Under God's eye
Editorial
by Giovanni Maria Vian
Translated from
the 12/21-12/22/09 issue of
The end of the secular year - and for Christians the celebration of the Nativity of Christ - is an occasion for reflection and balance.
For Benedict XVI, too, who by tradition addressed his closest co-workers (cardinals, members of the Roman Curia, pontifical representatives), reading the year in a light that may be surprising but which is the only true one, that is, 'under God's eye', offering his view of these past 12 months to those who wish to listen.
The Pope chose his three foreign trips of the year - to Africa, the Holy Land, and the heart of Europe - to develop a reflection on the human being who, whether he is aware of it or not, is constantly under God's eye.
Benedict XVI's concern is to bear witness to that fact - in a year that he described as largely focused on Africa, but also included a pilgrimage to the land promised to Moses and where Jesus walked the earth to inaugurate the Kingdom of God. And a visit to the Czech Republic at the heart of an eastern Europe that has been liberated and at peace for 20 years though it bears a new weight of divisions, injustices and intolerance.
As always, Benedict XVI grasps the essential without attenuating his attentive realism which is all too often lacking among politicians and those who govern.
This realism is the principal characteristic of the encyclical
Caritas in veritate, as it was of the Synodal assembly on Africa, without in any way arrogating inappropriate political competencies for the Church.
The essential for Christians is that heaven is no longer closed and that God is at hand. That is why African Catholics live the sense of sacredness daily, why they accept the primacy of the Pope as "a point of convergence for the unity of the Family of God", and why they celebrate joyous but orderly liturgies in what Benedict XVI calls the
sobria ebrietas - sober inebriation - dear to ancient mysticism, both Jewish and Christian.
Reconciliation, the Pope says, is urgent in Africa as in any other society, in the manner of what took place in Europe after the tragedy of the Second World War. And reconciliation is realized, first of all, in the Sacrament of penance, which has largely disappeared from the habits of Christians, because we have lost "the truth of confronting ourselves and God", thus placing our own humanity and capacity for peace at risk.
But one must be vigilant against evil. And that is why Benedict XVI recalled the 'overwhelming' visit he made to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, which commemorates the extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis and their ultimate intention to chase away from the world the God of Abraham and of Jesus Christ.
But the image that is most striking and which will linger about this great papal discourse is that of the 'Court of the Gentiles', as there was in the Temple of Jerusalem for pagans who wished to pray to the one God, and from which Jesus drove out the merchants who had transformed it into a 'den of thieves'.
Imitating Christ today, Benedict XVI proposed, the Church should open up a space for all peoples and individuals who only know God from afar or to whom God is unknown or extraneous - in order to help them 'make a connection to God' who keeps his eye on every human being.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/12/2009 11:47]