BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Friday, February 8, Fouth Week in Ordinary Time

Photos on extreme right: Poster for TV movie shown on RAI-TV in 2011, by the producers of the Augustine miniseries; and an English biography of Bakhita.
ST JOSEPHINE BAKHITA (b Sudan ca 1869, d Italy 1947), Former slave, Canossian nun
Our saint of the day has the distinction that her biography was cited in a papal encyclical. Here is what Benedict XVI said of her in Spe salvi: "She was born around 1869 — she herself did not know the precise date — in Darfur in Sudan. At the age of nine, she was kidnapped by slave-traders, beaten till she bled, and sold five times in the slave-markets of Sudan. Eventually she found herself working as a slave for the mother and the wife of a general, and there she was flogged every day till she bled; as a result of this she bore 144 scars throughout her life. Finally, in 1882, she was bought by an Italian merchant for the Italian consul Callisto Legnani, who returned to Italy as the Mahdists advanced. Here, after the terrifying 'masters' who had owned her up to that point, Bakhita came to know a totally different kind of 'master' — in Venetian dialect, which she was now learning, she used the name paron for the living God, the God of Jesus Christ. Up to that time she had known only masters who despised and maltreated her, or at best considered her a useful slave.

"Now, however, she heard that there is a paron above all masters, the Lord of all lords, and that this Lord is good, goodness in person. She came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created her — that he actually loved her. She too was loved, and by none other than the supreme Paron, before whom all other masters are themselves no more than lowly servants. She was known and loved and she was awaited. What is more, this master had himself accepted the destiny of being flogged and now he was waiting for her 'at the Father's right hand'.

"Now she had hope — no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope: “I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me —I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.” Through the knowledge of this hope she was 'redeemed', no longer a slave, but a free child of God. She understood what Paul meant when he reminded the Ephesians that previously they were without hope and without God in the world —without hope because without God.

"Hence, when she was about to be taken back to Sudan, Bakhita refused; she did not wish to be separated again from her Paron. On 9 January 1890, she was baptized and confirmed and received her first Holy Communion from the hands of the Patriarch of Venice. On 8 December 1896, in Verona, she took her vows in the Congregation of the Canossian Sisters and from that time onwards, besides her work in the sacristy and in the porter's lodge at the convent, she made several journeys round Italy in order to promote the missions: the liberation that she had received through her encounter with the God of Jesus Christ, she felt she had to extend, it had to be handed on to others, to the greatest possible number of people. The hope born in her which had 'redeemed' her she could not keep to herself; this hope had to reach many, to reach everybody." She died in 1947, and steps for her beatification began in 1959. She was canonized in 2000.
Readings for today's Mass: www.usccb.org/bible/readings/020813.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

The Holy Father met with

- Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk, Archbishop of Utrecht (Netherlands)

- Ten Italian bishops of the Lazio region on ad limina visit

- Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Dean of the College of Cardinals

This evening, the Pope will make his traditional visit to Rome's Major Seminary for a lectio divina
to the seminarians from the Diocese's four seminaries.




R.I.P. Cardinal Giovanni Cheli, 94
The Vatican released the text of the Pope's telegram of condolence on the death of Cardinal Giovanni Cheli,
emeritus president of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care pf Migrants and Itinerant Workers. He was 94.
His funeral Mass will be held in St. Peter's Basilica tomorrow at 5 PM, with Cardinal Angelo Sodano
as principal celebrant. The Pope's telegram was sent to the Bishop of Asti, where Cheli had begun his
priestly career.

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Most Reverend Excellency
MONS. FRANCESCO RAVINALE
Bishop of Asti

I learned with sadness the news of the passing away of the venerated Cardinal Giovanni Cheli and I wish to express my deep condolence to your diocesan community which counts him among its most illustrious sons, as well as to his family and all those who knew and esteemed him.

I recall with gratitude the valuable and diligent collaboration he lent for so many decades to the Apostolic See in various Nunciatures, in the Secretariat of State, then as observer of the Holy See at the United Nations, and finally as president of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant Workers.

He leaves the testimony of a life spent in consistent and generous adherence to his vocation a a priest who was always solicitous of the needs of the faithful, but especially for the Christian formation of young people.

I raise fervent prayers that the Lord may welcome in joy and eternal peace this zealous Pastor who was ever faithful to the Gospel and the Church. I send a comforting Apostolic Blessing to Your Excellency, to all your priests, and all those who mourn his passing.

BENEDICTUS PP. XVI

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Cardinal Cheli was considered one of the great postwar Vatican diplomats and an expert about eastern Europe in the Communist era. He served as the Vatican's permanent observer to the United Nations from 1973 to 1986, when he was named by John Paul II to head the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Itinerants, a post he held till his retirement in 1998 at age 80. Surprisingly it was not until 1998, a few months before he turned 80, that he was named a cardinal. Later, he became an outspoken critic of the age limit for cardinal electors, as well as a critic of Benedict XVI for failing to use 'more diplomats' in the Curia.






Two other fresh 'controversies' I have not posted about involve two persons closely associated with Benedict XVI - one as a personal friend of long standing, the other as a member of the Curia and president of the institute that is publishing his Collected Writings before he became Pope. In both cases, I will wait till there is a clear resolution that also indicates the Pope's thinking on these two unrelated issues.

- The first is Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne, who expressed support for the use of a 'morning after' pill for rape victims, based on his understanding that such a pill can prevent the fertilization of an egg by sperm and therefore acts before new life has been created. Some Catholic doctors now point out that these pills also prevent nidation (attachment of the embryo to the lining of the uterus) and are therefore directly contraceptive.

[The objective problem with Cardinal Meisner's position is that there is no way of telling when fertilization occurs after sperm reaches the woman's fallopian tube, where the process takes place. Theoretically, sperm can survive as long as 72 hours in the tube, but an egg is fertilizable only for 24 hours after it is ovulated, which provides a window of at least 24 hours for fertilization to take place. Assuming that the rape occurred during a woman's fertile days (when she is likely to ovulate), fertilization could theoretically occur before the rape victim gets the morning-after pill, in which case it would act as a contraceptive. Of course, if the rape occurs well outside the victim's ovulatory period, then there would be no egg for the sperm to fertilize, and she would not need any pill at all. These physiological facts apply, of course, regardless of whether the sexual act was rape or consensual.]

- The second is Mons. Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who has apparently contradicted both Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone and the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima, Peru, conservative Cardinal Luis Cipriani, in the matter of disciplining the 'Catholic University of Peru', which Cardinal Bertone last year directed to drop 'Catholic' from its name but has been ignored, and which Cardinal Cipriani, as ex officio president of the University's Executive Board, prohibited from teaching Catholic theology. Mueller has apparently written the university that, for the moment and until further instructions, it can go on teaching Catholic theology.

There has been no reaction from anyone in the Vatican to the above news reports.

- John Allen has written a comparison of how the Vatican has reacted in the case of Cardinal Schoenborn's accusation against Cardinal Sodano in 2010 of blocking Cardinal Ratzinger from ordering a canonical trial of Schoenborn's predecessor in Vienna for committing sexual abuses against seminarians, and the more recent case of Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez publicly censuring his predecessor, Cardinal Mahony, for decades of covering up for erring priests.
http://ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/gomez-mahony-and-sodano-rule
Although he says his purpose is to point out the obvious differences in the two cases, his conclusion is, in effect, that Pope Benedict XVI is acting arbitrarily in the matter of censuring or sanctioning cardinals, with the cynical and flippant formulation of what he calls 'the Sodano rule': "Only the pope can judge a cardinal -- unless there are good reasons to let somebody else do it."

- Yesterday, Fr. Federico Lombardi denied news reports from Bulgaria saying Pope Benedict XVI would be visiting that country in 2014. He said that while the Pope gets invitations to visit all the time, a foreign trip is only arranged, provided the Pope agrees and his schedule allows it, after both the national bishops' conference and the government of the host country formally send an invitation.

Apropos, for the first time since 2006, the Vatican has not announced any foreign trips for the Pope for the current year, other than that for WYD in Rio de Janeiro in July, first announced in 2011 after WYD in Madrid. It probably means that, barring any significant occasion that may warrant a papal trip abroad, he will not be making any other foreign trip this year.

The possibility has been raised that he may visit a Spanish-speaking country in Latin America before proceeding to Rio, but there have been no concrete indications for this so far. He turns 86 in April. The long trans-Atlantic trip to Rio alone will require him to have at least 24 hours of rest and readjustment of his daily biorhythm before he begins his official schedule (as he did when he travelled to Mexico last year; in Australia, where the time difference from Rome is 18 hours, he needed 3 days). Do his doctors - and he himself - think that he can withstand a visit to another country (where he would have to spend the period of readjustment) before the actual visit, and then proceed to Brazil and the tough schedule of a WYD?