(8 Sept. 07 -RV) Below is the full text of Pope Benedict XVI's homily delivered at
Mariazell during Mass to mark the 850th anniversary of the Marian shrine's founding...
APOSTOLIC
VISIT TO AUSTRIA
Homily of the Holy Father Solemn Eucharist Mariazell,
Square in front of the Basilica Saturday, 8 September 2007
Dear Brothers
and Sisters,
With our great pilgrimage to Mariazell, we are celebrating the
patronal feast of this Shrine, the feast of Our Lady’s Birthday. For 850 years pilgrims
have been travelling here from different peoples and nations; they come to pray for
the intentions of their hearts and their homelands, bringing their deepest hopes and
concerns. In this way Mariazell has become a place of peace and reconciled unity,
not only for Austria, but far beyond her borders. Here people experience the consoling
kindness of the Madonna. Here they meet Jesus Christ, in whom God is with us, as
today’s Gospel reminds us – Jesus, of whom the reading from the prophet Micah says:
“He himself will be peace” (5:4). Today we join in this great centuries-old pilgrimage.
We rest awhile with the Mother of the Lord, and we pray to her: Show us Jesus. Show
to us pilgrims the one who is both the way and the destination: the truth and the
life.
The Gospel passage we have just heard broadens our view. It presents
the history of Israel from Abraham onwards as a pilgrimage, which, with its ups and
downs, its paths and detours, leads us finally to Christ. The genealogy with its
light and dark figures, its successes and failures, shows us that God writes straight
even on the crooked lines of our human history. God allows us our freedom, and yet
in our failures he can always find new paths for his love. God does not fail. Hence
this genealogy is a guarantee of God’s faithfulness; a guarantee that God does not
allow us to fall, and an invitation to direct our lives ever anew towards him, to
walk ever anew towards Jesus Christ.
Making a pilgrimage means setting out
in a particular direction, travelling towards a destination. This gives a beauty
of its own even to the journey and to the effort involved. Among the pilgrims of
Jesus’s genealogy there were many who forgot the goal and wanted to make themselves
the goal. Again and again, though, the Lord called forth people whose longing for
the goal drove them forward, people who directed their whole lives towards it. The
awakening of the Christian faith, the dawning of the Church of Jesus Christ was made
possible, because there were people in Israel whose hearts were searching – people
who did not rest content with custom, but who looked further ahead, in search of something
greater: Zechariah, Elizabeth, Simeon, Anna, Mary and Joseph, the Twelve and many
others. Because their hearts were expectant, they were able to recognize in Jesus
the one whom God had sent, and thus they could become the beginning of his worldwide
family. The Church of the Gentiles was made possible, because both in the Mediterranean
area and in those parts of Asia to which the messengers of Jesus Christ travelled,
there were expectant people who were not satisfied by what everyone around them was
doing and thinking, but who were seeking the star which could show them the way towards
Truth itself, towards the living God.
We too need an open and restless heart
like theirs. This is what pilgrimage is all about. Today as in the past, it is not
enough to be more or less like everyone else and to think like everyone else. Our
lives have a deeper purpose. We need God, the God who has shown us his face and opened
his heart to us: Jesus Christ. Saint John rightly says of him that only he is God
and rests close to the Father’s heart (cf. Jn 1:18); thus only he, from deep within
God himself, could reveal God to us – reveal to us who we are, from where we come
and where we are going. Certainly, there are many great figures in history who have
had beautiful and moving experiences of God. Yet these are still human experiences,
and therefore finite. Only he is God and therefore only he is the bridge that brings
God and man together. So if we call him the one universal Mediator of salvation,
valid for everyone and, ultimately, needed by everyone, this does not mean that we
despise other religions, nor are we arrogantly absolutizing our own ideas; on the
contrary, it means that we are gripped by him who has touched our hearts and lavished
gifts upon us, so that we, in turn, can offer gifts to others. In fact, our faith
is decisively opposed to the attitude of resignation that considers man incapable
of truth – as if this were more than he could cope with. This attitude of resignation
with regard to truth lies at the heart of the crisis of the West, the crisis of Europe.
If truth does not exist for man, then neither can he ultimately distinguish between
good and evil. And then the great and wonderful discoveries of science become double-edged:
they can open up significant possibilities for good, for the benefit of mankind, but
also, as we see only too clearly, they can pose a terrible threat, involving the destruction
of man and the world. We need truth. Yet admittedly, in the light of our history
we are fearful that faith in the truth might entail intolerance. If we are gripped
by this fear, which is historically well grounded, then it is time to look towards
Jesus as we see him in the shrine at Mariazell. We see him here in two images: as
the child in his Mother’s arms, and above the high altar of the Basilica as the Crucified.
These two images in the Basilica tell us this: truth prevails not through external
force, but it is humble and it yields itself to man only via the inner force of its
veracity. Truth proves itself in love. It is never our property, never our product,
just as love can never be produced, but only received and handed on as a gift. We
need this inner force of truth. As Christians we trust this force of truth. We are
its witnesses. We must hand it on as a gift in the same way we have received it.
“To
gaze upon Christ” is the motto of this day. For one who is searching, this summons
repeatedly turns into a spontaneous plea, a plea addressed especially to Mary, who
has given us Christ as her Son: “Show us Jesus!” Let us make this prayer today with
our whole heart; let us make this prayer above and beyond the present moment, as
we inwardly seek the Face of the Redeemer. “Show us Jesus!” Mary responds, showing
him to us in the first instance as a child. God has made himself small for us. God
comes not with external force, but he comes in the powerlessness of his love, which
is where his true strength lies. He places himself in our hands. He asks for our
love. He invites us to become small ourselves, to come down from our high thrones
and to learn to be childlike before God. He speaks to us informally. He asks us
to trust him and thus to learn how to live in truth and love. The child Jesus naturally
reminds us also of all the children in the world, in whom he wishes to come to us.
Children who live in poverty; who are exploited as soldiers; who have never been
able to experience the love of parents; sick and suffering children, but also those
who are joyful and healthy. Europe has become child-poor: we want everything for
ourselves, and place little trust in the future. Yet the earth will be deprived of
a future only when the forces of the human heart and of reason illuminated by the
heart are extinguished – when the face of God no longer shines upon the earth. Where
God is, there is the future.
“To gaze upon Christ”: let us look briefly now
at the Crucified One above the high altar. God saved the world not by the sword,
but by the Cross. In dying, Jesus extends his arms. This, in the first place, is
the posture of the Passion, in which he lets himself be nailed to the Cross for us,
in order to give us his life. Yet outstretched arms are also the posture of one who
prays, the stance assumed by the priest when he extends his arms in prayer: Jesus
transformed the Passion, his suffering and his death, into prayer, into an act of
love for God and for humanity. That, finally, is why outstretched arms are also a
gesture of embracing, by which he wishes to draw us to himself, to enfold us in his
loving hands. In this way he is the image of the living God, he is God himself, and
we may entrust ourselves to him.
“To gaze upon Christ!” If we do this, we
realize that Christianity is more than and different from a moral code, from a series
of requirements and laws. It is the gift of a friendship that lasts through life
and death: “No longer do I call you servants, but friends” (Jn 15:15), the Lord says
to his disciples. We entrust ourselves to this friendship. Yet precisely because
Christianity is more than a moral system, because it is the gift of friendship, for
this reason it also contains within itself great moral strength, which is so urgently
needed today on account of the challenges of our time. If with Jesus Christ and his
Church we constantly re-read the Ten Commandments of Sinai, entering into their full
depth, then a great teaching unfolds before us. It is first and foremost a “yes”
to God, to a God who loves us and leads us, who carries us and yet allows us our freedom:
indeed, it is he who makes our freedom real (the first three commandments). It is
a “yes” to the family (fourth commandment), a “yes” to life (fifth commandment), a
“yes” to responsible love (sixth commandment), a “yes” to solidarity, to social responsibility
and to justice (seventh commandment), a “yes” to truth (eighth commandment) and a
“yes” to respect for other people and for what is theirs (ninth and tenth commandments).
By the strength of our friendship with the living God we live this manifold “yes”
and at the same time we carry it as a signpost into our world.
“Show us Jesus!”
It was with this plea to the Mother of the Lord that we set off on our journey here.
This same plea will accompany us in our daily lives. And we know that Mary hears
our prayer: yes, whenever we look towards Mary, she shows us Jesus. Thus we can
find the right path, we can follow it step by step, filled with joyful confidence
that the path leads into the light – into the joy of eternal Love. Amen.