Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - The Holy Father, Benedict XVI, dedicated his Angelus reflection on the last Sunday of August to the necessity to protect creation, a theme, - he said - which, like the theme of peace, brings together many different Christians ecumenically. These issues in recent times have risen to the rank of “primary", almost absolute, values, literally detached from any objective reference or hierarchy value.
For example, the issue of Creation - unless considered as such, that is, ‘made by the Creator’ - is in danger of being understood as an indistinct whole of environment, animals and humans; a whole in which the latter have no particular importance, indeed they are even considered enemies of nature. On the other hand, peace, notoriously reduced and detached from justice, frequently becomes Irenism, dragging with it a Saint such as Francis who loved and saw peace and Creation only in reference to God: “ubi Deus ibi pax”, “where there is God, there is peace”, we read over the entrance to the 'Carceri' Hermitage.
We need therefore to ask ourselves what permitted this deviation, which in Italy has even brought certain Catholic groups to adopt the ambiguous so-called 'rainbow flag', even as an altar cloth! The always possible separation from Revelation of the values born therein, which survive positively only if therein they remain, might be one remote root of such a misunderstanding. And “the end of the modern epoch ”, predicted by Romano Guardini in 1950, has reached its consummation.
The non-Christian culture which too often is also anti-Christian, initiated with the end of the modern epoch, has led to “a Christianity without Christ”, an inconceivable experience for the very history of Christianity and aggravated by the fact that at times even those whose duty it is to announce “Christ, the one Saviour”, become “preachers of values”, siding, perhaps unintentionally, with those who embrace certain human values, and, at the same time, leading a fierce battle against Christ and above all against His Church, the only way to really attack Christ.
“They defended –Guardini writes– the fruits brought by Christ, separating them from their "origin" that is, from Him.
Too often from this point of view, man and creation are considered naturally good in themselves, exempt from any sort of “original defect”, therefore creation needs to be “safeguarded” not “from sin” but from man; whereas instead Creation “groans with birth pangs”, as St Paul writes, until it is set free by the only One who can free it.
This is the time of disenchantment, secularisation is advanced and touches even the Church; everything is clearer and at the same time cruder: the play which had separated "Jesus of history" from "Christ of the faith" has ended, because it produced neither “more Christianity”, nor more humanism or morality. This is masse relativism and nihilism in full swing. The sole sentinel, as always all through history, the Holy Father, in the footsteps of Pope Gregory the Great, exhorts men and women non believers but persons of reason, to take religion seriously and to live “as if God does exist”. And Grace will continue to foster experiences of conversion to the Lord: the only root which produces peace and salvation within and around the human person. (Agenzia Fides 3/9/2009; righe 39, parole 509)
