Fr. Cantalamessa: Christmas is a time for stillness
Gathered with the Holy Father and other members of the papal household in the Redemptoris
mater chapel of the Apostolic Palace on Friday morning, Capuchin Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa
gave the third of the traditional weekly Advent sermons – this one focusing on the
Christian response to rationalism. Starting from a passage from the 1st Letter of St. Peter, “sanctify the Lord Christ in your hearts, being ready always to satisfy every one that asketh you a reason of that hope which is in you.,” Fr. Cantalamessa delivered a 3-part reflection that drew on the thought of Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman to articulate a vision of human reason that is essentially open to the transcendent ground of the order of being, to God, and therefore capable of responding to and overcoming the problems and inadequacies of the modern understanding of rationality.
Moving from a consideration of the modern tendency toward what Newman called in an 1831 Oxford sermon, “the usurpation of reason,” Fr. Cantalamessa moved to consider the connexion between faith and the sense of the sacred, before treating of the need for witnesses, whom he described as those who welcome and embrace the experience of the sacred and the divine, which thus becomes for them a lived experience – witnesses, he said, who are best exemplified in the saints and more specifically in those we call, “mystics.”
The preacher of the Papal household went on to say, “It is most helpful to make Christmas an occasion to find spaces for silence,” and concluded with an exhortation to make our own the wisdom of the 46th psalm, in which the Lord invites us, “[To] be still, and know that [He is] God.”
Listen to Chris Altieri's report:
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