Pope's Lenten message 2013: Believing in charity calls forth charity
(Vatican Radio) On Friday Pope Benedict XVI's message for Lent 2013 was published
at the Vatican. With less than two weeks to Ash Wednesday, the Holy Father has concentrated
his reflections for the 40 days of prayer, penance and almsgiving to "the indissoluble
interrelation" between faith and charity. Emer McCarthy reports: The Pope writes
'"faith is a gift and response, it helps us know the truth of Christ as the incarnate
and crucified Love, full and perfect obedience to the Father's will and God's infinite
mercy towards others", "charity helps us enter into the love of God manifest in Christ,
and joins us in a personal and existential way to the total and unconditional self-giving
of Jesus to the Father and to his brothers and sisters. " The greatest work of
charity is evangelization, because "essentially, everything proceeds from Love and
tends towards Love. This Year of Faith, Pope Benedict XVI has dedicated his Lenten
message to the relationship between faith and charity, entitled "Believing in charity
calls forth charity." In the message the Pope addresses the issue starting from
the definition of faith as "response to the love of God”."Faith - writes Benedict
XVI - is this personal adherence - which involves all our faculties - to the revelation
of God's gratuitous and "passionate" love for us, fully revealed in Jesus Christ.
He notes "Sometimes we tend, in fact, to reduce the term "charity" to solidarity
or simply humanitarian aid. It is important, however, to remember that the greatest
work of charity is evangelization, which is the "ministry of the word".
The
Pope writes: “There is no action more beneficial - and therefore more charitable -
towards one's neighbour than to break the bread of the word of God, to share with
him the Good News of the Gospel, to introduce him to a relationship with God: evangelization
is the highest and the most integral promotion of the human person.
Faith
he concludes, precedes charity, but faith is genuine only if crowned by charity.
Below
please find the text of the Holy Father’s Lenten message 2013:
Believing
in charity calls forth charity
“We have come to know and to believe
in the love God has for us” (1 Jn 4:16)
Dear
Brothers and Sisters, The celebration of Lent, in the context of the Year of Faith,
offers us a valuable opportunity to meditate on the relationship between faith and
charity: between believing in God – the God of Jesus Christ – and love, which is the
fruit of the Holy Spirit and which guides us on the path of devotion to God and others.
1.
Faith as a response to the love of God
In my first Encyclical, I offered
some thoughts on the close relationship between the theological virtues of faith and
charity. Setting out from Saint John’s fundamental assertion: “We have come to know
and to believe in the love God has for us” (1 Jn 4:16), I observed that “being
Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter
with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction …
Since God has first loved us (cf. 1 Jn 4:10), love is now no longer a mere
‘command’; it is the response to the gift of love with which God draws near to us”
(Deus Caritas Est, 1). Faith is this personal adherence – which involves all
our faculties – to the revelation of God’s gratuitous and “passionate” love for us,
fully revealed in Jesus Christ. The encounter with God who is Love engages not only
the heart but also the intellect: “Acknowledgement of the living God is one path towards
love, and the ‘yes’ of our will to his will unites our intellect, will and sentiments
in the all-embracing act of love. But this process is always open-ended; love is never
‘finished’ and complete” (ibid., 17). Hence, for all Christians, and especially
for “charity workers”, there is a need for faith, for “that encounter with God in
Christ which awakens their love and opens their spirits to others. As a result, love
of neighbour will no longer be for them a commandment imposed, so to speak, from without,
but a consequence deriving from their faith, a faith which becomes active through
love” (ibid., 31a). Christians are people who have been conquered by Christ’s
love and accordingly, under the influence of that love – “Caritas Christi urget
nos” (2 Cor 5:14) – they are profoundly open to loving their neighbour
in concrete ways (cf. ibid., 33). This attitude arises primarily from the consciousness
of being loved, forgiven, and even served by the Lord, who bends down to wash the
feet of the Apostles and offers himself on the Cross to draw humanity into God’s love. “Faith
tells us that God has given his Son for our sakes and gives us the victorious certainty
that it is really true: God is love! … Faith, which sees the love of God revealed
in the pierced heart of Jesus on the Cross, gives rise to love. Love is the light
– and in the end, the only light – that can always illuminate a world grown dim and
give us the courage needed to keep living and working” (ibid., 39). All this
helps us to understand that the principal distinguishing mark of Christians is precisely
“love grounded in and shaped by faith” (ibid., 7).
2. Charity
as life in faith
The entire Christian life is a response to God’s love.
The first response is precisely faith as the acceptance, filled with wonder and gratitude,
of the unprecedented divine initiative that precedes us and summons us. And the “yes”
of faith marks the beginning of a radiant story of friendship with the Lord, which
fills and gives full meaning to our whole life. But it is not enough for God that
we simply accept his gratuitous love. Not only does he love us, but he wants to draw
us to himself, to transform us in such a profound way as to bring us to say with Saint
Paul: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (cf. Gal 2:20). When
we make room for the love of God, then we become like him, sharing in his own charity.
If we open ourselves to his love, we allow him to live in us and to bring us to love
with him, in him and like him; only then does our faith become truly “active through
love” (Gal 5:6); only then does he abide in us (cf. 1 Jn 4:12). Faith
is knowing the truth and adhering to it (cf. 1 Tim 2:4); charity is “walking”
in the truth (cf. Eph 4:15). Through faith we enter into friendship with the
Lord, through charity this friendship is lived and cultivated (cf. Jn 15:14ff).
Faith causes us to embrace the commandment of our Lord and Master; charity gives us
the happiness of putting it into practice (cf. Jn 13:13-17). In faith we are
begotten as children of God (cf. Jn 1:12ff); charity causes us to persevere
concretely in our divine sonship, bearing the fruit of the Holy Spirit (cf. Gal
5:22). Faith enables us to recognize the gifts that the good and generous God has
entrusted to us; charity makes them fruitful (cf. Mt 25:14-30).
3.
The indissoluble interrelation of faith and charity
In light of the above,
it is clear that we can never separate, let alone oppose, faith and charity. These
two theological virtues are intimately linked, and it is misleading to posit a contrast
or “dialectic” between them. On the one hand, it would be too one-sided to place a
strong emphasis on the priority and decisiveness of faith and to undervalue and almost
despise concrete works of charity, reducing them to a vague humanitarianism. On the
other hand, though, it is equally unhelpful to overstate the primacy of charity and
the activity it generates, as if works could take the place of faith. For a healthy
spiritual life, it is necessary to avoid both fideism and moral activism. The Christian
life consists in continuously scaling the mountain to meet God and then coming back
down, bearing the love and strength drawn from him, so as to serve our brothers and
sisters with God’s own love. In sacred Scripture, we see how the zeal of the Apostles
to proclaim the Gospel and awaken people’s faith is closely related to their charitable
concern to be of service to the poor (cf. Acts 6:1-4). In the Church, contemplation
and action, symbolized in some way by the Gospel figures of Mary and Martha, have
to coexist and complement each other (cf. Lk 10:38-42). The relationship with
God must always be the priority, and any true sharing of goods, in the spirit of the
Gospel, must be rooted in faith (cf. General Audience, 25 April 2012). Sometimes
we tend, in fact, to reduce the term “charity”to solidarity or simply humanitarian
aid. It is important, however, to remember that the greatest work of charity is evangelization,
which is the “ministry of the word”. There is no action more beneficial – and therefore
more charitable – towards one’s neighbour than to break the bread of the word of God,
to share with him the Good News of the Gospel, to introduce him to a relationship
with God: evangelization is the highest and the most integral promotion of the human
person. As the Servant of God Pope Paul VI wrote in the Encyclical Populorum Progressio,
the proclamation of Christ is the first and principal contributor todevelopment
(cf. n. 16). It is the primordial truth of the love of God for us, lived and proclaimed,
that opens our lives to receive this love and makes possible the integral development
of humanity and of every man (cf. Caritas in Veritate, 8). Essentially,
everything proceeds from Love and tends towards Love. God’s gratuitous love is made
known to us through the proclamation of the Gospel. If we welcome it with faith, we
receive the first and indispensable contact with the Divine, capable of making us
“fall in love with Love”, and then we dwell within this Love, we grow in it and we
joyfully communicate it to others. Concerning the relationship between faith and
works of charity, there is a passage in the Letter to the Ephesians which provides
perhaps the best account of the link between the two: “For by grace you have been
saved through faith; and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God; not because
of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ
Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them”
(2:8-10). It can be seen here that the entire redemptive initiative comes from God,
from his grace, from his forgiveness received in faith; but this initiative, far from
limiting our freedom and our responsibility, is actually what makes them authentic
and directs them towards works of charity. These are not primarily the result of human
effort, in which to take pride, but they are born of faith and they flow from the
grace that God gives in abundance. Faith without works is like a tree without fruit:
the two virtues imply one another. Lent invites us, through the traditional practices
of the Christian life, to nourish our faith by careful and extended listening to the
word of God and by receiving the sacraments, and at the same time to grow in charity
and in love for God and neighbour, not least through the specific practices of fasting,
penance and almsgiving.
4. Priority of faith, primacy of charity
Like
any gift of God, faith and charity have their origin in the action of one and the
same Holy Spirit (cf. 1 Cor 13), the Spirit within us that cries out “Abba,
Father” (Gal 4:6), and makes us say: “Jesus is Lord!” (1 Cor 12:3) and
“Maranatha!” (1 Cor 16:22; Rev 22:20). Faith, as gift and response,
causes us to know the truth of Christ as Love incarnate and crucified, as full and
perfect obedience to the Father’s will and infinite divine mercy towards neighbour;
faith implants in hearts and minds the firm conviction that only this Love is able
to conquer evil and death. Faith invites us to look towards the future with the virtue
of hope, in the confident expectation that the victory of Christ’s love will come
to its fullness. For its part, charity ushers us into the love of God manifested in
Christ and joins us in a personal and existential way to the total and unconditional
self-giving of Jesus to the Father and to his brothers and sisters. By filling our
hearts with his love, the Holy Spirit makes us sharers in Jesus’ filial devotion to
God and fraternal devotion to every man (cf. Rom 5:5). The relationship
between these two virtues resembles that between the two fundamental sacraments of
the Church: Baptism and Eucharist. Baptism (sacramentum fidei) precedes the
Eucharist (sacramentum caritatis), but is ordered to it, the Eucharist being
the fullness of the Christian journey. In a similar way, faith precedes charity, but
faith is genuine only if crowned by charity. Everything begins from the humble acceptance
of faith (“knowing that one is loved by God”), but has to arrive at the truth of charity
(“knowing how to love God and neighbour”), which remains for ever, as the fulfilment
of all the virtues (cf. 1 Cor 13:13). Dear brothers and sisters, in this
season of Lent, as we prepare to celebrate the event of the Cross and Resurrection
– in which the love of God redeemed the world and shone its light upon history – I
express my wish that all of you may spend this precious time rekindling your faith
in Jesus Christ, so as to enter with him into the dynamic of love for the Father and
for every brother and sister that we encounter in our lives. For this intention, I
raise my prayer to God, and I invoke the Lord’s blessing upon each individual and
upon every community!