And now let us thank the Lord who gives us also the Bavarian sky, since this was not something we could have ordered. Thank you!He is just such a lovely man.
Visiting the Column of Mary, he recounted once more the legend of Corbinian's bear, which we've discussed here before so I won't quote it, but he made the wry remark
Saint Corbinian’s bear was set free in Rome. In my case, the Lord decided otherwise.Then he made his visit and offered a prayer that's perfect for tomorrow's feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. The next day he delivered this marvelous homily at an open-air mass. Something I love about his preaching is that he sticks to the texts of the liturgy, and his commentary on the Old & New Testament passages leads him to reflect on the meaning of "Thy Kingdom Come!"
We are not asking for something off in the distance, something that, deep down, we may not even want to experience. Rather, we pray that God's will may here and now determine our own will, and that in this way God can reign in the world. We pray that justice and love may become the decisive forces affecting our world. A prayer like this is naturally addressed first to God, but it also proves unsettling for us. Really, is this what we want? Is this the direction in which we want our lives to move?That's insightful, isn't it? To pray "thy kingdom come" necessarily entails conversion. . . . From there he moves to the Gospel, where Christ heals the deaf and dumb man.
There is not only a physical deafness which largely cuts people off from social life; there is also a "hardness of hearing" where God is concerned, and this is something from which we particularly suffer in our own time. Put simply, we are no longer able to hear God - there are too many different frequencies filling our ears. What is said about God strikes us as pre-scientific, no longer suited to our age. Along with this hardness of hearing or outright deafness where God is concerned, we naturally lose our ability to speak with him and to him. And so we end up losing a decisive capacity for perception. We risk losing our inner senses. This weakening of our capacity for perception drastically and dangerously curtails the range of our relationship with reality in general. The horizon of our life is disturbingly foreshortened.Christ's word of healing for the deaf men, is also for us: "Be opened." Then he gets to the real challenge for the German Church:
The Catholic Church in Germany is outstanding for its social activities, for its readiness to help wherever help is needed. During their visits ad Limina, the Bishops, most recently those of Africa, have always mentioned with gratitude the generosity of German Catholics and ask me to convey that gratitude, and that is what I wish to do now, publically.But. . .
Every now and then, however, some African Bishop will say to me: “If I come to Germany and present social projects, suddenly every door opens. But if I come with a plan for evangelization, I meet with reservations”. Clearly some people have the idea that social projects should be urgently undertaken, while anything dealing with God or even the Catholic faith is of limited and lesser urgency. Yet the experience of those Bishops is that evangelization itself should be foremost, that the God of Jesus Christ must be known, believed in and loved, and that hearts must be converted if progress is to be made on social issues and reconciliation is to begin, and if - for example - AIDS is to be combated by realistically facing its deeper causes and the sick are to be given the loving care they need.So many Christians seem to have reduced charity to the corporal works of mercy solely --an unintentional materialism. And here's where the Holy Father makes his controversial critique of Western rationalism, which he explained more fully in his remarks at Regensburg.
People in Africa and Asia admire, indeed, the scientific and technical prowess of the West, but they are frightened by a form of rationality which totally excludes God from man's vision, as if this were the highest form of reason, and one to be taught to their cultures too. They do not see the real threat to their identity in the Christian faith, but in the contempt for God and the cynicism that considers mockery of the sacred to be an exercise of freedom and that holds up utility as the supreme criterion for the future of scientific research. Dear friends, this cynicism is not the kind of tolerance and cultural openness that the world's peoples are looking for and that all of us want!Must. Fight. Temptation. To Paste The Whole Thing. Please RTWT.
Then there was the Angelus. Note here the theme we see in all his pleas for peace:
how necessary it is – both for the lives of individuals and for the serene and peaceful coexistence of all people – to see God as the centre of all there is and the centre of our personal lives.The next day, at vespers in the Cathedral of Munich, he addressed first communicants --and their parents:
Please, go with your children to Church and take part in the Sunday Eucharistic celebration! You will see that this is not time lost; rather, it is the very thing that can keep your family truly united and centred. Sunday becomes more beautiful, the whole week becomes more beautiful, when you go to Sunday Mass together. And please, pray together at home too: at meals and before going to bed. Prayer does not only bring us nearer to God but also nearer to one another. It is a powerful source of peace and joy. Family life becomes more joyful and expansive whenever God is there and his closeness is experienced in prayer.(and their teachers and pastors, too).
On September 11, At the Marian shrine in Altotting, he gave a marvelous homily on what we can learn from Mary. Something else I love about the Pope's teaching is that he never evades the hard questions. Talking about Cana, he discusses Christ's address of his mother as "Woman," which we instinctively dislike.
Yet we like even less what Jesus at Cana then says to Mary: “Woman, what have I to do with you? My hour has not yet come” (Jn 2:4). We want to object: you have a lot to do with her! It was Mary who gave you flesh and blood, who gave you your body, and not only your body: with the “yes” which rose from the depths of her heart she bore you in her womb and with a mother's love she gave you life and introduced you to the community of the people of Israel. But if this is how we speak to Jesus, then we are already well along the way towards understanding his answer.Read it and find the Pope's explanation. Truly lovely.
Equally lovely is this vespertine address to religious and seminarians.
The briefest description of the priestly mission - and this is true in its own way for men and women religious too - has been given to us by the Evangelist Mark. In his account of the call of the Twelve, he says: "Jesus appointed twelve to be with him and to be sent out" (3:14). To be with Jesus and, being sent, to go out to meet people- these two things belong together and together they are the heart of a vocation, of the priesthood. To be with him and to be sent out - the two are inseparable. Only one who is "with him" comes to know him and can truly proclaim him. And anyone who has been with him cannot keep to himself what he has found; instead, he has to pass it on.And:
We know this from experience: whenever priests, because of their many duties, allot less and less time to being with the Lord, they eventually lose, for all their often heroic activity, the inner strength that sustains them. Their activity ends up as an empty activism.And:
I would like to quote some fine words of Saint Edith Stein, Co-Patroness of Europe, who wrote in one of her letters: "The Lord is present in the tabernacle in his divinity and his humanity. He is not there for himself, but for us: for it is his joy to be with us. He knows that we, being as we are, need to have him personally near. As a result, anyone with normal thoughts and feelings will naturally be drawn to spend time with him, whenever possible and as much as possible" (Gesammelte Werke VII, 136ff.). Let us love being with the Lord! There we can speak with him about everything. We can offer him our petitions, our concerns, our troubles. Our joys. Our gratitude, our disappointments, our needs and our aspirations.Another outdoor mass, another heartfelt thankyou:
I am a bit taken aback by all this goodness, and once again I can only offer an inadequate "thank you!" for all your efforts. You did not do this for just one person; in the end, you did it in a spirit of solidarity in faith, inspired by love of the Christ and the Church.Then he gets down to business, asking what is meant by saying "We believe. . .?" It's interesting to me that throughout these addresses he keeps returning to the topic of Baptism and its implications. There seems to be a message for the Germans --or I might say the Europeans-- in highlighting the fact that most of them are baptized, although he never pursues the point explicitly. However, he does address the matter of what happens when Science attempts to prove God doesn't exist.
whenever the attempt seemed to be nearing success - inevitably it would become clear: something is missing from the equation! When God is subtracted, something doesn't add up for man, the world, the whole universe. So we end up with two alternatives. What came first? Creative Reason, the Creator Spirit who makes all things and gives them growth, or Unreason, which, lacking any meaning, yet somehow brings forth a mathematically ordered cosmos, as well as man and his reason. The latter, however, would then be nothing more than a chance result of evolution and thus, in the end, equally meaningless. As Christians, we say: "I believe in God the Father, the Creator of heaven and earth" -I believe in the Creator Spirit. We believe that at the beginning of everything is the eternal Word, with Reason and not Unreason.
And this Reason is Love:
Today, when we have learned to recognize the pathologies and the life-threatening diseases associated with religion and reason, and the ways that God's image can be destroyed by hatred and fanaticism, it is important to state clearly the God in whom we believe, and to proclaim confidently that this God has a human face. Only this can free us from being afraid of God - which is ultimately at the root of modern atheism. Only this God saves us from being afraid of the world and from anxiety before the emptiness of life. Only by looking to Jesus Christ does our joy in God come to fulfilment and become redeemed joy.Some 250,000 people heard that one. Then there was the university address, previously posted, which has the Muslim authorities up in arms (as if to prove his point about the difficulty of dialogue)!
Then there was his address at an ecumenical service. And how appropriate for him: the blessing of a new organ:
The organ has always been considered, and rightly so, the king of musical instruments, because it takes up all the sounds of creation – as was just said - and gives resonance to the fullness of human sentiments, from joy to sadness, from praise to lamentation. By transcending the merely human sphere, as all music of quality does, it evokes the divine. The organ’s great range of timbre, from piano through to a thundering fortissimo, makes it an instrument superior to all others. It is capable of echoing and expressing all the experiences of human life.But don't think you're getting off that easy: this is a metaphor.
If here or there something becomes blocked, if one pipe is out of tune, this may at first be perceptible only to a trained ear. But if more pipes are out of tune, dissonance ensues and the result is unbearable. Also, the pipes of this organ are exposed to variations of temperature and subject to wear. Now, this is an image of our community in the Church. Just as in an organ an expert hand must constantly bring disharmony back to consonance, so we in the Church, in the variety of our gifts and charisms, always need to find anew, through our communion in faith, harmony in the praise of God and in fraternal love. The more we allow ourselves, through the liturgy, to be transformed in Christ, the more we will be capable of transforming the world, radiating Christ’s goodness, his mercy and his love for others.
There are two more addresses to come --unpublished because the puckish Holy Father, borrowing a page from Jack Kemp, announced he had a text, but didn't feel like sticking to it. Loads of photos here.
