Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - The scandalised cry of the Scribes and Pharisees against Jesus of Nazareth is still heard today after two thousand years in all its inexorable drama. “Who are you claiming to be?'?” is the question which every man and women, since Jesus, is bound to ask. Taking one’s humanity seriously means accepting the constitutive disproportion between the finitude of I and the structural necessity for Truth, Beauty, Justice, in a word, Happiness, found in every human heart.
It is precisely the paradox of a finite creature with infinite needs, which constitutes that wound of the heart which opens to the dimension of petition, begging. A real man who lived at a certain time, in a certain place claimed to be the Answer to the human heart, a concrete possibility for the paradox of disproportion to find a dwelling place in which to rest. This proposal must be taken into consideration without censuring either history or, almost worse, our I.
“Who are you claiming to be?'” the world continues to ask today. Jesus of Nazareth, the Lord, the Anointed One, offers himself to the men and women of every age as the complete answer, founded on the unity in His Divine Person, his nature both human and divine. “Who are you claiming to be?”; “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”. Christians are men and women who censure nothing of their humanity yet accept and verify the proposal of Christ. A proposal both totally human and totally divine, which saves us not “from our humanity but through our humanity” (Cf. Benedict XVI, Urbi et Orbi Blessing, Christmas 2006). This common experience generates among Christians that Unity which is clearly a fruit of the Spirit and which no human compromise could ever achieve.
“Who are you claiming to be?” is the question which still today, as yesterday, the world addresses to the Church, demonstrating, unawares, the inseparable nature of “Corpus Christi” Jesus and the Holy Church of God. (Cf. Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis, n.15). The Church remain in Christ’s “claim” to render God present in the world, and so She must scandalise, provoke reflection, keep alive that dimension of paradox which, as H. De Lubac taught, is constitutive of Christianity.
A recent statement issued by the Italian Bishops’ Conference on the fundamental theme of the family, where it is said “legalisation of de facto couples is unacceptable on the level of principle and dangerous on the social and educative levels”, fits perfectly into the hermeneutics of the Church mentioned above.
“Who are you claiming to be?”. The world’s question echoes again and again. Through time in her self-awareness the Church makes the “claim” of Christ: the Way, Truth and Life. The unity of the Church and in the Church, cannot, at this point, be relegated to the “good intentions” of a few, it asks to be rooted in that awareness of belonging to Christ which alone justifies the “claim”. To belong to the Church, identify oneself with the Church is in fact to belong to Christ and acknowledge Him as the answer to the infinite longings of our heart, as He who He is: God made man. The claim remains in time, as does the scandal.
The same is perceived in the strange contradiction of those supporters of Church unity «ad extra» who take dangerous ecumenical shortcuts, and who, on contrary, «ad intra» promote a misunderstood pluralism which, in the end, fails to reply to the question of questions: You Jesus of Nazareth, You Church, “Who are you claiming to be?”. (Agenzia Fides 29/3/2007; righe 42, parole 571)
