Pope Benedict addresses Catholics working for the Church and society
Pope Benedict's final engagement before departing from Germany at the end of his 4-day
state visit to his homeland was a meeting in the city of Freiburg with lay Catholics
working for the Church and for society.
Here is the full text of his remarks:
"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."