(09 Sept 07 - RV ) Here we publish the full text of Pope Benedict XVI's homily during
Evening Prayer at Mariazell:
Dear Brother Priests, Dear Men and Women
of Consecrated Life, Dear Friends,
We have come together in the venerable
Basilica of our Magna Mater Austriae in Mariazell. For many generations people have
come to pray here to obtain the help of the Mother of God. We too want to do the
same today. We want to join Mary in praising God’s immense goodness and in expressing
our gratitude to the Lord for all the blessings we have received, especially the incomparable
gift of faith. We also wish to commend to Mary our heartfelt concerns: to beg her
protection for the Church, to invoke her intercession for the gift of worthy vocations
for Dioceses and religious communities, to implore her assistance for families and
her merciful prayers for all those longing for freedom from sin and for the grace
of conversion, and, finally, to entrust to Mary’s maternal care our sick and our elderly.
May the great Mother of Austria and of Europe bring all of us to a profound renewal
of faith and life!
Dear friends, as priests, and as men and women religious,
you are servants of Christ’s mission. Just as two thousand years ago Jesus called
people to follow him, today too young men and women are setting out at his call, attracted
by him and moved by a desire to devote their lives to serving the Church and helping
others. They have the courage to follow Christ, and they want to be his witnesses.
Being a follower of Christ is full of risks, since we are constantly threatened by
sin, lack of freedom and defection. Consequently, we all need his grace, just as
Mary received it in its fullness. We learn to look always, like Mary, to Christ,
and to make him our criterion and measure. Thus we can participate in the universal
saving mission of the Church, of which he is the head. The Lord calls priests, religious
and lay people to go into the world, in all its complexity, and to cooperate in the
building up of God’s Kingdom. They do this in a great variety of ways: in preaching,
in building communities, in the different pastoral ministries, in the practical exercise
of charity, in research and scientific study carried out in an apostolic spirit, in
dialogue with the surrounding culture, in promoting the justice willed by God and,
in no less measure, in the recollected contemplation of the triune God and the common
praise of God in their communities.
The Lord invites you to join the Church
“on her pilgrim way through history”. He is inviting you to become pilgrims with
him and to share in his life which today too includes both the way of the Cross and
the way of the Risen One through the Galilee of our existence. But he remains always
one and the same Lord who, through the one Baptism, calls us to the one faith. Taking
part in his journey thus entails both things: the dimension of the Cross – with failure,
suffering, misunderstanding and even contempt and persecution – , but also the experience
of profound joy in his service and of the deep consolation born of an encounter with
him. Like the Church, parishes, communities and all baptized Christians find in their
experience of the crucified and risen Christ the source of their mission.
At
the heart of the mission of Jesus Christ and of every Christian is the proclamation
of the Kingdom of God. Proclaiming the Kingdom in the name of Christ means for the
Church, for priests, men and women religious, and for all the baptized, a commitment
to be present in the world as his witnesses: you testify to a “meaning” rooted in
God’s creative love and opposed to every kind of meaninglessness and despair. You
stand alongside all those who are earnestly striving to discover this meaning, alongside
all those who want to make something positive of their lives. By your prayer and
intercession, you are the advocates of all who seek God. You bear witness to a hope
which, against every form of hopelessness, silent or spoken, points to the fidelity
and the loving concern of God. Hence you are on the side of those who are crushed
by misfortune and can no longer break free of their burdens. You bear witness to
that Love which sacrificed itself for humanity and thus conquered death. You are
on the side of all who have never known love, and who are no longer able to believe
in life. And so you stand against all forms of injustice, hidden or apparent, and
against a growing contempt for man. In this way, dear brothers and sisters, your
whole life needs to be, like that of John the Baptist, a great, living witness to
Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnate. Jesus called John “a burning and shining
lamp” (Jn 5:35). You too must be such lamps! Let your light shine in our society,
in political and economic life, in culture and research. Even if it is only a flicker
amid so many deceptive lights, it nonetheless draws its power and splendour from the
great Morning Star, the Risen Christ, whose light shines brilliantly and will never
fade.
Following Christ means taking on ever more fully his mind and his way
of life (cf. Phil 2:5). “To Look to Christ” is the theme of these days. In looking
to him, the great Teacher of life, the Church has discerned three striking features
of Jesus’ basic attitude. These three features – we call them the “evangelical counsels”
– have become the distinctive elements of a life committed to the radical following
of Christ: poverty, chastity and obedience. Let us reflect briefly on them.
Jesus
Christ, who was rich with the very richness of God, became poor for our sake (cf.
2 Cor 8:9). He emptied himself; he humbled himself and became obedient even to death
on a Cross (cf. Phil 2:6ff.) Himself poor, he called the poor “blessed”. It is clear
from Luke that these words referred to the poor in Israel at that time, where there
was a sharp distinction between rich and poor. But Matthew, in his version of the
Beatitudes, makes it clear that material poverty alone does not ensure God’s closeness,
even though God does remain particularly close to the poor. So it becomes evident:
in the poor Christians see the Christ who awaits them, who awaits their commitment.
Anyone who wants to follow Christ in a radical way must decisively renounce material
goods. But he or she must live this poverty in a way centred on Christ, as a means
of becoming inwardly free for God and neighbour. For all Christians, but especially
for priests and religious, both as individuals and in community, the issue of poverty
and the poor must be the object of a constant and serious examination of conscience.
To
understand correctly the meaning of chastity, we must start with its positive content.
Once again, we find this by looking to Christ. Jesus’ life had a two-fold direction:
he lived for the Father and for his neighbour. In sacred Scripture we see Jesus as
a man of prayer, one who spends entire nights in dialogue with the Father. Through
his prayer, he made his own humanity, and the humanity of us all, part of his filial
relation to the Father. This dialogue with the Father thus became a constantly-renewed
mission to the world, to us. Jesus’ mission led him to a pure and unreserved commitment
to men and women. Sacred Scripture shows that at no moment of his life did he betray
even the slightest trace of self-interest or selfishness in his relationship with
others. Jesus loved others as he loved his Father. Entering into these sentiments
of Jesus inspired in Paul a theology and a way of life consonant with Jesus’ words
about celibacy for the Kingdom of heaven (cf. Mt 19:12). Priests and religious are
not aloof from interpersonal relationships. By their vow of celibate chastity they
do not consecrate themselves to individualism or a life of isolation; instead, they
solemnly promise to put completely and unreservedly at the service of God’s Kingdom
the deep relationships of which they are capable and which they accept as a gift.
In this way they become men and women of hope: staking everything on God, they open
up a space for his presence – the presence of God’s Kingdom – in our world. Dear
priests and religious, you have an important contribution to make: amid so much greed,
possessiveness, consumerism and the cult of the individual, we strive to show selfless
love for men and women. We are living lives of hope, a hope whose fulfilment we leave
in God’s hands. What might have happened had the history of Christianity lacked such
outstanding figures and examples? What would our world be like, if there were no
priests, if there were no men and women in religious congregations and communities
of consecrated life – people whose lives testify to the hope of a fulfilment beyond
every human desire and an experience of the love of God which transcends all human
love? Today too, the world needs our witness.
We now come to obedience.
Jesus lived his entire life, from the hidden years in Nazareth to the very moment
of his death on the Cross in listening to the Father, in obedience to the Father.
We see this in an exemplary way at Gethsemane. “Not my will, but yours be done”.
In this prayer Jesus takes up into his filial will the stubborn resistance of us all,
and transforms our rebelliousness into his obedience. Jesus was a man of prayer.
But at the same time he was also someone who knew how to listen and to obey: he became
“obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:8). Christians have always known
from experience that, in abandoning themselves to the will of the Father, they lose
nothing, but instead discover their deepest identity and interior freedom. In Jesus
they have discovered that those who lose themselves find themselves, and those who
bind themselves in an obedience grounded in God and inspired by the search for God,
become free. Listening to God and obeying him has nothing to do with external constraint
and the loss of oneself. Only by entering into God’s will do we attain our true identity.
Our world today needs the testimony of this experience precisely because of its desire
for “self-realization” and “self-determination”.
Romano Guardini relates in
his autobiography how, at a critical moment on his journey, when the faith of his
childhood was shaken, the fundamental decision of his entire life – his conversion
– came to him through an encounter with the saying of Jesus that only the one who
loses himself finds himself (cf. Mk 8:34ff.; Jn 12:25); without self-surrender, without
self-loss, there can be no self-discovery or self-realization. But how should we
lose ourselves? To whom do we give ourselves? It became clear to him that we can
surrender ourselves completely only if by doing so we fall into the hands of God.
Only in him, in the end, can we lose ourselves and only in him can we find ourselves.
But then the question arose: Who is God? Where is God? Then he came to understand
that the God to whom we can surrender ourselves can only be the God who became tangible
and close to us in Jesus Christ. But once more the question arose: Where do I find
Jesus Christ? How can I truly give myself to him? The answer Guardini found after
much searching was this: Jesus is concretely present to us only in his Body, the Church.
As a result, obedience to God’s will, obedience to Jesus Christ, must be, really and
practically, humble obedience to the Church. This is something that calls us to a
constant and deep examination of conscience. It is all summed up in the prayer of
Saint Ignatius of Loyola – a prayer which always seems to me so overwhelming that
I am almost afraid to say it, yet one which we should always repeat: “Take O Lord,
and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding and my entire will. All that
I have and all that I possess you have given me: I surrender it all to you; it is
all yours, dispose of it according to your will. Give me only your love and your
grace; with these I will be rich enough and will desire nothing more”.
Dear
brothers and sisters! You are about to return to those places where you live and
carry out your ecclesial, pastoral, spiritual and human activity. May Mary, our great
Advocate and Mother, watch over and protect you and your work. May she intercede
for you with her Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. I thank you for your prayers and your
labours in the Lord’s vineyard, and I join you in praying that God will protect and
bless all of you, and everyone, particularly the young people, both here in Austria
and in the various countries from which many of you have come. With affection I accompany
all of you with my blessing.