(09 Sept. 07 -RV) Here are the Holy Father's remarks at the Cistercian abbey of Heiligenkreuz...
APOSTOLIC
VISIT TO AUSTRIA
Address of the Holy Father Visit to Heiligenkreuz Abbey Sunday,
9 September 2007
Most Reverend Father Abbot, Venerable Brothers
in the Episcopate, Dear Cistercian Monks of Heiligenkreuz, Dear Brothers and
Sisters in Consecrated Life, Distinguished Guests and Friends of the Monastery
and the Academy, Ladies and Gentlemen!
On my pilgrimage to the Magna Mater
Austriae, I am pleased to visit this Abbey of Heiligenkreuz, which is not only an
important stop on the Via Sacra leading to Mariazell, but the oldest continuously
active Cistercian monastery in the world. I wished to come to this place so rich
in history in order to draw attention to the fundamental directive of Saint Benedict,
according to whose Rule Cistercians also live. Quite simply, Benedict insisted that
“nothing be put before the divine Office”.(1)
For this reason, in a monastery
of Benedictine spirit, the praise of God, which the monks sing as a solemn choral
prayer, always has priority. Monks are certainly not the only people who pray; others
also pray: children, the young and the old, men and women, the married and the single
– all Christians pray. Or at least, they should!
In the life of monks, however,
prayer takes on a particular importance: it is the heart of their calling. Their
vocation is to be men of prayer. In the patristic period the monastic life was likened
to the life of the angels. It was considered the essential mark of the angels that
they are worshippers. Their very life is worship. This should hold true also for
monks. Monks pray first and foremost not for any specific intention, but simply because
God is worthy of being praised. “Confitemini Domino, quoniam bonus! – Praise the
Lord, for he is good, for his mercy is eternal!”: so we are urged by a number of Psalms
(e.g. Ps 106:1). Such prayer for its own sake, intended as pure divine service, is
rightly called officium. It is “service” par excellence, the “sacred service” of
monks. It is offered to the triune God who, above all else, is worthy “to receive
glory, honour and power” (Rev 4:11), because he wondrously created the world and even
more wondrously redeemed it.
At the same time, the officium of consecrated
persons is also a sacred service to men and women, a testimony offered to them. All
people have deep within their hearts, whether they know it or not, a yearning for
definitive fulfilment, for supreme happiness, and thus, ultimately, for God. A monastery,
in which the community gathers several times a day for the praise of God, testifies
to the fact that this primordial human longing does not go unfulfilled: God the Creator
has not placed us in a fearful darkness where, groping our way in despair, we seek
some ultimate meaning (cf. Acts 17:27); God has not abandoned us in a desert void,
bereft of meaning, where in the end only death awaits us. No! God has shone forth
in our darkness with his light, with his Son Jesus Christ. In him, God has entered
our world in all his “fullness” (cf. Col 1:19); in him all truth, the truth for which
we yearn, has its source and summit.(2)
Our light, our truth, our goal, our
fulfilment, our life – all this is not a religious doctrine but a person: Jesus Christ.
Over and above any ability of our own to seek and to desire God, we ourselves have
already been sought and desired, and indeed, found and redeemed by him! The roving
gaze of people of every time and nation, of all the philosophies, religions and cultures,
encounters the wide open eyes of the crucified and risen Son of God; his open heart
is the fullness of love. The eyes of Christ are the eyes of a loving God. The image
of the Crucified Lord above the altar, whose romanesque original is found in the Cathedral
of Sarzano, shows that this gaze is turned to every man and woman. The Lord, in truth,
looks into the hearts of each of us.
The core of monasticism is worship –
living like the angels. But since monks are people of flesh and blood on this earth,
Saint Benedict and Saint Bernardo added to the central command: “pray”, a second command:
“work”. In the mind of Saint Benedict, part of monastic life, along with prayer,
is work: the cultivation of the land in accordance with the Creator’s will. Thus
in every age monks, setting out from their gaze upon God, have made the earth live-giving
and lovely. Their protection and renewal of creation derived precisely from their
looking to God. In the rhythm of the ora et labora, the community of consecrated
persons bears witness to the God who, in Christ, looks upon us, while human beings
and the world, as God looks upon them, become good.
Monks are not the only
ones who pray the officium; from the monastic tradition the Church has derived the
obligation for all religious, and also for priests and deacons, to recite the Breviary.
Here too, it is appropriate for men and women religious, priests and deacons – and
naturally Bishops as well – to come before God in their daily “official” prayer with
hymns and psalms, with thanksgiving and pure petition.
Dear brother priests
and deacons, dear brothers and sisters in the consecrated life! I realize that discipline
is needed, and sometimes great effort as well, in order to recite the Breviary faithfully;
but through this officium we also receive many riches: how many times, in doing so,
have we seen our weariness and despondency melt away! When God is faithfully praised
and worshipped, his blessings are unfailing. In Austria, people rightly say: “Everything
depends on God’s blessing!”.
Your primary service to this world must therefore
be your prayer and the celebration of the divine Office. The interior disposition
of each priest, and of each consecrated person, must be that of “putting nothing before
the divine Office”. The beauty of this inner attitude will find expression in the
beauty of the liturgy, so that wherever we join in singing, praising, exalting and
worshipping God, a little bit of heaven will become present on earth. Truly it would
not be presumptuous to say that, in a liturgy completely centred on God, we can see,
in its rituals and chant, an image of eternity. Otherwise, how could our forefathers,
hundreds of years ago, have built a sacred edifice as solemn as this? Here the architecture
itself draws all our senses upwards, towards “what eye has not seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined: what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor
2:9). In all our efforts on behalf of the liturgy, the determining factor must always
be our looking to God. We stand before God – he speaks to us and we speak to him.
Whenever in our thinking we are only concerned about making the liturgy attractive,
interesting and beautiful, the battle is already lost. Either it is Opus Dei, with
God as its specific subject, or it is not. In the light of this, I ask you to celebrate
the sacred liturgy with your gaze fixed on God within the communion of saints, the
living Church of every time and place, so that it will truly be an expression of the
sublime beauty of the God who has called men and women to be his friends.
The
soul of prayer, ultimately, is the Holy Spirit. Whenever we pray, it is he who “helps
us in our weakness, interceding for us with sighs too deep for words” (Rom 8:26).
Trusting in these words of the Apostle Paul, I assure you, dear brothers and sisters,
that prayer will produce in you the same effect which once led to the custom of calling
priests and consecrated persons simply “spirituals” (Geistliche). Bishop Sailer of
Regensburg once said that priests should be first and foremost spiritual persons.
I would like to see a revival of the word “Geistliche”. More importantly, though,
the content of that word should become a part of our lives: namely, that in following
the Lord, we become, by the power of the Spirit, “spiritual” men and women.
Austria
(Österreich) is, in an old play on words, truly Klösterreich: a realm of monasteries
and a land rich in monasteries. Your ancient abbeys whose origins and traditions
date back many centuries are places where “God is put first”. Dear friends, make
this priority given to God ever more apparent to people! As a spiritual oasis, a
monastery reminds today’s world of the most important, and indeed, the only decisive
thing: that there is an ultimate reason why life is worth living: God and his unfathomable
love.
And I ask you, dear members of the faithful: see your abbeys and monasteries
for what they are and always wish to be: not mere strongholds of culture and tradition,
or even simple business enterprises. Structure, organization and finances are necessary
in the Church too, but they are not what is essential. A monastery is above all this:
a place of spiritual power. Coming to one of your monasteries here in Austria, we
have the same impression as when, after a strenuous hike in the Alps, we finally find
refreshment at a clear mountain spring… Take advantage of these springs of God’s
closeness in your country; treasure the religious communities, the monasteries and
abbeys; and make use of the spiritual service that consecrated person are willing
to offer you!
Finally, I have come also to visit the Academy, now the Pontifical
Academy, which is 205 years old and which, in its new status, the Abbot has named
after the present Successor of Peter. Important though it is that the discipline
of theology be part of the universitas of knowledge through the presence of Catholic
theological faculties in state universities, it is equally important that there should
be academic institutions like your own, where there can be a deeper interplay between
scientific theology and lived spirituality. God is never simply the “object” of theology;
he is always its living “subject” as well. Christian theology, for that matter, is
never a purely human discourse about God, but always, and inseparably, the logos and
“logic” of God’s self-revelation. For this reason scientific rationality and lived
devotion are two necessarily complementary and interdependent aspects of study.
The
father of the Cistercian Order, Saint Bernard, in his own day fought against the detachment
of an objectivizing rationality from the main current of ecclesial spirituality.
Our situation today, while different, nonetheless has notable similarities. In its
desire to be recognized as a rigorously scientific discipline in the modern sense,
theology can lose the life-breath given by faith. But just as a liturgy which no
longer looks to God is already in its death throes, so too a theology which no longer
draws its life-breath from faith ceases to be theology; it ends up as a array of more
or less loosely connected disciplines. But where theology is practised “on bent knee”,
as Hans Urs von Balthasar (3) urged, it will prove fruitful for the Church in Austria
and beyond.
This fruitfulness is shown through fostering and forming those
who have vocations to the priesthood or the religious life. Today, if such a vocation
is to be sustained faithfully over a lifetime, there is a need for a formation capable
of integrating faith and reason, heart and mind, life and thought. A life devoted
to following Christ calls for an integration of one’s entire personality. Neglect
of the intellectual dimension can give rise all too easily to a kind of superficial
piety nourished mostly by emotions and sentiments, which cannot be sustained over
a lifetime. Neglect of the spiritual dimension, in turn, can create a rarified rationalism
which, in its coldness and detachment, can never bring about an enthusiastic self-surrender
to God. A life devoted to following Christ cannot be built on such one-sided foundations;
half-measures leave a person unhappy and, consequently, also spiritually barren.
Each vocation to the religious life or to the priesthood is a treasure so precious
that those responsible for it should do everything possible to ensure a formation
which promotes both fides et ratio – faith and reason, heart and mind.
At
the advice of his son, Blessed Otto of Freising, who was my predecessor in the episcopal
see of Freising, Saint Leopold of Austria founded your abbey in 1133, and called it
Unsere Liebe Frau zum Heiligen Kreuz – Our Lady of Holy Cross. This monastery is
dedicated to Our Lady not simply by tradition – like every Cistercian monastery –,
but among you there burns the Marian flame of a Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. Bernard,
who entered the monastery along with thirty of his companions, is a kind of patron
saint of vocations. Perhaps it was because of his particular devotion to Our Lady
that he exercised such a compelling and infectious influence on his many young contemporaries
called by God. Where Mary is, there is the archetype of total self-giving and Christian
discipleship. Where Mary is, there is the pentecostal breath of the Holy Spirit;
there is new beginning and authentic renewal.
From this Marian sanctuary on
the Via Sacra, I pray that all Austria’s shrines will experience fruitfulness and
further growth. Here, as at Mariazell, I would like, before leaving, to ask the Mother
of God once more to intercede for all of Austria. In the words of Saint Bernard,
I invite everyone to become a trusting child before Mary, even as the Son of God did:
“Look to the star of the sea, call upon Mary … in danger, in distress, in doubt, think
of Mary, call upon Mary. May her name never be far from your lips, or far from your
heart … If you follow her, you will not stray; if you pray to her, you will not despair;
if you turn your thoughts to her, you will not err. If she holds you, you will not
fall; if she protects you, you need not fear; if she is your guide, you will not tire;
if she is gracious to you, you will surely reach your destination”. (4)
(1)
Regula Benedicti 43,3.
(2) Cf. SECOND VATICAN ECUMENICAL COUNCIL, Gaudium et
Spes, 22.
(3) Cf. HANS URS VON BALTHASAR, Theologie und Heiligkeit, an essay
written in 1948, in Verbum Caro. Schriften zur Theologie I, Einsiedeln, 1960, 195-224.
(4)
BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX, In laudibus Virginis Matris, Homilia 2, 17.