Pope: Pray for me, future Pope, the Lord will guide us!
(Vatican Radio) Even though only 3500 tickets had been distributed for this Wednesday’s
general audience, thousands more flocked to the Paul VI hall hoping to gain access
for Pope Benedict XVI’s penultimate audience with pilgrims. Emer McCarthy reports
Listen:
As
soon as the Holy Father emerged onto the stage from the side door the crowds erupted
in greeting. “Dear brothers and sisters, as you know I decided", he began only to
be interrupted with prolonged applause. “Thank you for your kindness” he responded
and began again. “I decided to resign from the ministry that the Lord had entrusted
me on April 19, 2005. I did this in full freedom” the Pope added forcefully, “for
the good of the Church after having prayed at length and examined my conscience before
God, well aware of the gravity of this act”.
But continued Pope Benedict,
“I was also well aware that I was no longer able to fulfil the Petrine Ministry with
that strength that it demands. What sustains and illuminates me is the certainty that
the Church belongs to Christ whose care and guidance will never be lacking. I thank
you all for the love and prayer with which you have accompanied me”.
Again
the Pope was interrupted by lengthy applause, and visibly moved he continued: “I have
felt, almost physically, your prayers in these days which are not easy for me, the
strength which the love of the Church and your prayers brings to me. Continue to pray
for me and for the future Pope, the Lord will guide us!".
As the cheers and
applause subsided, Pope Benedict then turned to this Wednesday’s catechesis which
focused on the season of Lent when we are called to make “more room for God in our
lives” as he tweeted to his followers. Just like the great American Convert, Dorothy
Day who of whom the Pope also spoke in his audience.
Below a Vatican
Radio translation of Pope Benedict XVI’s catechesis [original text Italian]
Dear
Brothers and Sisters,
Today, Ash Wednesday, we begin the liturgical time of
Lent, forty days that prepare us for the celebration of Holy Easter, it is a time
of particular commitment in our spiritual journey. The number forty occurs several
times in the Bible. In particular, it recalls the forty years that the Israelites
wandered in the wilderness: a long period of formation to become the people of God,
but also a long period in which the temptation to be unfaithful to the covenant with
the Lord was always present. Forty were also the days of the Prophet Elijah’s journey
to reach the Mount of God, Horeb; as well as the time that Jesus spent in the desert
before beginning his public life and where he was tempted by the devil. In this Catechesis
I would like to dwell on this moment of earthly life of the Son of God, which we will
read of in the Gospel this Sunday.
First of all, the desert, where Jesus withdrew
to, is the place of silence, of poverty, where man is deprived of material support
and is placed in front of the fundamental questions of life, where he is pushed to
towards the essentials in life and for this very reason it becomes easier for him
to find God. But the desert is also a place of death, because where there is no water
there is no life, and it is a place of solitude where man feels temptation more intensely.
Jesus goes into the desert, and there is tempted to leave the path indicated by God
the Father to follow other easier and worldly paths (cf. Lk 4:1-13). So he takes on
our temptations and carries our misery, to conquer evil and open up the path to God,
the path of conversion.
In reflecting on the temptations Jesus is subjected
to in the desert we are invited, each one of us, to respond to one fundamental question:
what is truly important in our lives? In the first temptation the devil offers to
change a stone into bread to sate Jesus’ hunger. Jesus replies that the man also lives
by bread but not by bread alone: without a response to the hunger for truth, hunger
for God, man can not be saved (cf. vv. 3-4). In the second, the devil offers Jesus
the path of power: he leads him up on high and gives him dominion over the world,
but this is not the path of God: Jesus clearly understands that it is not earthly
power that saves the world, but the power of the Cross, humility, love (cf. vv. 5-8).
In the third, the devil suggests Jesus throw himself down from the pinnacle of the
Temple of Jerusalem and be saved by God through his angels, that is, to do something
sensational to test God, but the answer is that God is not an object on which to impose
our conditions: He is the Lord of all (cf. vv. 9-12). What is the core of the three
temptations that Jesus is subjected to? It is the proposal to exploit God, to use
Him for his own interests, for his own glory and success. So, in essence, to put himself
in the place of God, removing Him from his own existence and making him seem superfluous.
Everyone should then ask: what is the role God in my life? Is He the Lord or am I?
Overcoming
the temptation to place God in submission to oneself and one’s own interests or to
put Him in a corner and converting oneself to the proper order of priorities, giving
God the first place, is a journey that every Christian must undergo. "Conversion",
an invitation that we will hear many times in Lent, means following Jesus in so that
his Gospel is a real life guide, it means allowing God transform us, no longer thinking
that we are the only protagonists of our existence, recognizing that we are creatures
who depend on God, His love, and that only by “losing" our life in Him can we truly
have it. This means making our choices in the light of the Word of God. Today we
can no longer be Christians as a simple consequence of the fact that we live in a
society that has Christian roots: even those born to a Christian family and formed
in the faith must, each and every day, renew the choice to be a Christian, to give
God first place, before the temptations continuously suggested by a secularized culture,
before the criticism of many of our contemporaries.
The tests which modern
society subjects Christians to, in fact, are many, and affect the personal and social
life. It is not easy to be faithful to Christian marriage, practice mercy in everyday
life, leave space for prayer and inner silence, it is not easy to publicly oppose
choices that many take for granted, such as abortion in the event of an unwanted pregnancy,
euthanasia in case of serious illness, or the selection of embryos to prevent hereditary
diseases. The temptation to set aside one’s faith is always present and conversion
becomes a response to God which must be confirmed several times throughout one’s life.
The
major conversions like that of St. Paul on the road to Damascus, or St. Augustine,
are an example and stimulus, but also in our time when the sense of the sacred is
eclipsed, God's grace is at work and works wonders in life of many people. The Lord
never gets tired of knocking at the door of man in social and cultural contexts that
seem engulfed by secularization, as was the case for the Russian Orthodox Pavel Florensky.
After acompletely agnostic education, to the point he felt an outright hostility towards
religious teachings taught in school, the scientist Florensky came to exclaim: "No,
you can not live without God", and to change his life completely, so much so he became
a monk.
I also think the figure of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch woman of Jewish
origin who died in Auschwitz. Initially far from God, she found Him looking deep inside
herself and wrote: "There is a well very deep inside of me. And God is in that well.
Sometimes I can reach Him, more often He is covered by stone and sand: then God is
buried. We must dig Him up again "(Diary, 97). In her scattered and restless life,
she finds God in the middle of the great tragedy of the twentieth century, the Shoah.
This young fragile and dissatisfied woman, transfigured by faith, becomes a woman
full of love and inner peace, able to say: "I live in constant intimacy with God."
The
ability to oppose the ideological blandishments of her time to choose the search for
truth and open herself up to the discovery of faith is evidenced by another woman
of our time, the American Dorothy Day. In her autobiography, she confesses openly
to having given in to the temptation that everything could be solved with politics,
adhering to the Marxist proposal: "I wanted to be with the protesters, go to jail,
write, influence others and leave my dreams to the world. How much ambition and how
much searching for myself in all this!". The journey towards faith in such a secularized
environment was particularly difficult, but Grace acts nonetheless, as she points
out: "It is certain that I felt the need to go to church more often, to kneel, to
bow my head in prayer. A blind instinct, one might say, because I was not conscious
of praying. But I went, I slipped into the atmosphere of prayer ... ". God guided
her to a conscious adherence to the Church, in a lifetime spent dedicated to the underprivileged.
In
our time there are no few conversions understood as the return of those who, after
a Christian education, perhaps a superficial one, moved away from the faith for years
and then rediscovered Christ and his Gospel. In the Book of Revelation we read: "Behold,
I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, [then]
I will enter his house and dine with him, and he with me"(3, 20). Our inner person
must prepare to be visited by God, and for this reason we should allow ourselves be
invaded by illusions, by appearances, by material things.
In this time of Lent,
in the Year of the faith, we renew our commitment to the process of conversion,
to overcoming the tendency to close in on ourselves and instead, to making room for
God, looking at our daily reality with His eyes. The alternative between being wrapped
up in our egoism and being open to the love of God and others, we could say corresponds
to the alternatives to the temptations of Jesus: the alternative, that is, between
human power and love of the Cross, between a redemption seen only in material well-being
and redemption as the work of God, to whom we give primacy in our lives. Conversion
means not closing in on ourselves in the pursuit of success, prestige, position, but
making sure that each and every day, in the small things, truth, faith in God and
love become most important.
Below the Holy Father’s summary and greetings
in English
Dear Brothers and Sisters, Today, Ash Wednesday,
we begin our yearly Lenten journey of conversion in preparation for Easter. The forty
days of Lent recall Israel’s sojourn in the desert and the temptations of Jesus at
the beginning of his public ministry. The desert, as the place of silent encounter
with God and decision about the deepest meaning and direction of our lives, is also
a place of temptation. In his temptation in the desert, Jesus showed us that fidelity
to God’s will must guide our lives and thinking, especially amid today’s secularized
society. While the Lord continues to raise up examples of radical conversion, like
Pavel Florensky, Etty Hillesum and Dorothy Day, he also constantly challenges those
who have been raised in the faith to deeper conversion. In this Lenten season, Christ
once again knocks at our door (cf. Rev 3:20) and invites us to open our minds and
hearts to his love and his truth. May Jesus’ example of overcoming temptation inspire
us to embrace God’s will and to see all things in the light of his saving truth.
* * * * * I offer a warm welcome to all the English-speaking visitors present
at today’s Audience, including those from England, Denmark and the United States.
My particular greeting goes to the many student groups present. With prayers that
this Lenten season will prove spiritually fruitful for you and your families, I invoke
upon all of you God’s blessings of joy and peace.