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.”