Posted on 01/01/2006 9:36:59 AM PST by TaxachusettsMan
Dear brothers and sisters!
In today’s liturgy our gaze continues to be directed toward the great mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God, while, with special prominence, we contemplate the maternity of the Virgin Mary. In the Pauline passage which we have heard (cf Gal. 4:4), the Apostle indicates in a very discrete way the one by means of whom the Son of God enters the world: Mary of Nazareth, the Mother of God, the Theotokos. At the beginning of the new year we are thus invited to place ourselves in her school, the school of the faithful disciple of the Lord, in order to learn from Her to receive in faith and in prayer the salvation which God wishes to pour forth upon all who trust in his merciful love.
Salvation is the gift of God; in the first reading it is presented to us as a blessing: “The Lord bless you and protect you . . . turn his face upon you and grant you peace” (Numbers 6:24, 26). The text speaks here of the blessing which the priests used to invoke upon the people at the conclusion of the great liturgical feasts, particularly on the feast of the new year. We are in the presence of a text exceedingly pregnant, filled with the name of the Lord which comes to be repeated at the beginning of every verse. A text that does not limit itself to a simple repetition from the beginning, but moves toward the fulfillment of that which it affirms. As it has been noted, in fact, in Semitic thought, the blessing of the Lord produces, by its own power, well-being and salvation, just as the curse brings about disgrace and ruin. The efficacy of the blessing is concretized for us, very specifically, in God’s role of protecting us (verse 24), in being gracious to us (verse 25), and in giving us peace, that is, in other words, in offering us the abundance of happiness.
Making us listen once again to this ancient blessing, as it is accustomed to do at the beginning of a new year, the liturgy wishes, as it were, to encourage us to invoke upon our own time the blessing of the Lord upon the new year that takes its first steps, so that it may be for all of us a year of prosperity and peace. And this is an appropriate greeting with which to acknowledge the illustrious Ambassadors of the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See, those who take part in today’s liturgical celebration. I greet Cardinal Angelo Sodano, my Secretary of State. Together with him, I greet Cardinal Renato Raffaele Martino and all the members of the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace. To them I am particularly grateful for their profound commitment to disseminate the annual Message for the World Day of Peace, addressed to Christians and to all men and women of good will. A cordial greeting also to the numerous Pueri Cantores, who, with their song, once again made even more solemn this Holy Mass, through which we implored of God the gift of peace for the whole world.
Choosing for the Message of today’s Word Day of Peace the theme: “In truth, peace,” I wished to express the conviction that “wherever and whenever men and women are enlightened by the splendor of truth, they naturally set out on the path of peace.” (n. 3, official translation). How could we not see an effective and appropriate realization of this in the gospel passage that has been proclaimed, where we have contemplated the scene of the shepherds on the road toward Bethlehem to adore the Infant? (cf. Luke 2:16). Is there any question that those shepherds, whom the evangelist Luke describes for us in their poverty and in their simplicity obedient to the command of the angel and docile to the will of God, are an image, very easily accessible to each one of us, of the man who lets himself be illuminated by the truth, thus becoming capable of building a world of peace?
Peace! This grand aspiration of the heart of every man and woman is built up day after day with the contribution of all, making a treasure again of the wonderful heritage left to us by the Second Vatican Council with the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, where there is affirmed, among other things, that humanity will not succeed in “the establishment of a truly human world for all men over the entire earth, unless everyone devotes himself to the cause of true peace with renewed vigor” (n. 77, Flannery translation). The historical moment in which the Constitution Gaudium et Spes was promulgated, was not very different from our own; then as, unfortunately, also in our own days, tensions of various kinds had proliferated across the face of the earth. Confronted by the persistence of situations of injustice and of violence that continue to oppress different parts of the world, and faced with those things that now present themselves as new and even more insidious menaces to peace – terrorism, nihilism and fanatical fundamentalism – it becomes more necessary than ever to work together for peace!
It is necessary to “jump start” our courage and confidence in God and in man to choose to hasten along the road of peace. And this on the part of all: each individual and people, international organizations and world powers. In particular, in the Message for today’s observance, I wanted to call again upon the United Nations to capture a renewed awareness of their responsibility to promote the values of justice, of solidarity and of peace, in a world ever more marked by the vast phenomenon of globalization. If peace is the aspiration of every person of good will, for the disciples of Christ it is an enduring commandment that obliges all; the necessary mission which compels them to announce and to bear witness to “the Gospel of Peace,” proclaiming that the acknowledgment of the full truth of God is the necessary and indispensable pre-condition for the consolidation of true peace. For this awareness to grow ever stronger, every Christian community must become a “ferment” of a new humanity renewed in love.
“Mary, for her part, stored up all these things, meditating upon them in her heart” (Luke 2:19). The first day of the year is placed under the sign of a woman, Mary. The evangelist Luke describes her as the silent Virgin, in constant listening to the eternal word, who lives in the Word of God. Mary stores up in her heart the words that come from God and, joining them together as in a mosaic, learns to understand them In her school we wish to learn also to become attentive and docile disciples of the Lord. With her maternal help, we desire to commit ourselves to work diligently in the “workshop” of peace, in the following of Christ (Tr. note: an allusion to the Rule of St. Benedict?), the Prince of Peace. Following the example of the Holy Virign, we want to permit ourselves to be guided always and only by Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today and forever! (cf. Hebrews 13:8).
But the Vatican website translations have been running behind over the holydays, and I thought that FR people would enjoy not only the spirituality of the Pope's homily, of course, but his calling on the United Nations - for the second time now recently - to renew itself.
In that regard, there is a partial translation of this on the AsiaNews site (www.asianews.it) which has some connection, I'm told, with the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.
But there's an interesting divergence (in my opinion) from the official text there. The Pope's homily, in its original Italian, says:
"In particolare, nel Messaggio per l’odierna ricorrenza, ho voluto richiamare l’Organizzazione delle Nazioni Unite a prendere rinnovata coscienza delle sue responsabilità nella promozione dei valori della giustizia, della solidarietà e della pace, in un mondo sempre più segnato dal vasto fenomeno della globalizzazione."
The Asia News translation says: “In today’s message, I especially call on the United Nations Organisation to be conscious of its responsibility in promoting justice, solidarity and peace in a world increasingly marked by globalisation”.
In other words, at least as I see it, "a prendere rinnovata" disappears completely from the text!
In my opinion, this Pope seems a little less willing than his Predecessor - or than the Secretariat of State - simply to give the UN the benefit of the doubt as the default moral conscience of the planet.
Anyhow, beyond the politics, there is a nice reference to Our Lady by the Greek title that, more or less, translates the Latin designation of this day in the current Roman Calendar and a beautiful meditation on "the school of the silent Virgin".
In short, another home-run homily from the new Pope whose preaching never disappoints and never fails both to comfort and challenge us.
Happy New Year!
"but his calling on the United Nations - for the second time now recently - to renew itself. "
Do you really think the U.N. is going to clean itself up at the beckon of him? Really? Do you really think terrorists can be REASONED with? Really? Don't you think this fellow needs to GET REAL? I do!
I don't get the over emphasis on Mary?
"In the Pauline passage which we have heard (cf Gal. 4:4), the Apostle indicates in a very discrete way the one by means of whom the Son of God enters the world: Mary of Nazareth, the Mother of God, the Theotokos."
Galatians 4:4
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, ...
The expression "Mother of God" or "Birth-giver of God" should not be understood in the eternal sense; that is, Mary is not understood as having eternally given birth to God the Son in the same way that he is eternally begotten by God the Father (see Holy Trinity and Nicene Creed). Rather, in the Incarnation, the divine person of God the Son took on a human nature in addition to his divine nature, and it is through Mary that this takes place. Since Jesus Christ is seen as both fully God and fully human, to call Mary the Birth-giver of God is to affirm the fullness of his Incarnation, and by extension, the salvation of humanity.
Many Fathers of the early Christian Church used the title Theotokos for Mary, at least since the third century AD.
The first documented use of the term is in the writings of Origen in 230 AD.
Dionysios of Alexandria used the term in about 250, in a epistle to Paul of Samosata.
Athanasius of Alexandria in 330, Gregory the Theologian in 370, John Chrysostom in 400, and Augustine all used the term Theotokos.
Theodoret wrote in 436 that calling Virgin Mary Theotokos was an apostolic tradition.
As our priest said today, Jesus got his humanity from Mary, all of it, and it was his humanity that has saved us. But it is God she bore, Jesus the son of God. So she is Mother of God. The term is hyperbole, but it is used to emphasis the truth of Jesus: Man, but not mere man; divine, but not only divine. Not only a prophet of the Word, but the Word himself.
Be careful, your anti-Catholicism is showing.
You said "fellow Catholic" there. Now I'm confused........sigh..........
Freudian slip, no doubt.
Sit up higher in your chair so the homily doesn't sail so far over your head.
I think nowadays we take it for granted that Christians always agreed on the correct understanding of Christ as "true God and true man" from the moment of His conception. Among a lot of other statements, I think the term 'Mother of God' was formalized at one of those early Church councils. I think the main heresy that necessitated some formal pronouncements about what the Church actually believes was Nestorianism.
Nestorius was a disciple of the school of Antioch, and his Christology was essentially that of Diodorus of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, both Cilician bishops and great opponents of Arianism. Both died in the Catholic Church. Diodorus was a holy man, much venerated by St. John Chrysostom. Theodore, however, was condemned in person as well as in his writings by the Fifth General Council, in 553. In opposition to many of the Arians, who taught that in the Incarnation the Son of God assumed a human body in which His Divine Nature took the place of soul, and to the followers of Apollinarius of Laodicea, who held that the Divine Nature supplied the functions of the higher or intellectual soul, the Antiochenes insisted upon the completeness of the humanity which the Word assumed. Unfortunately, they represented this human nature as a complete man, and represented the Incarnation as the assumption of a man by the Word. The same way of speaking was common enough in Latin writers (assumere hominem, homo assumptus) and was meant by them in an orthodox sense; we still sing in the Te Deum: "Tu ad liberandum suscepturus hominem", where we must understand "ad liberandum hominem, humanam naturam suscepisti". But the Antiochene writers did not mean that the "man assumed" (ho lephtheis anthropos) was taken up into one hypostasis with the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. They preferred to speak of synapheia, "junction", rather than enosis, "unification", and said that the two were one person in dignity and power, and must be worshipped together. The word person in its Greek form prosopon might stand for a juridical or fictitious unity; it does not necessarily imply what the word person implies to us, that is, the unity of the subject of consciousness and of all the internal and external activities. Hence we are not surprised to find that Diodorus admitted two Sons, and that Theodore practically made two Christs, and yet that they cannot be proved to have really made two subjects in Christ. Two things are certain: first, that, whether or not they believed in the unity of the subject in the Incarnate Word, at least they explained that unity wrongly; secondly, that they used most unfortunate and misleading language when they spoke of the union of the manhood with the Godhead -- language which is objectively heretical, even were the intention of its authors good.
Nestorianism - Catholic Enyclopedia
I doubt most Catholics have the faintest idea of how the term came into existence. I know my deacon didn't get anywhere near that point in his homily this morning.
Of course, since Catholics see Mary in Rv 12:17 "Then the dragon became angry with the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring, those who keep God's commandments and bear witness to Jesus." - they consider that she has a role in Christian life unlike any other created being.
A bit on the history of the celebration of the feast:
The Divine Motherhood of God was conceded to the king of Portugal as a national celebration in 1751 by Pope Benedict XIV. The Mass and Office are the Pope's own composition.
It was on the 15th centenary of the Council of Ephesus in 1931 that the celebration was extended to the whole Church by Pius XI with slight variations made to the original liturgical texts.
Vatican II established the feast as a solemnity.
What do you mean by "Bubba Jethro Cletus friends"? Intolerance?
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