Pope and Archbishop of Canterbury celebrate Vespers at San Gregorio al Celio
Pope Benedict and the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams celebrated Vespers in
the church of St Gregory on the Caelian hill on Saturday afternoon, as they gave thanks
together the 1000th anniversary of the Camaldoli monastic community which
is based there. Philippa Hitchen was at the celebration and tells us more about this
ecumenical encounter..
“It is good to touch the soil on which you are nurtured”.
Those words from Dr Rowan Williams explain why three successive archbishops of Canterbury
have come to the Rome church of San Gregorio al Celio – to the very place from where
Pope Gregory the Great sent out Augustine and 40 of his monks to take the Christian
gospel to Anglo-Saxon England at the end of the 6th century.
“Oggi
per la terza volta….
Today, for the third time, Pope Benedict said in his homily,
the Bishop of Rome is meeting the Archbishop of Canterbury in the home of St Gregory
the Great. Today’s celebration, he said is therefore marked by a profoundly ecumenical
character, which as we know is part and parcel of the spirit of the Camaldoli community
that has lived and worshipped in the church on the Caelian hill since the mid 16th
century. Noting the hospitality and openness of this community which has made it a
place for fruitful dialogue throughout the centuries and now in different parts of
the world, the Pope said we hope that today’s celebration will act as a stimulus for
all the faithful – Catholic and Anglican – encouraging them to renew their commitment
and prayer for the unity that Jesus himself asked of His Father.
In his sermon,
Archbishop Williams spoke of the monastic vision of Gregory the Great, grounded in
humility, which helped him see clearly the needs of the people of England and respond
by sending St Augustine on his prophetic mission. The church today, he said, is called
upon to show that same prophetic spirit, to see where true need is and to answer God’s
call…
“To do this, it requires a habit …
Speaking of the need for silence
and patient discernment to combat a feverish advertising culture and an economic system
centred on selfishness and greed, the Archbishop said we must learn to set aside our
busy and self-serving agendas and allow the self-giving Christ to live in us, to open
our eyes and to empower us for service.
Before leaving the church, the two
leaders lit a candle in the small chapel thought to have been Pope Gregory’s simple
monastic cell – a tangible reminder of the need to continue bringing the light of
the Gospel to today’s world, just as St Gregory sent Augustine to bring the Cross
of Christ to Britain over 14 centuries ago.
Listen:
Below please
find the full texts of the two homilies, first of Pope Benedict and then of Archbishop
Rowan Williams:
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.
The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Homily
at Papal Vesper, San Gregorio Magno al Celio 10 March 2012, 17.30 pm
Your
Holiness, Dear brothers and sisters in Christ:
It is a privilege to stand here,
where my predecessors stood in 1989 and 1996, and to offer once again, as we did most
recently in Westminster [and Assisi], the sacrifice of praise that we owe to the One
Lord in whose name we are baptized; the One Lord who by his Spirit, brings to recognisability
in each member of his sacramental Body, the image and abundant life of Christ his
Son, through the temptations and struggles of our baptismal calling.
St Gregory
the Great had much to say about the peculiar temptations and struggles of those called
to office in the Church of God. To be called to this service is to be called to several
different kinds of suffering – the torment of compassion, as he puts it (Moralia 30.25.74),
the daily awareness of urgent human needs, bodily and spiritual, and the torment of
praise, flattery and status (ib. 26.34.62). This latter is a torment because those
called to this ministry know so clearly their own inner weakness and instability.
But that knowledge is a saving knowledge, which among other things helps us minister
effectively to others in trouble; and it reminds us that we find stability, soliditas,
only in the life of the Body of Christ, not in our own achievement (Homilies on Ezekiel
2.5.22).
These are insights deeply rooted in St Gregory’s formation as a monk.
Humility is the key to all faithful ministry, a humility that constantly seeks to
be immersed, involved, in the life of Christ’s Body, not looking for an individual
heroism or holiness. And it is this humility which the writer of the first life of
St Gregory, written in England in the early eighth century, places at the head of
the list of his saintly virtues, associating it with the ‘prophetic’ gift which allowed
him to see what the English people needed and to respond by sending the mission of
St Augustine from this place. That association of humility and prophecy is indeed
one that St Gregory himself makes in the Dialogues. The true pastor and leader in
the Church is one who, because he is caught up in the eternal self-offering of Jesus
Christ through the sacramental mysteries of the Church, is free to see the needs of
others as they really are. This may be ‘tormenting’, because those needs can be so
profound and tragic; but it also stirs us to action to address such needs in the name
and the strength of Christ.
And here lies the heart of Gregory’s monastic vision,
the vision which the brothers and sisters of Camaldoli—whose millennium we celebrate
with sincere joy here today—still seek to live out. To be immersed in the sacramental
life of Christ’s Body requires the daily immersion of contemplation; without this,
we cannot see one another clearly; without it we shall not truly recognize and love
one another, and grow together in his one holy catholic and apostolic Body. The balance
in the monastic life of solitude and common work and worship, a balance particularly
carefully worked out in the life of Camaldoli, is something that seeks to enable a
clear, even ‘prophetic’ vision of the other – seeing them, as the Eastern Christian
tradition represented by Evagrius suggests, in the light of their authentic spiritual
essence, not as they relate to our passions or preferences. The inseparable labour
of action and contemplation, of solitude and community, is to do with the constant
purification of our awareness of each other in the light of the God whom we encounter
in silence and self-forgetting.
Your Holiness, dear brothers and sisters, it
would be wrong to suggest that we enter into contemplation in order to see one anther
more clearly; but if anyone were to say that contemplation is a luxury in the Church,
something immaterial for the health of the Body, we should have to say that without
it we should be constantly dealing with shadows and fictions, not with the reality
of the world we live in. The Church is called upon to show that same prophetic spirit
which is ascribed to St Gregory, the capacity to see where true need is and to answer
God’s call in the person of the needy. To do this, it requires a habit of discernment,
penetration beyond the prejudices and clichés which affect even believers in a culture
that is so hasty and superficial in so many of its judgements; and with the habit
of discernment belongs a habit of recognizing one another as agents of Christ’s grace
and compassion and redemption.
And such a habit will develop only if we are
daily learning the discipline of silence and patience, waiting for the truth to declare
itself to us as we slowly set aside the distortions in our vision that are caused
by selfishness and greed. In recent years, we have seen developing a vastly sophisticated
system of unreality, created and sustained by acquisitiveness, a set of economic habits
in which the needs of actual human beings seem to be almost entirely obscured. We
are familiar with a feverish advertising culture in which we are persuaded to develop
unreal and disproportionate desires. We are all – Christians and their pastors included
– in need of the discipline that purges our vision and restores to us some sense of
the truth of our world, even if that can produce the ‘torment’ of knowing more clearly
how much people suffer and how little we can do for them by our unaided labours.
Your
Holiness, ‘Certain yet imperfect’ was how our predecessors of blessed memory, Pope
John Paul II and Archbishop Robert, here in Rome in 1989, characterised the communion
that our two churches share. ‘Certain’ because of the shared ecclesial vision to
which both our communions are committed as being the character of the Church both
one and particular – a vision of the restoration of full sacramental communion, of
a eucharistic life that is fully visible, and thus a witness that is fully credible,
so that a confused and tormented world may enter into the welcome and transforming
light of Christ. And ‘yet imperfect’ because of the limit of our vision, a deficit
in the depth of our hope and patience. Our recognition of the one Body in each other’s
corporate life is unstable and incomplete; yet without such ultimate recognition
we are not yet fully free to share the transforming power of the Gospel in Church
and world.
‘The truth will set you free’, says Our Lord. In the disciplines
of contemplation and stillness, we are brought closer to the truth, and so also closer
to the cross of the Lord. We learn our weakness and we learn something of the mystery
of how God deals with our weakness – not by ignoring or rejecting it but by embracing
its consequences in the incarnation and the passion of Christ. His self-emptying
calls out our own self-denial – an appropriate theme for this Lenten season. We learn
how to set on one side our busy and self-serving agendas and allow the self-giving
Christ to live in us, to open our eyes and to empower us for service. Today, as we
give thanks for a millennium of monastic witness, we celebrate the gifts of true and
clear vision that have been made possible through this witness. And we pray for all
who are called to public service in Christ’s Church that they may be given the grace
of contemplative discipline and prophetic clarity in their own witness, so that the
glory of Christ’s cross will shine forth in our world even in the midst of our own
weaknesses and failures.