ELDERLY ARE PRESENT AND FUTURE

© Vatican Media

Pope Francis Declares Elderly are Present and Future of the Church

Address to Conference: ‘The Richness of Many Years’

JANUARY 31, 2020 16:58JIM FAIRFAMILY & LIFE ISSUES

“When we think of the elderly and talk about them, especially in the pastoral dimension, we must learn to change the tenses of verbs a little,” according to Pope Francis. “There is not only the past, as if, for the elderly, there were only a life behind them and a mouldy archive.

“No. The Lord can and wants to write with them also new pages, pages of holiness, of service, of prayer… Today I would like to tell you that the elderly are also the present and the future of the Church. Yes, they are also the future of a Church that, together with the young, prophesies and dreams! This is why it is so important that the elderly and the young speak to each other, it is so important.”

The Holy Father’s dramatic remarks on the importance of the elderly came on January 31, 2020, when he addressed in the Vatican Apostolic Palace, the participants in the First International Congress on the pastoral care of the elderly on the theme “The richness of many years”, organized by the Dicastery for the Laity, Family, and Life, and taking place from January 29-31, 2020, at the “Augustinianum” Congress Centre in Rome.

“The ‘richness of many years’ is a richness of people, of each individual person who has many years of life, experience, and history behind them,” the Pope said. “It is the precious treasure that takes form in the journey of life of each man and woman, whatever their origins, provenance, and economic or social conditions. Life is a gift, and when it is long it is a privilege, for oneself and for others. Always, it is always this way.”

Pope Francis noted how the “population pyramid” has been inverted in recent decades. In the past, the number of children was large and the number of elderly few. Today, it is the opposite. He stressed the need for the pastoral care of the elderly but also suggested the important role the elderly can play in passing on the faith to new generations.

“God has a large population of grandparents throughout the world.” Francis reminded listeners. “Nowadays, in secularized societies in many countries, current generations of parents do not have, for the most part, the Christian formation and living faith that grandparents can pass on to their grandchildren. They are the indispensable link in educating children and young people in the faith. We must get used to including them in our pastoral horizons and to considering them, in a non-episodic way, as one of the vital components of our communities. They are not only people whom we are called to assist and protect to guard their lives, but they can be actors in a pastoral evangelizing ministry, privileged witnesses of God’s faithful love.”

The following is the Pope’s address to those present, provided by the Vatican:

Dear brothers and sisters,

I cordially welcome you, participants in the first International Congress on the pastoral care of the elderly, “The richness of many years”, organized by the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life, and I thank Cardinal Farrell for his kind words.

The “richness of many years” is a richness of people, of each individual person who has many years of life, experience, and history behind them. It is the precious treasure that takes form in the journey of life of each man and woman, whatever their origins, provenance, and economic or social conditions. Life is a gift, and when it is long it is a privilege, for oneself and for others. Always, it is always this way.

In the twenty-first century, old age has become one of the distinctive features of humanity. Over a period of just a few decades, the demographic pyramid – which once rested upon a large number of children and young people and had at the top just a few elderly people – has been inverted. If once the elderly could have populated a small state, nowadays they could populate an entire continent. In this regard, the enormous presence of the elderly constitutes a novelty for every social and geographic environment worldwide. In addition, different seasons of life correspond to old age: for many, it is the age in which productive efforts cease, strength declines and the signs of illness, the need for help, and social isolation appear; but for many, it is the beginning of a long period of psycho-physical well-being and freedom from work commitments.

In both situations, how can these years be lived? What meaning can be given to this phase of life, which for many people can be long? Social disorientation and, in many respects, the indifference and rejection that our societies manifest towards the elderly demand not only of the Church but of all of us, a serious reflection to learn to grasp and to appreciate the value of old age. Indeed, while on the one hand states must learn to face the new demographic situation on the economic level, on the other, civil society needs values and meaning for the third and fourth ages. And here, above all, is the contribution of the ecclesial community.

That is why I welcomed with interest the initiative of this conference, which focused attention on pastoral care for the elderly and initiated a reflection on the implications of a substantial presence of grandparents in our parishes and societies. I ask that this does not remain an isolated initiative, but that it instead marks the beginning of a journey of pastoral exploration and discernment. We need to change our pastoral habits in order to respond to the presence of so many older people in families and communities.

In the Bible, longevity is a blessing. It confronts us with our fragility, with our mutual dependence, with our family and community ties, and above all with our divine sonship. Granting old age, God the Father gives us time to deepen our knowledge of Him, our intimacy with Him, to enter ever more into His heart and surrender ourselves to Him. This is the time to prepare to deliver our spirit into His hands, definitively, with childlike trust. But it is also a time of renewed fruitfulness. “They will still bear fruit in old age,” says the psalmist (Ps 92:14). God’s plan of salvation, in fact, is also carried out in the poverty of weak, sterile and powerless bodies. From the barren womb of Sarah and the centenarian body of Abraham the Chosen People was born (cf. Rom 4:18-20). From Elizabeth and the old Zechariah, John the Baptist was born. The elderly person, even when he is weak, can become an instrument of salvation history.

Aware of this irreplaceable role of the elderly, the Church becomes a place where generations are called to share in God’s plan of love, in a relationship of mutual exchange of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. This intergenerational sharing obliges us to change our gaze towards older people, to learn to look to the future together with them.

When we think of the elderly and talk about them, especially in the pastoral dimension, we must learn to change the tenses of verbs a little. There is not only the past, as if, for the elderly, there were only a life behind them and a mouldy archive. No. The Lord can and wants to write with them also new pages, pages of holiness, of service, of prayer… Today I would like to tell you that the elderly are also the present and the future of the Church. Yes, they are also the future of a Church that, together with the young, prophesies and dreams! This is why it is so important that the elderly and the young speak to each other, it is so important.

The prophecy of the elderly is fulfilled when the light of the Gospel enters fully into their lives; when, like Simeon and Anne, they take Jesus in their arms and announce the revolution of tenderness, the Good News of He Who came into the world to bring the light of the Father. That is why I ask you not to spare yourselves in proclaiming the Gospel to grandparents and elders. Go to them with a smile on your face and the Gospel in your hands. Go out into the streets of your parishes and seek out the elderly who live alone. Old age is not an illness, it is a privilege! Loneliness can be an illness, but with charity, closeness and spiritual comfort we can heal it.

God has a large population of grandparents throughout the world. Nowadays, in secularized societies in many countries, current generations of parents do not have, for the most part, the Christian formation and living faith that grandparents can pass on to their grandchildren. They are the indispensable link in educating children and young people in the faith. We must get used to including them in our pastoral horizons and to considering them, in a non-episodic way, as one of the vital components of our communities. They are not only people whom we are called to assist and protect to guard their lives, but they can be actors in a pastoral evangelizing ministry, privileged witnesses of God’s faithful love.

For this I thank you all who dedicate your pastoral energies to grandparents and the elderly. I know well that your commitment and your reflection are born of concrete friendship with many elderly people. I hope that what is today the sensitivity of the few will become the patrimony of every ecclesial community. Do not be afraid, take initiatives, help your bishops and your dioceses to promote pastoral service to and with older people. Do not be discouraged, keep going! The Dicastery for the Laity, Family, and Life will continue to accompany you in this task.

I too accompany you with my prayer and my blessing. And please, do not forget to pray for me. Thank you!

BIBLE - DIVINE LOVE-LETTER

BIBLE – DIVINE LOVE-LETTER

ROME - Pope Francis on Sunday compared the Bible to a “love letter” from God to humanity, and said that those who follow Jesus should read it daily, keeping the Gospel at hand “on our cell phones,” being open to His word and not just going to Him with some “rote prayers.”

“To follow Jesus, mere good works are not enough; we have to listen daily to his call,” Francis said. “He, who alone knows us and who loves us fully, leads us to push out into the depth of life.”

“That is why we need His word: So that we can hear, amid the thousands of other words in our daily lives, that one word that speaks to us not about things, but about life,” he said.

Francis’s words came as he was celebrating Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica for the first Day of the Word of God, entrusted to the whole Church by the pontiff with his document Aperuit illis, released last year.

Most of his homily turned around a passage from the Gospel of Matthew read in Catholic churches around the world this Sunday. This text, in which Jesus calls on two of his apostles to be “fishers of men,” the pope said, is helpful to know “how, where and to whom,” Jesus began to preach.

Jesus, Francis said, came to speak with everyone, in his own words and through his own life. He began his ministry with a “very simple phrase: ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’”

This, he said, is the main message of all of Christ’s sermons: That God is near.

“The One who dwells in heaven has come down to earth; he became man,” Francis said. “He has torn down walls and shortened distances. We ourselves did not deserve this: He came down to meet us.”

“He wants to stay with us and give us the beauty of life, peace of heart, the joy of being forgiven and feeling loved,” he said. Understanding this, Francis argued, allows for the understanding of his first demand: “repent,” meaning, “change your life.”

“The time when you lived for yourself is over; now is the time for living with and for God, with and for others, with and for love,” he said.

Francis said the Word of God is both encouraging and consoling, but challenging, freeing humanity from the bondage of selfishness and urging it to conversion, having the power of leading people out of darkness and into light.

The pope spoke about “where” Jesus began preaching, on the road by the sea, described in the Gospel as the “Galilee of the nations,” which Francis defined as “the border region, from a periphery,” instead of beginning from the temple of Jerusalem. The “land beyond the Jordan,” he said, was home to peoples from all nations, languages and cultures, not the place to find “the religious purity of the chosen people.”

“Here there is a message for us: The word of salvation does not go looking for untouched, clean and safe places,” Francis said. “Instead, it enters the complex and obscure places in our lives. Now, as then, God wants to visit the very places we think he will never go.”

Yet, he said, it’s often us who close the door to His word, approaching the Lord with “some rote prayers,” afraid of letting his truth “stir our hearts.”

Regarding the “to whom” did Jesus speak when he began his public ministry, Francis underlined that they were fishermen, known today as the apostles Peter and his brother Andrew. They weren’t chosen for their abilities or because they were devout people at prayer in the temple, but “ordinary working people.” And he spoke to them in a language they would understand, changing their lives “on the spot.”

Closing his homily, he asked for Catholics to read the Bible daily, beginning with the Gospel, to discover that God is close and “he dispels our darkness.”

MATERIAL THINGS AND GOD

How Material Things Can Lead Us to God

By John Horvat II

“The enjoyment of material things is not only good but can even be helpful toward reaching sanctification.”

A lady recently wrote me with a question about the role of material things in life. She was confounded by apparent contradictions between living a pious life while enjoying material things that are all around us.

She had read the stories of the saints and how they often scorned material things. Since we are all called to be saints, she reasoned, then eventually we must all adopt a life detached from the world like that of monks, nuns or priests. However, this is difficult to do because people derive joy from eating, buying things or enjoying beautiful music, for example, all of which are normal activities for those living in society.

The dilemma is compounded by the fact that the legitimate joys and desires of material things are not sinful in themselves yet seem to be harmful. Thus, many find themselves vacillating between the two extremes of “secular” and religious desires. The enjoyment of material things gives rise to guilt and blame. People are even encouraged to live a frugal and austere life surrounded by misery and ugliness as a means to become holy

The battle between material and spiritual, temporal and religious, has always triggered debate in the Church. On her part, the Church has always responded with balance and common sense. If some saints scorned material things, it was because they represented something good that could be given up, not something evil that must always be rejected.

The fundamental assumption of the question I was asked is that somehow the material universe is in contradiction with the spiritual world and, therefore, bad. Such was the position of the ancient Gnostics who viewed all matter as evil.

However, the question of the lady does not plumb those depths of the debate. She does not want to go into complex dialectics of spirit and matter. She only wants to know if she might enjoy food, music or any other material pleasure that she finds in her path. She wants to know if these are necessarily obstacles to sanctification.

The Nature of Material Goods

Material goods are hardly obstacles. God created the material universe for our good. He would not be a just God if creation was a constant temptation for our salvation. Thus, the first thing to be established is that there is no inherent contradiction between the spiritual world and material life. In fact, the enjoyment of material things is not only good but can even be helpful toward reaching sanctification.

Obviously, our fallen nature is such that we can abuse material things and develop exaggerated attachments to them. However, this can also happen to spiritual things. The balanced position is the practice of the virtue of temperance whereby man governs his natural appetites and passions in accordance with the norms prescribed by reason and faith. When we use things with temperance, they help us become holy.

Creation Reflects the Creator

And that is why created things are important. Creation speaks to us of the Creator. Since we cannot see God, we can only gain an idea of what God is like by analogy of what we see. We have a better idea of God’s grandeur, for example, by coming to know the majesty of the sea. We can have a glimpse of God’s might by coming to know a strong, grand oak tree. God’s infinite immensity is reflected in vast firmaments of the heavens at night.

“The basis of such an affirmation can be found in Saint Thomas’ fourth way of proving the existence of God whereby we come to know God by his traits we see in creation.”

The basis of such an affirmation can be found in Saint Thomas’ fourth way of proving the existence of God whereby we come to know God by his traits we see in creation. This way asserts that God created a whole universe to reflect himself since no one creature could sufficiently mirror him. Each creature reflects something of the goodness, truth, and beauty that God is. When we contemplate this finite work of creation, we grasp better God’s infinite perfection and experience the great spiritual joy of understanding the order and meaning of things (Summa Contra Gentiles, II, 45; Summa Theologica, I, q. 47, a. 2).

That is to say, by seeking the excellence of material things, we can better come to know and love God. We better understand ourselves and the meaning of life.

The Teaching of Saint Bonaventure

The teaching of Saint Thomas is echoed by that of his medieval contemporary, Saint Bonaventure, the Franciscan theological giant. In his great work, The Mind’s Road to God, the saint goes one step further by calling the world “a ladder for ascending to God,” where we find “certain traces (of his hand),” and we are thus “led into the way of God.” In this case, material things are not just helpful aids but necessary steps that can take us to God.

The saint claims that “all creatures of this sensible world lead the mind of the one contemplating and attaining wisdom to the eternal God.” He continues: “The invisible things of God are clearly seen, from the creation of the world, being understood by the things that are made; so that those who are unwilling to give heed to them and to know God in them all, to bless him and to love him are inexcusable.”

Clearly, temporal goods are means, not obstacles to sanctification. The saint claims they can be like wings that help us take flight to heavenly considerations.

Choosing the Right Things to Sanctify Oneself

Thus temporal goods are not the problem. It is our attitude toward them that is important. We must look upon temporal goods according to their nature. Thus, we are called to love those things most like unto God. We are called to seek after excellence and proportion in things because these qualities will direct us to God. At the same time, it is logical that we must reject those ugly and disproportional things that speak to us of disorder and sin. We must also never be satisfied with mediocre things that turn our minds away from God.

These criteria for what to seek is well expressed by the words of Saint Paul in Holy Scriptures that call upon us to look to high ideals when he says, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Phil. 4:8).

Splendour of Christian Civilization

That is not to say that we must own all the things of excellence that we admire. Nor can we be attached to these things as an end rather than a means. Rather it is to have a soul turned toward the excellence these things represent. It calls upon us to appreciate the beauty, excellence and good that God puts in our path so that we might know and love him better. It asks us to employ these criteria so that when we make or do something beautiful, we help ourselves, and others reflect God better.

That is why Christian civilization has always striven to instil splendour and beauty into the common lives of men. The arts and crafts flourished in Christendom. Whether it be cuisine, music, liturgy or architecture, they all developed and moved toward perfection under the guiding hand of the Church. The culture belonged to everyone united as they were in the quest to know God. All these marvellous things were accessible to everyone, however humble since all could appreciate them and make them in some way a part of their quest for God.

The problem with modern civilization is that things have no meaning or common purpose in society outside of personal gratification. There is no final end that we seek to know. Thus, things are no longer means toward God but selfish ends. Moreover, our fallen nature tends to make us distort excellence and create a civilization that moves us away from the good, true, and beautiful. It creates a civilization that exalts the false, sinful, and ugly.

Answering the Question

Thus, we find the answer to the question. Yes, one can and should enjoy and delight in material things (even cuisine) since they are not obstacles that keep us away from God unless we make them so. They can become essential means towards our sanctification. Enjoyed with temperance, material things exist for us to know and love God more, and we err if we fail to do so.

For as Saint Bonaventure says: “He who is not illumined by such great splendour of created things is blind; he who is not awakened by such great clamour is deaf; he who does not praise God because of all these effects is dumb; he who does not note the First Principle from such great signs is foolish. Open your eyes, therefore, prick up your spiritual ears, open your lips, and apply your heart, that you may see your God in all creatures, may hear him, praise him, love and adore him, magnify and honour him, lest the whole world rise against you.”

ROSARY IS POWERFUL

10 Reasons Why the Rosary Is So Powerful

Satan hates God. Satan hates you. And Satan hates the Rosary.

Saints say it. Popes say it.

The Rosary is a powerful weapon against evil. But have you stopped to figure out why?

Here are 10 reasons why the Rosary prayer is the most powerful and how you can use it most fully.

1. It Engages Your Will. The human will is powerful because it is a sharing in God’s power. He gives us the will to choose to do good or to do evil — and that will, in and of itself, is a powerful weapon in the spiritual realm. That’s why Satan seeks to enslave us and incapacitate our will through addictions. When our will is joined with God’s will through prayer we literally tap into God’s own power source.

2. It is Physical. God has given us bodies and souls. Angels — and this includes demons — are purely spiritual creatures. They have no physical form and are therefore inferior to us. When we pray the Rosary we use our bodies. We hold the rosary beads with a crucifix. If possible we should adopt an intentionally physical posture for prayer — either walking, kneeling or sitting attentively. If possible we should also use other physical sacramentals like blessed candles, holy water, maybe some incense and holy pictures or statues. When we use the physical aspects of prayer we are using tools that we have and which Satan does not have.

3. It Engages our Linguistic Functions. God has not only given us bodies — he has given us physical speech. We have tongues to praise him. We have vocal chords and breath to speak and sing. Satan does not have the means of physical speech. Animals do not have physical speech. Humans do. Therefore we should pray the Rosary out loud, moving our lips. This engages our physical bodies and our intellect through which we are able to produce speech.

4. It Involves Our Imagination. The non-verbal part of our mind communicates through imagery. We not only think with language, but we think in pictures. Satan likes to captivate our imagination through sinful images. These images can be communicated through internet, television or any visual stimulus, but he also want our imagination to dwell in images that are destructive. So our imagination can be used for lustful fantasies, violent imaginations against our enemies or indulging in negative memories. When we meditate on the mysteries of the Rosary we engage that channel of our mind in a positive and purifying way. Meditating on the mysteries therefore cleanses our imagination and engages and uses the imagination to promote God’s will rather than evil.

5. The Rosary Occupies the Language Facility. In order to allow the imagination to be properly cleansed through meditation it helps to switch into imagination mode. Unfortunately our minds usually function in a linguistic mode — using speech and speech concepts to think through problems, think about the future, plan what comes next, etc. By praying the Rosary this channel of our mind is occupied and the doors can open to the imagination and what I call the “sub-linguistic” parts of our being.

6. The Sub-Linguistic is Accessed. Much of our soul work takes place in the realm of emotions. Emotions are not linguistic nor are they imaginative. They are just raw emotions. We feel angry. We feel rage. We feel lust. We feel bliss. We feel peace. True emotions are irrational and unexplainable. The emotional area of the soul is also the area where we have our foundational experiences. In the mother’s womb and in the pre-linguistic stages of life we experience life in an irrational and emotional way. As we pray the Rosary and the linguistic channel is occupied and the imaginative channel is occupied the Holy Spirit can access the sub-linguistic, deep down, raw experiences of our earliest days. If there are wounds and bad emotional memories there Mother Mary can heal them.

7. The Healing Mysteries are Applied. I have written more about how this works in my book Praying the Rosary for Inner Healing but suffice it to say that as we pray the Rosary, the mysteries of Christ’s birth, ministry, passion and glory are opened up and the Holy Spirit applies them to our own inner needs. Where there are impurities, they are purged. Where there are bad memories, they are healed. Where there are wounds, Doctor Jesus and Nurse Mary minister to our needs.

8. Spiritual Warfare is Engaged. Satan hates the Rosary. He hates Mary. He hates the gospel. He hates God. He hates Christ the Lord. He hates the Lord’s Prayer. He hates the Hail Mary. He hates you. Every time you pray the Rosary, because of what I outlined above, you are entering the territory that he wants to claim as his own. He wants control over your will — you take that from him. He wants control over your speech — you take that from him. He wants control over your imagination — you take that from him. He wants control over your emotions and your early life — you take that from him.

9. The Battle Against Evil in the Word in Opened. I have written more about this in my second book on the Rosary called Praying the Rosary for Spiritual Warfare. Here I can say that in many ways the mysteries of the gospel bring alive Christ’s victory over Satan, and by praying the Rosary we can apply those victories against Satan’s work in the world.

10. It is Accessible and Easy for All. The fantastically amazing thing about the Rosary is that God does this very deep healing work in individual lives and in the world in this most accessible and easy way. No need for long sessions of psychoanalysis or counseling for most people. Instead ordinary men, women and boys and girls can simply pray the Rosary. All these good things happen even when they are unaware that these deep aspect of praying the Rosary are taking place. It doesn’t matter who — an old peasant woman or a smart college professor, a little child or a busy mom. Billions of Catholics. All can pray the Rosary.

So get busy praying!

POPE FRANCIS ON WOMEN

Pope FRANCIS ON WOMEN
ROME - Pope Francis began 2020 with a bang Wednesday, issuing a harsh condemnation of violence against women and insisting that how society treats women and their bodies is a measure of its level of humanity.

In a special Mass marking the Catholic Church’s Jan. 1 feast celebrating Mary, Mother of God, the pope noted that in God’s plan of salvation, “The rebirth of humanity began with a woman.”

“From her, woman, salvation arose and therefore there is no salvation without the woman…Women are sources of life,” he said. “Yet they are continually offended, beaten, raped, forced into prostitution and forced to suppress the lives they carry in their wombs.”

“Every violence inflicted on women is a profanation of God, born of a woman. Humanity’s salvation came from the body of a woman: By how we treat a woman’s body, we can understand our level of humanity,” the pope said.

He condemned the frequent “sacrifice” of a woman’s body on “the profane altars” of profit-making industries such as advertising and pornography. A woman’s body “must be freed from consumerism, it must be respected and honoured,” he said, calling it “the noblest flesh in the world, it conceived and gave birth to the love that saved us!”

Motherhood is also often “humiliated,” he said, “because the only growth that draws interest is that of the economy.”

“There are mothers who risk perilous journeys to try desperately to give the fruit of their wombs a better future,” yet they are dismissed “by people who have a full belly, but of things, and a heart devoid of love.”

This is not the first time Francis has spoken out on behalf of women. Violence against women is a cause he has taken to heart, issuing frequent condemnations of pornography, forced abortions, and forced prostitution, which many women, specifically victims of human trafficking, endure.

He has also corresponded with women who have suffered domestic violence, including an Italian mother named Filomena Lamberti, whose face was disfigured when her husband threw acid on her.

One of the most recent examples of the pope’s attention to the cause was given by Mexican journalist Valentina Alazraki, who in the January 2020 edition of Donna, Chiesa, Mondo, a monthly women’s supplement to the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, recounted words the pope shared with her on the topic during an interview.

Alazraki, who has interviewed Francis twice, penned an article for the supplement dedicated to violence against women in which she tells the story of Rocio, a 27-year-old mother of three who was killed in Mexico in front of her 8-year-old son after accidentally overhearing drug traffickers discuss their plans while eating at the restaurant Rocio worked at.

Alazraki, who has written a book about violence against women, was given the shirt Rocio wore the day she died by Rocio’s son. She brought the shirt with her to her interview with the pope, and, upon hearing Rocio’s story, the pope became emotional, she said.

Once the interview was over, Francis picked up the shirt and uttered a prayer for Rocio, calling her blouse “a flag of the suffering of so many women who give life and pass by without a name. We know the name of Rocio…but of many others no. They pass without leaving their name but a seed.”

This seed, he said, according to Alazraki, must be “an awareness of all this.”

In his homily Wednesday, Francis urged Catholics to imitate Mary and questioned them on their attitude toward others, including those closest to them, insisting that Mary helps to overcome indifference and to foster unity.

The devil, Francis said, tries to divide the Church by “putting in first place, differences, ideologies, parties and partisan thoughts. But we do not understand the Church if we look at it starting with structures, programs and trends: We will take something from it, but not the heart. Because the Church has the heart of a mother.”

Francis closed his homily praying that as the New Year begins, Christians would live it “with the desire to take others to heart, to take care of others.”

“If we want a better world, that it be a house of peace and not of war, at the heart is the dignity of every woman. From woman the Prince of Peace was born. The woman is the donor and mediator of peace,” he said, insisting that women “must be fully associated with decision-making processes.”

When women are able to share their gifts, he said, “The world finds itself more united and more peaceful. Therefore, an achievement for women is an achievement for all of humanity

CHURCH AND CULTURE

Cardinal Mueller: Church crisis comes from abandoning God, adapting to culture

Catholic News Agency

 1 January, 2020

Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Muller (Getty)

'The poison paralyzing the Church is the opinion that we should adapt to the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, and not the spirit of God,' the cardinal said

The crisis facing the Catholic Church today has arisen from an attempt – even by some within the Church – to align with the culture and abandon the teachings of the faith, Cardinal Gerhard Mueller has said.

“The crisis in the Church is man-made and has arisen because we have cozily adapted ourselves to the spirit of a life without God,” the cardinal told thousands of Catholics gathered in Phoenix for the 2020 Student Leadership Summit hosted by the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS).

“The poison paralyzing the Church is the opinion that we should adapt to the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, and not the spirit of God, that we should relativize God’s commandments and reinterpret the doctrine of the revealed faith,” he said.

He cautioned that even a number of people in the Church are “longing” for a kind of Catholicism without dogmas, without sacraments, and without an infallible magisterium.

Mueller, the former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, celebrated Mass on January 1 for the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. In his homily, he reflected on the human desire to embrace substitute gratifications when God is set aside.

“But the one who believes needs no ideology,” he said. “The one who hopes will not reach for drugs. The one who loves is not after the lust of this world, which passes along with the world. The one who loves God and his neighbor, finds happiness in the sacrifice of self-giving.”

“We will be happy and free when in the spirit of love we embrace the form of life to which God has called each one of us personally: in the sacrament of marriage, in celibate priesthood, or in religious life according to the three evangelical counsels of poverty, obedience and chastity for the sake of the kingdom of heaven,” he continued.

Mueller stressed that thanksgiving is a key part of the Christian life. At the start of the new year, he encouraged Catholics to voice gratitude for all of creation, for sending Christ into the world as our savior, for the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Catholic Church, the gift of family, and all the other blessings that can be easily taken for granted.

“As Christians, we have a musical awareness of life: In our hearts resounds the song of thanksgiving of being redeemed. Its melody is love, and its harmony is joy in God,” he said.

Rather than placing hope in fate, he said, the Christian recognizes that suffering is inevitable, but can still find joy in Christ, who also suffered and opened for us the door to eternal life.

In these challenging times, however, scandals in the Church and a crisis among traditionally Christian societies in the West have led many to anxiously wonder whether the rock on which Christ built his Church is crumbling, the cardinal said.

“For some, the Catholic Church is lagging behind by 200 years compared to where the world is today. Is there any truth to this accusation?”

Calls for modernization demand that the Church reject what it holds to be true, for the sake of building a “new religion of world unity,” Mueller warned.

“In order to be admitted to this meta-religion, the only price the Church would have to pay is giving up her truth claim. No big deal, it seems, as the relativism dominant in our world anyway rejects the idea that we could actually know the truth, and presents itself as guarantor of peace between all world views and world religions.”

The post-Christian society welcomes these efforts to reconstruct the Church “as a convenient civil religion,” the cardinal said.

The antidote to secularization within the Church is a life of faith, lived in the enduring truth of Christ, Mueller told those present.

God, who is eternal, cannot be changed by the whims of society, he stressed.

“In the concrete human being Jesus of Nazareth, God’s universal truth is concretely present here and now – in historical time and space,” Mueller said. “Jesus Christ is not the representation of some supratemporal truth: He is ‘the way, the truth and the life’ in person.”