Full text: Pope Benedict XVI at ecumenical Vespers
Your Grace, Dear Brother Bishops and Priests, Dear Monks and Nuns of Camaldoli, Dear
Brothers and Sisters, It gives me great joy to be here today in this Basilica
of San Gregorio al Celio for Solemn Vespers on the liturgical commemoration of the
death of Saint Gregory the Great. With you, dear Brothers and Sisters of the Camaldolese
family, I thank God for the thousand years that have passed since the foundation of
the Sacred Hermitage of Camaldoli by Saint Romuald. I am delighted to be joined on
this occasion by His Grace Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. To you, my
dear Brother in Christ, and to each one of you, dear monks and nuns, and to everyone
present, I extend cordial greetings. We have listened to two passages from Saint
Paul. The first, taken from the Second Letter to the Corinthians, is particularly
appropriate for the current liturgical season of Lent. It contains the Apostle’s
exhortation to seize the favourable moment for receiving God’s grace. The favourable
moment is naturally when Jesus Christ came to reveal and to bestow upon us the love
that God has for us, through his incarnation, passion, death and resurrection. The
“day of salvation” is the same reality that Saint Paul in another place describes
as the “fullness of time”, the moment when God took flesh and entered time in a completely
unique way, filling it with his grace. It is for us, then, to accept this gift, which
is Jesus himself: his person, his word, his Holy Spirit. Moreover, in the first reading,
Saint Paul tells us about himself and his apostolate – how he strives to remain faithful
to God in his ministry, so that it may be truly efficacious and may not prove instead
a barrier to faith. These words make us think of Saint Gregory the Great, of the
radiant witness that he offered the people of Rome and the whole Church by a blameless
ministry full of zeal for the Gospel. Truly, what Saint Paul wrote of himself applies
equally to Gregory: the grace of God in him has not been fruitless (cf. 1 Cor 15:10).
This, indeed, is the secret for the lives of every one of us: to welcome God’s grace
and to consent with all our heart and all our strength to its action. This is also
the secret of true joy and profound peace. The second reading was taken from the
Letter to the Colossians. We heard those words – always so moving for their spiritual
and pastoral inspiration – that the Apostle addressed to the members of that community
in order to form them according to the Gospel, saying to them: “whatever you do,
in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus” (Col 3:17). “Be perfect”,
the Master said to his disciples; and now the Apostle exhorts his listeners to live
according to the high measure of Christian life that is holiness. He can do this
because the brothers he is addressing are “chosen by God, holy and beloved”. Here
too, at the root of everything, is the grace of God, the gift of the call, the mystery
of the encounter with the living Jesus. But this grace demands a response from those
who have been baptized: it requires the commitment to be reclothed in Christ’s sentiments:
tenderness, goodness, humility, meekness, magnanimity, mutual forgiveness, and above
all, as a synthesis and a crown, agape, the love that God has given us through Jesus,
the love that the Holy Spirit has poured into our hearts. And if we are to be reclothed
in Christ, his word must dwell among us and in us, with all its richness and in abundance.
In an atmosphere of constant thanksgiving, the Christian community feeds on the word
and causes to rise towards God, as a song of praise, the word that he himself has
given us. And every action, every gesture, every service, is accomplished within
this profound relationship with God, in the interior movement of Trinitarian love
that descends towards us and rises back towards God, a movement that finds its highest
expression in the eucharistic sacrifice. This word also sheds light upon the happy
circumstances that bring us together today, in the name of Saint Gregory the Great.
Through the faithfulness and benevolence of the Lord, the Congregation of Camaldolese
monks of the Order of Saint Benedict has completed a thousand years of history, feeding
daily on the word of God and the Eucharist, as their founder Saint Romuald taught
them, according to the triplex bonum of solitude, community life and evangelization.
Exemplary men and women of God, such as Saint Peter Damian, Gratian – author of the
Decretum – Saint Bruno of Querfurt and the five brother martyrs, Rudolph I and II,
Blessed Gherardesca, Blessed Giovanna da Bagno and Blessed Paolo Giustiniani; men
of art and science like Brother Maurus the Cosmographer, Lorenzo Monaco, Ambrogio
Traversari, Pietro Delfino and Guido Grandi; illustrious historians like the Camaldolese
Annalists Giovanni Benedetto Mittarelli and Anselmo Costadoni; zealous pastors of
the Church, among whom Pope Gregory XVI stands out, have revealed the horizons and
the great fruitfulness of the Camaldolese tradition. Every phase of the long history
of the Camaldolese has produced faithful witnesses of the Gospel, not only in the
hidden life of silence and solitude and in the common life shared with the brethren,
but also in humble and generous service towards others. Particularly fruitful was
the hospitality offered by Camaldolese guest-houses. In the days of Florentine humanism,
the walls of Camaldoli witnessed the famous disputationes, in which great humanists
such as Marsilio Ficino and Cristoforo Landino took part. In the turbulent years
of the Second World War, those same cloisters were the setting for the birth of the
famous Codex of Camaldoli, one of the most significant sources of the Constitution
of the Italian Republic. Nor were the years of the Second Vatican Council any less
productive, for at that time individuals of high calibre emerged among the Camaldolese,
enriching the Congregation and the Church and promoting new initiatives and new houses
in the United States of America, Tanzania, India and Brazil. In all this activity,
a guarantee of fruitfulness was the support of monks and nuns praying constantly for
the new foundations from the depths of their “withdrawal from the world”, lived at
times to a heroic degree. On 17 September 1993, during his meeting with the monks
of the Sacred Hermitage of Camaldoli, Blessed John Paul II commented on the theme
of their imminent General Chapter, “Choosing hope, choosing the future”, with these
words: “Choosing hope and the future in the last analysis implies choosing God ...
It means choosing Christ, the hope of every human being.” And he continued, “This
particularly occurs in that form of life which God himself brought about in the Church,
inspiring Saint Romuald to found the Benedictine family of Camaldoli, with its characteristic
complementarity of hermitage and monastery, solitary life and cenobitic life in harmony
with each other.” Moreover, my blessed Predecessor emphasized that “choosing God
also means humbly and patiently cultivating, according to God’s design, ecumenical
and interreligious dialogue”, always on the basis of fidelity to the original charism
received from Saint Romuald and transmitted through a thousand years of varied tradition. Encouraged
by the visit from the Successor of Peter, and by his words, all of you Camaldolese
monks and nuns have pursued your path, constantly seeking the right balance between
the eremitical and the cenobitic spirit, between the need to dedicate yourselves totally
to God in solitude, the need to support one another in communal prayer, and the need
to welcome others so that they can draw upon the wellsprings of spiritual life and
evaluate the events of the world with a truly Gospel-formed conscience. In this way
you seek to attain that perfecta caritas that Saint Gregory the Great considered the
point of arrival of every manifestation of faith, a commitment that finds confirmation
in the motto of your coat of arms: “Ego Vobis, vos mihi”, a synthesis of the covenant
formula between God and his people, and a source of the perennial vitality of your
charism. The Monastery of San Gregorio al Celio is the Roman setting for our celebration
of the millennium of Camaldoli in company with His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury
who, together with us, recognizes this Monastery as the birthplace of the link between
Christianity in Britain and the Church of Rome. Today’s celebration is therefore
marked by a profoundly ecumenical character which, as we know, is part and parcel
of the modern Camaldolese spirit. This Roman Camaldolese Monastery has developed
with Canterbury and the Anglican Communion, especially since the Second Vatican Council,
links that now qualify as traditional. Today, for the third time, the Bishop of Rome
is meeting the Archbishop of Canterbury in the home of Saint Gregory the Great. And
it is right that it should be so, because it was from this Monastery that Pope Gregory
chose Augustine and his forty monks and sent them to bring the Gospel to the Angles,
a little over 1,400 years ago. The constant presence of monks in this place, over
such a long period, is already in itself a testimony of God’s faithfulness to his
Church, which we are happy to be able to proclaim to the whole world. We hope that
the sign of our presence here together in front of the holy altar, where Gregory himself
celebrated the eucharistic sacrifice, will remain not only as a reminder of our fraternal
encounter, but also as a stimulus for all the faithful – both Catholic and Anglican
– encouraging them, as they visit the glorious tombs of the holy Apostles and Martyrs
in Rome, to renew their commitment to pray constantly and to work for unity, and to
live fully in accordance with the “ut unum sint” that Jesus addressed to the Father. This
profound desire, that we have the joy of sharing, we entrust to the heavenly intercession
of Saint Gregory the Great and Saint Romuald.