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Evangelization Needs Belief in Eternity, Says...Fr. Cantalamessa ...Advent Sermon to Pope & Curia
Zenit.org ^ | December 10, 2010 | Father Raniero Cantalamessa

Posted on 12/18/2010 2:31:49 PM PST by Salvation

Evangelization Needs Belief in Eternity, Says Preacher


Father Cantalamessa Gives Advent Sermon to Pope and Curia

VATICAN CITY, DEC. 10, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa says that a renewed faith in eternal life is one of the keys to the New Evangelization. 

The preacher of the Pontifical Household offered this suggestion today during the second of three Advent sermons that he is giving in the presence of the Pope and the Roman Curia.

Father Cantalamessa proposed at the beginning of the series to offer "a small contribution to the need of the Church" for a New Evangelization, concretely by examining three obstacles to the Gospel message: scientism, secularism and rationalism. 

Last week's reflection centered on scientism and today's on secularism.

The Capuchin considered secularism as a synonym of temporality: "the reduction of the real only to the earthly dimension."

And he said, "The fall of the horizon of eternity, or of eternal life, has the effect on Christian life of sap thrown on a flame: it suffocates it, extinguishes it. Faith in eternal life is one of the conditions of the possibility of evangelization."

Changing the worldview

With this backdrop, the Pontifical Household preacher went on to reflect about eternity, including the rise and fall of the belief and the idea of eternity as a hope and a presence.

He gave a brief overview of belief in eternity within Judaism, noting that only after the Babylonian Exile did this faith start to gain ground, and even then, not everyone accepted it.

"This loudly denies the thesis of those -- Feuerbach, Marx, Freud -- who explain belief in God with the desire for an eternal recompense, as projection in the beyond of the disappointed earthly expectations," the preacher observed. "Israel believed in God many centuries before it believed in an eternal recompense in the beyond! Hence, it is not the desire of an eternal recompense that produced faith in God, but it is faith in God that produced the belief of an ultra-earthly recompense."

He continued that "even in the Greek-Roman world [there] is an evolution in the concept of the beyond. The oldest idea is that true life ends with death; after that there is only a semblance of life, in a world of shadows. [...]

"One can understand with this background the impact that the Christian proclamation must have had of a life after death infinitely more full and joyful than the earthly; one can also understand why the idea and the symbols of eternal life are so frequent in the Christian sepulchers of the catacombs."

Timid and reticent

Despite Christianity's radical impact, belief in eternity has wavered, Father Cantalamessa lamented.

"[W]hat has happened to the Christian idea of an eternal life for the soul and for the body, after it triumphed over the pagan idea of 'darkness beyond death,'" he asked.

The answer, the Capuchin suggested, lies in the style of atheism of the 19th century, "expressed preferably in the negation of a beyond."

He explained: "Taking up Hegel's affirmation according to which 'Christians waste in heaven the energies destined for earth,' Feuerbach and above all Marx combated the belief of a life after death, under the pretext that it alienates from the earthly commitment. To the idea of a personal survival in God is constituted the idea of a survival in the species and in the society of the future.

"Little by little, suspicion, forgetfulness and silence fell on the word eternity. Materialism and consumerism did the rest in the opulent society, making it seem inconvenient to still speak of eternity among educated persons and with the passage of time. All this had a clear repercussion on the faith of believers, which became, on this point, timid and reticent."

Coming to the light

Nevertheless, Father Cantalamessa continued, "For the believer, eternity is not, as we see, only a hope, it is also a presence. We have this experience every time that we make a real act of faith in Christ, because 'you have eternal life, you who believe in the name of the Son of God'; every time we receive Communion, in which 'we are given the pledge of future glory'; every time we hear the words of the Gospel which are 'words of eternal life.'"

And, he suggested, "Between the life of faith in time and eternal life there is a relationship similar to that which exists between the life of the embryo in the maternal womb and that of the baby, once he has come to the light."

"A renewed faith in eternity does not only serve for evangelization, that is, for the proclamation to be done to others," the Capuchin affirmed. "[I]t serves, even before that, to give a new impetus to our journey toward sanctity. The weakening of the idea of eternity acts also on believers, diminishing in them the capacity to face suffering and the trials of life with courage."

To illustrate this point, he proposed the image of a man with a scale: On one side there is the dish to hold that to be weighed and on the other side, the measure. If the measure is lost, he said, then "all that is put on the plate makes the bar rise and makes the scale incline to earth." Even a handful of feathers will bring the scale down. "That is how we are when we lose the weight, the measure of all that is eternity: Earthly things and sufferings easily pull our soul down. Everything seems too heavy, excessive."

Run, hurry up

Father Cantalamessa concluded with the invitation to "direct our thoughts then with renewed impetus toward eternity, repeating to ourselves with the words of the poet: Everything, except the eternal, to the world is vain."

He noted: "In the Hebrew Psalter there is a group of Psalms called 'Psalms of the ascension,' or 'canticles of Sion.' They were the Psalms that Jewish pilgrims sang when they went out on pilgrimage toward the holy city, Jerusalem. One of them begins thus: 'I was glad when they said to me, "let us go to the house of the Lord!"' These Psalms of the ascension then became the Psalms of those that, in the Church, are journeying toward the heavenly Jerusalem; they are our Psalms. Commenting on those initial words of the Psalm, St. Augustine said to his faithful:

"'Let us run because we will go to the house of the Lord; let us run because this course does not exhaust; because we will arrive at an end where there is no exhaustion. Let us run to the house of the Lord and our soul rejoices for those who repeat these words. They have seen the homeland before us, the Apostles saw it and have said to us: "Run, hurry up, follow us! We are going to the house of the Lord!"'"

[ZENIT will publish a translation of the full text of the sermon on Saturday]



TOPICS: Apologetics; Catholic; History; Theology
KEYWORDS: advent; catholic; catholiclist; secularism
I will post the full translation when it appears on Zenit.

Topic today -- secularism

1 posted on 12/18/2010 2:31:55 PM PST by Salvation
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To: All
Evangelization Needs Sense of Sacred, Says Preacher

Evangelization Needs Sense of Sacred, Says Preacher


Father Cantalamessa Gives Advent Sermon to Pope and Curia

VATICAN CITY, DEC. 17, 2010 (Zenit.org).- The re-evangelization of the secularized world requires a recovery of the sense of the sacred, says the preacher of the Pontifical Household.Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa offered this suggestion today during the last in his series of Advent sermons that he has given in the presence of the Pope and the Roman Curia.

Father Cantalamessa proposed at the beginning of the series to offer "a small contribution to the need of the Church" for a New Evangelization, concretely by examining three obstacles to the Gospel message: scientism, secularism and rationalism.

The first reflection centered on scientism, last week's on secularism, and today's on rationalism.

He considered meanings of rationalism, including the tendency "of not recognizing the existence of another field outside its own. In other words, in the refusal that some truth might exist outside that which passes through human reason."

Rationalists, the preacher suggested, in fact humiliate reason and put limits on it, rather than recognizing the "capacity it has to transcend itself."

For dealing with rationalism, Father Cantalamessa pointed to the value of experience and of testimony.

"I do not intend to speak here about the personal, subjective experience of faith," he clarified, "but of a universal and objective experience which we can then make use of in confrontations with persons who are still strangers to the faith. It does not lead to the full faith that saves: faith in Jesus Christ dead and risen, but can help us to create its premise, which is openness to the mystery, the perception of something that is beyond the world and reason."

Experiential fact

In this regard, the Capuchin cited Rudolph Otto and his illustration of how "the traditional affirmation that there is something that is not explained with reason is not a theoretical postulate or one of faith, but a primordial fact of experience."

Father Cantalamessa explained: "There is a feeling that has accompanied humanity since its beginning and it is present in all religions and cultures. [...] This is a primary fact, irreducible to any other sentiment of human experience; it hits man with a shudder when, for some external or internal circumstance to him, he finds himself before the revelation of the 'tremendous and fascinating' mystery of the supernatural."

This experience ranges from the "haunting feeling awakened by stories of spirits and ghost, to the purest stage which is the manifestation of the holiness of God," he said.

Re-ascent

In this context, the preacher affirmed that "the re-evangelization of the secularized world must pass also through the recovery of the sense of the sacred. The terrain of the culture of rationalism -- its cause and at the same time its effect -- is the loss of the sense of the sacred."

The Church, he said, must "help men to re-ascend the slope and rediscover the presence and beauty of the sacred in the world."

Citing Charles Peguy, he noted that the loss of the sacred is "the profound mark of the modern world."

"One notices it in every aspect of life, but in particular in art, in literature and in everyday language," he said. "For many authors, to be described as 'desecrating' is no longer an offense, but a compliment."

More real than reality

Father Cantalamessa observed that "[w]hen the experience of the sacred and the divine that reaches us spontaneously and unexpectedly from outside ourselves, is received and cultivated, it becomes a lived subjective experience."

In this regard, there are "'witnesses' of God who are the saints and, in an altogether particular way, a category of them, the mystics," he said.

The experience of the mystics is a clear invalidation of rationalism, the Capuchin suggested: "When their writings are read, how distant and even naive seem the most subtle argumentations of atheists and rationalists!"

A "sense of wonder and also of pity" arises in confronting them, "as when one is before someone who speaks of things that he manifestly does not know."

The rationalist is like "one who believes he can discover constant errors of grammar in an interlocutor, and does not realize that he or she is simply speaking in another language that he does not know," he proposed. "But there is no desire to get involved in refuting him, so much do even the words said in defense of God appear, at that moment, empty and out of place.

"The mystics are, par excellence, those who have discovered that God 'exists'; in fact, that he alone truly exists and that he is infinitely more real than that which we usually call reality."

Neutralized

Father Cantalamessa lamented that it is a "certain literary fashion" that has "succeeded in neutralizing even the living 'proof' of the existence of God that the mystics are."

He explained: "It did so with a most singular method: not by reducing their number, but by increasing it, not by restricting the phenomenon, but by dilating it to measure. I am referring to those that in a review of the mystics, in anthologies of their writings, or in a history of mysticism, put one next to another, as if they belonged to the same kind of phenomena, St. John of the Cross and Nostradamus, saints and eccentrics, Christian mysticism and Medieval cabbala, hermetism, theosophism, forms of pantheism and finally alchemy.

"True mystics are something else and the Church is right to be so rigorous in her judgment of them."

Christmas lesson

The preacher of the Pontifical Household concluded by drawing out a practical conclusion: "Not only non-believers are in need of unexpected eruptions of the supernatural but also us, believers, to revive our faith." And "Christmas can be a privileged occasion to have this leap of faith. It is the supreme 'theophany' of God, the highest 'manifestation of the Sacred.'"

He noted that Christmas is particularly victimized by the "phenomenon of secularism," which is "despoiling this feast of its character of 'tremendous mystery,'" making it "a feast of family values, of winter, of the tree, of reindeer and of Santa Claus."

To make Christmas an "occasion for a leap of faith," he suggested, believers must find time for silence. "At Christmas, we should feel as if the invitation of the Psalm was personally addressed to us: 'Be still and confess that I am God!'

"The Mother of God is the unsurpassable model of this Christmas silence. [...] Mary's silence at Christmas is more than a simple silence; it is wonder; it is adoration; it is a 'religious silence,' a being overwhelmed by the reality. [...]

"The person who truly participates in Christmas is the one who [...] does what Mary has taught us to do: to kneel, to adore, to be silent!"

--- --- ---

On ZENIT's Web page:

Full text: www.zenit.org/article-31269?l=english


2 posted on 12/18/2010 2:36:07 PM PST by Salvation ("With God all things are possible." Matthew 19:26)
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To: Salvation
Fr. Cantalamessa is spot on. Eternity exists; it's our consciousness of eternity which has changed from pagan times to modern times to post-modern intellectual chaos.
3 posted on 12/18/2010 2:48:58 PM PST by GAB-1955 (I write books, love my wife, serve my nation, and believe in the Resurrection.)
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To: Salvation
Fr. Cantalamessa is spot on. Eternity exists; it's our consciousness of eternity which has changed from pagan times to modern times to post-modern intellectual chaos.
4 posted on 12/18/2010 2:49:11 PM PST by GAB-1955 (I write books, love my wife, serve my nation, and believe in the Resurrection.)
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To: GAB-1955

**Fr. Cantalamessa is spot on. Eternity exists; it’s our consciousness of eternity which has changed from pagan times to modern times to post-modern intellectual chaos.**

And full circle back to pagan times. Look at the proligeration of atheists and secularism in general!


5 posted on 12/18/2010 2:57:31 PM PST by Salvation ("With God all things are possible." Matthew 19:26)
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To: Salvation

As my philosophy study group has noted, Plato was definitely a believer in the afterlife and eternity.


6 posted on 12/18/2010 3:11:37 PM PST by GAB-1955 (I write books, love my wife, serve my nation, and believe in the Resurrection.)
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