VATICAN - HOMAGE TO BENEDICT - Today we set out on a path to discover the thought and the achievements of the great Saint Benedict of Nursia, the key to correct and deeper reception of the Magisterium of the present Pontiff, setting it in the context of life in Benedictine communities in Italy and other countries

Monday, 30 October 2006

Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - One of the elements which had a major impact on public opinion when Joseph Ratzinger was elected to the Chair of Peter was the Pope’s choice of name: Benedict XVI. A decision which drew many comments, not all of them opportune or sufficiently founded. Now that some time has passed perhaps we can make a more authentic and founded reading of that choice.
Before any, albeit legitimate, reference to his Predecessors, Benedict XVI intended to draw inspiration from that giant of holiness, doctrine, culture and devotion, Saint Benedict of Nursia. While avoiding Euro-centric visions, it goes without saying that Saint Benedict was the Father of Europe and with it the father of Western civilisation. A paternity built on two simple stones which today would leave most intellectuals disconcerted: prayer and work, ora et labora.
Recognising Christ as the absolute centre of his own personal life, Saint Benedict captured the people of his day and the Holy Spirit created around him an extraordinary movement of men and women who changed the face of Europe and the world.
The Christ-centred aspect is the first Benedictine mark we find in the intentions, Magisterium and activity of Benedict XVI: Christ is the centre of history, the centre of the life of the Church, which is His mystical Body and therefore God’s presence in the world; Christ is the centre of the life of every man and woman because only in the light of the Revelation can man understand himself and not remain an unsolved enigma; Christ, again, is the centre of the concrete existential experience of every person, when the latter is not limited to vague spirituality or levelled in social works, forgetful of its origin. Christ as the centre not only in words, but in the concrete experience of every person as the foundation of decisions made by individuals, communities, Churches: Christ as the only normative value of ethics, because He is lived not as a distant, albeit beautiful, memory but as a living presence of the Risen Lord in our midst.
Prayer, ORA for Benedictines, is the first great pillar of the construction of Christian civilisation. Benedict XVI continues to indicate to the whole Church and to the whole of humanity the priority of prayer over action: “It is time to reaffirm the importance of prayer in the face of the activism and the growing secularism of many Christians engaged in charitable work” (Deus Caritas est n. 37). A person who does not pray is “less human”, unable to occupy the original position of the creature before the Creator: that of a beggar. Prayer is not a flight from reality, a haven or simply spiritual consolation: prayer is the first indispensable element for correct anthropology in which man is aware that he did not create himself or the cosmos, instead he realistically, therefore humbly, recognises his limits, realising that these limits are loved and overcome by God’s loving mercy: man experiences Love.
A Church totally focussed on the world but distracted from God, could never survive and would never be credible: the source of credibility is our faith professed personally and publicly and lived in daily life.
The liturgy is the principal gesture through which the Lord encounters His Church and the Church recognises her Lord. The Liturgy understood not as self-celebration of human activity or the community spirit, but rather as humanity’s adoration of God, adoration which permits contact, authentic experience in the sacramental sense, with the Holy of Holies. Only this type of experience can serve as the foundation of the individual’s whole existence, giving strength and support to human activity in the world. The warning given by Pope Benedict XVI to avoid all kinds of activism which, inevitably, leads to a secularised mentality, is to be read in this direction.
The second indispensable pillar of Saint Benedict is LABORA. What is the real significance of human activity? In the human experience of Joseph Ratzinger it is possible to see extraordinary dedication to work and his extraordinary intellectual contribution to the culture of humanity of our day has yet to be understood and received. Work, which we prefer to interpret as “labora”, is an integrant part of God’s plan for his creatures. The words “let us make man in our own image and likeness” include the dimension of work which can transform both reality and the I who performs the work.
Saint Benedict, with his ‘labora’, transformed the world in which he lived. He excluded no authentically human dimension from his activity: monasteries were a “seedbed of civilisation” around which a whole life took shape first of all from the point of view of spiritual and doctrinal formation, then both at the cultural and the economic and social level, they represented an authentic “Christian revolution” which was also a great process of humanisation.
Benedict XVI calls the whole Church to realise the extraordinary task entrusted to her by Christ: to be His presence in the world and therefore always missionary. Mission is not simply one dimension of the Church it is her ontological Nature: the Church is not Church unless she announces Christ, unless she evangelises, unless she generates sons and daughters, unless she courageously builds human civilisation with an eye on the city of God.
Discipline, which comes from being disciples, is an essential characteristic of the Benedictine Rule, and should be the element proper to every Christian, lay man or woman, priest, bishop, monk or cardinal: all are disciples of Christ and therefore ready to follow in total and loving obedience, with no ifs or buts, enraptured as they are by the one Lord of our freedom: the Risen Jesus Christ.
To return to Saint Benedict helps to understand the reasons for a decision and the fruits which the splendid Magisterium of Benedict XVI is bearing and will continue to bear for the whole Church and consequently for the world. A re-reading of the short Rule composed by the Saint of Nursia, could be an excellent hermeneutic key to understanding the thought of Benedict XVI. (S.V.) (Agenzia Fides 30/10/2006 - righe 71, parole 979)


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