our children, other than limited horizons, this is precisely the time when there is a demand for another kind of word.
When a crisis restricts the hopes of men constrained within narrow spaces, a tacit expectation of another greater hope becomes widespread, often not even acknowledged interiorly.
We might have become habituated to listening every morning to how large the national debt is, the declining gross national product, and growing unemployment. We could have resigned ourselves to be more poor, and to foresee that we could be even poorer in our old age. But it is precisely in such uncertain horizons that hunger grows for a greater hope, one so great that it cannot be reduced to any index nor containable in any diagram.
Why then do people go to listen to the Pope, without really planning to do so, when around them there is the splendor of Rome on a beautiful morning in May? Perhaps, they are there as if for a fresh gust of oxygen after stifling in a closed room - and they find themselves in the open, literally, and can breathe in the pure air deeply.
Because everything may decay and be eroded by crisis, but men, at least those who do not forget who they are, have a radical need for a wide and good horizon
So, if all that awaits us could only be described by the declining trends of an aging population and per capita income, then there is truly reason to be sad.
Yet we need another word - we want to hear that everything we wish to see of hope and wonder in the eyes of our children is not an illusion. And that truly there is eternity, that a love that lasts forever exists. How great is this love? We cannot say it with words,
And it is in this imperceptible silent expectation that on a Wednesday, the crowd at St. Peter's is twice as large as those who had requested tickets. And that many came without planning to do so in order to listen to the gentle but firm and sure voice of Benedict XVI.
Who spoke to them of St. Stephen, first of the martyrs. Stephen, who in his last moments said: "Behold, I see the heavens open" - the open heaven for which a nostalgia is inscribed in our hearts as though only in its spaces could our destiny play itself out freely. And in whose name, but that of Christ, is such a daring hope possible?
So one morning, one goes to listen to the Pope. To hear him say that this daring - rejected, often mocked - is reasonable, to feel that we are bearing witness to a God who is not unknown, who, on the contrary, knows each of us, one by one.
"With the trust and abandon of children who address themselves to a Father who loves them infinitely" was the last statement of Benedict XVI in his catechesis last Wednesday.
And to hear such assuring truths the faithful come to listen to him, many of them from far places. It is for this, and nothing less.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/05/2012 17:55]