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   February 20, 2008

Pope's Q-and-A Session With Roman Clergy, Part 4

On the Church's Role in Education

VATICAN CITY, FEB. 14, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Following a Lenten tradition, Benedict XVI met Thursday with parish priests and clergy of the Diocese of Rome. During the meeting, the participants asked the Pope questions. Here is a translation of a fourth question and the Holy Father's answer.

ZENIT began this series of questions-and-answers Monday.

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[Father Daniele Salera, parish vicar at Santa Mary, Mother of the Redeemer in Tor Bella Monaca and a religion professor:]

Your Holiness, I am Father Daniele Salera, a priest for six years now and the parish vicar in Tor Bella Monaca; there I give religion classes. In reading your letter about the urgent task of education, I have taken note of certain elements that struck me as significant and that I would like to talk about with you. […] I would like to transmit to you in these short moments the beauty of working in a school with colleagues who for various motives no longer have faith or no longer identify themselves with the Church. Nevertheless, they give me an example of passion for education and for the rescuing of adolescents whose lives are marked by crime and degradation.

I perceive in many of the people I work with in Tor Bella Monaca an authentic missionary drive. Through different but convergent paths we fight against this crisis of hope that is always lurking when one daily interacts with kids who seem dead on the inside, without a desire for the future, or so profoundly wrapped up in evil that they don't manage to perceive the goodness desired for them, or the occasions of freedom and redemption that in any case come along in their life. Before such a human emergency, there is no time for divisions. I often repeat to myself a saying of Pope Roncalli, who said, "I will always look for what unites, more than what divides."

Your Holiness, this experience allows me to live daily with youth and adults who would have never found me if I would have concentrated only on the activities of the parish. And I see that it's true: Many educators are giving up on ethics in favor of an affectivity that does not give certainties and creates dependence. Others fear defending the norms of civil coexistence because they think these norms don't take into account the needs, difficulties and identities of the youth. Using a slogan, I would say that at the level of education, we live in a culture of, "yes, always" and "no, never." But it is the "no" proclaimed with loving passion for man and for his future that often draws the line between good and evil, a limit that in the years of development is fundamental for building up a solid personal identity.

On one hand, I am convinced that, before the emergency, diversities are attenuated and therefore, in the realm of education, we can truly find common ground with those who freely do not declare themselves believers in the real sense. On the other hand, I ask myself, why do we, as a Church, who have written, thought and lived so much regarding education as formation in the correct use of liberty -- as you say -- fail to transmit this educational objective? Why do we seem, shall we say, so little free and freeing?

[Benedict XVI:]

Thank you for this reflection of your experiences in the school of today with the youth of today, and also for these self-critiquing questions for us. In this moment, I can only confirm that it seems very important to me that the Church be present also in the school, because an education that is not at the same time an education with God and in the presence of God, an education that does not transmit the great ethical values that have appeared in the light of Christ, is not education. Professional formation is never sufficient without the formation of the heart. And the heart cannot be formed without, at least, the challenge of the presence of God. We know that many youth live in environments, in situations, that make the light and the Word of God inaccessible. They are in life situations that represent a true slavery, not just exterior, but that provoke an intellectual slavery that obscures the truth in the heart and in the mind.

We try with what is within the reach of the Church to offer also to them a chance to escape. But, in any case, we bring to this diverse environment of a school -- where you can find a range from believers to the saddest situations -- the Word of God. This is what we have said about St. Paul, who wanted to make the Gospel arrive to everyone. This imperative of the Lord -- the Gospel should be announced to everyone -- is not a diachronic imperative, not a continental imperative, that in all cultures it be announced in a big way, but rather an interior imperative, in the sense of entering into the various facets and dimensions of a society to make, at least a little, the light of the Gospel more accessible. That the Gospel really be announced to everyone.

And it seems an aspect of the cultural formation of today. To know what is the Christian faith that has formed this continent and that is a light for all continents. The ways in which this light can be made most present and accessible are various, and I realize I don't have a recipe for this. But the need to offer oneself to the service of this adventure -- beautiful and difficult -- is really an element of the imperative of the Gospel itself. Let's pray that the Lord helps us to respond to this imperative of making knowledge of him, knowledge of his face, arrive to all of the dimensions of our society.

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Pope's Q-and-A Session With Roman Clergy, Part 5

On the Reality of Sin and the Sacrament of Penance

VATICAN CITY, FEB. 15, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Following a Lenten tradition, Benedict XVI met Feb. 7 with parish priests and clergy of the Diocese of Rome. During the meeting, the participants asked the Pope questions. Here is a translation of the fifth question and the Holy Father's answer.

ZENIT began this series of questions-and-answers Monday.

* * *

Father Pietro Riggi, Salesian of Borgo Ragazzi Don Bosco:

Holy Father, I work in an oratory and in a center for minors who are at risk. I want to ask you: On March 25, 2007 you gave an informal speech, lamenting that today the “Last Things” are little spoken of. […] Without these essential parts of the Creed, does it not seem to you that the logical system that brings us to see Christ’s redemption crumbles? Without sin, not speaking of hell, Christ’s redemption is diminished too. Does it not seem to you that with the loss of the sense of sin the salvific, sacramental figure itself of the priest, who has the power to absolve and celebrate in the name of Christ, is also lost?

Today, unfortunately, we priests as well, when the Gospel speaks of hell, we avoid the Gospel itself. It is not spoken of. Or we do not know how to talk about paradise. We do not know how to talk about eternal life. We risk giving the faith a dimension that is only horizontal or rather detached, the horizontal from the vertical. And this is beginning to disappear unfortunately from the catechesis for the kids, but also from the parishes, in the foundational structures. […]

I also wanted to point out that the Virgin Mary was not afraid to speak to the children of Fatima, who, incidentally, were of catechism age: 7, 9 and 12. And we so many times instead leave this out. Can you tell us something more about this?

Benedict XVI:

You rightly spoke of fundamental themes of the faith, which unfortunately rarely appear in our preaching. In the encyclical “Spe Salvi” I wanted to speak indeed also of the last judgment, of judgment in general, and in this context of purgatory, hell and paradise as well. I think that we are all still struck by the Marxist objection, according to which the Christians spoke only about the beyond and neglected this world. So, we want to show that we are really working for this world and we are not people who talk about distant realities that do not help this world. Now, although it is right to show that Christians work for this world -- and we are all called to work to truly make this world a city for God and of God -- we must not forget the other dimension. If we do not take it into account, we do not work well for this world.

Showing this was one of the fundamental purposes for me writing the encyclical. When one does not know God’s judgment, one does not know the possibility of hell, of radical and definitive failure of life, one does not know the possibility and the necessity of purification. Then man does not work well for the world because in the end he loses the criteria, he no longer knows himself, not knowing God, and he destroys the world. All of the great ideologies promised: We will take things in hand, we will no longer neglect the world, we will create a new, just, correct, fraternal world. Instead they destroyed the world. We see it with Nazism, we it also with communism -- they promised to construct the world as it should have been, and instead, they destroyed the world.

In the "ad limina" visits of the bishops from ex-communist countries I always see how in those lands not only the planet, ecology, was destroyed, but above all, and worse, souls. Rediscovering the truly human conscience, illumined by the presence of God, is the first task in rebuilding the earth. This is the common experience of those countries. The rebuilding of the earth, respecting the cry of suffering of this planet, can only happen by rediscovering God in the soul, with eyes open to God.

So, you are right: We must speak of all this out of responsibility for the world, for the men who live today. We must also speak precisely of sin as the possibility of destroying ourselves and so also of other parts of the earth. In the encyclical I tried to show that indeed the last judgment of God guarantees justice. We all want a just world. But we cannot repair all of the destruction of the past, all the people who were unjustly tormented and killed. Only God himself can create justice, which must be justice for all, for the dead too. And as Adorno, a great Marxist, says, only the resurrection of the flesh -- which he holds to be an illusion -- could create justice. We believe in this resurrection of the flesh, in which not all will be equal.

Today we are used to thinking: What is sin? God is great, he knows us, so sin will not count, in the end God will be good to all. It is a beautiful hope. But there is justice and there is true guilt. Those who have destroyed man and the earth cannot immediately sit at table with God together with their victims. God creates justice. We must keep this in mind. For this reason it seemed important to me also to write this text on purgatory, which for me is such an obvious truth, so evident and also so necessary and consoling that it cannot be left out.

I tried to say: Perhaps there are not many who are destroyed in this way, who are forever incurable, who have no element on which God’s love can rest, who do not have a minimal capacity to love in them. This would be hell. On the other hand, there are certainly few -- or, in any case, not many -- who are so pure that they can immediately enter into communion with God. Many of us hope that there is something that can be healed in us, that there is a final will to serve God and serve men, to live according to God. But there are many, many wounds, much filth. We need to be prepared, to be purified. This is our hope: Even with such filth in our souls, in the end the Lord gives us the possibility, he finally cleanses us with his goodness that comes from his cross. In this way he makes us capable of living eternally for him.

Thus, paradise is hope, it is justice finally realized. And it also gives us the criteria for living, so that this time can be paradise in some way, a first light of paradise. Where men live according to these criteria, a little bit of paradise appears in this world, and this is visible. It also seems to me a demonstration of the truth of the faith, of the necessity of following the road of the commandments, which we must talk about more. These are truly road signs and they show us how to live well, how to choose life. For this reason we must also speak of sin and of the sacrament of forgiveness and reconciliation. A man who is sincere knows that he is guilty, that he must begin again, that he must be purified. And this is the marvelous reality that the Lord gives us: There is a possibility of renewal, of being new. The Lord begins with us again and in this way we also can begin again with the others in our life.

This aspect of renewal, of restitution of our being after so many mistakes, after so many sins, is the great promise, the great gift that the Church offers, and what, for example, psychotherapy cannot offer. Psychotherapy is so widespread today and it is also necessary in the face of so many destroyed and gravely wounded psyches. But psychotherapy’s possibilities are very limited: It can only try a little to re-establish balance in an unbalanced soul. But it cannot give a true renewal, an overcoming of these grave maladies of the soul. And for this reason it always remains provisional and never definitive.

The sacrament of penance gives us the occasion to renew ourselves completely with the power of God -- “Ego te absolvo” -- which is possible because Christ took these sins, these faults upon himself. It seems that today indeed this is a great necessity. We can be healed again. Souls that are wounded and sick -- as is the experience of all -- need not only advice but true renewal, which can come only from the power of God, the power of crucified love. It seems to me that this is the great nexus of mysteries that are truly inscribed in our life. We ourselves must meditate on them again and in this way bring them again to our people.

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Pope's Q-and-A Session With Roman Clergy, Part 6

On Finding Silence and Space

VATICAN CITY, FEB. 17, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Following a Lenten tradition, Benedict XVI met Feb. 7 with parish priests and clergy of the Diocese of Rome. During the meeting, the participants asked the Pope questions. Here is a translation of one of the questions and the Holy Father's answer.

ZENIT began this series of questions-and-answers last Monday.

* * *

[Father Massimo Tellan, Pastor of the Parish of Sant'Enrico:]

My name is Massimo Tellan. I have been a priest for 15 years; for 6 years I have been a pastor at Casal Monastero, in the north. I believe that all of us realize that we live more and more immersed in a world of cultural word inflation -- words that are, in the end, often without meaning -- which disorient the human heart to such an extent that it becomes deaf to truth. That eternal Word that became flesh and assumed a face in Jesus of Nazareth becomes -- because of this inflation of words in our world -- evanescent, and above all for the new generations, inconsistent and distant.

Certainly [this Word gets] confused in the forest of ambiguous and ephemeral images that bombard one every day. So, what space should be given in education in the faith to this binomial of the word to be welcomed and the image to be contemplated? What happened to the art of narrating the faith and introducing people to the mystery [of the faith] as was done in the past with the "biblia pauperum"? In today's culture of the image how can we recover the incredible power of seeing that accompanies the mystery of the incarnation and the encounter with Jesus as happened on the banks of the Jordan for John and Andrew, who were invited to go and see where the master lived?

In other words, how do we educate [people] in the seeking and the contemplation of that true beauty that -- as Dostoyevsky wrote -- will save the world? Thank you, Your Holiness, for your attention, and if you will allow me, and with the consent of my confreres, as a priest of this presbyterium and a dilettante artist, along with what I have said I would like to give you an icon of Christ at the pillar [...] If it is true, as it is, that whoever sees the Son has seen the Father, so whoever sees us, his Church, can see Christ.

[Benedict XVI:]

Thank you for this beautiful gift. I am grateful that we have not only words but images too. We see that even today from Christian meditation new images are born, Christian culture is reborn, Christian iconography. Yes we live with an inflation of words, of images. So, it is difficult to create space for the word and the image. It seems to me that precisely in our world's situation, which we all know, which is also our suffering, the suffering of each one, the time of Lent takes on a new significance. Certainly bodily fasting -- which for a time was not considered to be in style -- is thought by everyone to be necessary today. It is not hard to understand that we must fast. Sometimes we find ourselves faced with exaggerations caused by a mistaken ideal of beauty. But in any case bodily fasting is something important because we are body and soul and the discipline of the body, even material discipline, is important for the spiritual life, which is always an incarnate life in a person who is body and soul.

This is one dimension. Today other dimensions are growing and manifesting themselves. It seems to me that the time of Lent can indeed also be a time of fasting from words and images. We need a little silence; we need a space that is free from the permanent bombardment of images. In this sense making the meaning of 40 days of exterior and interior discipline accessible and comprehensible today is very important for helping us to see that one dimension of our Lent, of this bodily and spiritual life, is to create for us spaces of silence that are also without images, to re-open our heart to the true image and the true word. It seems promising to me that today, too, one sees a rebirth of Christian art, meditative music -- like that of Taizé, for example -- or the renewing of the art of the icon, a Christian art that remains, let us say, within the great norms of the iconological art of the past, but broadening to the experiences and visions of today. There where there is a true and profound meditation on the Word, where we really enter into this visibility of God in the world, of this tangibility of God in the world, new images, new possibilities of making the events of salvation visible are also born. This is precisely the consequence of the event of the incarnation. The Old Testament prohibited every image and had to prohibit images in a world full of divinities. It lived in the great emptiness that was also represented by the interior of the temple, where, in contrast with the other temples, there was no image, but only the empty throne of the Word, the mysterious presence of the invisible God, not surrounded by our images.

But the new step is that this mysterious God liberates us from the inflation of images, even of a time full of images of divinity, and he gives us the freedom of the vision of the essential. He appears with a face, with a body, with a human history that, at the same time, is a divine history. A history that continues in the history of the saints, of the martyrs, of the saints of charity, of the word; [these saints] are always an explication, a continuation in the Body of Christ of his divine and human life, and give us the fundamental images in which -- beyond the superficial images that hide reality -- we can open our eyes toward the Truth itself. In this sense the iconoclastic period after the Council seems excessive to me -- but it had its meaning, because perhaps it was necessary to liberate ourselves from a superficiality of too many images.

Let us turn now to the knowledge of God who became man. As the Letter to the Ephesians says, he is the true image. And in this true image we see -- beyond the appearances that hide the truth -- the Truth itself: "He who sees me sees the Father." In this sense I would say that, with much respect and with much reverence, we can rediscover a Christian art and also rediscover the essential and great representations of the mystery of God in the iconographic tradition of the Church. And in this way we can rediscover the true image, covered up by the appearances. It is truly an important task of Christian education: the liberation for the Word behind the word, which always demands new spaces of silence, of mediation, of a deepening of knowledge, of abstinence, of discipline. It is equally the education in the true image, which is in the rediscovery of the great icons created in the history of Christianity: with the humility that liberates from superficial images. This type of iconoclasm is always necessary to rediscover the Image, that is, the fundamental images that express the presence of God in the flesh.

This is one dimension of the fundamental education in the faith, in true humanism, that we are attempting at this time in Rome. We have returned to rediscover the icon with its very severe rules, without the Renaissance beauties. And in this way we too can enter again onto the road to the rediscovery of the great images, toward an always new liberation from too many words, from too many images, to rediscover the essential images that are necessary for us. God himself has shown us his image and we can rediscover this image with a profound meditation on the Word that makes the images be reborn.

So, let us pray to the Lord that he help us along this road of true education, of re-education in the faith, which is always not only a listening but a seeing.