Year of Faith:
Benedict XVI deploys his 'legions'
to defy the secular spirit of the times
by Antonio Sanfrancesco
Translated from
Oct. 10, 2012
The Year of Faith, which opens tomorrow, Thursday, Oct. 11 - in St. Peter's Square, exactly 50 years ago since the start of the Second Vatican Council - is not just another event among many major events in the Pontificate of Benedict XVI but represents, in a certain sense, its heart and its distinctive mark.
In 2009, in his letter to all the bishops of the world over the controversy after he lifted the excommunication of four Lefebvrian bishops
[a controversy that seized on the pretext that one of the bishops happens to be a Holocaust-denier to blacken the Pope's entire reconciliatory gesture of canonical mercy], Benedict XVI wrote clearly:
In our days, when in vast areas of the world the faith is in danger of dying out like a flame which no longer has fuel, the overriding priority is to make God present in this world and to show men and women the way to God... The real problem at this moment of our history is that God is disappearing from the human horizon, and, with the dimming of the light which comes from God, humanity is losing its bearings, with increasingly evident destructive effects.
Strong words, stark, dramatic and clear. It is simply astounding why they did not resonate at the time as they ought to have done.
[The letter was extraordinarily and egregiously historic - nothing similar has been written by a Pope in the modern era, not in centuries perhaps - and it was very Pauline in its mixture of warning, admonition and pastoral concern, without sparing the words necessary to convey Benedict XVI's papal and personal thinking. But MSM completely failed to appreciate it for what it was because media had become too invested in the campaign to denigrate the Vatican completely for 1) 'yet another communications snafu', primarily, and 2) for even thinking of reconciling with the traditionalists, which was equated to Benedict XVI 'turning his back on Vatican II', a theme the Pope's detractors continue to hammer on, even if acceptance of Vatican II has been the sticking point with the Lefebvrians, and even if practically everything Benedict has said and done since he became Pope is almost always referred to Vatican-II !]
The world has
rightly been occupied with Vatileaks
[wrongly, I would say, because the MSM and commentators have looked at it from the single lens of "Gotcha!" politics, to the point of lionizing. almost canonizing, the traitor Gabriele and his laughing-his-way-to-the-bank accomplice Gianluigi Nuzzi, as well as the not-so-peripheral figure of Mons. Carlo Vigano, completely abdicating their (the media's) responsibility to critically examine their freshly-haloed heroes' words and actions, and the concrete circumstances, to find substantiation of their scattershot and blanket allegations made by these bozos], with treasonous valets, various scandals
[NAME ONE!], curial bureaucrats and the Church hierarchy.
But these are all just persons and means - highly imperfect, of course, and always reformable - in the service of the one true objective of the Church and the Vicar of Christ: to announce the Gospel, the Word of God, as something that is not an illusion but a truth upon which it is reasonable and rational to base one's life.
One might say that the objective need not be spelled out for believers and for the clergy. On the contrary. In the chaotic years that followed Vatican II, disputes - often harsh - have persisted over 'reorganizing the Church and the Vatican', the role of the Pope, the role of laymen and women, priestly celibacy, ecumenism, Catholics in politics, and the supposed political activism advocated by the Gospel
[that's code for 'liberation theology', or, more unequivocally, 'Marxism masquerading in Christian robes'.].
All proper topics for discussion, certainly, but none of them goes to the essential, which is this:
Is it still possible, and how, for post-modern man to believe in the truth of the Gospel, to place your bet - as Pascal said - on that Man who 2000 years ago said he was 'the way, the truth and the life'? [To which, obviously, Vatican-II clearly said Yes, and laid down the guidelines for the what and the how of it!]
For this, the Church needs a new commitment so that Christianity may once again be the yeast that can ferment through all the sectors of today's life - from science to sport, from politics to sical commitment, from culture to the world of volunteerism.
So it is not by chance that just as, at the end of Vatican II, Paul VI had special messages for the People of God, Benedict XVI will do the same at the end of the Mass that will open the Year of Faith tomorrow.
The messages will be handed out to government authorities; to scientists, represented tomorrow by the Italian research physicist Fabiola Giannotti, who was on the Atlas team responsible for detecting the Higgs Boson (the so-called 'God particle') at the European nuclear research center; artists represented by Scottish composer Hames McMillan, Italian sculptor Arnoldo Pomodoro and film director Ermanno Olmi; outstanding women like paralympic athlete Annalisa Minetti and Jocelyne Khoueiry, founder of a Lebanese women's movement for child education; labor representatives like Luis Alberto Urzua Iribairen, one of the Chilean mine workers who were trapped underground for more than two months in 2011, but also Renato Caputol and Flor Ventura who immigrated to Italy from the Philippines 22 years ago; to represent the sick and the suffering, a Red Cross worker and someone from Unitalsi, the Italian association that helps organize pilgrimages to Lourdes for those who have serious illnesses, and even the national president of an Italian association of families whose children have been killed in road accidents.
Just some of the diverse representatives of the Christian faith as lived daily by the faithful with consistency, commitment and enthusiasm. And often, in many countries of Asia and Africa, by Christians who live their faith even at the risk of their own lives.
These are the 'legions' that Benedict XVI counts to carry on the difficult struggle against the secular spirit of the times, and through the New Evangelization, seek to establish Christians not necessarily as the majority once more in Europe, but to be yeast for society, salt of the world, even if they are numerically in the minority.
De-Christianization in the secular West is not necessarily the decline of Christianity nor of that commitment to the Gospel of Christ which mysteriously, continues to renew itself in every generation.