Vestibules of Hospitality

This latest Q&A of Pope Benedict XVI is truly a goldmine. Now, he's speaking to priests of the Diocese of Rome, and so his answers are especially informed by the needs of those pastors and priests. In Question #2, regarding evangelization, Benedict offers several points. Here are three snippets that emphasize the unity of Word, witness, and community.

"In this way, I believe that the faithful can also play a missionary role ‘without words,’ because it’s a matter of persons who really live a just life. Thus they offer a witness of how it’s possible to live well along the path indicated by the Lord. Our society needs precisely these communities, capable of living justice today not only for themselves but also for others."

Over the past few years, I've thought a lot about this 'without words.' Without words, it seems to me, means without a pulpit, without setting oneself up as a teacher (though lay people can teach or offer exhortations at certain times). Without words meaning that life rings out a greater and more consistent witness than the words that must percolate periodically. I think also of the Messianic Secret of Mark's Gospel: See that you tell no one anything. Yet time and again, the changed person is impossible to conceal.

"For proclamation we need two elements: the Word, and witness. We need, as we know from the Lord himself, the Word that tells us what he has said to us, that makes the truth of God clear, the presence of God in Christ, and the path that opens up before us. It’s a matter, therefore, of a proclamation in the present, as you said, that translates the words of the past into the world of our experience. It’s absolutely indispensable, fundamental, to give credibility to this Word through our own example, so that it doesn’t seem like just a beautiful philosophy, or a beautiful utopia, but rather a reality. It’s a reality with which one can live, but not just that: it’s a reality that makes us come alive."

Word, witness and the common life of Christians are inseperable.

"We have our customs, of course, but we have to be open and to try to create ‘vestibules,’ meaning places where others can approach us. One who comes from afar can’t enter right away into the life formed by a parish which already has its ways of doing things. For such a person, at the beginning everything is very surprising and distant from his or her life. Thus we have to try to create, with the help of the Word, what the ancient church created with the catechumenate: spaces in which one can begin to live the Word, to follow the Word, to render it understandable and realistic, corresponding to forms of real experience."

This bit has an element of criticism for parishes, especially even vibrant, successful parishes. The question is: how to provide vestibules, porches of entry for those unfamiliar with the Church. Movements have a role here, but there are no doubt other initiatives that parishes could make that would enable the parish to be a positive missionary presence even within the physcial boundaries of its neighborhood. 

A Sermon on the Letter to the Galatians

Papal Address to Rome's Major Seminary at San Giovanni Laterano

"Let us now see what St. Paul says to us with this text: 'You were called to freedom.' At all times, freedom has been humanity's great dream, since the beginning, but particularly in modern times. We know that Luther was inspired by this text of the Letter to the Galatians, and his conclusion was that the monastic Rule, the hierarchy, the magisterium seemed a yoke of slavery from which he had to free himself. Subsequently, the age of the Enlightenment was totally guided, penetrated by this desire for freedom, which it was thought had already been attained. However, Marxism also presented itself as the path to freedom."

Confession Heals Us of Our Sins

Pope: Confessing our sins restores us to communion with the Father

At the Angelus, Benedict XVI recalls the gospel episode of the leper who is healed, to recall that it is sin, and not physical illness, that separates us from God. In his passion, Jesus "would become like a leper, made unclean by our sins, separated from God: he would do all of this for love, for the purpose of obtaining for us reconciliation, forgiveness, and salvation."

Hat tip: Blog by the Sea

Benedict XVI on Duns Scotus

Blessed John Duns Scotus: A model for maintaining faith & reason

Paul at the blog named Communio posts the text of a recent address by Pope Benedict on Duns Scotus. 

Paul significantly emphasizes a key point in the Holy Father's discussion of Scotus, the priority of practice and love over speculation in Scotus's thought:

"Thus we desire to remind scholars and everyone, believers and non-believers alike, of the path and method that Scotus followed in order to establish harmony between faith and reason, defining in this manner the nature of theology in order constantly to exalt action, influence, practice and love rather than pure speculation"

This preference for what is over what might have been is deftly summarized by Walter Ong SJ in his foundational study, Hopkins, the Self, and God. Not surprisingly, I discover that I have posted the relevant bit elsewhere ("Hopkins and Scotus"):

«Scotus' approach here was characteristically positive, not hypothetical. At least in the Ordinatio, his own composition, if not in the Reportationes drafted by his students, Scotus did not cast the issue in the hypothetical form in which it is often cast, 'If Adam had not sinned, would there have been an incarnation?' He remained within the actual economy of existence and of revelation (Carol 27-31; Bonnefoy, 3). The actual world which we know and inhabit, in which divine revelation is given and to which divine revelation refers, was created by God because God wanted to Son to become man and shares himself and his Father with the Holy Spirit with finite creatures, which are all spin-offs from the [I]ncarnation. Scotus here stays with what is real, attending to the origins of the existing world, not to possibilities.» (Hopkins, the Self, and God, p 108-109)