16 March 2013

Tribute

"When we walk without the cross…"

"...we are worldly. We are bishops, priests, cardinals, popes, but not disciples of the Lord." The first homily of Pope Francis, Thursday, March 14, in the Sistine Chapel with the cardinals who elected him (via)

by Jorge Mario Bergoglio

In these three readings I see that there is something in common: it is movement. In the first reading, movement in walking; in the second reading, movement in the building up of the Church; in the third, in the Gospel, movement in confession.

To walk, to build up, to confess.

To walk. “House of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.” This is the first thing that God said to Abraham: Walk in my presence and be without reproach. To walk: our life is a journey and when we stop it is no good. To walk always, in the presence of the Lord, in the light of the Lord, seeking to live with that irreproachability which God asked of Abraham, in his promise.

To build up. To build up the Church. Stones are spoken of: the stones have substance; but living stones, stones anointed by the Holy Spirit. To build up the Church, the bride of Christ, on that cornerstone which is the Lord himself. This is another movement of our lives: to build up.

Third, to confess. We can walk as much as we wish, we can build many things, but if we do not confess Jesus Christ, it is no good. We will become a humanitarian NGO, but not the Church, bride of the Lord.

When one does not walk, one halts. When one does not build on stone what happens? That happens which happens to children on the beach when they make sand castles, it all comes down, it is without substance. When one does not confess Jesus Christ, I am reminded of the expression of Léon Bloy: "He who does not pray to the Lord prays to the devil.” When one does not confess Jesus Christ, one confesses the worldliness of the devil, the worldliness of the demon.

To walk, to build/construct, to confess. But the matter is not so easy, because in walking, in building, in confessing, at times there are shocks, there are movements that are not properly movements of the journey: they are movements that set us back.

This Gospel continues with a special situation. The same Peter who has confessed Jesus Christ says to him: You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. I will follow you, but let us not speak of the cross. This has nothing to do with it. I will follow you with other possibilities, without the cross.

When we walk without the cross, when we build without the cross and when we confess Christ without the cross, we are not disciples of the Lord: we are worldly, we are bishops, priests, cardinals, popes, but not disciples of the Lord.

I would like that everyone, after these days of grace, should have the courage, truly the courage, to walk in the presence of the Lord, with the cross of the Lord; to build up the Church upon the blood of the Lord that was shed upon the cross; and to confess the only glory: Christ crucified. And in this way the Church will move forward.

I hope for all of us that the Holy Spirit, through the prayer of the Virgin Mary, our Mother, may grant us this grace: to walk, to build up, to confess Jesus Christ crucified. So may it be.

__________

The three readings of the Mass “pro Ecclesia," on which Pope Francis commented, were taken from the book of Isaiah (2:2-5), from the first letter of Peter (2:4-9), and from the Gospel according to Matthew (16:13-19)

The pope delivered the homily in Italian, without any written text. What is reproduced here is the complete transcription of his words.

http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1350469?eng=y

The Name of Francis, the Rule of St. Ignatius, and the Example of Jonah

The new pope tells how and why he chose to go by the name of the saint of Assisi. But already he has recalled the founder of the Society of Jesus as well. And like the prophet, he wants to preach to the modern Nineveh the forgiveness of God. A revealing interview

by Sandro Magister

ROME, March 16, 2013 – For the six thousand journalists packed into the audience hall this morning, Jorge Mario Bergoglio had news.

He recounted how and why it came into his mind to select as pope the name of Francis, precisely as in the conclave the votes were falling to him:

"At the election, I had beside me the archbishop emeritus of São Paulo and also prefect emeritus of the congregation for the clergy, Cardinal Claudio Hummes: a great friend, a great friend! When the thing was becoming a bit dangerous, he comforted me. And when the votes rose to two thirds, the usual applause came, because the pope had been elected. And he embraced me, he kissed me and said: 'Do not forget the poor!' And that word entered here: the poor, the poor. Then I thought of the wars, while the scrutiny continued, until the last of the votes. And in this way the name came, in my heart: Francis of Assisi. He is for me the man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves and cares for creation; at this time we as well have with creation a relationship that is not so good, no? He is the man who gives us the spirit of peace, the poor man... Ah, how I would like a Church that is poor and for the poor!”

And he concluded:

"Afterward, some [cardinals] made various remarks. ' But you should have called yourself Adrian, because Adrian VI was the reformer, there must be reform. . . .' And another told me: 'No, no: your name should be Clement.' But why? 'Clement XV: this is how you avenge yourself against Clement XIV, who suppressed the Society of Jesus!'"

By the irony of fate, Clement XIV, the pope who in the eighteenth century closed the order of the Jesuits to which Bergoglio belongs, was a Franciscan.

*

Pope Francis, in his first days as pope, has not however neglected to recall also the founder of his order, St. Ignatius of Loyola.

On March 15, at the Mass that he celebrated early in the morning in the chapel of Domus Sanctae Martae together with a few cardinals, he improvised a brief homily.

In it he cited St. Ignatius where in the rules of discernment he advises that “in the time of desolation changes should never be made, but one should remain firm and constant in the resolutions and decisions that one made in the time of consolation.”

Otherwise - he added - if one gives in and withdraws, when the Lord again makes himself visible “one risks being found no more.”

Shortly before, during the Mass, there had been a reading from the book of Wisdom in which the wicked want to put to the test the just man “with violence and torment, to know his meekness and try his patience.” But they “do not know the mysterious secrets of God, nor do they believe in a reward for a life irreproachable.”

On the demand contained in this last word, “irreproachable,” the pope insisted strongly.

This brief homily has not been made public. But it was reported by Cristiana Caricato on ilsussidiario.net, employing the confidence of a cardinal who had celebrated Mass with the pope.

*

But in addition to Francis of Assisi and St. Ignatius, in the “heaven” of Jorge Maria Bergoglio there also shines the prophet Jonah.

In a 2007 interview with the international magazine “30 Days,” highly revealing on how he sees his mission as pastor of the Church, the then-archbishop of Buenos Aires suddenly asked the interviewer, Stefania Falasca:

"Do you know the biblical episode of the prophet Jonah?".

"I don’t remember it. Tell us", the interviewer replied.

And Bergoglio:

"Jonah had everything clear. He had clear ideas about God, very clear ideas about good and evil. On what God does and on what He wants, on who was faithful to the Covenant and who instead was outside the Covenant. He had the recipe for being a good prophet. God broke into his life like a torrent. He sent him to Nineveh. Nineveh was the symbol of all the separated, the lost, of all the peripheries of humanity. Of all those who are outside, forlorn. Jonah saw that the task set on him was only to tell all those people that the arms of God were still open, that the patience of God was there and waiting, to heal them with His forgiveness and nourish them with His tenderness. Only for that had God sent him. He sent him to Nineveh, but he instead ran off in the opposite direction, toward Tarshish".

"Running away from a difficult mission…" said the interviewer.

"No. What he was fleeing was not so much Nineveh as the boundless love of God for those people. It was that that didn’t come into his plans. God had come once… 'and I’ll see to the rest': that’s what Jonah told himself. He wanted to do things his way, he wanted to steer it all. His stubbornness shut him in his own structures of evaluation, in his pre-ordained methods, in his righteous opinions. He had fenced his soul off with the barbed wire of those certainties that instead of giving freedom with God and opening horizons of greater service to others had finished by deafening his heart. How the isolated conscience hardens the heart! Jonah no longer knew that God leads His people with the heart of a Father".

"A great many of us can identify with Jonah", the interviewer remarked.

Bergoglio: "Our certainties can become a wall, a jail that imprisons the Holy Spirit. Those who isolate their conscience from the path of the people of God don’t know the joy of the Holy Spirit that sustains hope. That is the risk run by the isolated conscience. Of those who from the closed world of their Tarshish complain about everything or, feeling their identity threatened, launch themselves into battles only in the end to be still more self-concerned and self-referential".

"What should one do?"

Bergoglio: "Look at our people not for what they should be but for what they are and see what is necessary. Without preconceptions and recipes but with generous openness. For the wounds and the frailty God have spoken. Allowing the Lord to speak… In a world that we can’t manage to interest with the words we say, only His presence that loves us, saves us, can be of interest. Apostolic fervor renews itself in order to testify to Him who has loved us from the beginning".

Last question: "For you, then, what is the worst thing that can happen in the Church?"

Bergoglio: "It is what De Lubac calls 'spiritual worldliness'. It is the greatest danger for the Church, for us, who are in the Church. 'It is worse', says De Lubac, 'more disastrous than the infamous leprosy that disfigured the dearly beloved Bride at the time of the libertine popes'. Spiritual worldliness is putting oneself at the center. It is what Jesus saw going on among the Pharisees: 'You who glorify yourselves. Who give glory to yourselves, the ones to the others'".

*

The word “worldliness” was used several times, as a danger also for “priests, bishops, cardinals, popes,” in the first homily delivered by Bergoglio after his election as pope, in the Sistine Chapel:

> "When we walk without the cross…"

But in the interview cited above there is also another passage in which the then-archbishop of Buenos Aires delineated the mission of the Church and denounced its “gnostic and self-referential” threats.

To the question about what Bergoglio would have said to the pope and the cardinals at the consistory of November 24, 2007, in which he was unable to participate, the interviewee continued as follows:

A: I would have spoken about two things of which there is need in this moment, there is more need: mercy and apostolic courage.

Q: What do they mean to you?

A: To me apostolic courage is disseminating. Disseminating the Word. Giving it to that man and to that woman for whom it was bestowed. Giving them the beauty of the Gospel, the amazement of the encounter with Jesus… and leaving it to the Holy Spirit to do the rest. It is the Lord, says the Gospel, who makes the seed sprout and bear fruit.

Q: In short, it is the Holy Spirit who performs the mission.

A: The early theologians said: the soul is a kind of sailing boat, the Holy Spirit is the wind that blows in the sail, to send it on its way, the impulses and the force of the wind are the gifts of the Spirit. Without His drive, without His grace, we don’t move forward. The Holy Spirit lets us enter the mystery of God and saves us from the danger of a gnostic Church and from the danger of a self-referential Church, leading us to mission.

Q: That means also overthrowing all your functionalist solutions, your consolidated plans and pastoral systems…

A: I didn’t say that pastoral systems are useless. On the contrary. In itself everything that leads by the paths of God is good. I have told my priests: 'Do everything you should, you know your duties as ministers, take your responsibilities and then leave the door open.' Our sociologists of religion tell us that the influence of a parish has a radius of six hundred meters. In Buenos Aires there are about two thousand meters between one parish and the next. So I then told the priests: 'If you can, rent a garage and, if you find some willing layman, let him go there! Let him be with those people a bit, do a little catechesis and even give communion if they ask him.' A parish priest said to me: 'But Father, if we do this the people then won’t come to Church.' 'But why?' I asked him: 'Do they come to Mass now?' 'No,' he answered. And so! Coming out of oneself is also coming out from the fenced garden of one’s own convictions, considered irremovable, if they risk becoming an obstacle, if they close the horizon that is also of God.

Q: This is valid also for lay people…

A: Their clericalization is a problem. The priests clericalize the laity and the laity beg us to be clericalized… It really is sinful abetment. And to think that baptism alone could suffice. I’m thinking of those Christian communities in Japan that remained without priests for more than two hundred years. When the missionaries returned they found them all baptized, all validly married for the Church and all their dead had had a Catholic funeral. The faith had remained intact through the gifts of grace that had gladdened the life of a laity who had received only baptism and had also lived their apostolic mission by virtue of baptism alone. One must not be afraid of depending only on His tenderness.

12 March 2013

Thank you

"Help each other to live and to grow in the Christian faith so as to be valiant witnesses of the Lord. Be united, but not closed. Be humble, but not fearful. Be simple, but not naive. Be thoughtful, but not complicated. Enter into dialogue with others, but be yourselves." ~ Pope Benedict XVI

via WR

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1301038.htm

Jesus put church in hands of erring humans, not angels, says cardinal

Cardinal John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan of Abuja, Nigeria, arrives for a general congregation meeting in the synod hall at the Vatican March 8. The world's cardinals are meeting for several days in advance of the conclave to elect a new pope. (CNS/Paul Haring)

By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- If Jesus had wanted a church free of scandal or problems, he would have put it in the hands of angels, not a humanity he loved, said Nigeria's newest cardinal elector.

"If you say the church needs to reform and improve, it would be the first to admit it, because the church has never reached the end of its journey; the church is always under reform," Cardinal John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan of Abuja, Nigeria, told Catholic News Service.

Even successful changes or improvements don't signal the job of conversion "is done and finished once and for all, because every generation has to go through its own reforms," he said on the sidelines of pre-conclave meetings March 6.

Elevated to the College of Cardinals less than three months ago, Cardinal Onaiyekan, 69, downplayed the media's focus on some cardinals reportedly being concerned about the findings of an internal investigation of charges of corruption and financial mismanagement within the Vatican. Retired Pope Benedict XVI said the dossier compiled by a three-cardinal commission should be seen only by the next pope.

Cardinal Onaiyekan said, "I do believe that very often there's a tendency to exaggerate the gravity and even the moment (importance) of the problems we have in our house today. Anyone who has read church history knows that there is nothing new on that."

Problems or accusations of scandal or corruption should be addressed, he said, "but that only proves that the church is made of human beings."

"Jesus Christ could have left this church in the hands of angels; there were enough in heaven to do the job," he said.

Instead, with his love and hope for humanity, he put the church in the hands of 12 ignorant men, who included simple fishermen and a tax collector, he said.

He said the church shouldn't be concerned with being "credible," in the sense of its message being believed or accepted by everyone.

"There are people to whom my message will never be credible, because they will never believe me because they don't believe" in God.

"You can't be credible to everybody. Authentic, yes, but authentic means a message that is as close as possible to the message of Jesus; that I'm worried about," he said.

"The church cannot go around, obviously, all the time trying to be popular, to be acceptable" to the views, positions and opinion of journalists and the dominant culture, he said.

But that "doesn't mean that we go out of our way to be difficult to understand, no. We do our best to explain as much as we can" and face the challenge of making the message seem as relevant as possible.

"Even Jesus didn't have it easy explaining to the people of his day what his message was about," he said.

Cardinal Onaiyekan said he was not going into the conclave clearly decided on for whom he would cast his vote.

"We believe firmly that the period of the conclave is a special period of grace and that the Holy Spirit will lead us," he said.

The Holy Spirit, too, will inspire or guide the new pope in discerning how he will carry out his ministry and what "is most required in our days," he said.

"One pope is different from another. When the pope comes, he will (take) his own path, he will do his work, carry out his ministry according to the way he is led by the spirit," the cardinal said.

The College of Cardinals does not "democratically" represent the face of church on the ground, he said.

But church leaders from all over the world come together at synods or other large gatherings to share the hopes and concerns of their local churches "and that is what makes the church catholic" and helps everyone get "on board," he said.

That means the nationality of a new pope is not important, he said.

"What is important is that whoever is the pope should be a pope for all of us" not just his own nation or continent of origin, he said.

The conclave to elect a new successor of Peter "is one of the highest points of our faith in the church as (led) by the Lord Jesus."

"If we really want to live up to that, then we should keep as close as we can to Jesus throughout this process," especially through prayer, he said.

END

04 March 2013

proof of love

"The proof of love is in the works. Where love exists, it works great things. But where it ceases to act, it ceases to exist." - St. Gregory the Great