Remember you are first and foremost priests: not corporate executives
On Tuesday, 7 May, the Holy Father received the Bishops of the
Antilles, for their visit ad limina Apostolorum. The Pope
first of all urged the bishops to remember that they are first and
foremost priests, not corporate executives. He then spoke of the mission
of the laity. "The primary place for the exercise of the lay
vocation is the economic, social, political and cultural world. It is in
this world that lay people are invited to live their baptismal vocation
not as passive consumers but as active members of the great work that
expresses what is distinctively Christian. It belongs to the office of
the priest to preside over the Christian community so that lay people
can carry out their own ecclesial and missionary task. In a time of
continuing secularization, it might seem strange that the Church
emphasizes so forcefully the secular vocation of lay persons. It is
precisely the Gospel witness of the faithful in the world that is the
heart of the Church's response to the malaise of secularization (cf.
Ecclesia in America, n. 44)". Under the heading of
evangelization, the Pope reminded the Bishops of the three criteria they
can use to assess the validity of the inculturation that they are
promoting. As a further help to evangelization, John Paul II called for
a new apologetic that would win souls not just arguments. Here is the
Holy Father's address to the Bishops in English with a translation of
the 2nd paragraph of his address that he gave in French.
Dear Brother Bishops,
1. "Peace to the brethren, and love with faith, from God the
Father and the Lord Jesus Christ" (Eph 6,23). With the words of the
Apostle Paul and in the joy of Easter, I welcome you, the Bishops of
the Antilles, on the occasion of your visit ad limina Apostolorum.
Through you, I greet all the faithful of Christ entrusted to your
care. May the peace of the Risen Lord reign in every heart and every
home throughout the Caribbean region!
I thank Archbishop Clarke for his gracious words expressing that
spirituality of communion which is the very heart of the Church (cf.
Novo Millennio ineunte, nn. 43-45). It is this communion
which draws you to Rome, on pilgrimage to the tombs of the Apostles,
where you renew your fidelity to the apostolic tradition, the roots of
which reach back to the Lord's commission (cf. Mt 28,19-20) and
ultimately touch the inner life of the Trinity, the ground of all
reality.
Priests not corporate executives
You come as Pastors who have been called to share in the fullness of
Christ's eternal priesthood. First and foremost, you are priests:
not corporate executives, business managers, finance officers or
bureaucrats, but priests. This means above all that you have been set
apart to offer sacrifice, since this is the essence of priesthood, and the
core of the Christian priesthood is the offering of the sacrifice of
Christ. That is why the Eucharist is the very essence of what we are
as priests; it is why there is nothing more important that we do than
offer the Eucharistic Sacrifice; and it is why our celebration of the
Eucharist together lies at the heart of your ad limina visit. We
can never forget that the tombs of the Apostles which we venerate in
Rome are the tombs of martyrs, whose life and death
was drawn more and more into the depths of Christ's own sacrifice, until
they could say: "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer
I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Gal 2,20). That was the
womb of their extraordinary missionary work, which we as their
Successors must emulate in our own times if we are to be faithful to the
new evangelization for which the Second Vatican Council providentially
prepared the Church.
Laity must not be clericalized by making the priest disappear as head
of the community
2. The Council was "the great grace bestowed on the Church in
the 20th century" (Novo Millennio ineunte, n. 57).
Although the decades since then have not been exempt from problems,
there were even periods in which important elements of Christian life
seemed to be endangered, now many signs ate pointing to a new springtime
of the spirit, having a prophetic character that the Great Jubilee of
the Year 2000 plainly manifested. In the years following the Council, the
appearance of new spiritual aspirations and new apostolic energy among
the faithful of the Church were certainly one of the fruits of the
Holy Spirit. Lay people live the grace of their Baptism in forms that
make the wealth of charisms in the Church appear more splendidly, and
for this we never stop thanking God.
It is also true that the awakening of the lay faithful in the Church
has coincided in your countries with some problems about the vocation to
the priesthood, and also the reduction in numbers of those entering the
seminary in the Churches entrusted to your care. As pastors, you are
deeply concerned for, as you well know, the Catholic Church cannot
exist without the priestly ministry, which Christ himself desires for
her.
Some people, we know, affirm that the decreased number of priests is
the work of the Holy Spirit and that God himself will guide his Church
and will bring about the replacing of priests in the government of the
Church with the lay faithful. Such an affirmation certainly fails to
take into account what the Council Fathers said when they sought to
promote greater lay involvement in the Church. In their teaching, the
Council Fathers wanted to highlight the deep complementarity between
priests and lay people which is implicit in the nature of the Church
as communion. An erroneous understanding of this complementarity has at
times led to a crisis of identity and confidence among priests, and also
to forms of lay involvement that are too clerical or too politicized.
The involvement of the laity becomes a form of clericalism when the
sacramental or liturgical roles that belong to the priest are taken over
by lay faithful or when the laity start to perform tasks of pastoral
governance proper to the priest. In such situations, what the Council
taught on the essentially secular character of the lay vocation is
often disregarded (cf. Lumen gentium, n. 31). It is the priest
who, as an ordained minister and in the name of Christ, presides over
the Christian community in the sphere of her liturgical and pastoral
activity. The laity assist him in many ways in this work. The primary
place for the exercise of the lay vocation is the economic, social,
political and cultural world. It is in this world that lay people are
invited to live their baptismal vocation not as passive consumers but as
active members of the great work that expresses what is distinctively
Christian. It belongs to the office of the priest to preside over
the Christian community so that lay people can carry out their own
ecclesial and missionary task. In a time of continuing secularization,
it could seem strange that the Church emphasizes so forcefully the
secular vocation of lay persons. It is precisely the Gospel witness of
the faithful in the world that is the heart of the Church's
response to the malaise of secularization (cf. Ecclesia in
America, n. 44).
The involvement of lay people is politicized when the laity become
absorbed by the exercise of "authority" within the Church.
This happens when the Church is no longer seen in terms of a
"mystery" of grace that characterizes her, but in sociological
or political terms, often on the basis of a misunderstanding of the
notion of "People of God", a notion that has deep and rich
biblical roots and was so opportunely put to use by the Second Vatican
Council. When it is not service but power that shapes every form of
government in the Church, whether exercised by the clergy or by the
laity, opposing interests begin to make themselves felt. Clericalism for
priests is the kind of governance that comes more from the use of power
than from the spirit of service; it always gives rise to all sorts of
antagonism between priests and people. Such clericalism is found in
forms of lay leadership that do not reasonably respect the
transcendental and sacramental nature of the Church and of her role in
the world. Both these attitudes are harmful. On the contrary, what the
Church needs is a deeper and more creative sense of complementarity
between the vocation of the priest and the vocation of lay people. Without
this, we cannot hope to be faithful to the teaching of the Council nor
find a way out of the usual difficulties with the priest's identity, the
people's confidence in him and the call to the priesthood.
Criteria for assessing inculturation
3. Yet we must also look far beyond the bounds of the Church, for the
Council was essentially concerned to foster new energies for her mission
to the world. You are well aware that an essential part of her
evangelizing mission is the inculturation of the Gospel, and
I know that there has been much attention in your region to the need to
develop Caribbean forms of Catholic worship and life. In the Encyclical Fides
et ratio, I stressed that "the Gospel is not opposed to any
culture, as if in engaging a culture the Gospel would seek to strip it
of its native riches and force it to adopt forms which are alien to
it" (n. 71). I went on to point out that cultures are not only not
diminished by the encounter with the Gospel, but are prompted to open
themselves to the newness of the Gospel's truth and to be stirred by
this truth to develop in new ways" (ibid.; cf. Post-Synodal
Apostolic Exhortation Ecclesia in America, n. 70).
To this end, it is important to keep in mind the three criteria
for discerning whether or not our attempts to inculturate the Gospel are
soundly based. The first of these is the universality of the human
spirit, whose basic needs are no different even in vastly different
cultures. Therefore, no culture can ever be made absolute in a way that
denies that the human spirit is, at the deepest level, the same in every
time, place and culture. The second criterion is that, in engaging newer
cultures, the Church cannot abandon the precious heritage drawn from her
initial engagement with Greco-Latin culture, for to do this would be
"to deny the providential plan of God who guides his Church down
the paths of time and history" (Fides et ratio, n.
72). It is not a question, then, of rejecting the Greco-Latin heritage
in order to allow the Gospel to take new flesh in Caribbean culture. The
challenge rather is to bring the cultural heritage of the Church into
deep and mutually enriching dialogue with Caribbean culture. The third
criterion is that a culture must not become enclosed in its difference,
in a flight into isolation and opposition to other cultures and
traditions. That would be to deny not only the universality of the human
spirit but also the universality of the Gospel, which is alien to no
culture and seeks to take root in all.
Need for new apologetic to win souls
4. In Ecclesia in America I noted that "it is more
necessary than ever for all the faithful to move from a faith of habit
... to a faith which is conscious and personally lived. The renewal of
faith will always be the best way to lead others to the Truth that is
Christ" (D. 73). That is why it is essential in your particular
Churches to develop a new apologetic for your people, so that
they may understand what the Church teaches and thus be able to give
reason for their hope (cf. 1 Pt 3,15). For in a world where people are
continuously subjected to the cultural and ideological pressure of the
media and the aggressively anti-Catholic attitude of many sects, it is
essential for Catholics to know what the Church teaches, to understand
that teaching, and to experience its liberating power. A lack of
understanding leads to a lack of the spiritual energy needed for
Christian living and the work of evangelization.
The Church is called to proclaim an absolute and universal truth to
the world at a time when in many cultures there is deep uncertainty as
to whether such a truth could possibly exist. Therefore, the Church must
speak in ways which carry the force of genuine witness. In considering
what this entails, Pope Paul VI identified four qualities, which he
called perspicuitas, lenitas, fiducia, prudentia—clarity,
humanity [or meekness], confidence and prudence (cf.
Encyclical Letter Ecclesiam suam, n. 81).
To speak with clarity means that we need to explain
comprehensibly the truth of Revelation and the Church's teachings which
stem from it. What we teach is not always immediately or easily
accessible to people today. For this reason there is a need not simply
to repeat but to explain. That is what I meant when I said that we need
a new apologetic, geared to the needs of today, which keeps in mind that
our task is not to win arguments but to win souls, to engage not
in ideological bickering but a kind of spiritual warfare, concerned not
to vindicate or promote ourselves but to vindicate and promote the
Gospel.
Such an apologetic will need to breathe a spirit of humanity
[meekness], that humility and compassion which understand the anxieties
and questions of people and, at the same time, do not yield to a
sentimentalized sense of the love and compassion of Christ sundered from
the truth. We know that the love of Christ can make great demands,
precisely because they are tied not to sentimentality but to the truth
which alone sets us free (cf. Jn 8,32).
To speak with confidence will mean that we never lose
sight of the absolute and universal truth revealed in Christ, and never
lose sight of the fact that this is the truth for which all people long,
no matter how uninterested, resistant or hostile they may seem.
To speak with that practical wisdom and good sense which Paul VI
calls prudence and which Gregory the Great considers a virtue of
the brave (Moralia, n. 22, 1) will mean that we give a
clear answer to people who ask: "What must we do?" (Lk
3,10.12.14). In this, the heavy responsibility of our episcopal ministry
appears in all its demanding challenge. We must daily pray for the light
of the Holy Spirit, that we may speak the wisdom of God, not the wisdom
of the world, "lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its
power" (1 Cor 1,17).
Pope Paul VI concluded by claiming that to speak with perspicuitas,
lenitas, fiducia and prudentia "will make us
wise; it will make us teachers" (Ecclesiam suam, n.
83); and that is what we are called to be above all—teachers of
the truth, who never cease to beg "the grace to see life
whole and the power to speak effectively of it" (Gregory the Great,
On Ezekiel, I, 11, 6).
Greater generosity in the missionary task
5. 1 am convinced, dear Brothers, that many of the problems facing
your ministry—including the need for more priestly and religious
vocations—will be solved by daring to give ourselves with still
greater generosity to the missionary task. That was an
important goal of the Council, and if there have been internal problems
in the Church since then it has been in part perhaps because the
Catholic community has been less missionary than the Lord Jesus and the
Council intended.
Dear Brother Bishops, your particular Churches too must be
missionary—in the sense of going out boldly into every corner of
Caribbean society, even the darkest of them, armed with the light of the
Gospel and the love which knows no bounds. It is time to cast your nets
where there may seem to be no fish (cf. Lk 5,4-5): Duc in altum! In
your planning for this mission , it is vital to keep in mind that we
must "stake everything on charity" (Novo Millennio
ineunte, n. 49), for "the century and millennium now beginning
will need to see, and hopefully with still greater clarity, to what
length of dedication the Christian community can go in charity towards
the poorest" (ibid.). But it is even more vital that
you keep your gaze firmly fixed on Jesus (cf. Heb 12,2), never losing
sight of him who is the beginning and the end of all Christian
mission.
Invoking upon you in this Easter season a fresh outpouring of the
gifts of the Holy Spirit, and entrusting your beloved communities, those
"holy seeds of heaven" (St Augustine, Sermon 34, 5),
to the unfailing protection of Mary, Mother of the Redeemer, I impart my
Apostolic Blessing to you, the priests, the men and women religious and
all the lay faithful of the Caribbean as a pledge of grace and peace in
Jesus Christ, the firstborn from the dead.
|
