BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Wednesday, March 20, Fifth Week of Lent

Left photo: Death of St. Salvador, 16th century painting.
ST. SALVADOR DE HORTA (b Spain 1520, d Sicily 1567), Lay Franciscan
Yet another in the line of sainted Franciscan laymen who, while serving as porter, cook and official beggar for his community,
revealed healing powers and was venerated in his day. Son of a peasant family, he worked as a shepherd and shoemaker before
joining the lay Franciscans at age 21. Carrying out his humble work, it was found he could heal by the Sign of the Cross. His fame
was such that 2,000 people came to see him every week and tore at his habit to get a relic. The relentless attention eventually
forced his community to transfer him to Cagliari in Sicily where he died two years later. Many miracles continued to happen
at his tomb. When he was exhumed 23 years after his death for his beatification, the body was found incorrupt. However,
he was not canonized until 1938.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/032013.cfm

AT THE VATICAN TODAY

The Holy Father Francis met this morning at the Pope's Private Library in the Apostolic Palace with
- H.E. Madame Dilma Rousseff, President of Brazil, and her delegation

- His Holiness, Bartholomew I, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople

- Metropolitan Hilarion, representing the Patriarchate of Moscow.

Later, at the Sala Clementina, he met with the Fraternal Delegates to his inauguration from the other Christian
Churches and ecclesial communities, and internationalecumenical organizations, as well as representatives
of non-Christian faiths. Address in Italian.

Afterwards, he met separately with Claudio Epelman, from the Latin American Jewish Congress.

Here is Vatican Radio's translation of the Pope's discourse to the ecumenical and interfaith gathering:

---

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

First of all, heartfelt thanks for what my Brother Andrew told us. Thank you so much! Thank you so much! ['Brother Andrew' is the Ecumenical Patriach Bartholomew I of Constantinople who delivered the opening tribute in behalf of all the fraternal delegates.]

It is a source of particular joy to meet you today, delegates of the Orthodox Churches, the Oriental Orthodox Churches and Ecclesial Communities of the West. Thank you for wanting to take part in the celebration that marked the beginning of my ministry as Bishop of Rome and Successor of Peter.

Yesterday morning, during the Mass, through you, I recognized the communities you represent. In this manifestation of faith, I had the feeling of taking part in an even more urgent fashion the prayer for the unity of all believers in Christ, and together to see somehow prefigured the full realization of full unity which depends on God’s plan and on our own loyal collaboration.

I begin my Apostolic Ministry in this year during which my venerable Predecessor, Benedict XVI, with true inspiration, proclaimed the Year of Faith for the Catholic Church. With this initiative, that I wish to continue and which I hope will be an inspiration for every one’s journey of faith, he wished to mark the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council, thus proposing a sort of pilgrimage towards what for every Christian represents the essential: the personal and transforming relationship with Jesus Christ, Son of God, who died and rose for our salvation. This effort to proclaim this eternal treasure of faith to the people of our time, lies at the heart of the Council's message.

Together with you I cannot forget how much the council has meaning for the ecumenical journey. I like to remember the words that Blessed John XXIII, of whom we will soon mark 50 years since his death, when he gave his memorable inauguration speech: "The Catholic Church therefore considers it her duty to work actively so that there may be fulfilled the great mystery of that unity, which Christ Jesus invoked with fervent prayer from His heavenly Father on the eve of His sacrifice. She rejoices in peace, knowing well that she is intimately associated with that prayer ".

Yes, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, let us all be intimately united to our Saviour's prayer at the Last Supper, to his invocation: ut unum sint. We call merciful Father to be able to fully live the faith that we have received as a gift on the day of our Baptism, and to be able to it free, joyful and courageous testimony. The more we are faithful to his will, in thoughts, in words and in deeds, the more we will truly and substantially walk towards unity.

For my part, I wish to assure, in the wake of my predecessors, the firm wish to continue on the path of ecumenical dialogue, and I thank you, the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity, for the help it continues to offer in my name, for this noble cause.

I ask you, dear brothers and sisters, to bring my cordial greetings to the Churches and Christian communities who are represented here. And I ask you for a special prayer for me so that I can be a pastor according to the heart of Christ.

And now I turn to you, distinguished representatives of the Jewish people, to whom we are bound by a very special spiritual bond, from the moment that, as the Second Vatican Council said, "the Church of Christ acknowledges that according to God’s saving design, the beginnings of her faith and her election are found already among the Patriarchs, Moses and the prophets".(Decree Nostra Aetate, 4).

I thank you for your presence and trust that with the help of the Almighty, we can continue that fruitful fraternal dialogue that the Council wished for. And that it has actually achieved, bringing many fruits, especially during the last decades .

I greet and thank cordially all of you, dear friends belonging to other religious traditions; firstly the Muslims, who worship the one living and merciful God, and call upon Him in prayer. I really appreciate your presence, and in it I see a tangible sign of the wish to grow in reciprocall trust and in cooperation for the common good of humanity.

The Catholic Church is aware of the importance of the promotion of friendship and respect between men and women of different religious traditions – this I wish to repeat this: the promotion of friendship and respect between men and women of different religious traditions – this is attested evident also in the valuable work undertaken by the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue.

The Church is equally aware of the responsibility that each of us bring towards our world, and to the whole of creation, that we must love and protect. And we can do a lot for the good of the less fortunate, for those who are weak and suffering, to promote justice, to promote reconciliation, to build peace.

But above all, we must keep alive in our world the thirst for the absolute, and must not allow the vision of the human person with a single dimension to prevail, according to which man is reduced to what he produces and to what he consumes: this is one most dangerous threats of our times.

We know how much violence has been provoked in recent history by the attempt to eliminate God and the divine from the horizon of humanity, and we feel the need to witness in our societies the original openness to transcendence that is inherent in the human heart.

In this we feel the closeness also of those men and women who, while not belonging to any religious tradition, feel, however the need to search for the truth, the goodness and the beauty of God, and who are our precious allies in efforts to defend the dignity of man, in the building of a peaceful coexistence between peoples and in the careful protection of creation.

Dear friends, thank you for your presence. To all, I offer my cordial and fraternal greetings.

---

Late yesterday, the Vatican Press Office released this short but significantg bulletin that I failed to post in a timely manner:

Yesterday, Francis called Benedict XVI
to extend best wishes on his name day
Translated from

March 19, 2013

---

This afternoon, March 19, shortly after 5 pm, Pope Francis called emeritus Pope Benedict XVI to extend his heartfelt best wishes on the latter's name day, the Feast of St. Joseph, and to express once more his gratitude and that of the Church for Benedict XVI's service.

The conversation was ample and cordial. The emeritus Pope said he had followed the events of the day with 'intense participation', especially the Eucharistic celebration at which Francis was formally installed in the Petrine ministry. He assured his successor of his continuing closeness in prayer.

---

Pope Francis has set a beautiful example of utmost consideration for Benedict XVI, from the time he first presented himself to the world as Pope. He called him right after he was elected, has mentioned him in his early discourses and quoted from him, and there is the prospect of visiting him and lunching together in Castel Gandolfo on Saturday. Unfortunately, of course, no one in the media seems to be paying attention, much less follow his lead... Nor any of the cardinal electors, to my knowledge. As if they would not touch him with a 10-foot pole at all, while falling all over each other to beat their breasts at how proud they are to have made the perfect choice. I'm so bitter I think I can imagine some of them saying they should have voted for him in 2005 and made him Pope then - and how much better the Church would be by now!

We must be grateful to the handful of persons who have not been 'ashamed' to buck the tsunami of universal praise for the new Pope - who cannot be blamed, of course, for the media's generally indecent behavior, though he praised them copiously and told them he loved them at the lovefest in Aula Paolo VI last Saturday - and speak up for Benedict, in an effort to 'rescue' him for now from the oblivion to which the media and their cohorts in the Catholic and secular world have consigned him with the most gleeful Schadenfreude. It's as if these despicable types were only waiting for the opportunity not just to kick him around, but to 'stomp him down' and blot him out of the public consciousness, unless it serves their purpose to hold him up as the negative image of everything that Pope Francis is.

One year ago today...
The Press Office released a Summary of the findings of the Apostolic Visitation in Ireland, on the results of the Visitations to four Archdioceses, Religious Institutes and Irish Seminaries held in 2010-2011, to look into why sexual crimes against minors were committed by priests and religious in these institutions. The report was approved by the Offices which conducted the Visitation and contains some further observations from the Holy See, in addition to those that the individual Dicasteries communicated to the leaders of the respective Archdioceses or Institutes. It comes on the second anniversary of Benedict XVI's historic pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland. {It is incumbent to re-post that historic and very Pauline letter, and I will do so...]



Oh, look, someone actually wrote a book
last year about Benedict's humility -
and long before his renunciation!

Of the things I could choose to re-post today, I found this one very serendipitous, indeed... How blessedly apropos!


What a sweet idea and great tribute it is for someone to have written a book about Benedict XVI's humility! Here's one by Andrea Monda, who has studied both law (at La Sapienza) and religious sciences (at the Pontifical Gregorian U). He writes articles about the Church for various Italian publications and has written books on Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.... Here's a translation of the blurb from the book, published by Lindau in Italy - it is coming out on March 31 (2012).

---

'Blessed humility:
The simple virtues
of Joseph Ratzinger'

Tuesday, April 19, 2005, 5:44 p.m. Piazza San Pietro, navel of the world. The smoke is white from the Sistine chapel. It is here that Joseph Ratzinger began his new life as Vicar of Christ on earth.

And here, too, starts our journey to 'discover' Benedict XVI, 'simple, humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord', as he described himself that day.

But these first words - which are impressed in the minds of all those who heard him - Were they borne of the emotion of the moment? Do they just represent a rhetorical formulation? Or do they say something more profound about the man who had just been called to be the Successor of Peter?

Choosing the last hypothesis, Andrea Monda enters a 'luminous forest' of discretion, renunciation, availability, dedication, ease, sacrifice, self-irony, humor and joy - all precious pieces with which to construct the profile of the Professor-Pope through analysis of a personal style which perhaps is one of the most important lessons that he gives.

In particular, the centerpiece of all is humility - that most mysterious of virtues - and its sweetest fruit, humor. Two words that have a common etymological root in the word humus, earth.

Someone who is 'down to earth', who does not boast, is both humble and endowed with good humor, because he is aware that the world is much greater than his own 'I', and that beyond this world, there is something even much greater.

Humility and good humor are the secret to good living, especially for Catholics, and they are two traits which most characterize the man Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, as well as his work.

At the end of an analysis of the Pope's gestures and deeds, his words, and the thinking of the authors who are dear to him (from St. Augustine to Hans Urs von Balthasar, C.S. Lewis to G.K. Chesterton), it now becomes possible to see the present Pope in a light different from that cast by the media, and it will be easier to give him that which, with candid courage, he once asked for in the first volume of JESUS OF NAZARETH: "that initial goodwill without which there can be no understanding".

---

I still wish someone somewhere would keep track in public of all the books that have been written about Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI since he became Pope, of which there ought to be a record number by now, in his first seven years as Pope. I am sure the faithful Birgit Wansing is keeping track, as is the Schuelerkreis for their ongoing documentation, but I wish they would publish their updated list at least once a year.

I looked up the bibliography on books about John Paul II in George Weigel's biography of him - though the list is apparently limited only to those written in English, or in Polish translated to English (strange not to find anything in Italian)- and note that apart from one biography published in 1978 (he became Pope in October 1978) and another 8 published in 1979 (the first full year of his Pontificate), the next wave of books did not come out till 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the world came to recognize the role the Pope had played, along with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, in bringing down the Communist regimes of Europe.

In pointing this out, I have no intention other than to call attention to facts as they were - against the idealized picture that the media has held forth since the Blessed Pope's death that all 26 years of his Pontificate were an uninterrupted age of universal hosannas and instant recognition of his greatness and saintliness. On the other hand, of course, I am not aware that any books were written specifically to attack him at all, as there have been about Benedict XVI, starting with malicious 'biographies' such as those by John Allen (Version I - written in 2000, then revised to be more positive when it was re-published in 2005 after the Conclave) and the more opportunistic one by David Gibson in 2005. to quite a few anti-Benedict books in Italian, including Marco Politi's book-length diss. Somehow, John Paul II did not polarize people to the extent that those on the negative extreme were driven in any way to vent their spleen in public as the media have done about Benedict XVI.