Saturday, August 24, 20th Week in Ordinary Time
Fifth from right: Bartholomew holding his skin, from Michelangelo's Last Judgment.
ST. BARTHOLOMEW (b Judea, d Armenia, 1st cent), Apostle and Martyr
Benedict XVI dedicated his catechesis on Oct. 4, 2006,
www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2006/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20061004...
to this apostle about whom little is known for certain. He is mentioned in all four Gospels, always associated with Philip, and once in the Acts, but as Bartholomew, he was never the center of any Gospel episode. It has become widely accepted however that he was likely the man called Nathanael who became a disciple after an encounter when Jesus told him, "Before Philip called you, I saw you under the fig tree", a reference known only to Nathanael, who then professed "Rabbi, you are the Son of God, the King of Israel!" In John's Gospel, Nathanael is quoted to have told Philip "Can anything good come from Nazareth", after Philip tells him he has found "the man of whom Moses and the prophets wrote" in Jesus of Nazareth. The early historian Eusebius claimed that after the Ascension, Bartholomew brought the Gospel eastward up to India. A stronger tradition holds that he and Jude Thaddeus evangelized Armenia (they are the patron saints of the Armenian Apostolic Church), where Bartholomew converted the king, and was then flayed alive and crucified head downward by the king's brother. A famous monastery in Armenia was built in the 13th century on what was said to be the site of Bartholomew's martyrdom. Eventually, his remains were brought to Rome, where he is venerated in the church named for him on Tiberina island on the Tiber river. The legend of his martyrdom, particularly the aspect of having been skinned alive, was a favorite subject of artists in the past. Michelangelo depicts him in the Last Judgment, holding out his skin, on which the artist painted his own face.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/082413.cfm
AT THE VATICAN TODAY
Pope Francis met with the Rev. Fr. Jose Maria Di Paola.
Since the bulletin provided no information on the guest, I googled his name - and here is what I came up with - a CNS article from mid-March, five days after Cardinal Bergoglio became Pope Francis.
In Buenos Aires slum, the Church
counters drugs and evangelicals:
Interview with Father Di Paola
By David Agren
Catholic News Service
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina, March 18, 2013(CNS) -- Mass at the Christ the Worker Parish is celebrated on a cement soccer pitch. There, parishioners sit on portable pews and relax on the embankment of an overpass; shipping containers soar over the fence behind the altar.
The service starts as the sun sets, with children and local youth beating drums and dancers dressed in blue and white costumes -- similar to the national patroness, Our Lady of Lujan -- circling the pitch.
The Mass unfolds like any other: readings, homily, consecration, handshakes and Communion.
The chapel near the soccer pitch is part church, part community center and serves Villa 31, one of the more than 500 shanties surrounding the Argentine capital, places the authorities are often absent and drug dealing is rife. Christ the Worker Parish has six chapels in Villa 31 and adjacent areas.
It's an example of the outreach to outcasts and the poor employed by Pope Francis during his 15 years as archbishop of Buenos Aires, where he wanted the church brought closer to the people and sent seminarians and priests to serve them.
"The outskirts of Buenos Aires" -- where many "villas de emergencia," or shanties, are located -- "were the center for him, not the downtown," said Father Jose Maria di Paola, or, "Padre Pepe," perhaps the best-known of the priests who live and work in the villas.
"The orientation of the archdiocese has been directed toward the most needy," Father di Paola said, adding that the church at times has provided more social assistance in the villas than the state has provided.
The villas were such a priority for Pope Francis that he established chapels and missions, providing education, serving hot meals and organizing youth groups and drug rehabilitation programs.
He also denounced drug use, drug decriminalization and drug dealing -- especially paco, a form of crack cocaine processed with sulfuric acid and kerosene and sold in the villas. In 2009, the pope's denouncements forced Father di Paola, 50, to temporarily leave the villas after he received death threats.
None of that slowed down the mission work, which Father di Paola suspected has been successful because priests actually live and work in the villas and become part of the community. Their numbers grew under Pope Francis, going from "eight or nine" priests to more than 20, he said.
"This has stopped evangelicals" from moving in, added Father di Paolo, 50, who looks like a man in late 30s with his shaggy hair, thin beard and black tennis shoes.
It also gives a sense of community to those originally from other places: Father di Paolo said priests often incorporate customs that Catholics bring from the neighboring countries into their celebrations.
Pope Francis frequently visited the villas, places polite society members, and some taxi drivers, avoid. He arrived on the bus or collective transport, walked the rutted roads and baptized and confirmed the children of the residents -- many of whom worked as bricklayers and maids or came from countries such as Bolivia, Peru and Paraguay in search of better economic opportunities.
"He used to come to the villas, sip mate (an infusion) and visit with the people," Father di Paola said.
"People can show you photos of him in their house," he added. "Humble people can't believe that he came to my 'villa,' my barrio, and now he's pope."
Maria Laura, 20, said, "It's pretty strange to say that I was confirmed by the pope."
She participates with a youth group at Christ the Worker and said her group tried to help "a lot of kids getting into drugs."
The youth groups also provide a path for young men to enter the seminary, although many seminarians and priests not from the villas are sent to serve them.
Father Martin Carrozza, 36, grew up near the archdiocesan seminary, but was asked by Pope Francis to serve the villas.
"He said, 'If you don't like it, I (will) remove you from them," recalled Father Carrozza, vicar at Christ the Worker.
Father Carrozza said he would not consider leaving the community, explaining: "The people made me feel at home. They really opened their hearts."
With his former archbishop now in the Vatican, Father di Paolo expects pastors like him to be priority in the papacy of Pope Francis.
"Any priest working with the poor will have a pastor close by," he said.
********
Today the Vatican also announced that Pope Francis has named Mons. Gabriele Sciacca, till now Secretary of the Vatican Governatorate, to be the adjunct secretary of the Apostolic Seghnatura (the Church's canonical Supreme Court).
One year ago...
No events announced for Benedict XVI, who was preparing for his apostolic visit to Lebanon on September 14-16. Vatican officials earlier said that despite security concerns because of the civil war in neighboring Syria, there were no plans to cancel the Holy Father's trip. It was to be his last foreign travel as Pope.
And there was this article recalling JosephRatzinger's initial involvement in Vatican II:
Joseph Ratzinger on Vatican-II
in the summer before it began
by Gianni Valente
Translated from the Italian service of
August 24, 2012
Half a century ago, the future Pope Benedict XVI was 'under pressure' in his role as a theological expert in the forthcoming Second Vatican Ecumenical Council.
In the quiet summers of Castel Gandolfo, Benedict XVI has concluded the draft of his third and last volume on the life of Jesus and it is said he is also drafting his fourth encyclical.
Even 50 years ago, around this time, the then 35-year-old Joseph Ratzinger, who was at that time a professor of dogmatic theology at the University of Bonn - was occupied with books to study, papers to correct, and texts to contemplate and to write.
Adding to his workload were requests coming from the Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Joseph Frings, who had asked him to be his theological consultant for the Council and wished to avail of his help even during the final exchanges with the Vatican during the preparatory phase for the Council.
Frings was a member of the Council's central preparatory committee, and even then, he stood out for his interventions and his initiatives as a future playmaker in the Council.
Thanks to Frings, Ratzinger had access, in the spring of 1962, to the so-called 'schema', the drafts of documents prepared by the various preparatory committees on various themes to be discussed and approved by the Council.
Between May and September, as documented in the authoritative study by historians Norbert Trippen and the Jesuit Jared Wicks, Ratzinger analyzed for Frings a good part of the materials produced by the drafting committees, expressing opinions about them which were lucid, clearcut and often surprising.
For example, in a letter written in May 1962 to Fr. Hubert Luthe, Frings's secretary, who had been Ratzinger's fellow student at the theological faculty of Munich - Ratzinger was most enthusiastic about the drafts produced by the Secretariat for Christian Unity, which was led by Cardinal Augustin Bea, which had been increasingly emerging as the dialectical opposite of the Theological Commission, then presided by the Secretary of the Holy Office
[predecessor organism pf the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani.
Among the schema signed by Bea were the first drafts of what would become the conciliar decrees on ecumenism and religious freedom.
"If the Council could be oriented to the point of adopting these texts," wrote Ratzinger to Frings's secretary in May 1962, "it will have been worthwhile for that alone, and true progress would be achieved. This is truly language that serves our time, that can be understood by all men of good will".
At the end of June, still at the request of Frings - who by that time had become the spokesman for the growing dissatisfaction by ample sectors of the European episcopates at the way the preparatory phase of the Council was going - Ratzinger offered a draft of an Apostolic Constitution which would synthesize and define with didactic clarity the objectives of Vatican II before it began: three typewritten pages in Latin, in which the young Bavarian theologian presented a realistic observation of the historical circumstances during which Vatican II had been convoked ("The divine light seems obscured, and Our Lord seems to be sleeping in the middle of today's storms and buffeting waves"), and concludes by citing the model of announcing the Gospel laid down by St. Paul, who, in order to give witness to Jesus Christ, "became everything to everyone" (1 Cor 9,22).
The critical discernment of Ratzinger with regard to the preparatory drafts for Council documents reached its peak in September 1962. Less than a month from the opening of the Council, Ratzinger applied it directly to the first body of seven schema that had been proposed in definitive form by the preparatory commissions, largely under the dominant influence of the doctrinal organisms in the Roman Curia.
In a text prepared by Ratzinger in mid-September - and promptly forwarded by Cardinal Frings without changes and under his signature to Secretary of State Amleto Cicognani - positive evaluations were given only to the schema on liturgical reform and on unity with the Oriental churches.
According to Ratzinger, only these texts "correspond very well to the purpose of the Council as stated by the Roman Pontiff". If the intention is "the renewal of Christian life and adaptation of the regimen of the Church to the needs of today's world", he wrote, it is methodologically important to avoid having the Council bogged down from the start "in complicated questions raised by theologians which people in our time cannot grasp and which can only end in confusing them".
All the other schema - especially those elaborated by the preparatory theological commission presided by Cardinal Ottaviani - were considered by Ratzinger to be 'too scholastic'. In particular, he was very critical of the draft on preserving the purity of the
depositum fidei [the deposit of faith] - "It is so deficient that it cannot be presented to the Council int his form".
For the schema dedicated to the 'sources' of divine Revelation, Ratzinger proposed substantial changes in structure and content.
[This would become the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei verbum, which was the Vatican II document most associated with the work of theological expert Joseph Ratzinger, as Gaudium et spes was associated with the work of Archbishop Karol Wojtyla of Cracow.]
Ratzinger criticized the texts on Christian morality, celibacy, marriage and the family, arguing against their practical pastoral application. He also said they tended "to lose the reader in an excess of words".
He stressed that
the Conciliar texts "should give answers to the most urgent questions for the faithful, and should do this, as much as possible, not by judging or condemning, but using a maternal language, with an ample presentation of the treasures of the faith and her comforts".
From the suggestions he made to Cardinal Frings, starting from the preparatory phase, one sees that Joseph Ratzinger did not come to Vatican II unprepared. The young Bavarian professor appeared very much aware of what was at stake in this ecclesial event even before it began.
In his collaboration with Frings, Ratzinger already availed of a flexible but well-defined armamentarium of proposals and reflections which would give depth to his intense participation in the conciliar event.
