Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - “The year is the sixteenth centenary of the death of Saint John Chrysostom (407-2007). John of Antioch, also called Chrysostom or ‘Golden mouth' because of his eloquence, can be said to be still alive today because of his writings.” With these words the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI began his catechesis on Wednesday 19 September in St Peter's Square addressing thousands of people who had come for the weekly Audience with the Pope. The Holy Father arrived in the Vatican by helicopter from his Summer residence in Castel Gandolfo.
Retracing the life of John of Antioch, the Pope recalled that he was born around the year 349 in Antioch of Syria (today Antakya, in southern Turkey), where he exercised his priestly ministry for about eleven years until 397 when he was appointed Bishop of Constantinople. He was sent twice into exile between the years 403 and 407. His father died when he was very young and from his mother he acquired “outstanding human sensitivity and profound Christian faith”. He frequented courses in philosophy and rhetoric and became one of the greater orators of late ancient Greece. Baptised in 368 and formed for the ecclesiastic life by Bishop Melezio, from 367 to 372, with a group of other young men some of whom were later appointed bishops he frequented a sort of seminary in Antioch where he learned historical-literal exegesis. He then withdrew among the hermits on nearby Mt Silpio for four years and for another two years lived alone in a cave. “In that period he dedicated himself entirely to meditating ‘the laws of Christ', the Gospels and especially the Letters of Paul” the Holy Father said. When he fell ill John returned to the Christian community in Antioch where he fulfilled his true vocation as a shepherd of souls: “Familiarity with the Word of God, cultivated during his years as a hermit, left him with an irresistible desire to preach the Gospel, to give to others what he had received in those years of meditation. Thus the missionary ideal threw him, his heart on fire, into pastoral”.
“Deacon in 381 and priest in 386, he became a famous preacher in the churches of his city. He gave homilies against the Aryans, followed by those which commemorated the martyrs of Antioch and others on the principal liturgical feasts” the Pope said. In 387 to protest against rising taxes the people smashed all imperial statues and in those days he gave his 22 vigorous “Homilies on the Statues" finalised to repentance and conversion. Chrysostom is one of the most prolific Apostolic Fathers: 17 treaties, more than 700 authentic homilies, comments on Matthew and Paul (Letters to the Romans, Corinthians, Ephesians and Jews), and 241 letters have come down to us.
In an epoch marked by theological controversies due mainly to Aryanism, John Chrysostom is “a reliable witness of the dogmatic development reached by the Church in the 4th and 5th centuries - the Pope said in his address -. His is a typical pastoral theology, in which there is a constant concern for consistence between thought expressed by word and existential living … His interventions always aimed to develop in the faithful the exercise of intelligence, true reason, in order to understand and put into practice the moral and spiritual demands of the faith.”
In his pastoral concern John Chrysostom sought through his writings to accompany the integral development of the person, “in the physical, intellectual and religious dimension”. He usually preached “during the Liturgy, the ‘place’ where the community builds itself up with the Word and the Eucharist… His pastoral project was inserted into the life of the Church, in which the lay faithful with Baptism assume the priestly, royal and prophetic office … From this flow the fundamental duty of mission, because we each to some measure are responsible for the salvation of others … all this between two poles: the great Church and the ‘small Church', the family in reciprocal relation.” The Holy Father concluded by stressing that “this lesson of John Chrysostom on authentic Christian presence of the lay faithful in the family and in society, is more than ever relevant still today”. (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 20/9/2007 - righe 47, parole 669)
