APOSTOLIC JOURNEY OF POPE BENEDICT XVI TO GERMANY 22 - 25 SEPTEMBER 2011
All 17 addresses of the Pope during his visit
Apostolic Journey of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Germany Address
at the Welcome Ceremony Mr President of the Federal Republic, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Friends, I am honoured by the kind welcome which you have given to me here in
Bellevue Castle. I am particularly grateful to you, President Wulff, for inviting
me to make this official visit, which marks the third time I have come as Pope to
the Federal Republic of Germany. I thank you most heartily for your cordial and profound
words of welcome. I am likewise grateful to the representatives of the Federal Government,
the Bundestag, the Bundesrat, and the City of Berlin for their presence,
which signifies their respect for the Pope as the Successor of the Apostle Peter.
Last but not least, I thank the three Bishops who are my hosts, Archbishop Woelki
of Berlin, Bishop Wanke of Erfurt and Archbishop Zollitsch of Freiburg, and all those
at the various ecclesial and civil levels who helped in preparing this visit to my
native land and contributed to its happy outcome. Even though this journey is
an official visit which will consolidate the good relations existing between the Federal
Republic of Germany and the Holy See, I have not come here primarily to pursue particular
political or economic goals, as other statesmen do, but rather to meet people and
to speak to them about God. I am pleased, therefore, to see such a large turnout
of German citizens here. Many thanks! As you mentioned, Mr President, we are
witnessing a growing indifference to religion in society, which considers the issue
of truth as something of an obstacle in its decision-making, and instead gives priority
to utilitarian considerations. All the same, a binding basis for our coexistence
is needed; otherwise people live in a purely individualistic way. Religion is one
of these foundations for a successful social life. “Just as religion has need of
freedom, so also freedom has need of religion.” These words of the great bishop and
social reformer Wilhelm von Ketteler, the second centenary of whose birth is being
celebrated this year, remain timely. Freedom requires a primordial link to a higher
instance. The fact that there are values which are not absolutely open to manipulation
is the true guarantee of our freedom. The man who feels a duty to truth and goodness
will immediately agree with this: freedom develops only in responsibility to a greater
good. Such a good exists only for all of us together; therefore I must always be
concerned for my neighbours. Freedom cannot be lived in the absence of relationships In
human coexistence, freedom is impossible without solidarity. What I do at the expense
of others is not freedom but a culpable way of acting which is harmful to others and
hence ultimately also to myself. I can truly develop as a free person only by using
my powers also for the welfare of others. And this holds true not only in private
matters but also for society as a whole. In accordance with the principle of subsidiarity,
society must give sufficient space for smaller structures to develop and, at the same
time, must support them so that one day they will stand on their own. Here in
Bellevue Castle, named for its splendid view of the banks of the Spree and situated
close to the Victory Column, the Bundestag and the Brandenburg Gate, we are
in the very heart of Berlin, the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany. This
castle, with its dramatic history – like many buildings of this city – is a testimony
to the history of Germany. We are familiar with its great and noble pages, and we
are grateful for them. But a clear look at its dark pages is also possible, and this
is what enables us to learn from the past and to receive an impetus for the present.
The Federal Republic of Germany has become what it is today thanks to the power of
freedom shaped by responsibility before God and before one another. It needs this
dynamism, which engages every human sector in order to continue developing now. It
needs this in a world which requires a profound cultural renewal and the rediscovery
of fundamental values upon which to build a better future (Caritas in Veritate,
21). I trust that my meetings throughout this visit – here in Berlin, in Erfurt,
in Eichsfeld and in Freiburg – can make a small contribution in this regard. In these
days may God grant all of us his blessing. Thank you. XXX XXX
XXX
Apostolic Journey of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Germany Address
at the German Parliament, Berlin 22 September 2011The Listening Heart Reflections
on the Foundations of Law
Mr President of the Federal Republic, Mr President
of the Bundestag, Madam Chancellor, Mr President of the Bundesrat, Ladies and Gentlemen
Members of the House, It is an honour and a joy for me to speak before this distinguished
house, before the Parliament of my native Germany, that meets here as a democratically
elected representation of the people, in order to work for the good of the Federal
Republic of Germany. I should like to thank the President of the Bundestag both for
his invitation to deliver this address and for the kind words of greeting and appreciation
with which he has welcomed me. At this moment I turn to you, distinguished ladies
and gentlemen, not least as your fellow-countryman who for all his life has been conscious
of close links to his origins, and has followed the affairs of his native Germany
with keen interest. But the invitation to give this address was extended to me as
Pope, as the Bishop of Rome, who bears the highest responsibility for Catholic Christianity.
In issuing this invitation you are acknowledging the role that the Holy See plays
as a partner within the community of peoples and states. Setting out from this international
responsibility that I hold, I should like to propose to you some thoughts on the foundations
of a free state of law. Allow me to begin my reflections on the foundations of
law [Recht] with a brief story from sacred Scripture. In the First Book of the Kings,
it is recounted that God invited the young King Solomon, on his accession to the throne,
to make a request. What will the young ruler ask for at this important moment? Success
– wealth – long life – destruction of his enemies? He chooses none of these things.
Instead, he asks for a listening heart so that he may govern God’s people, and discern
between good and evil (cf. 1 Kg 3:9). Through this story, the Bible wants to tell
us what should ultimately matter for a politician. His fundamental criterion and
the motivation for his work as a politician must not be success, and certainly not
material gain. Politics must be a striving for justice, and hence it has to establish
the fundamental preconditions for peace. Naturally a politician will seek success,
as this is what opens up for him the possibility of effective political action. Yet
success is subordinated to the criterion of justice, to the will to do what is right,
and to the understanding of what is right. Success can also be seductive and thus
can open up the path towards the falsification of what is right, towards the destruction
of justice. “Without justice – what else is the State but a great band of robbers?”,
as Saint Augustine once said . We Germans know from our own experience that these
words are no empty spectre. We have seen how power became divorced from right, how
power opposed right and crushed it, so that the State became an instrument for destroying
right – a highly organized band of robbers, capable of threatening the whole world
and driving it to the edge of the abyss. To serve right and to fight against the
dominion of wrong is and remains the fundamental task of the politician. At a moment
in history when man has acquired previously inconceivable power, this task takes on
a particular urgency. Man can destroy the world. He can manipulate himself. He
can, so to speak, make human beings and he can deny them their humanity. How do we
recognize what is right? How can we discern between good and evil, between what is
truly right and what may appear right? Even now, Solomon’s request remains the decisive
issue facing politicians and politics today. For most of the matters that need
to be regulated by law, the support of the majority can serve as a sufficient criterion.
Yet it is evident that for the fundamental issues of law, in which the dignity of
man and of humanity is at stake, the majority principle is not enough: everyone in
a position of responsibility must personally seek out the criteria to be followed
when framing laws. In the third century, the great theologian Origen provided the
following explanation for the resistance of Christians to certain legal systems: “Suppose
that a man were living among the Scythians, whose laws are contrary to the divine
law, and was compelled to live among them ... such a man for the sake of the true
law, though illegal among the Scythians, would rightly form associations with like-minded
people contrary to the laws of the Scythians.” This conviction was what motivated
resistance movements to act against the Nazi regime and other totalitarian regimes,
thereby doing a great service to justice and to humanity as a whole. For these people,
it was indisputably evident that the law in force was actually unlawful. Yet when
it comes to the decisions of a democratic politician, the question of what now corresponds
to the law of truth, what is actually right and may be enacted as law, is less obvious.
In terms of the underlying anthropological issues, what is right and may be given
the force of law is in no way simply self-evident today. The question of how to recognize
what is truly right and thus to serve justice when framing laws has never been simple,
and today in view of the vast extent of our knowledge and our capacity, it has become
still harder. How do we recognize what is right? In history, systems of law have
almost always been based on religion: decisions regarding what was to be lawful among
men were taken with reference to the divinity. Unlike other great religions, Christianity
has never proposed a revealed body of law to the State and to society, that is to
say a juridical order derived from revelation. Instead, it has pointed to nature
and reason as the true sources of law – and to the harmony of objective and subjective
reason, which naturally presupposes that both spheres are rooted in the creative reason
of God. Christian theologians thereby aligned themselves with a philosophical and
juridical movement that began to take shape in the second century B.C. In the first
half of that century, the social natural law developed by the Stoic philosophers came
into contact with leading teachers of Roman Law. Through this encounter, the juridical
culture of the West was born, which was and is of key significance for the juridical
culture of mankind. This pre-Christian marriage between law and philosophy opened
up the path that led via the Christian Middle Ages and the juridical developments
of the Age of Enlightenment all the way to the Declaration of Human Rights and to
our German Basic Law of 1949, with which our nation committed itself to “inviolable
and inalienable human rights as the foundation of every human community, and of peace
and justice in the world”. For the development of law and for the development of
humanity, it was highly significant that Christian theologians aligned themselves
against the religious law associated with polytheism and on the side of philosophy,
and that they acknowledged reason and nature in their interrelation as the universally
valid source of law. This step had already been taken by Saint Paul in the Letter
to the Romans, when he said: “When Gentiles who have not the Law [the Torah of Israel]
do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves ... they show that
what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears
witness ...” (Rom 2:14f.). Here we see the two fundamental concepts of nature and
conscience, where conscience is nothing other than Solomon’s listening heart, reason
that is open to the language of being. If this seemed to offer a clear explanation
of the foundations of legislation up to the time of the Enlightenment, up to the time
of the Declaration on Human Rights after the Second World War and the framing of our
Basic Law, there has been a dramatic shift in the situation in the last half-century.
The idea of natural law is today viewed as a specifically Catholic doctrine, not worth
bringing into the discussion in a non-Catholic environment, so that one feels almost
ashamed even to mention the term. Let me outline briefly how this situation arose.
Fundamentally it is because of the idea that an unbridgeable gulf exists between “is”
and “ought”. An “ought” can never follow from an “is”, because the two are situated
on completely different planes. The reason for this is that in the meantime, the
positivist understanding of nature and reason has come to be almost universally accepted.
If nature – in the words of Hans Kelsen – is viewed as “an aggregate of objective
data linked together in terms of cause and effect”, then indeed no ethical indication
of any kind can be derived from it. A positivist conception of nature as purely
functional, in the way that the natural sciences explain it, is incapable of producing
any bridge to ethics and law, but once again yields only functional answers. The
same also applies to reason, according to the positivist understanding that is widely
held to be the only genuinely scientific one. Anything that is not verifiable or
falsifiable, according to this understanding, does not belong to the realm of reason
strictly understood. Hence ethics and religion must be assigned to the subjective
field, and they remain extraneous to the realm of reason in the strict sense of the
word. Where positivist reason dominates the field to the exclusion of all else –
and that is broadly the case in our public mindset – then the classical sources of
knowledge for ethics and law are excluded. This is a dramatic situation which affects
everyone, and on which a public debate is necessary. Indeed, an essential goal of
this address is to issue an urgent invitation to launch one. The positivist approach
to nature and reason, the positivist world view in general, is a most important dimension
of human knowledge and capacity that we may in no way dispense with. But in and of
itself it is not a sufficient culture corresponding to the full breadth of the human
condition. Where positivist reason considers itself the only sufficient culture and
banishes all other cultural realities to the status of subcultures, it diminishes
man, indeed it threatens his humanity. I say this with Europe specifically in mind,
where there are concerted efforts to recognize only positivism as a common culture
and a common basis for law-making, so that all the other insights and values of our
culture are reduced to the level of subculture, with the result that Europe vis-à-vis
other world cultures is left in a state of culturelessness and at the same time extremist
and radical movements emerge to fill the vacuum. In its self-proclaimed exclusivity,
the positivist reason which recognizes nothing beyond mere functionality resembles
a concrete bunker with no windows, in which we ourselves provide lighting and atmospheric
conditions, being no longer willing to obtain either from God’s wide world. And yet
we cannot hide from ourselves the fact that even in this artificial world, we are
still covertly drawing upon God’s raw materials, which we refashion into our own products.
The windows must be flung open again, we must see the wide world, the sky and the
earth once more and learn to make proper use of all this. But how are we to do
this? How do we find our way out into the wide world, into the big picture? How
can reason rediscover its true greatness, without being sidetracked into irrationality?
How can nature reassert itself in its true depth, with all its demands, with all its
directives? I would like to recall one of the developments in recent political history,
hoping that I will neither be misunderstood, nor provoke too many one-sided polemics.
I would say that the emergence of the ecological movement in German politics since
the 1970s, while it has not exactly flung open the windows, nevertheless was and continues
to be a cry for fresh air which must not be ignored or pushed aside, just because
too much of it is seen to be irrational. Young people had come to realize that something
is wrong in our relationship with nature, that matter is not just raw material for
us to shape at will, but that the earth has a dignity of its own and that we must
follow its directives. In saying this, I am clearly not promoting any particular
political party – nothing could be further from my mind. If something is wrong in
our relationship with reality, then we must all reflect seriously on the whole situation
and we are all prompted to question the very foundations of our culture. Allow me
to dwell a little longer on this point. The importance of ecology is no longer disputed.
We must listen to the language of nature and we must answer accordingly. Yet I would
like to underline a further point that is still largely disregarded, today as in the
past: there is also an ecology of man. Man too has a nature that he must respect
and that he cannot manipulate at will. Man is not merely self-creating freedom.
Man does not create himself. He is intellect and will, but he is also nature, and
his will is rightly ordered if he listens to his nature, respects it and accepts himself
for who he is, as one who did not create himself. In this way, and in no other, is
true human freedom fulfilled. Let us come back to the fundamental concepts of nature
and reason, from which we set out. The great proponent of legal positivism, Kelsen,
at the age of 84 – in 1965 – abandoned the dualism of “is” and “ought”. He had said
that norms can only come from the will. Nature therefore could only contain norms
if a will had put them there. But this would presuppose a Creator God, whose will
had entered into nature. “Any attempt to discuss the truth of this belief is utterly
futile”, he observed. Is it really? – I find myself asking. Is it really pointless
to wonder whether the objective reason that manifests itself in nature does not presuppose
a creative reason, a Creator Spiritus? At this point Europe’s cultural heritage
ought to come to our assistance. The conviction that there is a Creator God is what
gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before
the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person
and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory
is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the
past would be to dismember our culture totally and to rob it of its completeness.
The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome
– from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the
Greeks and Roman law. This three-way encounter has shaped the inner identity of Europe.
In the awareness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgment of the
inviolable dignity of every single human person, it has established criteria of law:
it is these criteria that we are called to defend at this moment in our history. As
he assumed the mantle of office, the young King Solomon was invited to make a request.
How would it be if we, the law-makers of today, were invited to make a request? What
would we ask for? I think that, even today, there is ultimately nothing else we could
wish for but a listening heart – the capacity to discern between good and evil, and
thus to establish true law, to serve justice and peace. Thank you for your attention! XXX
XXX XXX Apostolic Journey of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Germany Address
of the Holy Father - Meeting with Representatives of the Jewish Community Berlin,
Reichstag Building 22 September 2011 Ladies and Gentlemen, I am glad
to be taking part in this meeting with you here in Berlin. I warmly thank President
Dr Dieter Graumann for his kind words of greeting. They make it very clear to me
how much trust has grown between the Jewish people and the Catholic Church, who hold
in common a not insignificant part of their essential traditions. At the same time
it is clear to us all that a loving relationship of mutual understanding between Israel
and the Church, each respecting the being of the other, still has further to grow
and needs to be built into the heart of our proclamation of the faith. On my visit
to the Synagogue in Cologne six years ago, Rabbi Teitelbaum spoke of remembrance as
one of the supporting pillars that are needed if a future of peace is to be built.
And today I find myself in a central place of remembrance, the appalling remembrance
that it was from here that the Shoah, the annihilation of our Jewish fellow citizens
in Europe, was planned and organized. Before the Nazi terror, there were about half
a million Jews living in Germany, and they formed a stable component of German society.
After the Second World War, Germany was considered the “Land of the Shoah”, where
it had become virtually impossible to live. Initially there were hardly any efforts
to re-establish the old Jewish communities, even though Jewish individuals and families
were constantly arriving from the East. Many of them wanted to emigrate and build
a new life, especially in the United States or Israel. In this place, remembrance
must also be made of the Kristallnacht that took place from 9 to 10 November 1938.
Only a few could see the full extent of this act of contempt for humanity, like the
Berlin Cathedral Provost, Bernhard Lichtenberg, who cried out from the pulpit of Saint
Hedwig’s Cathedral: “Outside, the Temple is burning – that too is the house of God”.
The Nazi reign of terror was based on a racist myth, part of which was the rejection
of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ and of all who believe
in him. The supposedly “almighty” Adolf Hitler was a pagan idol, who wanted to take
the place of the biblical God, the Creator and Father of all men. Refusal to heed
this one God always makes people heedless of human dignity as well. What man is capable
of when he rejects God, and what the face of a people can look like when it denies
this God, the terrible images from the concentration camps at the end of the war showed.
In the light of this remembrance, it is to be acknowledged with thankfulness that
a new development has been seen in recent decades, which makes it possible to speak
of a real blossoming of Jewish life in Germany. It should be stressed that the Jewish
community during this time has made particularly laudable efforts to integrate the
Eastern European immigrants. I would also like to express my appreciation for the
deepening dialogue of the Catholic Church with Judaism. The Church feels a great
closeness to the Jewish people. With the Declaration Nostra Aetate of the Second
Vatican Council, an “irrevocable commitment to pursue the path of dialogue, fraternity
and friendship” was made (cf. Address in the Synagogue in Rome, 17 January 2010).
This is true of the Catholic Church as a whole, in which Blessed John Paul II committed
himself to this new path with particular zeal. Naturally it is also true of the Catholic
Church in Germany, which is conscious of its particular responsibility in this regard.
In the public domain, special mention should be made of the “Week of Fraternity”,
organized each year during the first week of March by local Societies for Christian-Jewish
Partnership. On the Catholic side there are also annual meetings between bishops
and rabbis as well as structured conversations with the Central Council of Jews.
Back in the 1970s, the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK) took the initiative
of establishing a “Jews and Christians” forum, which over the years has issued many
well-written and helpful documents. Nor must we overlook the historic meeting for
Jewish-Christian dialogue that took place in March 2006 with the participation of
Cardinal Walter Kasper. That meeting has continued to bear rich fruit right up to
the present time. Alongside these praiseworthy concrete initiatives, it seems to
me that we Christians must also become increasingly aware of our own inner affinity
with Judaism. For Christians, there can be no rupture in salvation history. Salvation
comes from the Jews (cf. Jn 4:22). When Jesus’ conflict with the Judaism of his time
is superficially interpreted as a breach with the Old Covenant, it tends to be reduced
to the idea of a liberation that views the Torah merely as a slavish enactment of
rituals and outward observances. In fact, the Sermon on the Mount does not abolish
the Mosaic Law, but reveals its hidden possibilities and allows more radical demands
to emerge. It points us towards the deepest source of human action, the heart, where
choices are made between what is pure and what is impure, where faith, hope and love
blossom forth. The message of hope contained in the books of the Hebrew Bible and
the Christian Old Testament has been appropriated and continued in different ways
by Jews and Christians. “After centuries of antagonism, we now see it as our task
to bring these two ways of rereading the biblical texts – the Christian way and the
Jewish way – into dialogue with one another, if we are to understand God’s will and
his word aright” (Jesus of Nazareth. Part Two: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to
the Resurrection, pp. 33f.). This dialogue should serve to strengthen our common
hope in God in the midst of an increasingly secularized society. Without this hope,
society loses its humanity. All in all, we may conclude that the exchanges between
the Catholic Church and Judaism in Germany have already borne promising fruits. Enduring
relations of trust have been forged. Jews and Christians certainly have a shared
responsibility for the development of society, which always includes a religious dimension.
May all those taking part in this journey move forward together. To this end, may
the One and Almighty, Ha Kadosch Baruch Hu, grant his blessing. XXX XXX
XXX
Apostolic Journey of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Germany Homily
during the Holy Mass in Berlin, Olympic Stadium Dear Brother Bishops,
Dear Brothers and Sisters, As I look around the vast arena of the Olympic Stadium,
where you have gathered today in such large numbers, my heart is filled with great
joy and confidence. I greet all of you most warmly – the faithful from the Archdiocese
of Berlin and the Dioceses of Germany as well as the many pilgrims from neighbouring
countries. It was fifteen years ago that Berlin, the capital of Germany, was first
visited by a Pope. We all remember vividly the visit of my venerable predecessor,
Blessed John Paul II, and the beatification of the Berlin Cathedral Provost Bernhard
Lichtenberg – together with Karl Leisner – here in this very place. If we consider
these beati and the great throng of those who have been canonized and beatified, we
can understand what it means to live as branches of Christ, the true vine, and to
bring forth rich fruit. Today’s Gospel puts before us once more the image of this
climbing plant, that spreads so luxuriantly in the east, a symbol of vitality and
a metaphor for the beauty and dynamism of Jesus’ fellowship with his disciples and
friends. In the parable of the vine, Jesus does not say: “You are the vine”, but:
“I am the vine, you are the branches” (Jn 15:5). In other words: “As the branches
are joined to the vine, so you belong to me! But inasmuch as you belong to me,
you also belong to one another.” This belonging to each other and to him is not some
ideal, imaginary, symbolic relationship, but – I would almost want to say – a biological,
life-transmitting state of belonging to Jesus Christ. Such is the Church, this communion
of life with him and for the sake of one another, a communion that is rooted in baptism
and is deepened and given more and more vitality in the Eucharist. “I am the true
vine” actually means: “I am you and you are I” – an unprecedented identification of
the Lord with us, his Church. On the road to Damascus, Christ himself asked Saul,
the persecutor of the Church: “Why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4). With these words
the Lord expresses the common destiny that arises from his Church’s inner communion
of life with himself, the risen Christ. He continues to live in his Church in this
world. He is present among us, and we are with him. “Why do you persecute me?”
It is Jesus, then, who is on the receiving end of the persecutions of his Church.
At the same time, when we are oppressed for the sake of our faith, we are not alone:
Jesus is with us. Jesus says in the parable: “I am the true vine, and my Father
is the vinedresser” (Jn 15:1), and he goes on to explain that the vinedresser reaches
for his knife, cuts off the withered branches and prunes the fruit-bearing ones, so
that they bring forth more fruit. Expressed in terms of the image from the prophet
Ezekiel that we heard in the first reading, God wants to take the dead heart of stone
out of our breast in order to give us a living heart of flesh (cf. Ez 36:26). He
wants to bestow new life upon us, full of vitality. Christ came to call sinners.
It is they who need the doctor, not the healthy (cf. Lk 5:31f.). Hence, as the Second
Vatican Council expresses it, the Church is the “universal sacrament of salvation”
(Lumen Gentium, 48), existing for sinners in order to open up to them the path of
conversion, healing and life. That is the Church’s true and great mission, entrusted
to her by Christ. Many people see only the outward form of the Church. This makes
the Church appear as merely one of the many organizations within a democratic society,
whose criteria and laws are then applied to the task of evaluating and dealing with
such a complex entity as the “Church”. If to this is added the sad experience that
the Church contains both good and bad fish, wheat and darnel, and if only these negative
aspects are taken into account, then the great and deep mystery of the Church is no
longer seen. It follows that belonging to this vine, the “Church”, is no longer
a source of joy. Dissatisfaction and discontent begin to spread, when people’s superficial
and mistaken notions of “Church”, their “dream Church”, fail to materialize! Then
we no longer hear the glad song “Thanks be to God who in his grace has called me into
his Church” that generations of Catholics have sung with conviction. The Lord’s
discourse continues: “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit
by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me ...
for apart from me [i.e. separated from me, or outside me] you can do nothing” (Jn
15:4f.). Every one of us is faced with this choice. The Lord reminds us how much
is at stake as he continues his parable: “If a man does not abide in me, he is cast
forth as a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire
and burned” (Jn 15:6). In this regard, Saint Augustine says: “The branch is suitable
only for one of two things, either the vine or the fire: if it is not in the vine,
its place will be in the fire; and that it may escape the latter, may it have its
place in the vine” (In Ioan. Ev. Tract. 81:3 [PL 35, 1842]). The decision that
is required of us here makes us keenly aware of the existential significance of our
life choices. At the same time, the image of the vine is a sign of hope and confidence.
Christ himself came into this world through his incarnation, to be our root. Whatever
hardship or drought befall us, he is the source that offers us the water of life,
that feeds and strengthens us. He takes upon himself all our sins, anxieties and
sufferings and he purifies and transforms us, in a way that is ultimately mysterious,
into good wine. In such times of hardship we can sometimes feel as if we ourselves
were in the wine-press, like grapes being utterly crushed. But we know that if we
are joined to Christ we become mature wine. God can transform into love even the
burdensome and oppressive aspects of our lives. It is important that we “abide” in
Christ, in the vine. The evangelist uses the word “abide” a dozen times in this brief
passage. This “abiding in Christ” characterizes the whole of the parable. In our
era of restlessness and lack of commitment, when so many people lose their way and
their grounding, when loving fidelity in marriage and friendship has become so fragile
and short-lived, when in our need we cry out like the disciples on the road to Emmaus:
“Lord, stay with us, for it is almost evening and darkness is all around us!” (cf.
Lk 24:29), then the risen Lord gives us a place of refuge, a place of light, hope
and confidence, a place of rest and security. When drought and death loom over the
branches, then future, life and joy are to be found in Christ. To abide in Christ
means, as we saw earlier, to abide in the Church as well. The whole communion of
the faithful has been firmly incorporated into the vine, into Christ. In Christ we
belong together. Within this communion he supports us, and at the same time all the
members support one another. They stand firm together against the storm and they
offer one another protection. Those who believe are not alone. We do not believe
alone, but we believe with the whole Church. The Church, as the herald of God’s
word and dispenser of the sacraments, joins us to Christ, the true vine. The Church
as “fullness and completion of the Redeemer” (Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, AAS 35 [1943]
p. 230: “plenitudo et complementum Redemptoris”) is to us a pledge of divine life
and mediator of those fruits of which the parable of the vine speaks. The Church
is God’s most beautiful gift. Therefore Saint Augustine also says: “as much as any
man loves the Church of Christ, so much has he the Holy Spirit” (In Ioan. Ev. Tract.
32:8 [PL 35:1646]). With and in the Church we may proclaim to all people that Christ
is the source of life, that he exists, that he is the one for whom we long so much.
He gives himself. Whoever believes in Christ has a future. For God has no desire
for what is withered, dead, ersatz, and finally discarded: he wants what is fruitful
and alive, he wants life in its fullness. Dear Brothers and Sisters! My wish for
all of you is that you may discover ever more deeply the joy of being joined to Christ
in the Church, that you may find comfort and redemption in your time of need and that
you may increasingly become the precious wine of Christ’s joy and love for this world.
Amen.XXX XXX XXX
Apostolic Journey of His Holiness
Pope Benedict XVI to Germany Address to Muslim Communities, Berlin, Apostolic
Nunciature 23 September 2011Dear Muslim Friends,I am glad to be able
to welcome you here, as the representatives of different Muslim communities in Germany.
I thank Professor Mouhanad Khorchide most sincerely for his kind greetings and for
the profound reflections that he shared with us. His words illustrate what a climate
of respect and trust has grown up between the Catholic Church and the Muslim communities
in Germany and how the convictions we share are becoming visible. Berlin is a good
place for a meeting like this, not only because the oldest mosque in Germany is located
here, but also because Berlin has the largest Muslim population of all the cities
in Germany. From the 1970s onwards, the presence of numerous Muslim families has
increasingly become a distinguishing mark of this country. Constant effort is needed
in order to foster better mutual acquaintance and understanding. Not only is this
important for peaceful coexistence, but also for the contribution that each can make
towards building up the common good in this society. Many Muslims attribute great
importance to the religious dimension of life. At times this is thought provocative
in a society that tends to marginalize religion or at most to assign it a place among
the individual’s private choices. The Catholic Church firmly advocates that due
recognition be given to the public dimension of religious adherence. In an overwhelmingly
pluralist society, this demand is not unimportant. In the process, care must be taken
to guarantee that the other is always treated with respect. This mutual respect grows
only on the basis of agreement on certain inalienable values that are proper to human
nature, in particular the inviolable dignity of every single person as created by
God. Such agreement does not limit the expression of individual religions; on the
contrary, it allows each person to bear witness explicitly to what he believes, not
avoiding comparison with others. In Germany – as in many other countries, not only
Western ones – this common frame of reference is articulated by the Constitution,
whose juridical content is binding on every citizen, whether he belong to a faith
community or not. Naturally, discussion over the best formulation of principles
like freedom of public worship is vast and open-ended, yet it is significant that
the German Basic Law expresses them in a way that is still valid today at a distance
of over sixty years (cf. Art. 4:2). In this law we find above all the common ethos
that lies at the heart of human coexistence and that also in a certain way pervades
the apparently formal rules of operation of the institutions of democratic life. We
could ask ourselves how such a text – drawn up in a radically different historical
epoch, that is to say in an almost uniformly Christian cultural situation – is also
suited to present-day Germany, situated as it is within a globalized world and marked
as it is by a remarkable degree of pluralism in the area of religious belief. The
reason for this seems to me to lie in the fact that the fathers of the Basic Law at
that important moment were fully conscious of the need to find truly solid ground
with which all citizens would be able to identify and which could serve as the supporting
foundation for everyone, irrespective of their differences. In seeking this, mindful
of human dignity and responsibility before God, they did not prescind from their own
religious beliefs; indeed for many of them, the real source of inspiration was the
Christian vision of man. But they knew that everyone has to engage with the followers
of other religions and none: common ground for all was found in the recognition of
some inalienable rights that are proper to human nature and precede every positive
formulation. In this way, a society which at that time was essentially homogenous
laid the foundations that we today may consider valid for a markedly pluralistic era,
foundations that actually point out the evident limits of pluralism: it is inconceivable,
in fact, that a society could survive in the long term without consensus on fundamental
ethical values. Dear friends, on the basis of what I have outlined here, it seems
to me that there can be fruitful collaboration between Christians and Muslims. In
the process, we help to build a society that differs in many respects from what we
brought with us from the past. As believers, setting out from our respective convictions,
we can offer an important witness in many key areas of life in society. I am thinking,
for example, of the protection of the family based on marriage, respect for life in
every phase of its natural course or the promotion of greater social justice. This
is another reason why I think it important to hold a day of reflection, dialogue and
prayer for peace and justice in the world, which as you know we plan to do on 27 October
next in Assisi, twenty-five years after the historic meeting there led by my predecessor,
Blessed Pope John Paul II. Through this gathering, we wish to express, with simplicity,
that we believers have a special contribution to make towards building a better world,
while acknowledging that if our actions are to be effective, we need to grow in dialogue
and mutual esteem. With these sentiments I renew my sincere greetings and I thank
you for this meeting, which for me has been a great enrichment of my visit to my homeland.
Thank you for your attention!XXX XXX XXX
Apostolic
Journey of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Germany Meeting with the Council
of the Evangelical Church in Germany 23 September 2011 Dear Brothers
and Sisters, As I begin to speak, I would like first of all to say how deeply
grateful I am that we are able to come together. I am particularly grateful to you,
my dear brother, Pastor Schneider, for receiving me and for the words with which you
have welcomed me here among you. You have opened your heart and openly expressed
a truly shared faith, a longing for unity. And we are also glad, for I believe that
this session, our meetings here, are also being celebrated as the feast of our shared
faith. Moreover, I would like to express my thanks to all of you for your gift in
making it possible for us to speak with one another as Christians here, in this historic
place. As the Bishop of Rome, it is deeply moving for me to be meeting you here
in the ancient Augustinian convent in Erfurt. As we have just heard, this is where
Luther studied theology. This is where he was ordained a priest. Against his father’s
wishes, he did not continue the study of Law, but instead he studied theology and
set off on the path towards priesthood in the Order of Saint Augustine. And on this
path, he was not simply concerned with this or that. What constantly exercised him
was the question of God, the deep passion and driving force of his whole life’s journey.
“How do I receive the grace of God?”: this question struck him in the heart and lay
at the foundation of all his theological searching and inner struggle. For Luther
theology was no mere academic pursuit, but the struggle for oneself, which in turn
was a struggle for and with God. “How do I receive the grace of God?” The fact
that this question was the driving force of his whole life never ceases to make a
deep impression on me. For who is actually concerned about this today – even among
Christians? What does the question of God mean in our lives? In our preaching?
Most people today, even Christians, set out from the presupposition that God is not
fundamentally interested in our sins and virtues. He knows that we are all mere flesh.
And insofar as people believe in an afterlife and a divine judgement at all, nearly
everyone presumes for all practical purposes that God is bound to be magnanimous and
that ultimately he mercifully overlooks our small failings. The question no longer
troubles us. But are they really so small, our failings? Is not the world laid waste
through the corruption of the great, but also of the small, who think only of their
own advantage? Is it not laid waste through the power of drugs, which thrives on
the one hand on greed and avarice, and on the other hand on the craving for pleasure
of those who become addicted? Is the world not threatened by the growing readiness
to use violence, frequently masking itself with claims to religious motivation? Could
hunger and poverty so devastate parts of the world if love for God and godly love
of neighbour – of his creatures, of men and women – were more alive in us? I could
go on. No, evil is no small matter. Were we truly to place God at the centre of
our lives, it could not be so powerful. The question: what is God’s position towards
me, where do I stand before God? – Luther’s burning question must once more, doubtless
in a new form, become our question too, not an academic question, but a real one.
In my view, this is the first summons we should attend to in our encounter with Martin
Luther. Another important point: God, the one God, creator of heaven and earth,
is no mere philosophical hypothesis regarding the origins of the universe. This God
has a face, and he has spoken to us. He became one of us in the man Jesus Christ
– who is both true God and true man. Luther’s thinking, his whole spirituality, was
thoroughly Christocentric: “What promotes Christ’s cause” was for Luther the decisive
hermeneutical criterion for the exegesis of sacred Scripture. This presupposes, however,
that Christ is at the heart of our spirituality and that love for him, living in communion
with him, is what guides our life. Now perhaps one might say: all well and good,
but what has this to do with our ecumenical situation? Could this just be an attempt
to talk our way past the urgent problems that are still waiting for practical progress,
for concrete results? I would respond by saying that the first and most important
thing for ecumenism is that we keep in view just how much we have in common, not losing
sight of it amid the pressure towards secularization – everything that makes us Christian
in the first place and continues to be our gift and our task. It was the error of
the Reformation period that for the most part we could only see what divided us and
we failed to grasp existentially what we have in common in terms of the great deposit
of sacred Scripture and the early Christian creeds. For me, the great ecumenical
step forward of recent decades is that we have become aware of all this common ground,
that we acknowledge it as we pray and sing together, as we make our joint commitment
to the Christian ethos in our dealings with the world, as we bear common witness to
the God of Jesus Christ in this world as our inalienable, shared foundation. To
be sure, the risk of losing it is not unreal. I would like to make two brief points
here. The geography of Christianity has changed dramatically in recent times, and
is in the process of changing further. Faced with a new form of Christianity, which
is spreading with overpowering missionary dynamism, sometimes in frightening ways,
the mainstream Christian denominations often seem at a loss. This is a form of Christianity
with little institutional depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content,
and with little stability. This worldwide phenomenon – that bishops from all over
the world are constantly telling me about – poses a question to us all: what is this
new form of Christianity saying to us, for better and for worse? In any event, it
raises afresh the question about what has enduring validity and what can or must be
changed – the question of our fundamental faith choice. The second challenge to
worldwide Christianity of which I wish to speak is more profound and in our country
more controversial: the secularized context of the world in which we Christians today
have to live and bear witness to our faith. God is increasingly being driven out
of our society, and the history of revelation that Scripture recounts to us seems
locked into an ever more remote past. Are we to yield to the pressure of secularization,
and become modern by watering down the faith? Naturally faith today has to be thought
out afresh, and above all lived afresh, so that it is suited to the present day.
Yet it is not by watering the faith down, but by living it today in its fullness that
we achieve this. This is a key ecumenical task in which we have to help one another:
developing a deeper and livelier faith. It is not strategy that saves us and saves
Christianity, but faith – thought out and lived afresh; through such faith, Christ
enters this world of ours, and with him, the living God. As the martyrs of the Nazi
era brought us together and prompted that great initial ecumenical opening, so today,
faith that is lived from deep within amid a secularized world is the most powerful
ecumenical force that brings us together, guiding us towards unity in the one Lord.
And we pray to him, asking that we may learn to live the faith anew, and that in this
way we may then become one.XXX XXX XXX
Apostolic Journey
of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Germany Ecumenical Celebration 23
September 2011
Dear Sisters and Brothers, “I ask not only on
behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through them”
(Jn 17:20). These words Jesus addressed to the Father in the Upper Room.
He intercedes for coming generations of believers. He looks beyond the Upper Room,
towards the future. He also prayed for us. And he prayed for our unity. This prayer
of Jesus is not simply something from the past. He stands before the Father, forever
making intercession for us. At this moment he also stands in our midst and he desires
to draw us into his own prayer. In the prayer of Jesus we find the very heart of
our unity. We will become one if we allow ourselves to be drawn into this prayer.
Whenever we gather in prayer as Christians, Jesus’ concern for us, and his prayer
to the Father for us, ought to touch our hearts. The more we allow ourselves to be
drawn into this event, the more we grow in unity. Did Jesus’ prayer go unheard?
The history of Christianity is in some sense the visible element of this drama in
which Christ strives and suffers with us human beings. Ever anew he must endure the
rejection of unity, yet ever anew unity takes place with him and thus with the triune
God. We need to see both things: the sin of human beings, who reject God and withdraw
within themselves, but also the triumphs of God, who upholds the Church despite her
weakness, constantly drawing men and women closer to himself and thus to one another.
For this reason, in an ecumenical gathering, we ought not only to regret our divisions
and separations, but we should also give thanks to God for all the elements of unity
which he has preserved for us and bestows on us ever anew. And this gratitude must
be at the same time a resolve not to lose, at a time of temptations and perils, the
unity thus bestowed. Our fundamental unity comes from the fact that we believe
in God, the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth. And that we confess that
he is the triune God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The highest unity is not the
solitude of a monad, but rather a unity born of love. We believe in God – the real
God. We believe that God spoke to us and became one of us. To bear witness to this
living God is our common task at the present time. Does man need God, or can we
do quite well without him? When, in the first phase of God’s absence, his light continues
to illumine and sustain the order of human existence, it appears that things can also
function quite well without God. But the more the world withdraws from God, the clearer
it becomes that man, in his hubris of power, in his emptiness of heart and in his
longing for satisfaction and happiness, increasingly loses his life. A thirst for
the infinite is indelibly present in human beings. Man was created to have a relationship
with God; we need him. Our primary ecumenical service at this hour must be to bear
common witness to the presence of the living God and in this way to give the world
the answer which it needs. Naturally, an absolutely central part of this fundamental
witness to God is a witness to Jesus Christ, true man and true God, who lived in our
midst, suffered and died for us and, in his resurrection, flung open the gates of
death. Dear friends, let us strengthen one another in this faith! This is a great
ecumenical task which leads us into the heart of Jesus’ prayer. The seriousness
of our faith in God is shown by the way we live his word. In our own day, it is shown
in a very practical way by our commitment to that creature which he wished in his
own image: to man. We live at a time of uncertainty about what it means to be human.
Ethics are being replaced by a calculation of consequences. In the face of this,
we as Christians must defend the inviolable dignity of human beings from conception
to death – from issues of pre-implantation diagnosis to the question of euthanasia.
As Romano Guardini once put it: “Only those who know God, know man.” Without knowledge
of God, man is easily manipulated. Faith in God must take concrete form in a common
defence of man. To this defence of man belong not only these fundamental criteria
of what it means to be human, but above all and very specifically, love, as Jesus
Christ taught us in the account of the final judgement (Mt 25): God will judge
us on how we respond to our neighbour, to the least of his brethren. Readiness to
help, amid the needs of the present time and beyond our immediate circle, is an essential
task of the Christian. As I mentioned, this is true first and foremost in our
personal lives as individuals. But it also holds true in our community, as a people
and a state in which we must all be responsible for one another. It holds true for
our continent, in which we are called to European solidarity. Finally, it is true
beyond all frontiers: today Christian love of neighbour also calls for commitment
to justice throughout the world. I know that Germans and Germany are doing much to
enable all men and women to live in dignity, and for this I would like to express
deep gratitude. In conclusion, I would like to mention an even deeper dimension
of our commitment to love. The seriousness of our faith is shown especially when
it inspires people to put themselves totally at the disposal of God and thus of other
persons. Great acts of charity become concrete only when, on the ground, we find
persons totally at the service of others; they make the love of God credible. People
of this sort are an important sign of the truth of our faith. Prior to my visit
there was some talk of an “ecumenical gift” which was expected from such a visit.
There is no need for me to specify the gifts mentioned in this context. Here I would
only say that, in most of its manifestions, this reflects a political misreading of
faith and of ecumenism. In general, when a Head of State visits a friendly country,
contacts between the various parties take place beforehand to arrange one or more
agreements between the two states: by weighing respective benefits and drawbacks a
compromise is reached which in the end appears beneficial for both parties, so that
a treaty can then be signed. But the faith of Christians does not rest on such a
weighing of benefits and drawbacks. A self-made faith is worthless. Faith is not
something we work out intellectually and negotiate between us. It is the foundation
for our lives. Unity grows not by the weighing of benefits and drawbacks but only
by entering ever more deeply into the faith in our thoughts and in our lives. In
the past fifty years, and especially after the visit of Pope John Paul II some thirty
years ago, we have drawn much closer together, and for this we can only be grateful.
I willingly think of the meeting with the Commission led by Bishop Lohse, in which
this kind of joint growth in reflecting upon and living the faith was practised.
To all those engaged in that process – and especially, on the Catholic side, to Cardinal
Lehmann – I wish to express deep gratitude. I will refrain from mentioning other
names – the Lord knows them all. Together we can only thank the Lord for the paths
of unity on which he has led us, and unite ourselves in humble trust to his prayer:
Grant that we may all be one, as you are one with the Father, so that the world may
believe that he has sent you (cf. Jn 17:21). XXX XXX XXX
Apostolic
Journey of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Germany Address at the Vespers
of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Etzelsbach, Chapel of the Shrine 23 September
2011 Dear Brothers and Sisters, Now I am able to fulfil my wish to visit
Eichsfeld, and here in Etzelsbach to thank Mary in company with you. “Here in the
beloved quiet vale”, as the pilgrims’ hymn says, “under the old lime trees”, Mary
gives us security and new strength. During two godless dictatorships, which sought
to deprive the people of their ancestral faith, the inhabitants of Eichsfeld were
in no doubt that here in this shrine at Etzelsbach an open door and a place of inner
peace was to be found. The special friendship with Mary that grew from all this,
is what we seek to cultivate further, not least through this evening’s Vespers of
the Blessed Virgin Mary. When Christians of all times and places turn to Mary,
they are acting on the spontaneous conviction that Jesus cannot refuse his mother
what she asks; and they are relying on the unshakable trust that Mary is also our
mother – a mother who has experienced the greatest of all sorrows, who feels all our
griefs with us and ponders in a maternal way how to overcome them. How many people
down the centuries have made pilgrimages to Mary, in order to find comfort and strength
before the image of the Mother of Sorrows, as here at Etzelsbach! Let us look upon
her likeness: a woman of middle age, her eyelids heavy with much weeping, gazing pensively
into the distance, as if meditating in her heart upon everything that had happened.
On her knees rests the lifeless body of her son, she holds him gently and lovingly,
like a precious gift. We see the marks of the crucifixion on his bare flesh. The
left arm of the corpse is pointing straight down. Perhaps this sculpture of the Pietà,
like so many others, was originally placed above an altar. The crucified Jesus would
then be pointing with his outstretched arm to what was taking place on the altar,
where the holy sacrifice that he had accomplished is made present in the Eucharist. A
particular feature of the holy image of Etzelsbach is the position of Our Lord’s body.
In most representations of the Pietà, the dead Jesus is lying with his head facing
left, so that the observer can see the wounded side of the Crucified Lord. Here in
Etzelsbach, however, the wounded side is concealed, because the body is facing the
other way. It seems to me that a deep meaning lies hidden in this representation,
that only becomes apparent through silent contemplation: in the Etzelsbach image,
the hearts of Jesus and his mother are turned to one another; they come close to each
other. They exchange their love. We know that the heart is also the seat of the
most tender affection as well as the most intimate compassion. In Mary’s heart there
is room for the love that her divine Son wants to bestow upon the world. Marian
devotion focuses on contemplation of the relationship between the Mother and her divine
Son. The faithful constantly discover new dimensions and qualities which this mystery
can help to disclose for us, for example when the image of the Immaculate Heart of
Mary is seen as a symbol of her deep and unreserved loving unity with Christ. It
is not self-fulfilment that truly enables people to flourish, according to the model
that modern life so often proposes to us, which can easily turn into a sophisticated
form of selfishness. Rather it is an attitude of self-giving directed towards the
heart of Mary and hence also towards the heart of the Redeemer. “We know that in
everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to
his purpose” (Rom 8:28), as we have just heard in the Scripture reading. With Mary,
God has worked for good in everything, and he does not cease, through Mary, to cause
good to spread further in the world. Looking down from the Cross, from the throne
of grace and salvation, Jesus gave us his mother Mary to be our mother. At the moment
of his self-offering for mankind, he makes Mary as it were the channel of the rivers
of grace that flow from the Cross. At the foot of the Cross, Mary becomes our fellow
traveller and protector on life’s journey. “By her motherly love she cares for her
son’s sisters and brothers who still journey on earth surrounded by dangers and difficulties,
until they are led into their blessed home” (Lumen Gentium, 62). Yes indeed, in life
we pass through high-points and low-points, but Mary intercedes for us with her Son
and conveys to us the strength of divine love. Our trust in the powerful intercession
of the Mother of God and our gratitude for the help we have repeatedly experienced
impel us, as it were, to think beyond the needs of the moment. What does Mary actually
want to say to us, when she rescues us from our plight? She wants to help us grasp
the breadth and depth of our Christian vocation. With a mother’s tenderness, she
wants to make us understand that our whole life should be a response to the love of
our God, who is so rich in mercy. “Understand,” she seems to say to us, “that God,
who is the source of all that is good and who never desires anything other than your
true happiness, has the right to demand of you a life that yields unreservedly and
joyfully to his will, striving at the same time that others may do likewise.” Where
God is, there is a future. Indeed – when we allow God’s love to influence the whole
of our lives, then heaven stands open. Then it is possible so to shape the present
that it corresponds more and more to the Good News of our Lord Jesus Christ. Then
the little things of everyday life acquire meaning, and great problems find solutions.
Amen.XXX XXX XXX
Apostolic Journey of His Holiness
Pope Benedict XVI to Germany Homily during the Holy Mass in Erfurt Cathedral
Square 24 September 2011 Dear Brothers and Sisters,“Praise the Lord
at all times, for he is good.” These are the words that we sang just before the Gospel.
Yes, we truly have reason to thank God with our whole hearts. If we think back thirty
years to the Elizabeth Year 1981, when this city formed part of the German Democratic
Republic, who would have thought that a few years later, the wall and the barbed wire
at the border would have come down? And if we think even further back, some 70 years,
to the year 1941, in the days of National Socialism, who could have predicted that
the so-called “thousand-year Reich” would turn to dust and ashes just four years later? Dear
Brothers and Sisters, here in Thuringia and in the former German Democratic Republic,
you have had to endure first a brown and then a red dictatorship, which acted on the
Christian faith like acid rain. Many late consequences of that period are still having
to be worked through, above all in the intellectual and religious fields. Most people
in this country since that time have spent their lives far removed from faith in Christ
and from the communion of the Church. Yet the last two decades have also brought
good experiences: a broader horizon, an exchange that reaches beyond borders, a faithful
confidence that God does not abandon us and that he leads us along new paths. “Where
God is, there is a future”. We are all convinced that the new freedom has helped
bring about greater dignity and a great many new possibilities for people’s lives.
On the part of the Church, we can point gratefully to many things that have become
easier, whether it be new opportunities for parish activities, renovation and enlargement
of churches and community centres, or diocesan initiatives of a pastoral or cultural
nature. But have these opportunities led to an increase in faith? Are not the deep
roots of faith and Christian life to be sought in something very different from social
freedom? It was actually amid the hardships of pressure from without that many committed
Catholics remained faithful to Christ and to the Church. They accepted personal disadvantages
in order to live their faith. Here I should like to thank the priests and the men
and women who assisted them during that period. I would like to remember especially
the pastoral care of refugees immediately after the Second World War: many priests
and laypersons achieved great things in order to relieve the plight of those driven
from their homes, and to provide them with a new home. Sincere thanks go not least
to the parents who brought up their children in the Catholic faith in the midst of
the diaspora and in an anticlerical political environment. With gratitude we remember,
for example, the Religious Weeks for Children during the holidays and the fruitful
work of the Catholic youth centres “Saint Sebastian” in Erfurt and “Marcel Callo”
in Heiligenstadt. Especially in Eichsfeld, many Catholic Christians resisted the
Communist ideology. May God richly reward their tenacity in the faith. That courageous
witness and that patient trust in God’s guidance are like a precious seed that promises
rich fruit for the future. God’s presence is seen especially clearly in his saints.
Their witness to the faith can also give us the courage to begin afresh today. Above
all, we may think of the patron saints of the Diocese of Erfurt: Saint Elizabeth of
Thuringia, Saint Boniface and Saint Kilian. Elizabeth came from a foreign land, from
Hungary, to the Wartburg here in Thuringia. She led an intense life of prayer, linked
to the spirit of penance and evangelical poverty. She regularly went down from her
castle into the town of Eisenach, in order to care personally for the poor and the
sick. Her life on this earth was only short – she was just twenty-four years old
when she died – but the fruit of her holiness was vast. Saint Elizabeth is greatly
esteemed also by Protestant Christians. She can help us all to discover the fullness
of the faith that has been handed down to us and to translate it into our everyday
lives. The foundation of the diocese of Erfurt in 742 by Saint Boniface reminds
us of the Christian roots of our country. This event at the same time forms the first
recorded mention of the city of Erfurt. The missionary bishop Boniface had come from
England and he worked in close association with the successor of Saint Peter. We
honour him as the “Apostle of Germany”; he died as a martyr. Two of his companions,
who also bore witness by shedding their blood for the Christian faith, are buried
here in the Cathedral of Erfurt: Saints Eoban and Adelar. Even before the Anglo-Saxon
missionaries, Saint Kilian, an itinerant missionary from Ireland, was at work in Thuringia.
Together with two companions he died in Würzburg as a martyr, because he criticized
the moral misconduct of the Duke of Thuringia whose seat was in that place. Nor must
we forget Saint Severus, the patron saint of the Severus Church here on the Cathedral
Square: he was Bishop of Ravenna in the fourth century and his remains were brought
to Erfurt in 836, in order to anchor the Christian faith more firmly in this region. What
do these saints have in common? How can we describe the particular qualities of their
lives and make them fruitful for ourselves? The saints show us that it is truly possible
and good to live our relationship with God in a radical way, to put him in first place,
not as one concern among others. The saints help us to see that God first reached
out to us, he revealed and continues to reveal himself to us in Jesus Christ. Christ
comes towards us, he speaks to every individual with an invitation to follow him.
This was an opportunity that the saints acted on, they as it were reached out to him
from deep within themselves in the ongoing dialogue of prayer, and in return they
received from him the light that shows where true life is to be found. Faith always
includes as an essential element the fact that it is shared with others. In the first
place I have God to thank for the fact that I can believe, for God approaches me and
so to speak “ignites” my faith. But on a practical level, I also have to thank my
fellow human beings for my faith, those who believed before me and who believe with
me. This “with”, without which there can be no personal faith, is the Church. And
this Church does not stop at national borders, as we can see from the nationalities
of the saints I mentioned earlier: Hungary, England, Ireland and Italy. Here we see
the importance of spiritual exchange, which encompasses the entire universal Church.
If we open ourselves up to the whole of the faith in all of history and the testimony
given to it in the whole Church, then the Catholic faith also has a future as a public
force in Germany. At the same time the saints that I mentioned show us the great
fruitfulness of a holy life, of this radical love for God and neighbour. Saints,
even if there are only a few of them, change the world. Thus the political changes
that swept through your country in 1989 were motivated not just by the demand for
prosperity and freedom of movement, but also decisively by the longing for truthfulness.
This longing was kept awake partly through people completely dedicated to serving
God and neighbour and ready to sacrifice their lives. They and the saints I mentioned
before give us courage to make good use of this new situation. We have no wish to
hide in a purely private faith, but we want to shape this hard-won freedom responsibly.
Like Saints Kilian, Boniface, Adelar, Eoban and Elizabeth of Thuringia, we want to
engage with our fellow citizens as Christians and to invite them to discover with
us the fullness of the Good News. Then we will resemble the famous bell of the Cathedral
of Erfurt, which bears the name “Gloriosa”, the “glorious”. It is thought to be the
largest free-swinging medieval bell in the world. It is a living sign of our deep
rootedness in the Christian tradition, but also a summons to set out upon the mission.
It will ring out once more at the end of today’s solemn Mass. May it inspire us,
after the example of the saints, to ensure that witness to Christ is both seen and
heard in the world in which we live. Amen.XXX XXX XXX
Apostolic
Journey of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Germany Address to the he citizens
of Freiburg, Münsterplatz 24 September 2011Dear Friends,With great joy
I greet you all and I thank you for the warm welcome you have accorded me. After
the wonderful meetings that took place in Berlin and Erfurt, I am happy now that I
can be here in Freiburg with you, in the warm sunlight. A special word of thanks
goes to your dear Archbishop Robert Zollitsch for the invitation – he was so insistent
that in the end I had to say, I really must come to Freiburg – and for his gracious
words of welcome. “Where God is, there is a future”, as the motto of these days
reminds us. As the Successor of Saint Peter, who was commissioned by the Lord in
the Upper Room to strengthen his brethren (cf. Lk 22:32), I have come gladly
to you, to this beautiful city, in order to pray together with you, to proclaim the
word of God and together to celebrate the Eucharist. I ask for your prayers, that
these days will be fruitful, that God will deepen our faith, strengthen our hope and
increase our love. During these days, may we become aware once more how much God
loves us and that he is truly good. And so we must be full of confidence that he
is good to us, that he has power for good, that he carries us and all our cares and
concerns in his hands. And we want to place all this consciously into his hands.
In him our future is assured: he gives meaning to our lives and he can bring them
to fulfilment. May the Lord accompany you in peace and make us all messengers of
his peace! Thank you very much for your welcome!XXX XXX XXX
Apostolic
Journey of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Germany Address to the representatives
of the Orthodox Churches and Eastern Orthodox 24 September 2011 Dear
Cardinals, Brother Bishops, Distinguished Representatives of Orthodox and Oriental
Orthodox Churches! It is a great joy for me that we have come together here today.
From my heart I thank all of you for coming and for the possibility of this friendly
exchange. I offer a particular word of thanks to you, dear Metropolitan Augoustinos
for your profound words. I was especially moved by what you said about the Mother
of God and about the saints who encompass and unite all the centuries. And I willingly
repeat in this setting what I have said elsewhere: among Christian Churches and communities,
it is undoubtedly the Orthodox who are theologically closest to us; Catholics and
Orthodox have maintained the same basic structure inherited from the ancient Church;
in this sense we are all the early Church that is still present and new. And so we
dare to hope, even if humanly speaking constantly new difficulties arise, that the
day may still be not too far away when we may once again celebrate the Eucharist together
(cf. Light of the World. A Conversation with Peter Seewald, p. 86). With interest
and sympathy the Catholic Church – and I personally – follow the development of Orthodox
communities in Western Europe, which in recent decades have grown remarkably. In
Germany today, as I have learned, there are approximately 1.6 million Orthodox and
Oriental Orthodox Christians. They have become a constitutive part of society that
helps bring alive the treasury of the Christian cultures and the Christian faith of
Europe. I welcome the increase of pan-Orthodox cooperation, which has made significant
progress in recent years. The founding of Orthodox Episcopal Conferences in places
where the Orthodox Churches exist in the Diaspora – of which you spoke to us – is
an expression of the consolidation of intra-Orthodox relations. I am pleased that
this step has been taken in Germany in the past year. May the work of these Episcopal
Conferences strengthen the bond between the Orthodox Churches and hasten the progress
of efforts to establish a pan-Orthodox council. Since the time when I was a professor
in Bonn and especially while I was Archbishop of Munich and Freising, I have come
to know and love Orthodoxy more and more through my personal friendships with representatives
of the Orthodox Churches. At that time the Joint Commission of the German Bishops’
Conference and the Orthodox Church also began its work. Since then, through its texts
on pastoral and practical questions, it has furthered mutual understanding and contributed
to the consolidation and further development of Catholic-Orthodox relations in Germany. Equally
important is the ongoing work to clarify theological differences, because the resolution
of these questions is indispensable for restoration of the full unity that we hope
and pray for. We know that above all it is the question of primacy that we must continue
patiently and humbly struggling to understand aright. In this regard, I think that
the ideas put forward by Pope John Paul II in the Encyclical Ut Unum Sint (no. 95)
on the distinction between the nature and form of the exercise of primacy can yield
further fruitful discussion points. I also express my appreciation of the work
of the Mixed International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic
Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches. I am glad, distinguished Eminences and
Delegates of the Oriental Orthodox Churches, that you are here representing the Churches
that are taking part in this dialogue. The results so far obtained allow us to grow
in mutual understanding and to draw closer to one another. In the present climate,
in which many would like, as it were, to “liberate” public life from God, the Christian
Churches in Germany – including Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Christians – are walking
side by side along the path of peaceful witness for understanding and solidarity among
peoples, on the basis of their faith in the one God and Father of all. At the same
time they continue to place the miracle of God’s incarnation at the centre of their
proclamation. Realizing that on this mystery all human dignity depends, they speak
up jointly for the protection of human life from conception to natural death. Faith
in God, the Creator of life, and unconditional adherence to the dignity of every human
being strengthen faithful Christians to oppose vigorously every manipulative and selective
intervention in the area of human life. Knowing too the value of marriage and the
family, we as Christians attach great importance to defending the integrity and the
uniqueness of marriage between one man and one woman from any kind of misinterpretation.
Here the common engagement of Christians, including Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox
Christians, makes a valuable contribution to building up a society equipped for the
future, in which the human person is given the respect which is his due. Finally,
I would like to direct our gaze towards Mary – you presented her to us as the Panagia
– and she is also the Hodegetria, the “Guide along the Way”, who is also venerated
in the West under the title “Our Lady of the Way”. The Most Holy Trinity has given
the Virgin Mother Mary to mankind, that she might guide us through history with her
intercession and point out to us the way towards fulfilment. To her we entrust ourselves
and our prayer that we may become a community ever more intimately united in Christ,
to the praise and glory of his name. May God bless you all! Thank you.XXX
XXX XXX
Apostolic Journey of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to
Germany Address to the Seminarians 24 September 2011 Dear
Seminarians, Dear Sisters and Brothers! It is a great joy for me to be able to
come together here with young people who are setting out to serve the Lord, young
people who want to listen to his call and follow him. I would like to express particularly
warm thanks for the beautiful letter that the Rector and the seminarians wrote to
me. It truly touched my heart, to see how you had reflected on my letter, and developed
your own questions and answers from it, and to see how seriously you are taking what
I tried to say in my letter, on the basis of which you are now working out your own
path.
Of course it would be wonderful if we could hold a conversation with
one another, but my travel schedule, which I am bound to follow, sadly does not permit
such things. So I can only try, in the light of what you have written and what I myself
had written, to offer just one or two further ideas.
In considering the question
-- What is the seminary for? What does this time mean? -- I am always particularly
struck by the account that St. Mark gives of the birth of the apostolic community
in the third chapter of his Gospel. Mark says: "And he appointed twelve". He makes
something, he does something, it is a creative act; and he made them, "to be with
him, and to be sent out to preach" (Mk 12:14). That is a twofold purpose, which in
many respects seems contradictory. "To be with him": they are to be with him, in order
to come to know him, to hear what he says, to be formed by him; they are to go with
him, to accompany him on his path, surrounding him and following him. But at the same
time they are to be envoys who go out, who take with them what they have learnt, who
bring it to others who are also on a journey -- into the margins, into the wide open
spaces, even into places far removed from him. And yet this paradox holds together:
if they are truly with him, then they are also always journeying towards others, they
are searching for the lost sheep; they go out, they must pass on what they have found,
they must make it known, they must become envoys. And conversely, if they want to
be good envoys, then they must always be with him. As St. Bonaventure once said: the
angels, wherever they go, however far away, always move within the inner being of
God. This is also the case here: as priests we must go out onto the many different
streets, where we find people whom we should invite to his wedding feast. But we can
only do this if in the process we always remain with him. And learning this: this
combination of, on the one hand, going out on mission, and on the other hand being
with him, remaining with him, is -- I believe -- precisely what we have to learn in
the seminary. The right way of remaining with him, becoming deeply rooted in him --
being more and more with him, knowing him more and more, being more and more inseparable
from him -- and at the same time going out more and more, bringing the message, passing
it on, not keeping it to ourselves, but bringing the word to those who are far away
and who nevertheless, as God’s creatures and as people loved by Christ, all have a
longing for him in their hearts.
The seminary is therefore a time for training;
also, of course, a time for discernment, for learning: does he want me for this? The
mission must be tested, and this includes being in community with others and also
of course speaking with your spiritual directors, in order to learn how to discern
what his will is. And then learning to trust: if he truly wants this, then I may entrust
myself to him. In today’s world, which is changing in such an unprecedented way and
in which everything is in a constant state of flux, in which human ties are breaking
down because of new encounters, it is becoming more and more difficult to believe
that I will hold firm for the whole of my life. Even for my own generation, it was
not exactly easy to imagine how many decades God might assign to me, and how different
the world might become. Will I be able to hold firm with him, as I have promised to
do? ... It is a question that demands the testing of the vocation, but then also --
the more I recognize that he does indeed want me -- it demands trust: if he wants
me, then he will also hold me, he will be there in the hour of temptation, in the
hour of need, and he will send people to me, he will show me the path, he will hold
me. And faithfulness is possible, because he is always there, because he is yesterday,
today and tomorrow, because he belongs not only to this time, but he is the future
and he can support us at all times.
A time for discernment, a time for learning,
a time for vocation ... and then, naturally, a time for being with him, a time for
praying, for listening to him. Listening, truly learning to listen to him -- in the
word of sacred Scripture, in the faith of the Church, in the liturgy of the Church
-- and learning to understand the present time in his word. In exegesis we learn much
about the past: what happened, what sources there are, what communities there were,
and so on. This is also important. But more important still is that from the past
we should learn about the present, we should learn that he is speaking these words
now, and that they all carry their present within them, and that over and above the
historical circumstances in which they arose, they contain a fullness which speaks
to all times. And it is important to learn this present-day aspect of his word --
to learn to listen out for it -- and thus to be able to speak of it to others. Naturally,
when one is preparing the homily for Sunday, it often seems ... my goodness, so remote!
But if I live with the word, then I see that it is not at all remote, it is highly
contemporary, it is right here, it concerns me and it concerns others. And then I
also learn how to explain it. But for this, a constant inner journey with the word
of God is needed.
Personally being with Christ, with the living God, is one
thing: another is that we can only ever believe within the "we". I sometimes say that
St. Paul wrote: "Faith comes from hearing" -- not from reading. It needs reading as
well, but it comes from hearing, that is to say from the living word, addressed to
me by the other, whom I can hear, addressed to me by the Church throughout the ages,
from her contemporary word, spoken to me the priests, bishops and my fellow believers.
Faith must include a "you" and it must include a "we". And it is very important to
practice this mutual support, to learn how to accept the other as the other in his
otherness, and to learn that he has to support me in my otherness, in order to become
"we", so that we can also build community in the parish, calling people into the community
of the word, and journeying with one another towards the living God. This requires
the very particular "we" that is the seminary, and also the parish, but it also requires
us always to look beyond the particular, limited "we" towards the great "we" that
is the Church of all times and places: it requires that we do not make ourselves the
sole criterion. When we say: "We are Church" -- well, it is true: that is what we
are, we are not just anybody. But the "we" is more extensive than the group that asserts
those words. The "we" is the whole community of believers, today and in all times
and places. And so I always say: within the community of believers, yes, there is
as it were the voice of the valid majority, but there can never be a majority against
the apostles or against the saints: that would be a false majority. We are Church:
let us be Church, let us be Church precisely by opening ourselves and stepping outside
ourselves and being Church with others.
Well now, according to the schedule,
I daresay I ought really to draw to a close now. I would like to make just one more
point to you. In preparing for the priesthood, study is very much a part of the journey.
This is not an academic accident that has arisen in the western Church, it is something
essential. We all know that St. Peter said: "Always be prepared to make a defence
to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you" (1 Pet 3:15). Our
world today is a rationalist and thoroughly scientific world, albeit often somewhat
pseudo-scientific. But this scientific spirit, this spirit of understanding, explaining,
know-how, rejection of the irrational, is dominant in our time. There is a good side
to this, even if it often conceals much arrogance and nonsense. The faith is not a
parallel world of feelings that we can still afford to hold on to, rather it is the
key that encompasses everything, gives it meaning, interprets it and also provides
its inner ethical orientation: making clear that it is to be understood and lived
as tending towards God and proceeding from God. Therefore it is important to be informed
and to understand, to have an open mind, to learn.
Naturally in twenty years'
time, some quite different philosophical theories will be fashionable from those of
today: when I think what counted as the highest, most modern philosophical fashion
in our day, and how totally forgotten it is now ... still, learning these things is
not in vain, for there will be some enduring insights among them. And most of all,
this is how we learn to judge, to think through an idea -- and to do so critically
-- and to ensure that in this thinking the light of God will serve to enlighten us
and will not be extinguished. Studying is essential: only thus can we stand firm in
these times and proclaim within them the reason for our faith. And it is essential
that we study critically -- because we know that tomorrow someone else will have something
else to say -- while being alert, open and humble as we study, so that our studying
is always with the Lord, before the Lord, and for him.
Yes, I could say much
more, and perhaps I should ... but I thank you for your attention. In my prayers,
all the seminarians of the world are present in my heart -- and not only those known
to me by name, like the individuals I had the pleasure of receiving here this evening;
I pray, as they make their inner journey towards the Lord, that he may bless them
all, give light to them all and show them the right way, and that he may grant us
to receive many good priests. Thank you very much.XXX XXX XXX
Apostolic
Journey of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Germany Address to the Catholic
laity 24 September 2011 Dear Brothers and Sisters, I am grateful
for this opportunity to come together, here in Freiburg, with you, the Council Members
of the Central Committee for German Catholics (ZdK). I gladly express to you my appreciation
for your work in publicly representing the concerns of Catholics and in giving impetus
to the apostolate of the Church and of Catholics in society. I would also like to
thank you, dear President Glück, for your words, and for your many important and thought-provoking
observations. Dear friends, for some years now, development aid has included what
are known as “exposure programmes”. Leaders from the fields of politics, economics
and religion live among the poor in Africa, Asia, or Latin America for a certain period
and share the day-to-day reality of their lives. They are exposed to the circumstances
in which these people live, in order to see the world through their eyes and hence
to learn how to practise solidarity. Let us imagine that an exposure programme
of this kind were to take place here in Germany. Experts from a far country would
arrive to spend a week with an average German family. They would find much to admire
here, for example the prosperity, the order and the efficiency. But looking on with
unprejudiced eyes, they would also see plenty of poverty: poverty in human relations
and poverty in the religious sphere. We live at a time that is broadly characterized
by a subliminal relativism that penetrates every area of life. Sometimes this relativism
becomes aggressive, when it opposes those who say that they know where the truth or
meaning of life is to be found. And we observe that this relativism exerts more
and more influence on human relationships and on society. This is reflected, among
other things, in the inconstancy and fragmentation of many people’s lives and in an
exaggerated individualism. Many no longer seem capable of any form of self-denial
or of making a sacrifice for others. Even the altruistic commitment to the common
good, in the social and cultural sphere or on behalf of the needy, is in decline.
Others are now quite incapable of committing themselves unreservedly to a single partner.
People can hardly find the courage now to promise to be faithful for a whole lifetime;
the courage to make a decision and say: now I belong entirely to you, or to take a
firm stand for fidelity and truthfulness and sincerely to seek a solution to their
problems. Dear friends, in the exposure programme, analysis is followed by common
reflection. This evaluation must take into account the whole of the human person,
and this includes – not just implicitly but quite clearly – the person’s relationship
to the Creator. We see that in our affluent western world much is lacking. Many
people lack experience of God’s goodness. They no longer find any point of contact
with the mainstream churches and their traditional structures. But why is this?
I think this is a question on which we must reflect very seriously. Addressing it
is the principal task of the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization. But naturally
it is something that concerns us all. Allow me to refer here to an aspect of Germany’s
particular situation. The Church in Germany is superbly organized. But behind the
structures, is there also a corresponding spiritual strength, the strength of faith
in the living God? We must honestly admit that we have more than enough by way of
structure but not enough by way of Spirit. I would add: the real crisis facing the
Church in the western world is a crisis of faith. If we do not find a way of genuinely
renewing our faith, all structural reform will remain ineffective. But let us return
to the people who lack experience of God’s goodness. They need places where they
can give voice to their inner longing. And here we are called to seek new paths of
evangelization. Small communities could be one such path, where friendships are lived
and deepened in regular communal adoration before God. There we find people who speak
of these small faith experiences at their workplace and within their circle of family
and friends, and in so doing bear witness to a new closeness between Church and society.
They come to see more and more clearly that everyone stands in need of this nourishment
of love, this concrete friendship with others and with the Lord. Of continuing importance
is the link with the vital life-source that is the Eucharist, since cut off from Christ
we can do nothing (cf. Jn 15:5). Dear brothers and sisters, may the Lord always
point out to us how together we can be lights in the world and can show our fellow
men the path to the source at which they can quench their profound thirst for life.
I thank you.XXX XXX XXX
Apostolic Journey of His Holiness
Pope Benedict XVI to Germany Address at Vigil with the Young 24
September 2011Dear young friends, Throughout today I have been looking forward
to this evening, and to this opportunity to be together with you and to join you in
prayer. No doubt some of you were present at World Youth Day, where we were able
to experience the special atmosphere of peace, deep fellowship and inner joy that
characterizes an evening prayer vigil. It is my wish that we may all experience the
same thing now: that the Lord may touch our hearts and make us joyful witnesses who
pray together and support one another, not just this evening but throughout our lives. In
all churches, in cathedrals and religious houses, wherever the faithful gather to
celebrate the Easter Vigil, that holiest of all nights begins with the lighting of
the Paschal candle, whose light is then passed on to all who are present. One tiny
flame spreads out to become many lights and fills the darkness of God’s house with
its brightness. This wonderful liturgical rite, which we have imitated in our prayer
vigil tonight, reveals to us in signs more eloquent than words the mystery of our
Christian faith. He, Christ, who says of himself: “I am the light of the world” (Jn
8:12), causes our lives to shine brightly, so that what we have just heard in the
Gospel comes true: “You are the light of the world” (Mt 5:14). It is
not our human efforts or the technical progress of our era that brings light into
this world. Again and again we experience how our striving to bring about a better
and more just world hits against its limits. Innocent suffering and the ultimate
fact of death awaiting every single person are an impenetrable darkness which may
perhaps, through fresh experiences, be lit up for a moment, as if through a flash
of lightning at night. In the end, though, a frightening darkness remains. While
all around us there may be darkness and gloom, yet we see a light: a small, tiny flame
that is stronger than the seemingly powerful and invincible darkness. Christ, risen
from the dead, shines in this world and he does so most brightly in those places where,
in human terms, everything is sombre and hopeless. He has conquered death – he is
alive – and faith in him, like a small light, cuts through all that is dark and threatening.
To be sure, those who believe in Jesus do not lead lives of perpetual sunshine, as
though they could be spared suffering and hardship, but there is always a bright glimmer
there, lighting up the path that leads to fullness of life (cf. Jn 10:10).
The eyes of those who believe in Christ see light even amid the darkest night and
they already see the dawning of a new day. Light does not remain alone. All around,
other lights are flaring up. In their gleam, space acquires contours, so that we
can find our bearings. We do not live alone in this world. And it is for the important
things of life that we have to rely on other people. Particularly in our faith, then,
we do not stand alone, we are links in the great chain of believers. Nobody can believe
unless he is supported by the faith of others, and conversely, through my faith, I
help to strengthen others in their faith. We help one another to set an example,
we give others a share in what is ours: our thoughts, our deeds, our affections.
And we help one another to find our bearings, to work out where we stand in society. Dear
friends, the Lord says: “I am the light of the world – you are the light of the world.”
It is mysterious and wonderful that Jesus applies the same predicate to himself and
to each one of us, namely “light”. If we believe that he is the Son of God, who healed
the sick and raised the dead, who rose from the grave himself and is truly alive,
then we can understand that he is the light, the source of all the lights of this
world. On the other hand, we experience more and more the failure of our efforts
and our personal shortcomings, despite our good intentions. In the final analysis,
the world in which we live, in spite of its technical progress, does not seem to be
getting any better. There is still war and terror, hunger and disease, bitter poverty
and merciless oppression. And even those figures in our history who saw themselves
as “bringers of light”, but without being fired by Christ, the one true light, did
not manage to create an earthly paradise, but set up dictatorships and totalitarian
systems, in which even the smallest spark of true humanity is choked. At this point
we cannot remain silent about the existence of evil. We see it in so many places
in this world; but we also see it – and this scares us – in our own lives. Truly,
within our hearts there is a tendency towards evil, there is selfishness, envy, aggression.
Perhaps with a certain self-discipline all this can to some degree be controlled.
But it becomes more difficult with faults that are somewhat hidden, that can engulf
us like a thick fog, such as sloth, or laziness in willing and doing good. Again
and again in history, keen observers have pointed out that damage to the Church comes
not from her opponents, but from uncommitted Christians. So how can Christ say that
Christians, presumably including these weak Christians, are the light of the world?
Perhaps we could understand if he were to call out to us: Repent! Be the light of
the world! Change your life, make it bright and radiant! Should we not be surprised
that the Lord directs no such appeal to us, but tells us that we are the light of
the world, that we shine, that we light up the darkness? Dear friends, Saint Paul
in many of his letters does not shrink from calling his contemporaries, members of
the local communities, “saints”. Here it becomes clear that every baptized person
– even before he or she can accomplish good works – is sanctified by God. In baptism
the Lord, as it were, sets our life alight with what the Catechism calls sanctifying
grace. Those who watch over this light, who live by grace, are holy. Dear friends,
again and again the very notion of saints has been caricatured and distorted, as if
to be holy meant to be remote from the world, naive and joyless. Often it is thought
that a saint has to be someone with great ascetic and moral achievements, who might
well be revered, but could never be imitated in our own lives. How false and discouraging
this opinion is! There is no saint, apart from the Blessed Virgin Mary, who has not
also known sin, who has never fallen. Dear friends, Christ is not so much interested
in how often in our lives we stumble and fall, as in how often with his help we pick
ourselves up again. He does not demand glittering achievements, but he wants his
light to shine in you. He does not call you because you are good and perfect, but
because he is good and he wants to make you his friends. Yes, you are the light of
the world because Jesus is your light. You are Christians – not because you do special
and extraordinary things, but because he, Christ, is your life, our life. You are
holy, we are holy, if we allow his grace to work in us. Dear friends, this evening
as we gather in prayer around the one Lord, we sense the truth of Christ’s saying
that the city built on a hilltop cannot remain hidden. This gathering shines in more
ways than one – in the glow of innumerable lights, in the radiance of so many young
people who believe in Christ. A candle can only give light if it lets itself be consumed
by the flame. It would remain useless if its wax failed to nourish the fire. Allow
Christ to burn in you, even at the cost of sacrifice and renunciation. Do not be
afraid that you might lose something and, so to speak, emerge empty-handed at the
end. Have the courage to apply your talents and gifts for God’s kingdom and to give
yourselves – like candlewax – so that the Lord can light up the darkness through you.
Dare to be glowing saints, in whose eyes and hearts the love of Christ beams and who
thus bring light to the world. I am confident that you and many other young people
here in Germany are lamps of hope that do not remain hidden. “You are the light of
the world”. Where God is, there is a future! Amen.XXX XXX XXX
Apostolic
Journey of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Germany Homily during the Holy
Mass in Freiburg Airport 25 September 2011 Dear Brothers and Sisters, It
is moving for me to be here once again to celebrate this Eucharist, this Thanksgiving,
with so many people from different parts of Germany and the neighbouring countries.
We offer our thanks above all to God, in whom we live and move. But I would also
like to thank all of you for your prayers that the Successor of Peter may continue
to carry out his ministry with joy and faithful hope, and that he may strengthen his
brothers in faith. “Father, you show your almighty power in your mercy and forgiveness”,
as we said in today’s Collect. In the first reading we heard how God manifested the
power of his mercy in the history of Israel. The experience of the Babylonian Exile
caused the people to fall into a crisis of faith: Why did this calamity happen? Perhaps
God was not truly powerful? There are theologians who, in the face of all the
terrible things that happen in the world today, say that God cannot be all-powerful.
In response to this we profess God, the all-powerful Creator of heaven and earth.
We are glad and thankful that God is all-powerful. At the same time, we have to be
aware that he exercises his power differently from the way we normally do. He has
placed a limit on his power, by recognizing the freedom of his creatures. We are
glad and thankful for the gift of freedom. However, when we see the terrible things
that happen as a result of it, we are frightened. Let us put our trust in God, whose
power manifests itself above all in mercy and forgiveness. Let us be certain, dear
faithful, that God desires the salvation of his people. He desires our salvation.
He is always close to us, especially in times of danger and radical change, his heart
aches for us and he reaches out to us. We need to open ourselves to him so that the
power of his mercy can touch our hearts. We have to be ready to abandon evil, to
raise ourselves from indifference and make room for his word. God respects our freedom.
He does not constrain us. In the Gospel Jesus takes up this fundamental theme
of prophetic preaching. He recounts the parable of the two sons invited by their
father to work in the vineyard. The first son responded: “‘I will not go’, but afterward
he repented and went.” Instead the other son said to the father: “‘I go, sir,’ but
did not go.” When asked by Jesus which of the two sons did the father’s will, those
listening respond: “the first” (Mt 21:29-31). The message of the parable is clear:
it is not words that matter, but deeds, deeds of conversion and faith. Jesus directs
this message to the chief priests and elders of the people, that is, to the experts
of religion for the people of Israel. At first they say “yes” to God’s will, but
their piety becomes routine and God no longer matters to them. For this reason they
find the message of John the Baptist and the message of Jesus disturbing. The Lord
concludes his parable with harsh words: “Truly, the tax collectors and the harlots
go into the Kingdom of God before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness,
and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the harlots believed him,
and even when you saw it, you did not afterward repent and believe him” (Mt 21:32).
Translated into the language of our time, this statement might sound something like
this: agnostics, who are constantly exercised by the question of God, those who long
for a pure heart but suffer on account of our sin, are closer to the Kingdom of God
than believers whose life of faith is “routine” and who regard the Church merely as
an institution, without letting their hearts be touched by faith. The words of
Jesus should make us all pause, in fact they should disturb us. However, this is
by no means to suggest that everyone who lives in the Church and works for her should
be considered far from Jesus and the Kingdom of God. Absolutely not! On the contrary,
this is a time to offer a word of profound gratitude to the many co-workers, employees
and volunteers, without whom life in the parishes and in the entire Church would be
hard to imagine. The Church in Germany has many social and charitable institutions
through which the love of neighbour is practised in ways that bring social benefits
and reach to the ends of the earth. I would like to express my gratitude and appreciation
to all those working in Caritas Germany and in other church organizations who give
their time and effort generously in voluntary service to the Church. In the first
place, such service requires objective and professional expertise. But in the spirit
of Jesus’ teaching something more is needed – an open heart that allows itself to
be touched by the love of Christ, and thus gives to our neighbour, who needs us, something
more than a technical service: it gives love, in which the other person is able to
see Christ, the loving God. So let us ask ourselves, how is my personal relationship
with God: in prayer, in participation at Sunday Mass, in exploring my faith through
meditation on sacred Scripture and study of the Catechism of the Catholic Church?
Dear friends, in the last analysis, the renewal of the Church will only come about
through openness to conversion and through renewed faith. The Gospel for this
Sunday speaks of two sons, but behind them, in a mysterious way, there is a third
son. The first son says “no,” but does the father’s will. The second son says “yes,”
but does not do what he was asked. The third son both says “yes” and does what he
was asked. This third son is the Only-begotten Son of God, Jesus Christ, who has
gathered us all here. Jesus, on entering the world, said: “Lo, I have come to do
thy will, O God” (Heb 10:7). He not only said “yes”, he acted on it. As the Christological
hymn from the second reading says: “Though he was in the form of God, [Jesus] did
not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the
form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form
he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a Cross” (Phil. 2:
6-8). In humility and obedience, Jesus fulfilled the will of the Father and by dying
on the Cross for his brothers and sisters, he saved us from our pride and obstinacy.
Let us thank him for his sacrifice, let us bend our knees before his name and proclaim
together with the disciples of the first generation: “Jesus Christ is Lord, to the
glory of God the Father” (Phil 2:11). The Christian life must continually measure
itself by Christ: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus”
(Phil 2:5), as Saint Paul says in the introduction to the Christological hymn. A
few verses before, he exhorts his readers: “So if there is any encouragement in Christ,
any incentive of love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy,
complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord
and of one mind” (Phil 2:1-2). Just as Christ was totally united to the Father and
obedient to him, so too the disciples must obey God and be of one mind among themselves.
Dear friends, with Paul I dare to exhort you: complete my joy by being firmly united
in Christ. The Church in Germany will overcome the great challenges of the present
and future, and it will remain a leaven in society, if the priests, consecrated men
and women, and the lay faithful, in fidelity to their respective vocations, work together
in unity, if the parishes, communities, and movements support and enrich each other,
if the baptized and confirmed, in union with their bishop, lift high the torch of
untarnished faith and allow it to enlighten their abundant knowledge and skills.
The Church in Germany will continue to be a blessing for the entire Catholic world:
if she remains faithfully united with the Successors of Saint Peter and the Apostles,
if she fosters cooperation in various ways with mission countries and allows herself
to be “infected” by the joy that marks the faith of these young Churches. To his
exhortation to unity, Paul adds a call to humility: “Do nothing from selfishness or
conceit, but in humility count others better than yourselves. Let each of you look
not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Phil 2:3-4).
Christian life is a life for others: existing for others, humble service of neighbour
and of the common good. Dear friends, humility is a virtue that does not enjoy great
esteem today. But the Lord’s disciples know that this virtue is, so to speak, the
oil that makes the process of dialogue fruitful, cooperation simple and unity sincere.
The Latin word for humility, humilitas, is derived from humus and indicates closeness
to the earth. Those who are humble stand with their two feet on the ground, but above
all they listen to Christ, the Word of God, who ceaselessly renews the Church and
each of her members. Let us ask God for the courage and the humility to walk the path
of faith, to draw from the riches of his mercy, and to fix our gaze on Christ, the
Word, who makes all things new and is for us “the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn
14:6): he is our future. Amen.XXX XXX XXX
Apostolic
Journey of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Germany Address at the Angelus
in Freiburg Airport 25 September 2011Dear Brothers and Sisters! At
the end of this solemn celebration of holy Mass we now pray the Angelus together.
This prayer constantly reminds us of the historical beginnings of our salvation.
The Archangel Gabriel presents God’s plan of salvation to the Virgin Mary, by which
she was to become the Mother of the Redeemer. Mary was fearful, but the angel spoke
a word of comfort to her: “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with
God.” So Mary is able to respond with her great “yes”. This “yes”, by which she
accepts to become the handmaid of the Lord, is the trusting “yes” to God’s plan, to
our salvation. And she finally addresses her “yes” to us all, whom she received as
her children entrusted to her at the foot of the Cross (cf. Jn 19:27). She never
withdraws this promise. And so she is called happy, or rather blessed, for believing
that what was promised her by the Lord would be fulfilled (cf. Lk 1:45). As we pray
the Angelus, we may join Mary in her “yes”, we may adhere trustingly to the beauty
of God’s plan and to the providence that he has assigned to us in his grace. Then
God’s love will also, as it were, take flesh in our lives, becoming ever more tangible.
In all our cares we need have no fear. God is good. At the same time we know that
we are sustained by the fellowship of the many believers who are now praying the Angelus
with us throughout the world, via radio and television.XXX XXX XXX
Apostolic
Journey of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Germany Address to the Catholics
engaged in the life of the Church and Society, Freiburg, Concert Hall 25
September 2011 Dear Brother Bishops and Priests, Ladies and Gentlemen, I
am glad to be here today with all of you who work in so many ways for the Church and
for society. This gives me a welcome opportunity personally to thank you most sincerely
for your commitment and your witness as “powerful heralds of the faith in things to
be hoped for” (Lumen Gentium, 35 – validi praecones fidei sperandarum rerum). In
your fields of activity you readily stand up for your faith and for the Church, something
that is not always easy at the present time. For some decades now we have been
experiencing a decline in religious practice and we have been seeing substantial numbers
of the baptized drifting away from church life. This prompts the question: should
the Church not change? Must she not adapt her offices and structures to the present
day, in order to reach the searching and doubting people of today? Blessed Mother
Teresa was once asked what in her opinion was the first thing that would have to change
in the Church. Her answer was: you and I. Two things are clear from this brief
story. On the one hand Mother Teresa wants to tell her interviewer: the Church is
not just other people, not just the hierarchy, the Pope and the bishops: we are all
the Church, we the baptized. And on the other hand her starting-point is this: yes,
there are grounds for change. There is a need for change. Every Christian and the
community of the faithful are constantly called to change. What should this change
look like in practice? Are we talking about the kind of renewal that a householder
might carry out when reordering or repainting his home? Or are we talking about
a corrective, designed to bring us back on course and help us to make our way more
swiftly and more directly? Certainly these and other elements play a part. As far
as the Church in concerned, though, the basic motive for change is the apostolic mission
of the disciples and the Church herself. The Church, in other words, must constantly
rededicate herself to her mission. The three Synoptic Gospels highlight various aspects
of the missionary task. The mission is built upon personal experience: “You are
witnesses” (Lk 24:48); it finds expression in relationships: “Make disciples of all
nations” (Mt 28:19); and it spreads a universal message: “Preach the Gospel to the
whole creation” (Mk 16:15). Through the demands and constraints of the world, however,
the witness is constantly obscured, the relationships are alienated and the message
is relativized. If the Church, in Pope Paul VI’s words, is now struggling “to model
itself on Christ's ideal”, this “can only result in its acting and thinking quite
differently from the world around it, which it is nevertheless striving to influence”
(Ecclesiam Suam, 58). In order to accomplish her mission, she will constantly set
herself apart from her surroundings, she needs in a certain sense to become unworldly
or “desecularized”. The Church’s mission has its origins in the mystery of the
triune God, in the mystery of his creative love. Love is not just somehow within
God, he himself is love by nature. And divine love does not want to exist in isolation,
it wants to pour itself out. It has come down to men in a particular way through
the incarnation and self-offering of God’s Son. He stepped outside the framework
of his divinity, he took flesh and became man; and indeed his purpose was not merely
to confirm the world in its worldliness and to be its companion, leaving it completely
unchanged. The Christ event includes the inconceivable fact of what the Church Fathers
call a commercium, an exchange between God and man, in which the two parties – albeit
in quite different ways – both give and take, bestow and receive. The Christian faith
recognizes that God has given man a freedom in which he can truly be a partner to
God, and can enter into exchange with him. At the same time it is clear to man that
this exchange is only possible thanks to God’s magnanimity in accepting the beggar’s
poverty as wealth, so as to make the divine gift acceptable, given that man has nothing
of comparable worth to offer in return. The Church likewise owes her whole being
to this unequal exchange. She has nothing of her own to offer to him who founded
her. She finds her meaning exclusively in being a tool of salvation, in filling the
world with God’s word and in transforming the world by bringing it into loving unity
with God. The Church is fully immersed in the Redeemer’s outreach to men. She herself
is always on the move, she constantly has to place herself at the service of the mission
that she has received from the Lord. The Church must always open up afresh to the
cares of the world and give herself over to them, in order to make present and continue
the holy exchange that began with the Incarnation. In the concrete history of the
Church, however, a contrary tendency is also manifested, namely that the Church becomes
settled in this world, she becomes self-sufficient and adapts herself to the standards
of the world. She gives greater weight to organization and institutionalization than
to her vocation to openness. In order to accomplish her true task adequately, the
Church must constantly renew the effort to detach herself from the “worldliness” of
the world. In this she follows the words of Jesus: “They are not of the world, even
as I am not of the world” (Jn 17:16). One could almost say that history comes to
the aid of the Church here through the various periods of secularization, which have
contributed significantly to her purification and inner reform. Secularizing trends
– whether by expropriation of Church goods, or elimination of privileges or the like
– have always meant a profound liberation of the Church from forms of worldliness,
for in the process she has set aside her worldly wealth and has once again completely
embraced her worldly poverty. In this the Church has shared the destiny of the tribe
of Levi, which according to the Old Testament account was the only tribe in Israel
with no ancestral land of its own, taking as its portion only God himself, his word
and his signs. At those moments in history, the Church shared with that tribe the
demands of a poverty that was open to the world, in order to be released from her
material ties: and in this way her missionary activity regained credibility. History
has shown that, when the Church becomes less worldly, her missionary witness shines
more brightly. Once liberated from her material and political burdens, the Church
can reach out more effectively and in a truly Christian way to the whole world, she
can be truly open to the world. She can live more freely her vocation to the ministry
of divine worship and service of neighbour. The missionary task, which is linked
to Christian worship and should determine its structure, becomes more clearly visible.
The Church opens herself to the world not in order to win men for an institution with
its own claims to power, but in order to lead them to themselves by leading them to
him of whom each person can say with Saint Augustine: he is closer to me than I am
to myself (cf. Confessions, III, 6, 11). He who is infinitely above me is yet so
deeply within me that he is my true interiority. This form of openness to the world
on the Church’s part also serves to indicate how the individual Christian can be open
to the world in effective and appropriate ways. It is not a question here of finding
a new strategy to relaunch the Church. Rather, it is a question of setting aside
mere strategy and seeking total transparency, not bracketing or ignoring anything
from the truth of our present situation, but living the faith fully here and now in
the utterly sober light of day, appropriating it completely, and stripping away from
it anything that only seems to belong to faith, but in truth is mere convention or
habit. To put it another way: for people of every era, not just our own, the Christian
faith is a scandal. That the eternal God should know us and care about us, that the
intangible should at a particular moment have become tangible, that he who is immortal
should have suffered and died on the Cross, that we who are mortal should be given
the promise of resurrection and eternal life – to believe all this is to posit something
truly remarkable. This scandal, which cannot be eliminated unless one were to eliminate
Christianity itself, has unfortunately been overshadowed in recent times by other
painful scandals on the part of the preachers of the faith. A dangerous situation
arises when these scandals take the place of the primary skandalon of the Cross and
in so doing they put it beyond reach, concealing the true demands of the Christian
Gospel behind the unworthiness of those who proclaim it. All the more, then, is
it time once again for the Church resolutely to set aside her worldliness. That does
not mean withdrawing from the world. A Church relieved of the burden of worldliness
is in a position, not least through her charitable activities, to mediate the life-giving
strength of the Christian faith to those in need, to sufferers and to their carers.
“For the Church, charity is not a kind of welfare activity which could equally well
be left to others, but is a part of her nature, an indispensable expression of her
very being” (Deus Caritas Est, 25). At the same time, though, the Church’s charitable
activity also needs to be constantly exposed to the demands of due detachment from
worldliness, if it is not to wither away at the roots in the face of increasing erosion
of its ecclesial character. Only a profound relationship with God makes it possible
to reach out fully towards others, just as a lack of outreach towards neighbour impoverishes
one’s relationship with God. Openness to the concerns of the world means, then,
for the Church that is detached from worldliness, bearing witness to the primacy of
God’s love according to the Gospel through word and deed, here and now, a task which
at the same time points beyond the present world because this present life is also
bound up with eternal life. As individuals and as the community of the Church, let
us live the simplicity of a great love, which is both the simplest and hardest thing
on earth, because it demands no more and no less than the gift of oneself. Dear
friends, it remains for me to invoke God’s blessing and the strength of the Holy Spirit
upon us all, that we may continually recognize anew and bear fresh witness to God’s
love and mercy in our respective fields of activity. Thank you for your attention.XXX
XXX XXX
Apostolic Journey of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to
Germany Address at the Departure Ceremony, Lahr Airport 25 September
2011Mr President of the Federal Republic, Distinguished Representatives of the
Federal Government, of Baden Württemburg and its Communities, Dear Brother Bishops,
Ladies and Gentlemen, Before leaving Germany, I would like very much to thank you
for these days, so moving and eventful, spent in my native land. I am grateful
to you, President Wulff, for welcoming me in Berlin in the name of the German people
and now, at the moment of my departure, for again honouring me with your gracious
words. My thoughts turn to the representatives of the Federal Government and the
governments of the Länder who are present at this departure ceremony. I offer heartfelt
thanks to Archbishop Zollitsch of Freiburg, who accompanied me throughout the journey.
I likewise express my gratitude to Archbishop Woelki of Berlin and Bishop Wanke of
Erfurt, who also showed me hospitality, and to the entire German episcopate. Finally
I offer a particular word of thanks to all those who worked behind the scenes before
and during these four days in order to ensure that all went smoothly: to the civic
institutions, to all those engaged in providing security, health services and public
transport, and to the many volunteers. I thank all of you for these splendid days,
for our many personal encounters and for your many signs of attention and affection. In
Berlin, the Federal Capital, I had the particular opportunity of addressing the members
of the Bundestag and presenting some reflections on the intellectual foundations of
the state. I also readily think of the fruitful conversations which I had with the
Federal President and the Federal Chancellor about the present state of the German
people and the international community. I was particularly touched by the cordial
welcome and enthusiasm shown by so many people in Berlin. Here in the land of
the Reformation, Christian unity was naturally a high point of my journey. I would
mention in particular my meeting with representatives of the Lutheran Church in Germany,
which took place in the former Augustinian convent of Erfurt. I am profoundly grateful
for our fraternal exchange and common prayer. Significant too were my meetings with
Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Christians, as well with Jews and Muslims. Of course
my visit was particularly aimed at the Catholic communities in Berlin, Erfurt, Eichsfeld
and Freiburg. I gladly recall our common liturgical celebrations and the joy which
accompanied them, our common listening to the word of God and our union in prayer
– especially in those parts of the country where efforts were made for decades to
remove religion from people’s lives. This gives me confidence for the future of Christianity
in Germany. As in previous visits, it was clear how many people here are bearing
witness to their faith and making its transforming power present in today’s world. Last
but not least, after the impressive celebration of World Youth Day in Madrid, I was
also delighted to be in the presence of large numbers of young people in Freiburg
at yesterday’s youth vigil. I encourage the Church in Germany to pursue with
resolute confidence the path of faith which leads people back to their roots, to the
heart of the Good News of Christ. It will be small communities of believers – and
these already exist – whose enthusiasm spreads within a pluralistic society and makes
others curious to seek the light which gives life in abundance. “There is nothing
more beautiful than to know Christ and to speak to others of our friendship with him”
(Homily for the Solemn Inauguration of the Petrine Ministry, 24 April 2005). This
experience ultimately gives the certainty that “where God is, there is a future.”
Wherever God is present, there is hope: new and often unexpected horizons open up
beyond the present and the ephemeral. In this sense I accompany in my thoughts and
prayers the path of the Church in Germany. With vivid memories of these days spent
in my native land, I now return to Rome. With the assurance of my prayers for all
of you, and for a future of peace and freedom for our country, I bid you farewell
with a hearfelt “Vergelt’s Gott” [May God reward you]. God bless you all! END