The most difficult times can produce the greatest spiritual blessings. God truly knows just what we need at every moment!

Sunday, March 28, 2010

OUR MISSION

We cannot expect Christ to "Be with us" if we do not "Go forth and teach all nations," or if we do worse and teach half-truths, easy options and basic lies. Christ said, "Take up your cross daily," not do what you like on the earth.
A great deal of prayer is needed now before it is too late.

BETWEEN INNOVATION AND TRADITION

The reform of the liturgy, a term to be understood, according to the liturgical constitution of the Second Vatican Council, as instauratio, namely, as a re-establishment of the correct place in ecclesial life, did not begin with Benedict XVI but with the very history of the Church, from the Apostles to the age of the martyrs, from Pope Damasus to Gregory the Great, from Pius V and Pius X to Pius XII and Paul VI. The instauratio is continuous, because the risk that the Church will slide from her place, which is to be source of Christian life, always exists; decadence comes when divine worship is subjected to the personal sentimentalism and activism of clerics and laity who, penetrating in it, transform it into human work and spectacular entertainment. A symptom today, for example, is applause in the church, which indistinctly punctuates the baptism of a newborn and the departure of a coffin in a funeral. Does not a liturgy that has become entertainment need reform? This is what Benedict XVI is doing: the emblem of his reforming work will be the re-establishment of the cross in the center of the altar, to make it understood that the liturgy is addressed to the Lord and not to man, even if he is a sacred minister.

Standing With the Pope

The attempt of the press to implicate Benedict XVI in the question of pedophilia is only the most recent sign of the aversion that many have for the Pope.

It is necessary to ask oneself how this Pontiff, despite his evangelical meekness and honesty, the clarity of his words joined to the depth of his thought and of his teachings, arouses in some places sentiments of disgust and forms of anti-clericalism that it was believed had been surmounted. And this, it must be said, causes even greater astonishment and also distress when those who do not follow the Pope and criticize his alleged errors are men of the Church, whether theologians, priests or laymen.

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These attacks are echoed sadly by those who do not listen to the Pope, also among ecclesiastics, professors of theology in seminaries, priests and laymen. Those who do not accuse the Pontiff openly, but are deaf to his teachings, who do not read the documents of his magisterium, who write and say exactly the contrary of what he says, give life to pastoral and cultural initiatives, for example in the area of bioethics or in that of the ecumenical dialogue, in open diverge with all that he teaches. The phenomenon is very grave as it is very widespread.

Benedict XVI has given teachings on the Second Vatican Council that many Catholics reject openly, promoting forms of counter-formation and of systematic parallel teaching, led by many "anti-popes"; he has given teachings on "non-negotiable values" which very many Catholics minimize or reinterpret, and this also happens on the part of theologians and famous commentators guests of the Catholic press in addition to secular press; he has given teachings on the primacy of the apostolic faith in the wise reading of events and very many continue talking of the primacy of the situation, or of the practice, or of the data of human sciences; he has given teachings on conscience and on the dictatorship of relativism but very many put democracy or the Constitution before the Gospel. For many, "Dominus Iesus," the Note of 2002 on Catholics in politics, the 2006 Regensburg address, "Caritas in Veritate," is as if they had never been written.

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