Father Cantalamessa on Resurrection as "New Creation"

ROME, APRIL 28, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of a commentary on the Gospel passage of this Sunday's liturgy, by Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher to the Pontifical Household.

* * *

Third Sunday of Easter -- B

The Lord Has Risen Indeed!

The Gospel enables us to be present at one of the many apparitions of the Risen One. The disciples of Emmaus have just arrived out of breath to Jerusalem and are recounting what happened to them on the road, when Jesus appears in person in their midst saying: "Peace to you!" At first, fear, as if they saw a spirit; then amazement, disbelief; finally, joy. What is more, disbelief and joy at the same time: "And while they still disbelieved for joy, and wondered."

Theirs is an altogether special disbelief. It is the attitude of someone who believes (otherwise, there would be no joy) but does not know how to realize it. As someone who says: "Too wonderful to be true." We can call it, paradoxically, an incredulous faith. To convince them, Jesus asks them for something to eat, because there is nothing like eating together to comfort and create communion.

All this tells us something important about the Resurrection. The latter is not only a great miracle, an argument or a proof in favor of the truth of Christ. More than that, it is a new world in which one enters with faith accompanied by wonder and joy. Christ's resurrection is the "new creation."

It is not just about believing that Jesus has risen; it is about knowing and experiencing "the power of the resurrection" (Philippians 3:10).

This more profound dimension of Easter is particularly felt by our Orthodox brothers. For them, Christ's resurrection is everything. In Eastertide, when they meet someone they greet one another saying: "Christ has risen!", and the other replies: "He has risen indeed!"

This custom is so rooted in the people that the following anecdote is told that occurred at the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution. A public debate had been organized on the resurrection of Christ. First the atheist spoke, demolishing for good, in his opinion, Christians' faith in the resurrection.

When he came down, the Orthodox priest went to the dais, who was to speak in defense. The humble priest looked at the crowd and said simply: "Christ is risen!" Before even thinking, all answered in unison: "He has risen indeed!" And the priest came down from the dais in silence.

We know well how the resurrection is represented in the Western tradition, for example, in Piero della Francesca. Jesus comes out of the sepulcher raising the cross as a standard of victory. His face inspires extraordinary trust and security. But his victory is over his external, earthly enemies. The authorities had put seals in his sepulcher and guards to keep watch, and, lo, the seals are broken and the guards asleep. Men are present only as inert and passive witnesses; they do not really take part in the Resurrection.

In the Eastern image, the scene is altogether different. It is not developed under an open sky, but underground. In the resurrection, Jesus does not come out but descends. With extraordinary energy he takes Adam and Eve by the hand, who were waiting in the realm of the dead, and pulls them with him to life and resurrection. Behind the two parents, an innumerable multitude of men and women who awaited the redemption. Jesus tramples on the gates of hell which he himself has just dislocated and broken. Christ's victory is not so much over visible but over invisible enemies, which are the worst: death, darkness, anguish, the devil.

We are involved in this representation. Christ's resurrection is also our resurrection. Every man who looks is invited to be identified with Adam, and every woman with Eve, and to stretch out their hands to allow themselves to be gripped and pulled by Christ out of the sepulcher. This is the new universal Easter exodus. God has come "with powerful arm and outstretched hand" to liberate his people from a much harsher and universal slavery than that of Egypt.

[Translation by ZENIT]

Speech: April 19 Address on 1st Anniversary of Pontificate

VATICAN CITY, APRIL 27, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Here is a Vatican translation of the address Benedict XVI gave at the Wednesday general audience on April 19, the first anniversary of his pontificate.

* * *

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

At the beginning of today's general audience which is taking place in the joyful atmosphere of Easter, I would like to thank the Lord together with you. After calling me, exactly a year ago, to serve the Church as the Successor of the Apostle Peter -- thank you for your joy, thank you for your applause -- he never fails to assist me with his indispensable help.

How quickly time passes! A year has already elapsed since the cardinals gathered in conclave and, in a way I found absolutely unexpected and surprising, desired to choose my poor self to succeed the late and beloved Servant of God, the great Pope John Paul II. I remember with emotion my first impact with the faithful gathered in this same square, from the central loggia of the basilica, immediately after my election.

That meeting is still impressed upon my mind and heart. It was followed by many others that have given me an opportunity to experience the deep truth of my words at the solemn concelebration with which I formally began to exercise my Petrine ministry: "I too can say with renewed conviction: I am not alone. I do not have to carry alone what in truth I could never carry alone" (L'Osservatore Romano, English edition, April 27, 2005, p. 2).

And I feel more and more that alone I could not carry out this task, this mission. But I also feel that you are carrying it with me: Thus, I am in a great communion and together we can go ahead with the Lord's mission. The heavenly protection of God and of the saints is an irreplaceable support to me and I am comforted by your closeness, dear friends, who do not let me do without the gift of your indulgence and your love. I offer very warm thanks to all those who in various ways support me from close at hand or follow me from afar in spirit with their affection and their prayers. I ask each one to continue to support me, praying to God to grant that I may be a gentle and firm Pastor of his Church.

The Evangelist John says that precisely after his Resurrection Jesus called Peter to tend his flock (cf. John 21:15,23). Who could have humanly imagined then the development which was to mark that small group of the Lord's disciples down the centuries?

Peter, together with the apostles and then their successors, first in Jerusalem and later to the very ends of the earth, courageously spread the Gospel message, whose fundamental and indispensable core consists in the paschal mystery: the passion, the death and the resurrection of Christ.

The Church celebrates this mystery at Easter, extending its joyous resonance in the days that follow; she sings the alleluia for Christ's triumph over evil and death.

The celebration of Easter in accordance with a date on the calendar, Pope St. Leo the Great remarked, reminds us of the eternal feast that surpasses all human time. Today's Easter, he noted further, is the shadow of the future Easter. For this reason we celebrate it, to move on from an annual celebration to a celebration that will last forever.

The joy of these days extends throughout the liturgical year and is renewed especially on Sunday, the day dedicated to the memory of the Lord's resurrection. On Sunday, as it were, the "little Easter" of every week, the liturgical assembly gathered for holy Mass proclaims in the Creed that Jesus rose on the third day, adding that we wait for "the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come."

This shows that the event of Jesus' death and resurrection constitutes the center of our faith and that it is on this proclamation that the Church is founded and develops.

St. Augustine recalled incisively: "Let us consider, dear friends, the Resurrection of Christ: indeed, just as his Passion stood for our old life, his Resurrection is a sacrament of new life. ... You have believed, you have been baptized; the old life is dead, killed on the Cross, buried in Baptism. The old life in which you lived is buried: The new life emerges. Live well: Live life in such a way that when death comes you will not die (Sermo Guelferb. 9, 3).

The Gospel accounts that mention the appearances of the Risen One usually end with the invitation to overcome every uncertainty, to confront the event with the Scriptures, to proclaim that Jesus, beyond death, is alive forever, a source of new life for all who believe in him.

This is what happened, for example, in the case of Mary Magdalene (cf. John 20:11-18), who found the tomb open and empty and immediately feared that the body of the Lord had been taken away. The Lord then called her by name and at that point a deep change took place within her: Her distress and bewilderment were transformed into joy and enthusiasm. She promptly went to the apostles and announced to them: "I have seen the Lord" (John 20:18).

Behold: Those who meet the risen Jesus are inwardly transformed; it is impossible "to see" the Risen One without "believing" in him. Let us pray that he will call each one of us by name and thus convert us, opening us to the "vision" of faith.

Faith is born from the personal encounter with the Risen Christ and becomes an impulse of courage and freedom that makes one cry to the world: "Jesus is risen and alive for ever."

This is the mission of the Lord's disciples in every epoch and also in our time: "If, then, you have been raised with Christ," St. Paul exhorts us, "seek the things that are above. ... Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth" (Colossians 3:1-2). This does not mean cutting oneself off from one's daily commitments, neglecting earthly realities; rather, it means reviving every human activity with a supernatural breath, it means making ourselves joyful proclaimers and witnesses of the resurrection of Christ, living for eternity (cf. John 20:25; Luke 24:33-34).

Dear brothers and sisters, in the Pasch of his Only-begotten Son, God fully revealed himself, his victorious power over the forces of death, the power of Trinitarian Love. May the Virgin Mary, who was closely associated with the Passion, death and Resurrection of the Son and at the foot of the cross became the Mother of all believers, help us to understand this mystery of love that changes hearts and makes us experience fully the joy of Easter, so that we in turn may be able to communicate it to the men and women of the third millennium.

To special groups

I offer a warm welcome to the newly ordained deacons of the Pontifical Irish College and their families. I also greet the pilgrims from the Diocese of Kerry. Upon all the English-speaking visitors, especially those from Ireland, Switzerland, Australia, Canada and the United States, I invoke an abundance of joy and peace in the Risen Lord.

My thoughts now go to the sick and to the newlyweds. For you, dear sick people, may the resurrection of Christ be an inexhaustible source of comfort and hope. And you, dear newlyweds, may you be witnesses of the Risen Lord with your faithful conjugal love.

© Copyright 2006 -- Libreria Editrice Vaticana [adapted]

Podcast: Fr. John Wauck on Opus Dei and The Da Vinci Code

Take a look at this Podcast by Fr. John Wauck on Opus Dei and the Da Vinci Code.

http://davincicode-opusdei.com/?p=89

Feel free to also post your comments there. I've listened to it and it's quite a very very good interview.

Father Wauck Comments on...

* the Annunciation (includes the Gospel Reading from 03/25/06, Luke 1:26-38).
* What is it that makes the Da Vinci code compelling and popular with millions of people around the world.
* A person who reads this novel and treats it as "Fact" is making a huge error.
* Where we should start when evaluating the inaccuracies contained in the Da Vinci Code.
* The Gnostic Gospels. (The best "cure" for thinking the Gnostic Gospels have validity is read them!)
* The Council of Nicea: Who called it, why it was called, what was its purpose.
* There is no coherent theological system contain among the Gnostic Gospels.
* Why it is important for Catholics to believe that Jesus wasn't married.
* The role of women in the Catholic tradition is greater than that of any other religion that we know of.
* The "missing Mary" of the Da Vinci Code is not Mary Magdalene, it is the Blessed Virgin Mary.
* The definition of monk as a one who lives in a monastery
* The canonical status of Opus Dei as a personal prelature (not a sect or an order)
* The Priory of Sion was actually fabricated by a French fraud from the 1950's
* Dan Brown's gigantic exaggeration and narrow interpretation of the practice of corporal mortification
* Opus Dei is not a secretive organization
* The mission of Opus Dei is to promote holiness among lay Catholics, that every baptized person is called to be a saint and an apostle, to convert the "prose of everyday life into heroic verse"

Wednesday Liturgy: Combining Office of Readings and Morning Prayer

ROME, APRIL 25, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Answered by Father Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum university.

Q: In religious houses of my order in the United States there is no agreement on the position of the hymn when the Office of Readings and Morning Prayer are combined as a single office. In some houses, the hymn of Morning Prayer is sung immediately after the Invitatory, and then at the end of the Office of Readings the psalmody of Morning Prayer begins immediately. In other houses, the Invitatory is sung and the psalmody of Office of Readings follows immediately without a hymn. The hymn of Morning Prayer is then sung between the responsory of the last reading in the Office of Readings and the psalmody of Morning Prayer. What is the correct way to join these two offices? -- A.T., Charlottesville, Virginia

A: Several readers, in fact, have sent in questions regarding the joining of these two offices.

This question is discussed in No. 99 of the General Instruction of the Liturgy of the Hours:

"If the Office of Readings is said immediately before another Hour of the Office, then the appropriate hymn for that Hour may be sung at the beginning of the Office of Readings. At the end of the Office of Readings the prayer and conclusion are omitted, and in the Hour following the introductory verse with the Glory to the Father is omitted."

It would appear, as our questioner says, that the "praeponi potest" (may be sung at the beginning) here is taken by some liturgists to allow the dropping of the Office of Readings hymn rather than its replacement by the Morning Prayer hymn.

This procedure is incorrect. The clear sense of the norm is that the hymn of Morning Prayer, often specific to the feast or at least more in consonance with its general theme, may replace the hymn of the Office of Readings.

All of the offices open with a hymn, and so there is no liturgical reason why there should be no hymn at the beginning of the Office of Readings.

All the same, the norm says "may," not "must," and thus, while a hymn at the beginning of the Office of Readings may never be omitted, an individual or a community could also opt to sing both hymns.

The hymn corresponding to the Office of Readings is sung at the beginning of that office while the hymn corresponding to Morning Prayer is sung immediately after the second responsory or Te Deum as the case may be.

However, presuming that the hymn of Morning Prayer replaces that of the Office of Readings at a combined office, the proper order would be:

-- "Lord open our lips …";

-- Invitatory psalm with antiphon;

-- Morning Prayer hymn;

-- Office of Readings psalmody;

-- Versicle and response;

-- 1st Reading; responsory;

-- 2nd Reading; responsory;

-- Te Deum (on Sundays except during Lent; during the octaves of Christmas and Easter; and on all solemnities and feasts);

-- Morning Prayer psalmody;

-- Reading;

-- Short responsory;

-- Benedictus;

-- Intercessions;

-- The Lord's Prayer;

-- Concluding prayer;

-- Conclusion.

The most appropriate moment for a homily, if one is given, appears to be between the reading and short responsory of Morning Prayer.

Wednesday Liturgy: Follow-up: "Way of the Cross" Within Mass

ROME, APRIL 25, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Answered by Father Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum university.

After our column on joining the Way of the Cross to Mass (April 4), a priest from California kindly reminded me of Pope Paul VI's doctrine in "Marialis Cultis," No. 31 (cited in the "Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy," No. 74), which offers further corroboration to our answer.

The text states:

"Secondly there are those who, without wholesome liturgical and pastoral criteria, mix practices of piety and liturgical acts in hybrid celebrations. It sometimes happens that novenas or similar practices of piety are inserted into the very celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. This creates the danger that the Lord's Memorial Rite, instead of being the culmination of the meeting of the Christian community, becomes the occasion, as it were, for devotional practices. For those who act in this way we wish to recall the rule laid down by the Council prescribing that exercises of piety should be harmonized with the liturgy, not merged into it. Wise pastoral action should, on the one hand, point out and emphasize the proper nature of the liturgical acts, while on the other hand it should enhance the value of practices of piety in order to adapt them to the needs of individual communities in the Church and to make them valuable aids to the liturgy."

Some readers asked if the rite of the veneration of the cross required a crucifix or if it was permitted to use a plain cross.

I would reiterate the reply given to similar questions in a follow-up on April 6, 2004.

Some official documents, such as the U.S. bishops' "Built on Living Stones" (No. 83), specifically allow either a cross or a crucifix for veneration on Good Friday.

I personally consider, however, that the sense of the original Latin rubric, the nature of the rite itself, and pastoral effectiveness, is better served by the use of a crucifix rather than a plain cross.

Metanarrative: One Year After

It has been 12 months since I first experimented on the idea to do a blog on theological-philosophical matters. I started this blog exactly on May 1, the feast of St. Joseph the Worker. As an employee myself in a company, I found it very hard to live a contemplative spirit without having some sort of a guide. I am very fortunate that I have attended some doctrinal-religious activities since college and this has helped keep a good perspective on the world, at least my own world.

For the past year, although it was my desire to be able to write something original, I thought eventually that I shouldn't make any attempts (at this stage, at least) to "reinvent the wheel". There are so many materials out there that are both rich and exciting in developing one's Catholic faith. Most of the material come from a news agency (Zenit) based in Rome. I have subscribed to this free service for years now and although I do not read each and every article, I do read those articles of interest.

Perhaps the most widely read section would be the "Liturgy" article every Tuesday (Wednesday in Manila). Before the 4nov80 blog was born, I took it upon myself to copy-paste (with some necessary aesthestic editing) the article every week and send to people via email. It has evoked a wide range of responses from the recipients, but overall, it was a welcome refresher from a hard day's work.

Later, I eventually realized that the "Liturgy" articles are not enough. I tried looking for other stuff, first from Zenit and then from other sites like the Catholic Educators' Resource Center (CERC). They provided some balance to the blog without losing sight of the objective to educate the readers in the domain of Catholic theology and philosophy.

I am not an expert in these matters. It's only an interest that I've taken up since 3 years ago. I'm a big fan of the late Pope John Paul II, but it doesn't mean that I don't give the same level of reverence of the present Pope Benedict XVI. However, I have noticed that people nowadays are less interested in the emotive stuff in expressing one's faith. They're really looking for something to nourish their faith from an intellectual standpoint.

What should you expect for the second year of 4nov80?

First thing, I'm in dire need of people to provide me with materials other than Zenit or CERC. In fact, I'm planning to talk to some of my priest friends to help contribute one or two articles each month on various issues, most especially those affecting the family. Please pray that we will be able to get more and more articles from other sources.

Second, I'll make an attempt to write an article every month. It's no guarantee, but at least I want to give this blog a voice, instead of being another site with cross-references of sorts.

Lastly, I'll think of something to make this blog engaging. Contests with prizes are not far-fetched, but I do intend to continue some of the customs I've done since my college days like organizing a book drive or visiting the sick and less fortunate in a select hospital. This blog will serve as some sort of bulletin for these events.

I would like to dedicate the second year of 4nov80 to its main patrons, St. Joseph and Our Lady, and to its very powerful intercessor, St. Catherine of Siena, whose feast we'll celebrate this Sat (Apr 29).

Our Mother, St. Joseph, St. Catherine, please pray for us who benefit from this blog greatly.

Father Cantalamessa: On Faith as a Gift

ROME, APRIL 24, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of a commentary by Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, the Pontifical Household preacher, on the Gospel for the Second Sunday of Easter.

* * *

(John 20:19-31)

"Unless I Place My Hand in His Side, I Will Not Believe"

"Eight days later, his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. The doors were shut, but Jesus came and stood among them, and said: 'Peace be with you.' Then he said to Thomas, 'Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.' Thomas answered him, 'My Lord and my God!' Jesus said to him, 'Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.'"

With the emphasis on the incident of Thomas and his initial incredulity ("Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, I will not believe"), the Gospel addresses the man of the technological age who believes only what he can verify. Among the apostles, we can call Thomas our contemporary.

St. Gregory the Great says that, with his incredulity, Thomas was more useful to us than all the other apostles who believed right away. Acting in this way, so to speak, he obliged Jesus to give us a "tangible proof of the truth of his resurrection." Faith in the resurrection benefited by his doubts. This is true, at least in part, when applied to the numerous "Thomases" of today who are the nonbelievers.

The criticism of nonbelievers and dialogue with them, when carried out in respect and reciprocal loyalty, are very useful to us. Above all they make us humble. They oblige us to take note that faith is not a privilege or an advantage for anyone. We cannot impose it or demonstrate it, but only propose it and show it with our life. "What have you that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?" says St. Paul (1 Corinthians 4:7). In the end, faith is a gift, not a merit, and as all gifts it can only be lived in gratitude and humility.

The relationship with nonbelievers also helps us to purify our faith of clumsy representations. Very often what nonbelievers reject is not the true God, the living God of the Bible, but his double, a distorted image of God that believers themselves have contributed to create. Rejecting this God, nonbelievers oblige us to go back to the truth of the living and true God, who is beyond all our representations and explanations, and not to fossilize or trivialize him.

But there is also a wish to be expressed: that St. Thomas might find today many imitators not only in the first part of his story -- when he states he does not believe -- but also at the end, in that magnificent act of faith that leads him to exclaim: "My Lord and my God!"

Thomas is also imitable because of another fact. He does not close the door; he does not remain in his position, considering the problem resolved once and for all. In fact, we find him eight days later with the other apostles in the Cenacle. If he had not wished to believe, or to "change his opinion," he would not have been there. He wants to see, to touch: Therefore, he is searching. And at the end, after he has seen and touched with his hand, he exclaims to Jesus, not as someone defeated but as victorious: "My Lord and my God!" No other apostle had yet gone out to proclaim Christ's divinity with so much clarity.

[Translation by ZENIT]

Urbi et Orbi Message of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI: Easter 2006

Dear Brothers and Sisters!

Christus resurrexit!- Christ is risen!

During last night’s great Vigil we relived the decisive and ever-present event of the Resurrection, the central mystery of the Christian faith. Innumerable Paschal candles were lit in churches, to symbolize the light of Christ which has enlightened and continues to enlighten humanity, conquering the darkness of sin and death for ever. And today there re-echo powerfully the words which dumbfounded the women on the morning of the first day after the Sabbath, when they came to the tomb where Christ’s body, taken down in haste from the Cross, had been laid. Sad and disconsolate over the loss of their Master, they found the great stone rolled away, and when they entered they saw that his body was no longer there. As they stood there, uncertain and bewildered, two men in dazzling apparel surprised them, saying: “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, he is risen” (Lk 24:5-6). “Non est hic, sed resurrexit” (Lk 24:6). Ever since that morning, these words have not ceased to resound throughout the universe as a proclamation of joy which spans the centuries unchanged and, at the same time, charged with infinite and ever new resonances.

“He is not here . . . he is risen.” The heavenly messengers announce first and foremost that Jesus “is not here”: the Son of God did not remain in the tomb,because it was not possible for him to be held prisoner by death (cf. Acts 2:24) and the tomb could not hold on to “the living one” (Rev 1:18) who is the very source of life. Like Jonah in the belly of the whale, so too Christ crucified was swallowed up into the heart of the earth (cf. Mt 12:40) for the length of a Sabbath. Truly, “that Sabbath was a high day”, as Saint John tells us (Jn 19:31): the highest in history, because it was then that the “Lord of the Sabbath” (Mt 12:8) brought to fulfilment the work of creation (cf. Gen 2:1-4a), raising man and the entire cosmos to the glorious liberty of the children of God (cf. Rom 8:21). When this extraordinary work had been accomplished, the lifeless body was suffused with the living breath of God and, as the walls of the tomb were shattered, he rose in glory. That is why the angels proclaim “he is not here”, he can no longer be found in the tomb. He made his pilgrim way on earth among us, he completed his journey in the tomb as all men do, but he conquered death and, in an absolutely new way, by an act of pure love, he opened the earth, threw it open towards Heaven.

His resurrection becomes our resurrection, through Baptism which “incorporates” us into him. The prophet Ezekiel had foretold this: “Behold, I will open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you home into the land of Israel” (Ez 37:12). These prophetic words take on a singular value on Easter Day, because today the Creator’s promise is fulfilled; today, even in this modern age marked by anxiety and uncertainty, we relive the event of the Resurrection, which changed the face of our life and changed the history of humanity. From the risen Christ, all those who are still oppressed by chains of suffering and death look for hope, sometimes even without knowing it.

May the Spirit of the Risen one, in particular, bring relief and security in Africa to the peoples of Darfur, who are living in a dramatic humanitarian situation that is no longer sustainable; to those of the Great Lakes region, where many wounds have yet to be healed; to the peoples of the Horn of Africa, of the Ivory Coast, Uganda, Zimbabwe and other nations which aspire to reconciliation, justice and progress. In Iraq, may peace finally prevail over the tragic violence that continues mercilessly to claim victims. I also pray sincerely that those caught up in the conflict in the Holy Land may find peace, and I invite all to patient and persevering dialogue, so as to remove both ancient and new obstacles. May the international community, which re-affirms Israel’s just right to exist in peace, assist the Palestinian people to overcome the precarious conditions in which they live and to build their future, moving towards the constitution of a state that is truly their own. May the Spirit of the Risen one enkindle a renewed enthusiastic commitment of the Countries of Latin America, so that the living conditions of millions of citizens may be improved, the deplorable scourge of kidnapping may be eradicated and democratic institutions may be consolidated in a spirit of harmony and effective solidarity. Concerning the international crises linked to nuclear power, may an honourable solution be found for all parties, through serious and honest negotiations, and may the leaders of nations and of International Organizations be strengthened in their will to achieve peaceful coexistence among different races, cultures and religions, in order to remove the threat of terrorism.

May the Risen Lord grant that the strength of his life, peace and freedom be experienced everywhere. Today the words with which the Angel reassured the frightened hearts of the women on Easter morning are addressed to all: “Do not be afraid! ... He is not here; he is risen (Mt 28:5-6)”. Jesus is risen, and he gives us peace; he himself is peace. For this reason the Church repeats insistently: “Christ is risen - Christós anésti.” Let the people of the third millennium not be afraid to open their hearts to him. His Gospel totally quenches the thirst for peace and happiness that is found in every human heart. Christ is now alive and he walks with us. What an immense mystery of love!

Christus resurrexit, quia Deus caritas est! Alleluia!

Focused Link: Freaked Out: Liberty, Choice, and Rogue Economics

It is a rare thing for an economist to write a bestselling book, but Steven Levitt is a rather rare economist.

The full article:
http://catholiceducation.org/articles/civilization/cc0193.html

Focused Link: Love and Responsibility: Beyond the Sexual Urge

In our first reflection on Pope John Paul II’s Love and Responsibility, we considered the “personalist principle,” which says that we should not treat other persons merely as a means to an end.

The full article:
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/marriage/mf0076.html

Focused Link: Does Prayer Work?

The headlines seemed almost triumphal in tone. “Prayer Doesn’t Aid Recovery, Study Finds.” That was the Washington Post. “Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer.” That was the New York Times.

The full article:
http://catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0204.htm

Focused Link: Character-Centered Families and Schools

The goal of Catholic character education is to form children in the character of Christ, says developmental psychologist, Tom Lickona.

The full article:
http://catholiceducation.org/articles/education/ed0287.htm

Focused Link: Sterilization as Contraception

Our neighbors told us that their sons and wives (all of whom are Catholic and educated in Catholic elementary and high schools), each couple with two children apiece, don’t plan to have any more children and to make certain everyone recently had surgical procedures performed to prevent conception. The sons had vasectomies and their wives had their fallopian tubes sutured. Our friends think this is a form of birth control, and we agree with them. Has the Church addressed this matter?

The full article:
http://catholiceducation.org/articles/religion/re0788.html

Focused Link: None So Blind: How Secularists Ignore the Value of Religion

It’s the same argument we’ve heard so many times before, except now with increasing frequency and intensity: the world’s troubles are caused by religion. If only people would at last abandon these silly superstitions and get with the times!

The full article:
http://catholiceducation.org/articles/persecution/pch0101.html

Father Cantalamessa's Good Friday Homily

VATICAN CITY, APRIL 7, 2006 (ZENIT.org).- Here is a translation of the Good Friday sermon preached today in St. Peter's Basilica, before Benedict XVI and the Roman Curia, by Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher to the Pontifical Household.

* * *

"God Manifests His Love for Us"

1. Christians, be serious in taking action!

"The time is sure to come when people will not accept sound teaching, but their ears will be itching for anything new and they will collect themselves a whole series of teachers according to their own tastes; and then they will shut their ears to the truth and will turn to myths" (2 Timothy 4:3-4).

This word of Scripture -- and in a special way the reference to the itching for anything new -- is being realized in a new and impressive way in our days. While we celebrate here the memory of the passion and death of the Savior, millions of people are seduced by the clever rewriting of ancient legends to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was never crucified. In the United States a best-seller at present is an edition of The Gospel of Thomas, presented as the Gospel that "spares us the crucifixion, makes the resurrection unnecessary, and does not present us with a God named Jesus."[1]

Some years ago, Raymond Brown, the greatest biblical scholar of the Passion, wrote: "It is an embarrassing insight into human nature that the more fantastic the scenario, the more sensational is the promotion it receives and the more intense the faddish interest it attracts. People who would never bother reading a responsible analysis of the traditions about how Jesus was crucified, died, was buried, and rose from the dead are fascinated by the report of some 'new insight' to the effect that he was not crucified or did not die, especially if the subsequent career involved running off with Mary Magdalene to India. These theories demonstrate that in relation to the passion of Jesus, despite the popular maxim, fiction is stranger than fact, and often, intentionally or not, more profitable."[2]

There is much talk about Judas' betrayal, without realizing that it is being repeated. Christ is being sold again, no longer to the leaders of the Sanhedrin for thirty denarii, but to editors and booksellers for billions of denarii. No one will succeed in halting this speculative wave, which instead will flare up with the imminent release of a certain film, but being concerned for years with the history of Ancient Christianity, I feel the duty to call attention to a huge misunderstanding which is at the bottom of all this pseudo-historical literature.

The apocryphal gospels on which they lean are texts that have always been known, in whole or in part, but with which not even the most critical and hostile historians of Christianity ever thought, before today, that history could be made. It would be as if within two centuries an attempt were made to reconstruct a present-day history based on novels written in our age.

The huge misunderstanding is the fact that they use these writings to make them say exactly the opposite of what they intended. They are part of the gnostic literature of the 2nd and 3rd centuries. The gnostic vision -- a mixture of Platonic dualism and Eastern doctrines, cloaked in biblical ideas -- holds that the material world is an illusion, the work of the God of the Old Testament, who is an evil god, or at least inferior; Christ did not die on the cross, because he never assumed, except in appearance, a human body, the latter being unworthy of God (Docetism).

If, according to The Gospel of Judas, of which there has been much talk in recent days, Jesus himself orders the apostle to betray him, it is because, by dying, the divine spirit which was in him would finally be able to liberate itself from involvement of the flesh and re-ascend to heaven. Marriage oriented to births is to be avoided; woman will be saved only if the "feminine principle" (thelus) personified by her, is transformed into the masculine principle, that is, if she ceases to be woman.[3]

The funny thing is that today there are those who believe they see in these writings the exaltation of the feminine principle, of sexuality, of the full and uninhibited enjoyment of this material world, contrary to the official Church which would always have frustrated all this! The same mistake is noted in regard to the doctrine of reincarnation. Present in the Eastern religions as a punishment due to previous faults and as something to which one longs to put an end with all one's might, it is accepted in the West as a wonderful possibility to live and enjoy this world indefinitely.

These are issues that would not merit being addressed in this place and on this day, but we cannot allow the silence of believers to be mistaken for embarrassment and that the good faith (or foolishness?) of millions of people be crassly manipulated by the media, without raising a cry of protest, not only in the name of the faith, but also of common sense and healthy reason. It is the moment, I believe, to hear again the admonishment of Dante Alighieri:

Christians, be serious in taking action:
Do not be like a feather to every wind,
Nor think that every water cleanses you.
You have the New and the Old Testament
And the Shepherd of the Church to guide you;
Let this be all you need for your salvation
Be men, do not be senseless sheep.[4]

2. The Passion Preceded the Incarnation!

But let us leave these fantasies to one side. They have a common explanation: We are in the age of the media and the media are more interested in novelty than in truth. Let us concentrate on the mystery that we are celebrating. The best way to reflect this year on the mystery of Good Friday would be to re-read the entire first part of the Pope's encyclical "Deus Caritas Est," Not being able to do so here, I would like at least to comment on some passages that refer more directly to the mystery of this day. We read in the encyclical:

"To fix one's gaze on the pierced side of Christ, of which John speaks, helps to understand what has been the point of departure of this encyclical letter: 'God is love.' It is there, on the cross, where this truth can be contemplated. And, beginning from there, we must now define what love is. And, from that gaze, the Christian finds the orientation of his living and loving."[5]

Yes, God is love! It has been said that, if all the Bibles of the world were to be destroyed by some cataclysm or iconoclastic rage and only one copy remained; and if this copy was also so damaged that only one page was still whole, and likewise if this page was so wrinkled that only one line could still be read: if that line was the line of the First Letter of John where it is written that "God is love!" the whole Bible would have been saved, because the whole content is there.

I lived my childhood in a cottage only a few meters from a high-tension electrical wire, but we lived in darkness, or with the light of candles. Between us and the electrical wire was a railway, and with the war going on, nobody thought of overcoming the small obstacle. This is what happens with the love of God: It is there, within our grasp, capable of illuminating and warming everything in our life, but we live out our existence in darkness and cold. This is the only true reason for sadness in life.

God is love, and the cross of Christ is the supreme proof, the historical demonstration. There are two ways of manifesting one's love towards someone, said Nicholas Cabasilas, an author of the Byzantine East. The first consists of doing good to the person loved, of giving gifts; the second, much more demanding, consists of suffering for him. God has loved us in the first way, that is, with a munificent love, in creation, when he filled us with gifts, within and outside us; he has loved us with a suffering love in the redemption, when he invented his own annihilation, suffering for us the most terrible torments, for the purpose of convincing us of his love.[6] Therefore, it is on the cross that one must now contemplate the truth that "God is love."

The word "passion" has two meanings: It can indicate a vehement love, "passionate," or a mortal suffering. There is continuity between the two things and daily experience shows how easily one passes from one to the other. It was also like this, and first of all, in God. There is a passion, Origen wrote, that precedes the incarnation. This is "the passion of love" that God has always nourished towards the human race and that, in the fullness of time, led him to come on earth and suffer for us.[7]

3. Three Orders of Greatness

The encyclical "Deus Caritas Est" indicates a new way of engaging in the apologetics of the Christian faith, perhaps the only way possible today and certainly the most effective. It does not pit supernatural values against natural values, divine love against human love, eros against agape, but shows the original harmony, that must be continually discovered healed, due to human sin and frailty. The Gospel not only coincides with human ideals, but in the literal sense of realizing them, the Gospel restores, elevates and protects them. It does not exclude eros from life, but rather excludes the poison of egoism from eros.

There are three orders of greatness, Pascal said in his famous "Pensees."[8] The first is the material order or of bodies: in it excels one who has many properties, who is gifted with athletic strength or physical beauty. It is a value that should not be disparaged, but it is the lowest. Above it is the order of genius and intelligence in which thinkers, inventors, scientists, artists, and poets are distinguished. This is an order of a different quality. To be rich or poor, beautiful or ugly does not add or subtract anything from genius. The physical deformity attributed to their person, does not take anything away from the beauty of Socrates' thought or Leopardi's poetry.

The value of genius is certainly higher than the preceding, but it is not yet the highest. Above it is another order of greatness, and it is the order of love, of goodness. (Pascal calls it the order of holiness and grace). A drop of holiness, Gounod said, is worth more than an ocean of genius. To be beautiful or ugly, learned or illiterate does not add or take anything away from a saint. His greatness is of a different order.

Christianity belongs to this third level. In the novel Quo Vadis, a pagan asks the Apostle Peter who had just arrived in Rome: Athens has given us wisdom, Rome power, and what does your religion offer us? Peter responds: Love! Love is the most fragile thing that exists in the world; it is represented, and it is, as a child. It can be killed with very little, as we have seen with horror these days that very little is needed to kill a child. But what do power and wisdom become, that is strength and genius, without love and goodness? They become Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all the rest that we know well.

4. Forgiving love

"God's eros for man," continues the encyclical, "is also totally agape. This is not only because it is bestowed in a completely gratuitous manner, without any previous merit, but also because it is love which forgives" (no. 10).

This quality also shines in the highest degree in the mystery of the cross. "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends," Jesus said in the Cenacle (John 15:13). One could exclaim: a love does exist, O Christ, which is greater than giving one's life for one's friends. Yours! You did not give your life for your friends, but for your enemies! Paul says "one will hardly die for the righteous man -- though perhaps for a good man one will dare even to die. But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us" (Romans 5:6-8).

However, it does not take long to discover that the contrast is only apparent. The word "friends" in the active sense indicates those who love you, but in the passive sense it indicates those who are loved by you. Jesus calls Judas "friend" (Matthew 26:50) not because Judas loved him, but because He loved Judas! There is no greater love than to give one's life for enemies, considering them friends: this is the meaning of Jesus' phrase. Men can be enemies of God, but God will never be able to be an enemy of man. It is the terrible advantage of children over fathers (and mothers).

We must reflect in what way, specifically, the love of Christ on the cross can help the man of today to find, as the encyclical says, "the orientation of his living and loving." It is a love of mercy, that excuses and forgives, which does not wish to destroy the enemy, but, if anything, enmity (cf. Ephesians 2:16). Jeremiah, the closest among men to the Christ of the Passion, prays to God saying: "let me see the vengeance upon them" (Jeremiah 11:20); Jesus dies saying: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34).

It is precisely this mercy and capacity for forgiveness of which we are in need today, so as not to slide ever more into the abyss of globalized violence. The Apostle wrote to the Colossians: "Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience, forbearing one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive" (Colossians 3:12-13).

To have mercy means to be moved to pity (misereor) in the heart (cordis) in regard to one's enemy, to understand of what fabric we are all made and hence to forgive. What might happen if, by a miracle of history, in the Near East, the two peoples at war for decades, rather than blaming one another were to begin to think of the suffering of others, to be moved to pity for one another. A wall of division between them would no longer be necessary. The same thing must be said of so many other ongoing conflicts in the world, including those between the different religious confessions and Christian Churches.

How much truth there is in the verse of Pascoli: "Men, peace! In the prostrate earth, too great is the mystery."[10] A common fate of death looms over all. Humanity is enveloped in so much darkness and bowed under so much suffering that we must have some compassion and solidarity for one another.

5. The duty to love

There is another teaching that comes to us from the love of God manifested on the cross of Christ. God's love for man is faithful and eternal: "I have loved you with an everlasting love," says God to man in the prophets (Jeremiah 31:3); and again, "I will not be false to my faithfulness" (Psalm 89:34). God has bound himself to love forever; he has deprived himself of the freedom to turn back. This is the profound meaning of the Covenant that in Christ became "new and eternal."

Questioned ever more frequently in our society is what relationship there might exist between the love of two young people and the law of marriage; what need love has, which is impulsive and spontaneous, to be "bound." Ever more numerous therefore are those who refuse the institution of marriage and choose so-called free love or simple, de facto, living together.

Only if one discovers the profound and vital relationship that exists between law and love, decision and institution, can one respond correctly to those questions and give young people a convincing reason to be "bound" to love forever and not to be afraid to make love a "duty."

"Only when the duty to love exists," wrote the philosopher who, after Plato, has written the most beautiful things about love, "only then is love guaranteed for ever against any alteration; eternally liberated in blessed independence; assured in eternal blessedness against any desperation."[11] The meaning of these words is that the person who loves, the more intensely he loves, the more he perceives with anguish the danger his love runs. A danger that does not come from others, but from himself.

He knows well in fact that he is inconstant and that tomorrow, alas, he might get tired and no longer love or change the object of his love. And, now that he is in the light of love, he sees clearly what an irreparable loss this would entail, so he protects himself by "binding" himself to love with the bond of duty, thus anchoring in eternity his act of love in time.

Ulysses wanted to return to see his homeland and wife again, but he had to pass through the place of the Sirens that lured mariners with their singing and lead them to crash against the rocks. What did he do? He had himself tied to the vessel's mast, after having plugged the ears of companions with wax. Arriving at the spot, charmed, he cried out to be loosed to reach the Sirens, but his companions could not hear him and so he was able to see his homeland and embrace his wife and son again.[12] It is a myth, but it helps to understand the reason for "indissoluble" marriage and, on a different plane, for religious vows.

The duty to love protects love from "desperation" and renders it "blessed and independent" in the sense that it protects from the desperation of not being able to love forever. Show me some one who is really in love -- said the same thinker -- and he will tell you if, in love, there is opposition between pleasure and duty; if the thought of "having" to love for the whole of life brings fear and anguish to the lover, or, rather, supreme joy and happiness.

Appearing one day in Holy Week to Blessed Angela of Foligno, Christ said a word to her that has become famous: "I have not loved you for fun!"[13] Christ, indeed, has not loved us for fun. There is a gamesome and playful dimension in love, but it itself is not a game; it is the most serious thing and most charged with consequences that exists in the world; human life depends on it. Aeschylus compares love to a lion cub that is raised at home, "docile and tender at first even more than a child," with which one can even play but then growing up, is capable of slaughter and of staining the house with blood.[14]

These considerations are not enough to change the present culture that exalts the freedom to change and the spontaneity of the moment, the practice off "use and discard" applied even to love. (Life, unfortunately, will do so when at the end we find ourselves with ashes in hand and the sadness of not having built anything lasting with love). But that they at least serve to confirm the goodness and beauty of the choice of those who have decided to live love between man and woman according to God's plan and to attract many young people to make the same choice.

Nothing more remains for us but to intone with Paul the hymn to the victorious love of God. He invites us to attain with him a marvelous experience of interior healing. He thinks about all the negative things and critical moments of his life: tribulation, anguish, persecution, hunger, nakedness, danger and the sword. He contemplates them in the light of the certainty of the love of God and shouts: "But in all this we emerge triumphant thanks to him who loves us!"

Lift up your gaze; from your personal life move to consider the world that surrounds you and the universal human destination, and again the same joyous certainty: "I am convinced that neither death nor life...nor present things nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:37-39).

We reclaim his invitation, this Friday of the Passion, and we repeat his words for us while, before long, we adore the cross of Christ.

* * *

[1] H. Bloom, in the interpretative essay that accompanies M. Meyer's edition, The Gospel of Thomas, Harper, San Francisco, s.d., p. 125.
[2] R. Brown, The Death of the Messiah, II, New York, 1998, pp. 1092-1096
[3] See logion 114 in The Gospel of Thomas, ed, Mayer, p. 63); in the Gospel of the Egyptians, Jesus says: "I have come to destroy woman's work" (cf. Clemens of Al., Stromata, III, 63). This explains why The Gospel of Thomas became the gospel of the Manicheans, while it was severely combated by ecclesiastical authors (for example, by Hippolytus of Rome), who defended the goodness of marriage and of creation in general.
[4] Paradiso, V, 73-80.
[5] Benedict XVI, Enc. "Deus Caritas Est," 12.
[6] Cf. N. Cabasilas, Life in Christ, VI, 2 (PG 150, 645).
[7] Cf. Origen, Homilies on Ezekiel, 6,6 (GCS, 1925, p. 384 f).
[8] Cf. B. Pascal, "Pensees," 793, ed. Brunschvicg.
[9] Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis, chapt. 33.
[10] Giovanni Pascoli, "I due fanciulli."
[11] S. Kierkegaard, Acts of Love, I, 2, 40, ed. by C. Fabro, Milan, 1983, p. 177 ff.
[12] Cf. Odyssey, XII.
[13] The Book of Blessed Angela of Foligno, Instructio 23 (ed. Quaracchi, Grottaferrata, 1985, p. 612).
[14] Aeschylus, Agamemnon, vv. 717 ff.

Article: Chiara Lubich on the Grain of Wheat That Died

ROME, APRIL 14, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Chiara Lubich, founder of the Focolare Movement, wrote this "Word of Life" for the month of April, on the passion and death of Christ.

* * *

"Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit" (John 12:24).

More eloquently than any treatise, these words of Jesus reveal the secret of life. A person cannot experience the joy that Jesus gives without having loved suffering. Nor can one experience resurrection without going through death.

In this Word of Life, Jesus refers to himself; he explains the significance of his existence. He said this just a few days before his death. It would be a painful one and full of humiliation. Why did he die, he who proclaimed himself the Life? Why did he suffer, he who was innocent? Why was he slandered, beaten, ridiculed, and nailed to a cross, to die in the most disgraceful way? And, above all, why did he, who lived in constant union with God, feel abandoned by his own Father? Even for him death was fearful, but it had a meaning: the Resurrection.

He had come "to gather into one the dispersed children of God" (John 11:52), to break down every barrier between groups and individuals, to reconcile people who were previously divided, to bring peace, and to build unity. But he had to pay a price: In order "to draw everyone" to himself, he would have to be "lifted up from the earth," on the cross (John 12:32). In this context we find this parable, the most beautiful one in the whole Gospel: "Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit." Jesus is that grain of wheat.

In this Lenten season, we contemplate him on the cross, the place of his martyrdom and his glory, as a sign of his limitless love. There he gave everything: forgiveness to sinners and heaven to the good thief; he gave his mother; he gave his own body and blood and his very life, to the point of crying out: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46).

Back in 1944 I wrote: "Do you realize that he has given us everything? What more could a God give us, who loves us so much that he seems to forget that he is God?" And he gave us the possibility of becoming children of God. He generated a new people, a new creation.

On the day of Pentecost, the grain of wheat that had fallen to the ground and had died was already blooming into a fruitful plant. Three thousand people, of every ethnicity and nation, became "one heart and soul" (Acts 4:32). Then they became five thousand, and then ...

"Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit!"

This Word of Life gives meaning to our lives, to our suffering and to our death.

The universal brotherhood we want to live for, the peace and unity that we want to build around us, is merely an illusion, a nice dream, if we are not ready to follow in the same footsteps as our Teacher. How did he manage to produce "much fruit"?

He shared everything that is ours. He took on our sufferings. He joined himself to our darkness, our sadness, our fatigue, and our struggles. He experienced betrayal, solitude, being orphaned. ... In a word, he made himself "one with us," taking upon himself all our burdens.

So we who are in love with this God who becomes our "neighbor," now have a way to tell him that we are infinitely grateful for his immense love; we can live as he lived. And then we, too, become "neighbors" to all those who come in contact with us in life, with a readiness to "be one" with them, to reconcile a division, to share in a suffering, or to resolve a problem, with a love that serves others concretely.

Jesus in his abandonment gave all of himself. In this spirituality that is centered on him, the risen Jesus should shine out fully and our joy should bear witness to him.

Wednesday Liturgy: 2 Paschal Candles; Lights On at Vigil

ROME, APRIL 11, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Answered by Father Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum university.

* * *

Q: Our pastor found himself in a dilemma last Easter. He was appointed in charge of two parishes, but only able to celebrate one Vigil Mass for the parishes at the larger of the churches. The problem encountered was how to bless two paschal candles! In the absence of any advice from the diocesan authorities, and with no trace of any liturgical norm to hand, he decided to bless and engrave them both, but only lighted one (which the deacon duly carried). He himself carried the other candle in his arms and left it on the altar to be taken to the other parish church afterward. At the other parish church, he lighted that second paschal candle immediately before the first Mass of Easter and carried it in procession into the church singing the Lumen Christi three times before continuing with the Eucharistic celebration as normal. I thought this was done very movingly but, as always, some disagreed! -- B.C., Birmingham, England.

Q: I would like to know the exact moment in which, during the Easter Vigil, all the lights of the church should be lit: Is it immediately before the chanting of the Exsultet starts, or at the intoning of the Gloria during Mass? Up to some time ago, if I am not mistaken, it was before the Exsultet starts. I do not know if it has been changed recently. -- L.B., Malta

A: Regarding the two paschal candles: There do not seem to be any recent guidelines as to how to handle this particular situation. It is quite possible that some bishops' conferences have already proposed solutions that I am unaware of.

Although the pastor's action was an honest attempt to come to terms with a liturgical conundrum, I think it was imperfect in some ways.

First of all, the liturgical books and guidelines insist very much that only one paschal candle be prepared for the celebration. For example, the 1988 Circular Letter on the preparation for Easter published by the Congregation for Divine Worship states:

"The paschal candle should be prepared, which for effective symbolism must be made of wax, never be artificial, be renewed each year, be only one in number, and be of sufficiently large size, so that it may evoke the truth that Christ is the light of the world. It is blessed with the signs and words prescribed in the Missal or by the Conference of Bishops."

This insistence has to do with the symbolism involved of the one light of Christ from which all the other candles are lit. This the pastor well understood by not lighting the second paschal candle.

Where I believe he made a mistake, at least with respect to present norms, was in blessing and carrying the other candle and in repeating the rite of entrance on Easter morning. The nocturnal nature of this rite does not readily lend itself to repetition.

What then is a pastor to do? Although eventually a better solution might be officially established as the question reflects a genuine pastoral difficulty, we could momentarily take inspiration from the norms in force before the Second Vatican Council.

At that time, if Mass or the Divine Office was celebrated at a side altar during Eastertide, it was permitted to use a second paschal candle provided it had been blessed and had the five grains of incense.

Therefore, in the case described above, the pastor could privately bless and prepare the other candle at a convenient moment after the Easter Vigil and simply set it up in the other parish before the first Mass with no particular ceremonies.

After all, even if the Vigil had been celebrated the night before, people attending Mass on Easter Sunday usually find the Easter candle already set up and no special ceremony is carried out. It is appropriate, however, to incense the candle along with the altar at the beginning of Mass.

Regarding the appropriate moment for turning on the lights: The rubrics for the Vigil clearly indicate that they are lit after the third Lumen Christi and before the Exultet.

There seems to be a custom in some places to await the end of the Exultet or even the Gloria. And some eminent liturgists even recommend that, whenever possible, the amount of light should be gradually increased until the church is fully illuminated at the Gloria.

While I can appreciate the ideas behind this gradual approach I personally think that the rubrics should be followed as that is what the Church asks of us. I also believe that turning on the lights after the third Lumen Christi better captures the dramatic and transforming suddenness of the Resurrection.

Wednesday Liturgy: Follow-up: Washing of the Feet on Holy Thursday

ROME, APRIL 11, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Answered by Father Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum university.

In the wake of our article on foot washing (March 28), one reader "begged to differ" that the rubric in the missal stipulated that only men's feet be washed.

He wrote: "Clearly, as we have been told a million times, in churchspeak 'men' means both males and females, as in 'who for us men and our salvation.' As we also know, since 'Liturgicam Authenticam' the Church has forbidden the use of modern English that would avoid the possible confusion, and so those who produced these statements are obligated to use the term 'men' instead of simply saying 'those who.' Either we have a univocal use of the term 'men' or we have nothing."

Our reader apparently did not have access to the original Latin text of the rubric in question. That rubric does not use the generic "Homo" which in some contexts includes both sexes, but rather the specific "Vir" which refers only to males.

I also fear he has caricatured the translation norms of "Liturgicam Authenticam." Rather than mandating the generic "man" as a univocal translation for "Homo," the document inculcates prudence in translating this term whenever it is subject to several shades of theological meaning.

For example, the expression "son of man" in the Old Testament can mean simply "human being" but in some cases Church tradition has interpreted it prophetically as referring to Christ.

I am likewise not convinced that the generic use of man to include all human beings no longer forms part of "modern English."

Certainly the language needs to adapt to acknowledge the fact that women participate in many endeavors which were formally male preserves. But I see no reason to engage in linguistic contortions so as to avoid the generic use of "man" when this is the best literary option.

Finally, a reader from Belgium wrote a thought-provoking -- albeit somewhat tongue in cheek -- note on those who proposed hand washing instead of foot washing on Holy Thursday: "It is worthwhile pointing out … that the only hand washing mentioned in the Scriptures around Holy Week is that done by Pontius Pilate -- hardly a positive example to be followed."

Article: Holy See on Agrarian Reform

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil, APRIL 8, 2006 (Zenit.org).- The Holy See prepared this Technical Note on the occasion of an international conference on agrarian reform and rural development, held March 7-10 in Porto Alegre. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization organized the conference.

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Technical Note from the Holy See

1. The International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development, organized in Porto Alegre by FAO together with the Brazilian Government, is an opportunity for attentive reflection on the situation of the rural world and for formulating adequate responses to the concern for justice and the desire for development of those who live there. The topics under consideration are important for the human family and so they are of direct concern to the Holy See and the Catholic Church, which, according to their nature and mission, are called to support in every circumstance the cause of the human person.

Political leaders, heads of international organizations and representatives of civil society have a chance to take stock of commitments previously made and subsequent actions, and at the same time to provide directives for the future of over 900 million people, representing 75% of the world's poor, who live in rural areas in conditions of extreme poverty.[1] Their future appears increasingly uncertain, as indicated by the information offered for the consideration of the Conference, and it therefore requires necessary interventions both through the action of individual countries and through the various initiatives offered by international cooperation.

It is necessary to reinforce international solidarity in order to tackle directly the great challenge posed by the goal of the development of peoples and specifically by the commitment to guarantee effective food security for humanity; at the same time valid answers must also be given to the expectations of those who, as laborers, smallholders, craftsmen and their families, live and work long-term in the rural world. The rural world is not to be treated as secondary or forgotten altogether, thereby putting at risk its positive characteristics in the social, economic and spiritual order.

2. The current situation of the rural world highlights the way that global interaction and interchange, modern technology and constant progress in research can lead to rapid increases in production and also in the indices of human development. This cannot be overlooked or denied, but is to be accepted and valued, as long as it is recognized as a further instrument of creation offered to the human family, and not as a disruption of the natural order. "There is likewise a need to recognize that technical progress, necessary as it is, is not everything. True progress is that alone which integrally safeguards the dignity of the human being and which enables each people to share its own spiritual and material resources for the benefit of all."[2]

The question is directly linked to the themes before the Conference, especially when, in contrast with the ideal of the common destination of goods, these are concentrated instead in the hands of a few, excluding those who are not in a position to enjoy them and who sadly find themselves thwarted in their deepest aspirations or even deprived of the essential condition of dignity.

In considering the numerous issues linked to agrarian reform and to rural development, it is helpful to recall the unchanging principle that "God destined the world and all it contains for all people and nations"[3] as an inspiring and foundational criterion of social and economic order involving and motivating every member of the human family. On this basis, the Church's social doctrine has often expressed its condemnation of the latifundium as intrinsically illegitimate.[4]

This criterion assumes greater importance when one considers the unequal distribution of goods within individual countries, giving rise especially in the rural areas of developing countries to conditions of life that fall far short of satisfying basic needs. In the rural world, deprivation, exploitation, lack of access to the market and social exclusion become more acute in the absence of a context of guarantees protecting those who work on the land. Such people experience precarious life conditions, since their work is affected by adverse climatic and natural factors, and also by a lack of resources for coping with the scarcity or loss of harvests, and the consequent gradual abandonment of agricultural activity for urban areas in the often illusory search for better alternatives to poverty.

The precarious situation in rural areas of developing countries is also affected by the tendency of industrialized countries to sustain and subsidize agricultural production, trade and the consumption of foodstuffs. To introduce correctives to this situation means also to appeal to a concrete concept of justice capable of being implemented in policies, rules, norms and acts of solidarity.

3. Then there is a further element which conditions the future of rural areas related to the responsibility of present generations for the conservation and protection of nature and its resources, as well as the various ecosystems which belong to the rural world (agriculture, forestry, fauna, water sources, atmosphere). Often the lack of a correct relation between the earth and those who cultivate it, uncertainty in the title or possession of property, impossibility of access to credit, as well as other situations which affect small farmers, are the cause of an excessive exploitation of natural resources with no other goal than immediate profit. All of this compromises the fertility of the land, respect for the cycle of the seasons and hence the preservation of territory that could be cultivated for the use of future generations.

Experience thus for shows that the criterion of environmental sustainability alone, placed at the center of development strategies in recent decades, cannot constitute an effective response unless it is based on an authentic human ecology which, while asserting the responsibility of the human person towards himself, others, creation and the Creator, recognizes that "man remains above all a being who seeks the truth and strives to live in that truth, deepening his understanding of it through a dialogue that involves past and future generations."[5]

4. "The first and fundamental structure for human ecology is the family, in which man receives his first formative ideas about truth and goodness, and learns what it means to love and to be loved, and thus what it actually means to be a person."[6] In rural areas, then, a firmly based and healthy concept of human relations has to include the importance of the family: The rural family is in fact "called to manage with its work the little family enterprise, but also to transmit the idea of relations based on the exchange of mutual knowledge, values, ready assistance and respect."[7] When the family encounters difficulties or is no longer able to carry out its function, the entire rural community suffers the grave and painful consequences, such as when concepts of marriage and family life become detached from the values proper to them or when familial relations are influenced or even dominated by selfish, hedonistic or simply materialistic notions.

If these considerations are to be correctly applied to the demands of rural development, then it must be recognized that the family, like other primary social aggregates and structures, precedes the state's institutional apparatus and is to be duly respected and valued in its essence and in its organization of property rights, of productive activity and of the use of labor techniques.

Examining the image that authentic family life can imprint on the social order, we rediscover an application of the principle of subsidiarity that is nowadays considered by the international community as an instrument for regulating every relation and therefore contributes to the definition of institutional forms and economic laws. Through a proper subsidiarity, public authorities, from the local level to the most international dimension, can truly operate for the development of rural areas, at the same time promoting the common good, knowing however that this can only be achieved if proportionally more attention is given to those in greater need. Peasant farmers without land and smallholders are thus the first who must receive attention within comprehensive programs of cooperation, based on partnership with civil society, at the local and functional level, in guaranteeing a real development that respects their social, cultural, religious, economic and institutional identity.

5. The reflection that is asked of states taking part in the Conference includes, among other things, the question of land ownership, a matter of fundamental importance in economic and agrarian policies that can effectively promote rural development and at the same time guarantee social justice, political stability and peaceful coexistence. It is well known, in fact, as numerous economic analyses have pointed out, that insecure access to land is one of the principal causes of rural poverty.

This is a complex matter that often implies the need for comprehensive agrarian reforms which cannot be reduced to a simple redivision and redistribution of land. Instead they must form part of rural development strategies which, as well as seeing to the necessary investments in public infrastructure and social services, take note of the requirements of the agricultural sector, professionalism in planning, organizing and implementing the reforms.

The issue becomes even more acute when conflict situations, epidemics and forced migration cause the responsibility for the nuclear family to fall exclusively on the woman. Traditional customs and rules often prevent the woman from having access to landed property rights, therefore necessitating measures aimed at granting due juridical recognition of her role and her capacity to the woman with family and social responsibilities.

The reduction in concentration of land ownership should be guided by certain fundamental criteria such as: "incomes must be raised, working conditions improved, security in employment assured, and personal incentives to work encouraged; insufficiently cultivated estates should be divided up and given to those who will be able to make them productive."[8] This may mean promoting certain forms of enterprise, especially family agricultural enterprise, cooperative structures that can operate autonomously and effectively, as well as access to credit for small farmers and, not least, formation in modern approaches to the use of appropriate technology and to agricultural production and business methods.[9] In this way, negative repercussions on production levels and on movement of population can be avoided -- all too often there is a drift away from the countryside and an excessive demographic pressure around great urban centers or towards areas that lack the necessary infrastructure.

In this regard, it is important to sustain the uniqueness of indigenous communities which trace their identity, culture and spirituality to their ancestral relation with the land, and whose social structure sees use of the land as a consequence of common ownership. All too often, as a result of economic activity, exploitation of natural resources or construction projects, this relation is weakened, inhibiting use of the land and leading to the loss of methods of production based on traditional knowledge. All agrarian reform in favor of indigenous communities needs not only to guarantee effective protection of their rights to the land, but also to promote truly integral development, avoiding any discrimination against them in comparison with other sectors of the population.

6. The Holy See has always given particular attention to the rural world and its values, fully cognizant of the fact that its principal characteristics -- its human dimension, direct knowledge of the order, harmony and beauty of nature, satisfaction of labor, generous exchange of services in correct individual conduct and relations with others, to name but a few -- are constantly being rediscovered in every part of the world.

Moreover, the Holy See realizes how much importance rural society attaches to religion, present in individual and community life, in work and in family life, and above all as a source of moral principles capable of permeating society, providing stability and integrity in the face of the difficulties and setbacks of daily life.

The International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development offers an important opportunity for recognizing the rural world's true identity and that of its inhabitants if every concern is centered on the human person, the protection of human dignity and the defense of the fundamental rights. In this way, not only can the rural world's values be safeguarded, avoiding approaches based on greed or on purely economic considerations, but suitable national policies can also be implemented, and international action can achieve the lasting efficacy that it seeks.

Technical solutions, however complex and useful, remain ineffective if they lack the necessary reference to the centrality of the human person. It is the person, in an inseparable unity of the spiritual and the material, that must be the source and the goal of every decision and action taken by individual states and international institutions.

--- --- ---

Footnotes

[1] IFAD: "Rural Poverty Report 2001," Oxford University Press, 2001.

[2] Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI to the Participants in the 33rd Conference of the FAO, Rome, Nov. 24, 2005.

[3] Second Vatican Council, "Gaudium et Spes," 69.

[4] Cf. Paul VI: "Populorum Progressio" (1967), 23; Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace: "Towards a better distribution of land. The challenge of agrarian reform" (1997) 32-34; idem, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (2004) 300.

[5] John Paul II, "Centesimus Annus," 49; cf. also 38.

[6] John Paul II, "Centesimus Annus," 39.

[7] Address by the Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano on the occasion of the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of FAO, Rome, Oct. 17, 2005.

[8] Second Vatican Council, "Gaudium et Spes," 71.

[9] Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace: "Towards a better distribution of land. The challenge of agrarian reform" (1997).

Article: Character-Centered Families and Schools

CORTLAND, New York, APRIL 8, 2006 (Zenit.org).- The goal of Catholic character education is to form children in the character of Christ, says a developmental psychologist.

Tom Lickona is a professor of education at the State University of New York at Cortland, where he is the founding director of the Center for the 4th and 5th Rs (respect and responsibility).

He is the author of seven books on character development in the family and school, including the co-authored "Smart and Good High Schools."

In this interview with ZENIT, Lickona speaks about the role of parents and educators in helping children to flourish and become persons of character.

Q: What is the reason for the growing awareness of the need for character-education programs for children?

Lickona: I think there are at least six factors that have driven the current character education movement:

One, the weakening of the family; as families do less character formation, more kids arrive at school without social skills and a sense of right and wrong, and schools have to take up the slack;

Two, the rise of the mass media and the popular and marketplace culture as a powerful, largely negative influence on the values and character of youth;

Three, the perception of widespread moral breakdown in society; in one recent poll, for example, nearly three of four American adults said they believe people in general "lead less honest and moral lives than they used to";

Four, troubling youth trends suggesting that societal moral breakdown is particularly reflected in the values and attitudes of the young;

Five, the conviction that non-directive, relativistic approaches to values education -- notably "values clarification" -- have been part of the problem instead of part of the solution; and

Six, the recovery of the belief that there is common ethical ground even in our intensely pluralistic society -- that there are basic qualities of character such as honesty, hard work, justice and caring that virtually all people agree we should teach in our schools, families and communities.

Without the recovery of shared ethical wisdom, the first five factors would not have been sufficient to bring about the renewal of character education.

Q: What are the most important strengths that you suggest forming in children and adolescents?

Lickona: One of my recent books, "Character Matters," identifies 10 "essential virtues" that are affirmed by nearly all philosophical, cultural and religious traditions: wisdom; justice; fortitude; self-control; love; positive attitude, including hope and humor; hard work; integrity; gratitude; and humility, which motivates us to strive to be a better person.

In a recent report, "Smart and Good High Schools," Matt Davidson and I suggest that it's helpful to think of two big parts of character: performance character -- those qualities such as self-discipline and perseverance that enable us to give our best effort and do our best work in any performance context; and moral character -- those qualities such as honesty, justice and caring that enable us to have successful relationships, live and work in community, and assume the responsibilities of democratic citizenship.

Bringing performance character into the picture helps schools see that character development is essential for academic achievement.

Q: What are some ways that the Catholic faith shapes our ideal of character education?

Lickona: Our Catholic faith would say that to be a good person, we need to develop the 10 essential virtues such as wisdom, justice, fortitude and so on.

These human virtues then give us a foundation for seeking to become not only good but holy.

As St. Gregory reminded us, the ultimate goal of a virtuous life is "to become like God." At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, "Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

The goal of Catholic character education is not simply "good character" but the character of Christ.

That means developing not only the cardinal virtues of wisdom, justice, etc., but also the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, and the supporting spiritual virtues of prayer, frequenting the sacraments, and a radical obedience, in imitation of Christ, that surrenders our will to God.

These theological and spiritual virtues are essential for our transformation in Christ -- our life's purpose as Christians.

As we become transformed in Christ, our task is to transform the world -- into what John Paul II called "the civilization of truth and love," God's Kingdom on earth, as we pray in the Our Father.

In a Catholic school, that begins with creating a moral and spiritual community in the school that is a living incarnation of Christ.

Sister Mary Carole Gentile describes beautifully how the award-winning St. Rocco Catholic school in Providence, Rhode Island, does that through a devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus; an annual school theme -- one year it was "We are God's family of peacemakers"; a Good Deeds Journal in which children made daily entries; community service; a partnership with a sister-school for the deaf that pairs every St. Rocco student with a hearing-impaired child for varied activities over the school year; "school families," which group children across grade levels for special events and promote a strong schoolwide sense of community; and a peer-mediation program.

Many Catholic schools, sadly, are miles from this kind of intentional and comprehensive character education.

A father told me of his ninth-grade daughter entering an area Catholic school, being frozen out by the girls there, walking the halls alone at lunchtime, and wanting, at year's end, to go back to her old public school.

Q: In a culture where the medication of children for depression or behavioral problems is becoming more prevalent, where does character education fit in?

Lickona: In some cases, medication for depression, hyperactivity, ADHD [attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder], etc., may be helpful or necessary, but even those children also need character education.

A simple definition of becoming "a person of character" is "becoming the best person you can be."

How do we help every child do that -- in their families, schools, and communities? By providing loving relationships, good models, high expectations, firm and fair discipline that holds them accountable to those expectations, and concrete regular experiences to develop and practice the virtues.

No matter what a child's biology or handicapping conditions, they need these supports for character building.

Q: How can the practice of excellence and ethics contribute to mental health and the good of the person as a whole?

Lickona: When we strive for excellence, we develop our God-given gifts, the talents that enable us to become fully the person God means us to be and to contribute to the human community.

When we strive for ethical behavior, we exercise our God-given capacity for goodness, and love each other in a way that reflects God's love. In both these ways, we are being fully human -- the best way to be mentally healthy.

Q: What advice would you give to parents with busy schedules and educators with academic priorities, so as to not lose sight of the importance of forming these character strengths in their children?

Lickona: For both families and schools, time can be the tyrant that keeps us from living out our deepest values.

Deep down, most parents want their children to be moral people who use their talents to help others.

Deep down, every educator wants to touch the lives of students in a way that makes an enduring difference and that helps to build a better world.

If we keep these goals in mind, we will organize both family life and school life to be character-centered. To see how to make this happen, we can look to families and to schools that have made character development a high priority. All of us learn from example.

There are now abundant good examples out there -- in books, Web sites, curricular resources, and the regional and national organizations that are providing leadership in character education.

Father Cantalamessa on Christ's Suffering

VATICAN CITY, APRIL 7, 2006 (ZENIT.org).- Here is a translation of the second Lenten sermon preached this morning, before Benedict XVI and the Roman Curia, by Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher to the Pontifical Household.

* * *

"The Rocks Were Split"

1. The Passion and the Shroud

Christ's passion is the subject most addressed in Western art. Suffice it to think of the innumerable representations, in painting and sculpture, of Jesus in Gethsemane, the "Ecce Homo," the crucifixion, the famous depositions from the cross, called "pietà" and, in the German world, "Vesperbild." In our secularized world, art remains one of the forms of evangelization which even penetrates realms closed to all other forms of proclamation. I met a Japanese girl who converted and received baptism [after] studying art in Florence.

No artistic representation of the Passion, however, has exercised and still exercises a fascination like that of the shroud. It matters not, from our point of view, to know whether or not the shroud is "authentic," if the image was formed naturally or artificially, if it is only an icon or also a relic. What is certain is that it is the most solemn and sublime representation of death that the human eye has ever contemplated. If a God can die, this is the least inadequate way to represent his death to us.

The closed eyelids, the lips together, the composed features of the face: More than a dead person, it all makes one think of a man immersed in profound and silent meditation. It seems like the translation in images of the ancient antiphon of Holy Saturday: "Caro mea requiescet in spe," "my body too will rest secure." Even the former homily on Holy Saturday that is read in the office of readings acquires a particular force read before the shroud: "What happened? Today on earth, there is great silence, great silence and solitude. Great silence because the King sleeps.…"[1]

Theology tells us that at his death Christ's soul separated from his body as it does in every man who dies, but his divinity remained united both to his soul as well as to his body. The shroud is the most perfect representation of this Christological mystery. That body was separated from the soul, but not from the divinity. There is something divine that moves over the martyred face, full of majesty, of the Christ of the shroud.

To perceive it, suffice it to compare the shroud with other representations of the dead Christ made by the hand of human artists, for example Mantegna's dead Christ, and even more so that of Holbein the Younger, in the Museums of Basel, which represents the body of Christ in all the rigidity of death and the incipient decomposition of the members. Before this image, Dostoyevsky, who contemplated it at length on one of his trips, said that one can easily lose one's faith;[2] before the shroud, on the contrary, faith may be found, or found again if it has been lost.

Christ's face of the shroud is like a boundary, a wall that separates two worlds: the world of men full of agitation, violence and sin and the world of God inaccessible to evil. It is a shore on which all waves break. As if, in Christ, God says to the force of evil what the book of Job says to the ocean: "Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed" (Job 38:11).

Before the shroud we can pray like this: "Lord, make me your shroud. When, again descending from the cross, you come to me in the sacrament of your body and blood, may I wrap you with my faith and love as in a shroud, so that your features are imprinted on my soul and also leave on it an indelible trace. Lord, make of the coarse and crude cloth of my humanity our shroud!"

2. The Passion of the Savior's Soul

In this meditation, we go ideally to Calvary. The evangelists sum up the most overwhelming event of the history of the world in three words: "and they crucified him" (Mark and Matthew), "there they crucified him" (Luke), "to crucify him" (John). The readers they were addressing knew well what these words meant; we do not. We must deduce it from other sources. These also, however, are strangely reticent; the torture of the cross was considered so horrifying that it had to be kept far away, in Cicero's words, "not only from the eyes, but also from the ears of a Roman citizen."[3] It should not be spoken about by genteel people.

The condemned one could be bound by cords on the writs or fixed with nails to the cross. Mention of the wounds to the hands and feet of the risen one tells us that for Jesus the second way was adopted and one can easily imagine the torture that this entailed.

Several theories have been proposed about the immediate physical cause of Jesus' death: heart attack, suffocation; the most recent indicates dehydration and the loss of blood as the most plausible medical explanation of Christ's death.

But far more profound and painful than the passion of the body was that of Christ's soul. The latter had several causes. The first was solitude. The Gospels insist much on the progressive abandonment of Jesus in his passion: by the crowds, by the disciples and finally by the Father himself. "You will leave me alone" (John 16:32); "Then all the disciples forsook him and fled" (Matthew 26:56; Mark 14:50).

Christ's solitude is impressive above all in the episode of Gethsemane, when he seeks repeatedly and in vain for some one to be close to him. To express the anguish of this moment, Mark and Matthew use the verb "ademonein." In Greek we know that the letter "a" at the beginning of a ord indicates absence, privation; "demonein" has the same root as demos, people, and of democracy. The underlying idea then is that of a man cut off from human society, prey to a kind of solitary terror, as some one who finds himself projected in a remote point of the universe where, if he cries out, his voice is lost in an icy void.

Solitude reaches its culmination on the cross when Jesus, in his humanity, feels abandoned even by the Father: "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" This was not a cry of dejection or despair, as has sometimes been thought. If the evangelists thought this, they would not have made the Roman centurion's confession of faith depend on it: "Truly this was the Son of God!" (Matthew 27:54; Mark 15:39). Nothing however prevents one from thinking that the evangelists had interpreted Jesus' cry in the light of the quoted psalm, as expression of the extreme solitude and abandonment that Jesus experienced at this moment in his humanity.[4]

That which the Apostle Paul assumes as the greatest renunciation and suffering possible to the world, "I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen by race" (cf. Romans 9:1), Christ, in fact, experienced this with respect of God. He became the atheist, the one without God, so that men might return to God. There is, in fact, an active atheism, culpable, which consists in rejecting God, and there is a passive atheism, of punishment and expiation, which consists in being rejected or feeling rejected, by God. One must question the mystics who shared a small part of the dark night of Christ -- the last among them Mother Teresa of Calcutta -- to know how painful this form of atheism is.

Another aspect of the interior passion of Christ was humiliation and contempt. "He was despised and rejected by men. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth" (Isaiah 53:3-7). So predicted Isaiah, and so it happened. From the moment of the arrest until under the cross it was a crescendo of contempt, insults and mockery surrounding the person of Christ. "They clothed him in a purple cloak, and plaiting a crown of thorns they put it on him. And they began to salute him, 'Hail, King of the Jews!' And they struck his head with a reed, and spat upon him, and they knelt down in homage to him. And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the purple cloak, and put his own clothes on him. And they led him out to crucify him" (Mark 15:17-20). Under the cross, "the chief priests, with the scribes and elders, mocked him, saying: 'He saved others; he cannot save himself'" (Matthew 27:41ff.). Jesus is defeated. All the innumerable "defeated" of life have someone who can understand and help them.

But the passion of the Savior's soul has an even deeper cause than solitude and humiliation. In Gethsemane he prays that the cup be removed from him (cf. Mark 14:36). In the Bible, the image of the cup evokes almost always the idea of the wrath of God against sin (cf. Isaiah 51:22; Psalm 75:9; Revelation 14:10).

At the beginning of the letter, St. Paul establishes a fact which has the value of a universal principle: "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness" (Romans 1:18). Where there is sin, one cannot fail to note the judgment of God against it, otherwise God would compromise with sin and the distinction itself between good and evil would fail. God's wrath is the same thing as his holiness. Now, Jesus in Gethsemane is ungodliness, all the ungodliness of the world. He, writes the Apostle, is the man "made sin" (2 Corinthians 5:21). It is against him that the wrath of God "is revealed." The infinite attraction that there is from eternity between the Father and the Son is now run through by an equally infinite repulsion between the holiness of God and the malice of sin and this is "to drink the cup."

3. "Is it I, Master?

Now is the moment to pass from contemplation of the passion to our response to it. I pointed out at the beginning the role played by art in addressing the passion of Christ. Next to painting and sculpture, with gratitude we must also remember music. For many people, within and outside of Christianity, Bach's "Passion according to St. Matthew" is the only means of knowledge of the passion of Christ. A means before which it is difficult to remain altogether neutral and detached. Alternated in the account of the facts (recitatives) is meditation (the arias) prayer (choral) the impulse of the heart; all that penetrates in the senses and the soul by the suggestion of a music which reaches here one of its most sublime heights.

In view of these meditations, I wanted to hear again Bach's "Passion" according to St. Matthew; it was a moment that moved me profoundly. At the announcement of the betrayal, all the apostles asked Jesus: "Is it I, Lord?" However, before having us hear Christ's response, annulling all distance between the event and its commemoration, the composer makes today's devout Christian intervene who cries out his confession: "Yes, it is I, I am the traitor!"

This interpretation is profoundly biblical. The kerygma, or announcement, of the Passion is always made up of two elements: a fact -- "suffered," "died"; the motivation of the event -- "for us," "for our trespasses." He was put to death, says the Apostle, "for our trespasses" (Romans 4:25); died "for the ungodly," he died "for us" (Romans 5:6-8). It is always like this.

The Passion inevitably remains extraneous to us, unless we enter into it through that little narrow door of the "for us." Only he truly knows the Passion who acknowledges that it is also his work. Without this, the rest is digression. I am Judas who betrays, Peter who denies, the crowd that shouts, "Barabbas not him!" Every time I have preferred my satisfaction, my convenience, my honor to Christ's this has occurred. In a memorable talk for Good Friday, Don Primo Mazzolari was not wrong to speak of "our brother Judas."

If Christ died "for me" and "for my trespasses," then it means -- simply returning the phrase to the active -- that I killed Jesus of Nazareth, that my trespasses crushed him. It is what Peter proclaims forcefully to the three thousand listeners, the day of Pentecost: "You killed Jesus of Nazareth!" "You denied the Holy and Righteous One!" (cf. Acts 2:23; 3:14).

Those three thousand were not all present on Calvary to hammer the nails or before Pilate to ask that he be crucified. They could have protested, instead, they accepted the accusation and said to the apostles: "Brethren, what shall we do?" (Acts 2:37). The Holy Spirit had "convinced them of sin," making them engage in simple reasoning: If the Messiah is dead for the sins of his people and I have committed a sin, I have killed the Messiah.

It is written that at the moment of Christ's death "the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom; and the earth shook, and the rocks were split; the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised" (Matthew 27:51ff.). An apocalyptic explanation -- symbolic language to describe the eschatological event -- is usually given of these signs, but they also have a parenthetic meaning: indicating what should occur in the heart of the one who reads and meditates on the passion of Christ. St. Leo the Great writes: "Human nature trembles before the Redeemer's torture, the rocks of unfaithful hearts are split and those that were closed in the sepulchers of their mortality emerge, lifting the stone that weighed down on them."[5]

We have arrived at the point in which we must gather the fruit of the whole of our meditation on the Passion. The Bible has explained the profound meaning of the word metanoia, conversion, as a change of heart: "Create in me, O God, a new heart," "rend your hearts and not your garments" (Joel 2:13). Also the conversion of the crowd that heard Peter's talk is expressed through the image of the heart: "They were cut to the heart" (Acts 2:37).

Every conversion implies a movement, a passing from one state to another, from one point of departure to a point of arrival. The point of departure, a state from which one must come out is for Scripture that of the hardness of heart. "I gave them over to their stubborn hearts, to follow their own counsels" (Psalm 80:13), "For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives" (Matthew 19:8), "grieved at their hardness of heart" (Mark 3:5), "by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself" (Romans 2:5).

In the whole Bible, but especially in the New Testament, the heart indicates the seat of the interior life, as opposed to the outward appearance: "man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart" (1 Samuel 16:7). The heart is man's most profound I, his very person, in particular, his intelligence and will. It is the center of the religious life, the point in which God addresses man and man decides his response to God.

One now understands what hardness of heart represents for Scripture: the refusal to submit to God, to love him with one's whole heart, to obey his law. The term "sclerocardia," invented by the Bible, is significant. A hard heart is a sclerosed heart, felted up, impermeable to any form of love that is not love of self. The images used by Scripture are those of the "heart of stone" (Ezekiel 36:26), of the "uncircumcized heart" (Jeremiah 9:26), and of stubbornness (Deuteronomy 31:27).

The term "ad quem," or the point of arrival of the conversion is described, coherently, with the images of the contrite, wounded, lacerated, circumcised heart, of the heart of flesh, of the new heart: "The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise (Psalm 51:19); "this is the man to whom I will look, he that is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word" (Isaiah 66:2); "we may be heard with a contrite heart and a humbled spirit" (Deuteronomy 3:39).

4. "I stand at the door and knock"

Let us now attempt to understand how this change of heart is brought about.

We must distinguish two situations. When it is a question of the first conversion, from incredulity to faith, or from sin to grace, Christ is outside and knocks on the walls of the heart to enter, when it is a question of successive conversions, from one state of grace to a higher one, from lukewarmness to fervor, the opposite occurs: Christ is within and knocks on the walls of the heart to come out!

I will explain. In baptism we received the Spirit of Christ; that remains in us as in his temple (1 Corinthians 3:16), so long as he is not chased out by mortal sin. But it can happen that this Spirit ends up by being as though imprisoned and walled in by a heart of stone that is formed around it. It has no possibility to expand and permeate with himself the faculties, factions and sentiments of the person. When we read Christ's phrase in Revelation: "Behold, I stand at the door and knock" (Revelation 3:20), we should understand that he does not knock from outside, but from within; he does not wish to enter but to come out.

The Apostle says that Christ must be "formed" in us (Galatians 4:19), namely, develop and receive his full form; and this development is impeded by the heart of stone. Sometimes large trees are seen on the sides of the streets (in Rome they are generally pines), whose roots, imprisoned by the asphalt, struggle to expand, raising parts of the cement itself. This is how we should imagine the Kingdom of God within us: a seed destined to become a majestic tree on which the birds of heaven rest, but which makes it difficult to develop because of the resistance of our egoism.

There are obviously different degrees in this situation. In the majority of souls committed to a spiritual path, Christ is not imprisoned in a breastplate but, so to speak, in guarded freedom. He is free to move, but within very precise limits. This occurs when he is tacitly made to understand what he can and cannot ask of us. Prayer yes, but not so as to compromise our sleep, rest, healthy information; obedience yes, but he must not abuse our availability; chastity yes, but not to the point of depriving us of some relaxed show, though impudent. In sum, the use of half measures.

In the history of holiness, the most famous example of the first conversion, that from sin to grace, is St. Augustine; the most instructive example of the second conversion, that from lukewarmness to fervor, is St. Teresa of Avila. It might be that what she says of herself in her life is exaggerated and dictated by the delicacy of her conscience, but it might serve us for a useful examination of conscience.

"Well that is how I began, from pastime to pastime, from vanity to vanity, from occasion to occasion, to go so far on very great occasions and pervert my soul in many vanities. The things of God made me very content but I was bound by those of the world. It seems that I wished to reconcile these two opposites -- so inimical one to the other -- as are spiritual life and sensuous joys, tastes and pastimes."

The result of this state was a profound unhappiness, in which we might also recognize our own: "I spent almost twenty years in this tempestuous sea, with these falls and with raising myself up and badly -- as I would fall again -- and in a life so low in perfection, in which I paid virtually no attention to venial sins, and the mortal ones, though I feared them, but not as I should, as I did not remove myself from the dangers. I can say that it was one of the most painful lives that I believe one could imagine, because I neither enjoyed God nor brought happiness to the world. When I was in worldly joys, to remember what I owed God was painful for me; when I was with God, worldly pastimes disturbed me."[6]

It was, in fact, contemplation of the Passion that gave Teresa the decisive impulse to change. This is how the saint describes the moment of her "conversion": "It happened to me, entering the oratory one day, I saw an image that I had taken there to put away, which had been found for a celebration at home. It was of a very wounded Christ and so devout that, on looking at it, I was so distressed to see him like that, because it represented well what he went through for us. I felt so much how badly I had thanked him for those wounds, that I thought my heart was breaking and I threw myself next to Him with very great shedding of tears, begging him to strengthen me once and for all so as not to offend him. I told him I would not rise from there until he did what I implored him. I think it did me good, because I have improved much since then."[7] Today we know to what point she improved!

5, "Far be it from me to glory ..."

It is written that, on that day, the multitudes "when they saw what had taken place, returned home beating their breasts" (Luke 23:48). We want to do this also, returning to our work after being with Jesus on Calvary. Once we have passed through our little spiritual "earthquake," we see the sign of the cross and death of Christ change completely: from the chapter of accusation and reason for fear and sadness, to its transformation into a reason for joy and security. The "propter nos," because of us, is transformed into "pro nobis," in our favor. The cross now appears as honor and glory, that is, in Pauline language, as joyful security accompanied by overwhelming gratitude, to which man rises in faith and which is expressed in praise and thanksgiving.

We can open ourselves without fear to that joyful and pneumatic dimension in which the cross no longer appears as "folly and scandal," but, on the contrary, as "strength of God and wisdom of God." We can make of it our reason for unbreakable certainty, supreme proof of the love of God for us, inexhaustible topic of proclamation and, without any arrogance at all, but with profound humility, say with the Apostle: "But far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ!" (Galatians 6:14).

At a time when in several places pressure is being exerted to remove the crucifix from classrooms and public places, we, Christians, must fix it more than ever to the walls of our hearts. We began this meditation asking Jesus to make his shroud in our souls. We ask Mary to help us to fulfill this program with the words of the Stabat Mater: "Sancta Mater, istud agas, / crucifixi fige plagas / cordi meo valide": "O Holy Mother, make the wounds of the Crucified One be engraved in my heart."

[1] "Antica Omelia sul Sabato Santo" (PG 43, 439 f.).

[2] F. Dostoyevsky, "The Idiot," Part II, iv.

[3] Cf. Cicero, "Pro Rabirio" 5, 16.

[4] Cf. R. Brown, "The Death of the Messiah," II, p. 1051.

[5] St. Leo the Great, "Sermo" 66, 3(PL 54, 366).

[6] St. Teresa of Avila, "Life," chapters 7-8.

[7] Ibid., 9, 1-3.

[Translation by ZENIT]