Sandro Magister has a posting on www.chiesa.com regarding the Holy Father’s recent remarks before the Roman curia just before Christmas. There is a unifying element in the pope’s world travels and speeches given in his recent travels.
In the address that he gave to the Roman curia just before Christmas, Benedict XVI identified the unifying element of the four trips he took outside of Italy in 2006: to Poland, Spain, Germany, and Turkey.
The unifying and decisive element, he said, was “the correlation of the topic of ‘God’ and the topic of ‘peace’.”
This is because, if this correlation is lacking, and “if reason remains closed before the question of God, this will end up leading to the clash of cultures” and religions: a clash ”that looms threateningly” over the entire planet.
Benedict XVI demonstrated that the response to the fundamental question of God affects a series of related questions.
In Poland, he said that man’s desire to “banish God from history” has its most striking memorial in Auschwitz and Birkenau. But even amid His apparent absence, God “does not cease to remain with us,” like the rainbow after the flood.
In Spain, there arose the great question about why Europe “practically doesn’t want to have any more children.” The pope’s reply is that the man of today has become “unsure about man himself.” And this explains the disintegration of the family, the tendency toward de facto couples, the removal of the differences between the sexes: it is a “denigration of corporeality” that leads to man’s self-destruction. The Church has a duty to raise its voice in defense of this endangered man.
In Germany, the pope continued, preaching about God is all the more necessary today because in some regions most people have not even been baptized, and the faith is seen as belonging to the past. Benedict XVI linked to this issue the priest’s role as a “man of God,” who is celibate not for pragmatic reasons, but precisely because he is “seized by a passion for God.” He also linked to the question of God the dialogue between faith and reason, which he explored in the lecture at the University of Regensburg.
In Turkey, Benedict XVI wanted to show his solidarity with those faithful of Allah who “precisely on the basis of their Muslim religious convictions struggle against violence and in favor of synergy between faith and reason, between religion and freedom.” Because this is exactly Islam’s task today: to elaborate the proper synthesis between the faith and “the real achievements of Enlightenment thinking” that Christians have reached over centuries of “laborious and never-finalized research.”
The latter is an approach to dialogue that is much more effective than a thousand ceremonial embraces, as is proved by the “open letter” addressed to the pope last October by 38 Muslim intellectuals and leaders from various nations, including the grand mufti of Istanbul.
But what follow here are the main passages from the extensive address delivered to the Roman curia by Benedict XVI on December 22, 2006, all of which is worth reading:
And the post goes on to Benedict’s words. This is well worth the read.
