Elizabeth’s words: “And blessed is she who believed” do not apply only to that particular moment of the Annunciation. Certainly this represents the culminating moment of Mary’s faith in expectation of Christ, but it is also her starting point, from which she begins her entire journey towards God, her entire journey of faith. (RM, 14).

On this journey, Mary reached the “night of faith” (RM, 18). The words of St. Augustine on Mary’s faith are known and often repeated: “By faith she gave birth to what she had conceived by faith” . We must complete the list with what happened after the Annunciation and Christmas. By faith she presented the Child to the Temple, by faith she followed him in his public life, keeping a low profile, by faith she stood under the cross and by faith she awaited his Resurrection.
Let us reflect on some moments of the journey of faith of the Mother of God. What the angel announces to her is something unheard of: it had never happened before and would never happen afterwards. What is her reaction? She was “very upset” at the words (Lk 1:29). The term used in the Gospel indicates a profound trouble, as when life suddenly takes a whole new turn. The angel’s response: “The Holy Spirit will descend on you…” is sufficient for her to pronounce her total unconditional “Yes”: “Here is the servant of the Lord.” She too sets out on her journey like Abraham, without knowing where she was going; she does not know what God has in store for her, but she accepts without hesitation.
Then comes the moment of joyful enthusiasm for Mary: a time in which everything flourishes and is amplified in joy! It is the moment of her meeting with Elisabeth. The praises she receives are very high. Mary does not refuse them, but she sends them back to God with the Magnificat.
It is easy to believe in these privileged moments, but others also come for her, moments of trial and darkness in which she is guided to a more demanding faith. There are apparently conflicting facts that Mary confronts within herself, without understanding. He is “the Son of God Most high” and lies in a manger! She keeps everything in her heart and lets it ferment in expectation. She hears Simeon’s prophecy and soon realizes how true it was! All the ups and downs of her Son’s life, all the misunderstandings and the progressive desertions around him, had profound repercussions in the heart of his mother. She first experienced this in the loss of Jesus in the Temple: “Why were you looking for me? But they did not understand…” (Lk 2: 49).
Finally there is the cross. She is there, helpless in the face of her son’s execution, but she agrees in love. It is a replica of Abraham’s drama, but how immensely more demanding! With Abraham, God stops at the last moment, with her he does not. She accepts that her Son is to be immolated and she hands him over to the Father, with a broken heart, but on her feet, strong in her unshakable faith. It is here that Mary’s voice reaches its highest note. Of Mary we must say, with much greater reason, what, in Romans 4:18, the Apostle says of Abraham: Mary believed, hoping against all hope, and thus she became the mother of many peoples. Our mother in faith!
There was a time in which Mary’s greatness was seen above all in the privileges that people competed to multiply, with the result of distancing rather than associating her with Christ, who had become “similar to us in every way”, nothing excluded (not even temptation!) but only sin. The Council directed us to see her greatness above all in her faith, hope and charity. Lumen gentium says:

She conceived, brought forth and nourished Christ. She presented Him to the Father in the temple, and was united with Him by compassion as He died on the Cross. In this singular way she cooperated by her obedience, faith, hope and burning charity in the work of the Savior in giving back supernatural life to souls. Wherefore she is our mother in the order of grace.

Let us join Mary in believing!

The renewal of Mariology brought about by Vatican II owes much (perhaps the essential part) to St. Augustine. It was his authority that pushed some theologians and then the conciliar assembly to insert the discussion on Mary into the constitution on the Church, the Lumen gentium, rather than making a separate document on her. Starting from the principle that “the whole is superior to a part”, Augustine wrote:

Holy is Mary, blessed is Mary, but the Church is more important than the Virgin Mary. Why? Because Mary is a part of the Church, a holy, excellent member, superior to all the others, but she is nevertheless a member of the whole body. If she is a member of the whole body, undoubtedly more important than a member is the body.

Now it is St. Augustine himself who suggests to us the resolution to take after having briefly retraced the path of faith of the Mother of God. At the end of his discourse on Mary’s faith, he addresses his listeners a vibrant exhortation which is also valid for us: “Mary believed, and in her life what she believed came true. Let us also believe, so that what came true in her can benefit us too!”
The fourth centenary of the birth of Blaise Pascal – which the Holy Father wanted to remind the Church with his Apostolic Letter of June 19 – helps us to give a current content to the exhortation: “Let us join Mary in believing!” One of Pascal’s most famous “Thoughts” is the following:

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. The heart has its reasons that reason does not know […] C’est le cœur qui sent Dieu et non la raison. The heart, and not the reason, feels God. This is what faith is: God felt by the heart and not by the reason.

This is a bold statement, but one that has the highest authority behind it, that of Holy Scripture! The apostle Paul knows and often uses the word nous, which corresponds to the modern concept of mind, intelligence or reason; but, speaking of faith, he does not say “mente creditur”, with the mind one believes; he says corde creditur (kardia gar pisteùetai), one believes with the heart (Rom 10, 19).
God “is felt by the heart and not by reason”, as Pascal says, for the simple reason that “God is love” and love is not perceived with the intellect, but with the heart. It is true that God is also truth (“God is light”, writes John in his First Letter) and truth is perceived with the intellect; but while love presupposes knowledge, knowledge does not necessarily presuppose love. You cannot love without knowing, but you can know without loving! A civilization like ours knows this well, proud, as we are, of having invented artificial intelligence, but so lacking of love and compassion.
Unfortunately, it is not Pascal’s “reasons of the heart” that have shaped the secular and theological thinking of the last three centuries, but rather the Cogito ergo sum “I think, therefore I exist” of his compatriot Descartes, even if against the intention of the latter who always remained a pious Christian and a believer. (I remember reading his name in the list of the famous pilgrims to the shrine of Loreto!).
The consequence was that rationalism dominated and dictated the law, before arriving at the current nihilism. All the speeches and debates that take place, even today, focus on “Faith and Reason”, never, as far as I know, on “Faith and the heart”, or “Faith and the will”. Pascal himself, however, in another of his thoughts, says that faith is clear enough for those who want to believe, and dark enough for those who do not want to believe. Believing, in other words, is more a question of will than reason and intellect.
At this point, I would like to mention a second lesson left to us by Pascal and which the Holy Father strongly highlights in his Apostolic Letter: the centrality of Christ for the Christian faith: “We know God – writes the philosopher – only through Jesus Christ. Without this mediator any communication with God is excluded.” And in the so-called Memorial, an echo of a memorable night of light, he exclaims: “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars…He is found only along the paths taught by the Gospel”
Pascal is often quoted in connection with “calculated risk,” or the profitable gamble. Having to choose between faith and unbelief, he writes, bet on the existence of God, because “if you win you have won everything, and if you lose you have lost nothing.” But the real risk of faith – he also knows this – is a deeper one: it is that of putting Jesus Christ in brackets. A long-standing risk! Let us remember what happened in Athens, on the occasion of the memorable speech given by the apostle Paul at the Areopagus (Acts 17:16-33).
The Apostle begins by speaking of the unique God who created the universe and of whom “we ourselves are offspring”. Those present catch the allusion to the verse of one of their poets and follow it attentively. But soon Paul gets to the point. He speaks of a man whom God designated as universal judge, proving this by raising him from the dead. The spell is over! “When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some mocked him, others said: ‘We will hear from you about this another time’” (Acts 17, 32).
What bothered them so much? Of course, the idea of the resurrection from the dead, so contrary to what, in the same place, Plato had taught. The body is “the tomb of the soul”: it is therefore not worthwhile carrying it around even after death. But perhaps they were even more disconcerted by the assumption that the fate of the whole humanity depended on a single historical event and on a concrete man. A century later, the Platonic philosopher Celsus threw the reasons for the scandal of the Greeks in the faces of Christians: “Son of God, a man who lived a few years ago? One from yesterday or the day before yesterday? A man born in a village in Judea to a poor spinner?”
The real risk of faith is that of being scandalized by the humanity and humility of Christ. It was the biggest obstacle that Augustine had to overcome to adhere to the Christian faith: “Not being humble, I could not accept the humble Jesus as my God”, he writes in the Confessions. Jesus had spoken of the possibility of being “scandalized” by him, due to his distance from the idea that men had of the Messiah, and he concluded by saying: “Blessed is he who finds no cause for scandal in me” (Mt 11:2-6).
The scandal is today less ostentatious than that of the Areopagites, but no less present among intellectuals. The effect – more harmful than rejection – is silence on him. I have followed many high-level debates on the Internet about the existence of God: almost never in them was the name of Jesus Christ mentioned. As if he didn’t belong in a discussion about God!
This must be our main commitment in the effort for evangelization. The world and its media – I said on another occasion in this same place – do everything they can (and unfortunately they succeed!) to keep the name of Christ separate, or silenced, in all their discussions on the Church. We must do everything we can to keep him obstinately present. Not to hide behind it and remain silent about our failures, but because it is “the light of the nations”, the “name that is above every other name”, “the cornerstone” of the world and of the history.

Back to the heart!

Let us return to Pascal’s words about God who “is felt with the heart”, no longer to make it the object of historical and theological considerations, but of a personal and practical decision. Pascal was a fervent disciple of St. Augustine, to the point of sharing even some of his excesses and errors, such as that, adopted by the Jansenists, of the double divine predestination, to glory or damnation! Pascal’s appeal to the heart is likewise influenced by the doctor of Hippo. Commenting on the verse of Isaiah: “Return, O prevaricators, to the heart (redite, praevaricatores ad cor)” (Is 46, 8, Vulgate), in a speech to the people he said:

Return to your heart!… Return from your wanderings that have led you astray; return to the Lord. He is ready. First return to your heart, you who have become a stranger to yourself, by dint of wandering outside. You do not know yourself, and you seek the one who created you! Do return to the heart, detach yourself from the body… return to the heart: there examine what perhaps you perceive of God, because the image of God is found there. Christ dwells in the interiority of man.

We send probes to the outskirts of the solar system and beyond, but we ignore what happens a few thousand meters below the earth’s crust, hence the difficulty in preventing earthquakes. It is an image of what also happens in the sphere of the spirit and in our own lives. We all live projected outside, to what happens around us, inattentive to what happens inside us. Silence makes us scary.

This year’s Christmas marks the eighth centenary of the first creation of the nativity scene in Greccio. It is the first of the three Franciscan centenaries. It will be followed, in 2024, by that of the Stigmata of the saint and, in 2026, by that of his death. This circumstance can also help us return to the heart. His first biographer, Tommaso of Celano, reports the words with which the Poverello explained his initiative:

I would like, he said, to represent the Child born in Bethlehem, and in some way see with the eyes of my body the hardships in which he found himself for the lack of the necessary things for a newborn baby, how he was placed in a crib and how he lay between the ox and the donkey.

Unfortunately, with the passing of time, the nativity scene has moved away from what it represented for Francis. It has often become a form of art or entertainment of which one admires the external setting, rather than the mystical meaning. Even so, however, it fulfills its function as a sign and it would be foolish to give it up. In our western world, initiatives are multiplying to eliminate every evangelical and religious reference from the Christmas solemnities, reducing it to a pure and simple human and family celebration, with many fairy tales and invented characters in place of the real ones. Some would even like to change the name of the feast.
One of the reasons for this is to foster peaceful coexistence with believers of other religions, in practice with Muslims. In reality, this is the pretext of a certain secularist world that does not want these symbols, not of Muslims. In the Quran there is a Sura dedicated to the birth of Jesus that is worth knowing. It says:

The angels said: “O Mary! Allah gives you good news of a Word from Him, his name will be the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary; honored in this world and the Hereafter, and he will be one of those nearest ˹to Allah˺. And he will speak to people in ˹his˺ infancy and adulthood and will be one of the righteous.” Mary wondered, “My Lord! How can I have a child when no man has ever touched me?” An angel replied, “So will it be. Allah creates what He wills. When He decrees a matter, He simply tells it, ‘Be!’ And it is!

Once, at the time when, on Saturday evenings, I was explaining the Sunday Gospel on the Italian television RAI “, I had this sura read by an Islamic man who said he was happy to contribute in this way to dispel a misunderstanding that damages them, with the pretext of favoring them. The veneration with which the Quran recalls the birth of Jesus and the place that the Virgin Mary occupies in it received unexpected and sensational recognition a few years ago. The emir of Abu Dhabi decided to dedicate the beautiful mosque of the emirate which previously bore the name of its founder, Sheikh Mohammad Bin Zayed, to Mariam, Umm Eisa, “Mary Mother of Jesus”.
The nativity scene is therefore a useful and beautiful tradition, but we cannot be satisfied with traditional external nativity scenes. We must set up a different presepio, that of the heart. Corde creditur: with the heart you believe. “May Christ dwell in your heart through faith”, says the same Apostle (Eph 3:17).
Mary and her husband Joseph continue to mystically knock at the doors, as they did that night in Bethlehem. In the Revelation it is the Risen One himself who says:”Behold, I stand at the door and knock” (Rev 3:20). Let’s open the door of our heart. Let us make it a cradle for the Baby Jesus, making him feel, in the chill of the world, the warmth of our love and our infinite gratitude!
This is not just a beautiful, poetic fiction; it is the most difficult undertaking in life. In our heart there is room for many guests, but for only one master. Giving birth to Jesus means letting one’s “self” die, or at least renewing the decision to no longer live for ourselves, but for Him who was born, died and rose again for us (see Rom 14:7-9). “Where God is born, man dies,” has been the affirmation of a certain atheistic existentialism. It is true! The one who dies, however, is the old man, corrupt and destined anyway to end in death, while the one who is borne is “the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth” (Eph 4:24), and destined to live eternally. This is an undertaking that will not end with Christmas, but can begin with it.
May the Mother of God – she who “conceived Christ in her heart before conceiving him in her body” – help us to realize our proposal.
Happy birthday to Jesus – and Merry Christmas to all of you: Holy – and beloved Father – Pope Francis – venerated Fathers, brothers and sisters!

1.Augustine, Sermons, 215: “quem credendo peperit, credendo concepit.”
2.Augustine, Sermon 72,7 (ed, in Miscellanea Agostiniana, I, Roma 1930, p.163).
3.Id., Sermon, 215,4.
4.Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 277-278, ed. Brunschvicg.
5.Cf. Ib., 430, ed. Br.
6.Ib., 221, Br.
7.Cf. Origen, Contra Celsum, I, 26.28; VI, 10.
8.Confessions, VII, 18,24.
9.On the Gospel of John, 18,10.
10.Thomas of Celano, Vita Prima, 84-86.
11.Quran, Sura III, 45-47.

John the Baptist, preacher of conversion

In the Gospels, the Forerunner appears to us in two different roles: that of a preacher of conversion and that of a prophet. We dedicate the first part of the reflection to the moralist and the second to the prophet.
Some verses from the Gospel of Luke are sufficient to give us an idea of the Baptist’s preaching:
He said to the crowds who came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce good fruits as evidence of your repentance…The crowds asked him, “What then should we do?” He said to them in reply, “Whoever has two tunics should share with the person who has none. And whoever has food should do likewise.” Even tax collectors came to be baptized and they said to him, “Teacher, what should we do?” He answered them, “Stop collecting more than what is prescribed.” Soldiers also asked him, “And what is it that we should do?” He told them, “Do not practice extortion, do not falsely accuse anyone, and be satisfied with your wages.”(Lk 3:7-14)
The Gospel allows us to see what distinguishes, on this point, the preaching of the Baptist from that of Jesus. The leap in quality is expressed in the clearest way by Jesus himself: “The Law and the Prophets up to John: from then onwards the kingdom of God is announced and everyone strives to enter it.” (Lk 16:16)
We must avoid simplistic contrasts between Law and Gospel. Immediately after the statement just quoted, Jesus (or maybe the evangelist) adds: “It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for the smallest part of a letter of the law to become invalid.” (Lk 16: 17). The Gospel does not abolish the law, that is, concretely, the commandments of God; but it inaugurates a new and different relationship with them.
What is new is the order between the commandment and the gift, that is, between the law and grace. At the basis of the Baptist’s preaching is the statement: “Repent and thus the kingdom of God will come to you!” At the basis of Jesus’ preaching is the statement: “Repent because the kingdom of God has come to you!” (Let us remember the word of Jesus just quoted: “The Law and the Prophets until John: from then on the kingdom of God is announced and everyone strives to enter it”).
It is not just a chronological difference, as between a before and an after; it is also a qualitative difference. It means that it is not the observance of the commandments that allows the kingdom of God to come; but it is the coming of the kingdom of God that allows the observance of the commandments. People did not suddenly change and become better, so that the Kingdom could come to them. No, they are the same as always, but it is God who, in the fullness of time, sent his Son, thus giving them the possibility of changing and living a new life. “For the law was given through Moses, but the grace comes from Jesus Christ”, says John the Evangelist (Jn 1:17). Loving God with all your heart is “the first and greatest commandment”; but the order of the commandments is not the first order, or the first level: above it there is the order of the gift: “We love because he loved us first” (1 Jn 4:19).
It is interesting to see how this newness of Christ is reflected in the different attitude of the Baptist and Jesus towards the so-called “sinners”. John, we have seen, attacks sinners who come to him with fiery words. It is Jesus himself who points out the difference between himself and the Forerunner on this subject: “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they said, ‘He is possessed by a demon’. The Son of Man came eating and drinking and they said, ‘Look, he is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’” (Lk 11:18-19). “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”, asked the Pharisees to the disciples of Jesus (Mt 9:11).
Jesus does not wait for sinners to change their lives before he can welcome them; but he welcomes them and this leads sinners to change their lives. All four Gospels – Synoptic and John – are unanimous on this. Jesus does not wait for the Samaritan woman to put her private life in order before spending time with her and even asking her to give him something to drink. But in doing so he changed the heart of that woman who became an evangelizer among her people. The same thing happens with Zacchaeus, with Matthew the publican, the adulteress and the anonymous woman who kisses his feet in Simon’s house.
We cannot draw an absolute norm from these examples. Jesus was Jesus and he read hearts; we are not Jesus; the two ways, moreover, do not contradict each other. The Church cannot ignore, however, the style of Jesus or place it on the same level as that of the Forerunner. Jesus disapproves of sin infinitely more than the most rigid moralists could do, but he proposed a new remedy in the Gospel: not distancing, but acceptance. Changing one’s life is not the condition for approaching Jesus in the Gospel; however, it must be the result (or at least the purpose) after approaching him. God’s mercy, in fact, is without conditions, but it is not without consequences!
On this point, Holy Mother Church has much to learn from today’s mothers and fathers. We all know the tragedies that tear many parents apart today: children who, despite their good example of Christian life and their good advice, take a path opposite to theirs, destroying themselves with drugs, sex abuse, early choices that turn out to be wrong and often tragic…But do parents close the door in their faces and chase them out of the house? They can’t help but respect their choice, as God respects it, and continue to love them. This dramatic situation of society is reflected in that of the Church. We are called to choose between the model of John the Baptist and the model of Jesus, between giving preeminence to the law, or giving it to grace and mercy.
There is one point on which there is no need to choice, because John and Jesus are in perfect agreement. We too should raise our voices on it. It is what John expresses with the words: “Whoever has two tunics should give one to him who has none, and whoever has something to eat should do the same” (Lk 3:11) and that Jesus inculcates with the parable of the rich man, and with the description of the final judgment in Matthew 25.

John the Baptist, “more than a prophet”

Now let’s move on to the second role, or title, of John the Baptist. He is not just a moralist and a preacher of penance; he is also and above all a prophet: “You, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High” (Lk 1:75). Jesus defines him as “more than a prophet” (Lk 7:26).
In what sense, we might ask, is John the Baptist a prophet? Where does the prophecy lie in his case? The prophets announced a future salvation. But John the Baptist does not announce future salvation; he points to someone who is present. In what sense then can he be called a prophet? Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel helped the people to overcome the barrier of time; John the Baptist helps the people to overcome the even thicker barrier of contrary appearances. How can the long-awaited Messiah, the one announced by the prophets, promised in the Psalms, be that man with such ordinary and modest appearances and origins?
It is easy to believe in something grandiose, divine, when it appears in an indefinite future – “in those days”, “in the last days”… -, in a cosmic setting, with the heavens dripping with sweetness and the earth opening up to make the Savior germinate. More difficult is when you have to say, “Now! It’s here! It’s this!” The man is immediately tempted to say: “Is that all?” ”Can anything good come from Nazareth?”, they said.
It is the scandal of God’s humility who reveals himself “under contrary appearances”, to confuse men’s pride and “will to power”. Believing that the man they saw shortly before eating, sleeping, perhaps even yawning upon waking up, is the Messiah, the one waited by everyone; believe that the time has reached its fullness: this required greater prophetic courage than that of Isaiah. This is a superhuman task and we understand the greatness of the precursor and why he is defined as “more than a prophet”.
All four Gospels highlight the dual role of John the Baptist, that of moralist and that of prophet. But while the Synoptics insist more on the first, the Fourth Gospel insists more on the second. John the Baptist is the man of the “Ecce!”, of the Behold!: “Behold the man of whom I spoke…Behold the Lamb of God!” (Jn 1:15.29). What a shiver must have run through the bodies of those who, with these or other similar words, first received the revelation. It was like a short circuit: past and future, expectation and fulfillment touched each other.
What does John the Baptist teach us as a prophet? Is his prophecy still alive or did it end that day? I believe that he left us his prophetic task. Saying: “There is one among you whom you do not know!” (Jn 1:26), he inaugurated the new Christian prophecy, which does not consist in announcing a future salvation, but in revealing the hidden presence of Christ in the world, in tearing the veils from people’s eyes, as if shouting, with the words of Isaiah: “God is doing something new! Do you not perceive it?” (see Is 43:19).
Jesus said, “I am with you always until the end of the world.” He is among us; he is in the world and the world even today, after two thousand years, does not recognize him. There is a saying of Jesus that has always worried believers: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Lk 18:8). But Jesus does not speak here of his coming at the end of the world. In the so-called eschatological discourses, two perspectives are often intertwined: that of the final coming of Christ and that of his coming as resurrected and glorified by the Father, which Paul defines as his coming “with power according to the Spirit of holiness” (Rom 1, 4), in contrast to the previous coming “according to the flesh”. It is in reference to this coming according to the Spirit that Jesus can say: “This generation will not pass away until all this happens” (Mt 24:34).
That disturbing phrase of Jesus therefore does not question our posterity, those who will find themselves living at the moment of his parousia; it questions our ancestors and it questions our contemporaries, including us. Despite his resurrection and the wonders that accompanied the beginning of the Church, did Jesus find faith among his people? Despite two thousand years of his presence in the world and all the confirmations of history, does he still find faith on earth, especially among the so-called “intellectuals”? The prophetic task of the Church will be the same as that of John the Baptist, until the end of the world: to shake each generation from its terrible distraction and blindness that prevents it from recognizing and seeing the light of the world.
At the time of John Baptist the scandal derived from the physical body of Jesus; from his flesh so similar to ours, except in sin. Even today it is his body, his flesh that scandalizes, his mystical body, the Church, so similar to the rest of humanity, not even sin excluded. Just as John the Baptist made his contemporaries recognize Christ under the humility of the flesh, so it is necessary today to make him recognized in the poverty of the Church – and in the poverty of our own lives.

An evangelization “new in fervor”

Saint John Paul II characterized the new evangelization as an evangelization – I quote – “new in fervor, new in methods and new in expressions”. John the Baptist is our teacher above all in the first of these three things, fervor. He is not such a great theologian; he has a very rudimentary Christology. He does not yet know the highest titles of Jesus, such as Son of God, Word, or Son of man.
He uses very simple images. “I am not worthy – he says – to untie the ties of his sandals …“ But, despite the poverty of his theology, how he manages to make us feel the greatness and uniqueness of Christ! The world and humanity appear, from his words, all contained as if inside a winnowing winch, or a sieve, which he, the Messiah, holds and shakes in his hands. In front of him it is decided who stands and who falls, who is good wheat and who is chaff that the wind scatters. Following the example of St. John the Baptist everyone can be an evangelizer!
Commenting on the words of John Paul II that I mentioned, someone pointed out that the new evangelization can and must be new “in fervor, in method and in expression”, but not in the contents which remain those always deriving from revelation. In other words: that there can and must be a new evangelization, but not a new Gospel.
All this is true. There cannot be truly and totally new content. There may, however, be new contents, in the sense that they were not highlighted enough in the past and had remained in the shadows or little valorized. Saint Gregory the Great said: “Scriptura cum legentibus crescit” (Moralia in Job, 20, 1, 1), the Scripture grows with those who read it. And in another passage, he explains why. “In fact – he says – one understands [the Scriptures] all the more deeply the deeper the attention he pays to them” (Hom in Ez. I, 7, 8). This growth is achieved first of all on a personal level in growth in holiness; but it is also realized on a universal level, as the Church advances in history.
What sometimes makes it so difficult to accept the “growth” of which Gregory the Great speaks is the lack of attention given to the history of the development of Christian doctrine from its origins to today, or a very superficial knowledge of it. This history demonstrates, in fact, that this growth has always been there, as Cardinal John Newman demonstrated in his famous essay.
Revelation – Scripture and Tradition together – grows according to the questions and provocations that are posed to it throughout history. Jesus promised the apostles that the Paraclete would guide them “into the whole truth” (Jn 16, 13), but he did not specify in how long time: whether in one or two generations, or – as everything seems to indicate – for the whole time that the Church is a pilgrim on earth.
The preaching of John the Baptist offers us the opportunity for an important observation precisely regarding this “growth” of the word of God that the Holy Spirit operates in history. The liturgical and theological tradition has collected, above all, his cry of the Baptist: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” The Liturgy proclaims it at every Mass before communion, after the people have sung three times: “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us”.
In reality, however, this is only half of his prophecy about Christ. He adds immediately, almost in one breath and in all four Gospels, that Jesus Christ is the one “ who baptizes with the Holy Spirit!” (Jn 1:33; Mt 3.11). Christian salvation is not, therefore, just something negative, “taking away sin”. It is above all something positive: it is a “giving”, an instilling new life, the life of the Spirit. It’s a rebirth.
The remission of sin appears to be the way and the condition for the gift of the Spirit which is the ultimate purpose, the supreme gift. The third chapter of the Letter to the Romans on the justification of the wicked must never be separated from the eighth chapter on the gift of the Spirit, with that liberating message that should resonate more often in our preaching: “Now there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has freed you from the law of sin and death.” (Rom 8: 1-2).
Of course, this positive aspect has never been forgotten. But perhaps not enough emphasis has always been placed on it. We have run the risk, especially in the West, of seeing Christianity, in a “negative” way, as the solution to the problem of original sin; as something, therefore, gloomy. This explains, at least in part, its rejection by large sectors of culture, such as those represented, in philosophy, by Nietzsche and, in literature, by the Norwegian playwright Ibsen. The current greater attention given to the action of the Holy Spirit and his charisms in all Christian Churches is a concrete example of Scripture “growing with those who read it”.
The saints love to continue, from heaven, the mission they carried out while alive on earth. Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus – whose 150th anniversary of her birth is this year – put this as a kind of condition to go to heaven. Saint John the Baptist also loves to be the precursor of Christ, he loves to prepare the paths for him. Let us lend him our voice!
Contemplating the icon of the Forerunner in the Deesis, with his hands extended towards Christ and a pleading gaze, the Orthodox Church addresses a prayer to him that we can make our own:
The hand that touched the head of the Lord and with which you pointed out to us the Savior, now extend it, O Baptist, towards him in our favor, by virtue of that assurance which you largely enjoy, since, according to his own testimony, you were the greatest of all the prophets; the eyes that saw the Holy Spirit descending in the form of a dove, turn them to him, O Baptist, so that he may show us his grace. Amen.

In our intent to open the gates to Christ who comes, we have reached the innermost door of the “interior castle”, that of the theological virtue of charity.
But what does it mean to open the door of love to Christ? Does it mean, perhaps, that we take the initiative to love God? So the pagan philosophers would have replied, based on the idea they had of God’s love. “God – said Aristotle – moves the world insofar as he is loved” . As much as he is loved, not as much as he loves! This philosophical view was completely reversed in the New Testament:
In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins… We love because he first loved us (1Jn 4: 12.19).
Henri de Lubac wrote: “The world must know: the revelation of Love upsets everything it had conceived of divinity” . To this day we have not finished (and will never finish) drawing all its consequences from the evangelical revolution on God as love. The Holy Spirit – Saint Irenaeus teaches us – continually rejuvenates the treasure of revelation, together with the vessel that contains it which is the tradition of the Church. With his help, let us try to understand what is the consequence still to be discovered and, above all, to be lived about the theological virtue of charity.
There are many treatises on the duty and degrees of God’s love, in other words, on the “God to love” (De diligendo Deo); I don’t know treatises on the “God who loves”! The Bible itself is a treatise on the God who loves; but, despite this, almost always, when we speak of “the love of God”, God is the object, not the subject of the sentence.
Now it is true that to love God with all one’s strength is “the first and greatest commandment”. This is certainly the first thing in the order of the commandments; but the order of the commandments is not the first order, the one that is on top of everything! Before the order of the commandments, there is the order of grace, that is, of God’s gratuitous love. The commandment itself is founded on the gift; the duty to love God is based on being loved by God: “We love because he first loved us”, the evangelist John just reminded us. This is the novelty of the Christian faith with respect to any ethics based on “duty”, or on the “categorical imperative”. We should never lose sight of this.

We believed in God’s love

Opening the door of love to Christ, therefore, means a very specific thing: welcoming the love of God, believing in love. “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us”, writes John in the same context (1 Jn 4:16). Christmas is the manifestation – literally, the epiphany – of God’s goodness and love for the world: “The grace of God has appeared (epephane), saving all”, writes St. Paul; and again: “the kindness and generous love of God our savior appeared“ (Tit 2, 11; 3, 4).
The most important thing to do at Christmas is to receive, full of wonder, the infinite gift of God’s love. When you receive a gift, it is not delicate to present your gift immediately with the other hand, perhaps already prepared in advance. One inevitably gives the impression of wanting to pay off immediately. First, it is necessary to honor the gift that is received and its donor, with amazement and gratitude. After – almost ashamed and with modesty – one can open one’s gift, as if it were nothing compared to what one has received. (Our gift to God is, in reality, less than nothing!). The traditional “act of charity”, at least in the private and personal recitation, should not begin with the words: “My God, I love you with all my heart”, but “My God, I believe with all my heart that you love me”.
What we must do, first of all, at Christmas is to believe in God’s love for us. It seems like an easy thing. Instead it is among the hardest things in the world. Man is more inclined to be active than passive, to do rather than to let himself be done. Unconsciously we do not want to be debtors, but creditors. Yes, we want God’s love, but as a reward, rather than as a gift. In this way, however, a shift and an overturning are insensibly effected: in the first place, on top of everything, in the place of the gift, is put duty, in the place of grace, the law, in the place of faith, works.
“We believed in love!”: This is a cry for which we must gather all our strength. I call it “incredulous faith”: faith that cannot not understand how this can be true, even if it believes it. God – the Eternal, the Being, the All – loves me and cares for me, a little nothing lost in the immensity of the universe and of history! All we can do is to say with the poet: “And it is sweet to shipwreck in such a sea” .
You have to become a child to believe in love. Children believe in love, but not based on reasoning. By instinct, by nature. They are born full of confidence in the love of their parents. They ask parents for the things they need, perhaps even by stamping their feet, but the unspoken assumption is not that they have earned it; rather that they are the children and that one day they will be the heirs of everything. It is above all for this reason that Jesus so often recommends becoming like children to enter his Kingdom.
It is not easy to become a child again. The experience, the bitterness, the disappointments of life make us cautious, prudent, sometimes cynical. We are all a little like Nicodemus. “How can a man – we think – be born again when he is old?” (Jn 3, 4). How can we be reborn, get excited again, be amazed at Christmas like children? But what did Jesus answer Nicodemus? “Amen, amen, I say to you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit” (Jn 3: 5).
Being born again is not the result of human effort and ambition, or excitement of the heart; it is the work of the Holy Spirit. Jesus does not speak here only of baptism; at least not just water baptism. It is a question of a rebirth and a baptism “in the Spirit”, or “from above” (Jn 3: 3), which can be renewed several times throughout one’s life. This was what the apostles and disciples experienced at Pentecost and that we too should desire in order to know to some extent that “new Pentecost” that Pope Saint John XXIII asked God for the whole Church in announcing the Council.
The essential of Pentecost is contained in these words of verse 4 of the second chapter of Acts: “They were all filled with the Holy Spirit”. What does this short sentence that we have heard thousands of times mean? “They were all filled with the Holy Spirit”: okay: but what is the Holy Spirit? It is the love – says theology – with which the Father loves the Son and with which the Son loves the Father. We say more freely: it is life, sweetness, fire, bliss that flow in the Trinity, because love is all these things together and in an infinite degree.
So saying that “all were filled with the Holy Spirit”, is like saying that all were filled with the love of God. They had an overwhelming experience of being loved by God. By dying, Christ had destroyed the dividing wall of sin and now God’s love could eventually pour out on the apostles and disciples, submerging them in an ocean of peace and happiness. By saying that “the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom 5: 5), St. Paul only describes – in a synthetic rather than a narrative form – the event of Pentecost, actualized, for each one, in baptism.
God’s love has an objective aspect that we call sanctifying grace, or infused charity, but it also involves a subjective element, an existential repercussion, as it is in the very nature of love. It was not, as we are inclined to think, something purely objective, or ontological, of which the person concerned has no awareness. The gift of the “new heart” did not happen under total anesthesia, like normal heart transplants! We see it from the sudden change that takes place in the apostles. No more fears, rivalry, shyness; new men, ready to reach out and give their lives for Christ.

“Charity edifies”

The discourse on the theological virtue of love certainly does not end at this point. It would be an unfinished speech, like a protasis not followed by the apodosis. The protasis is: “If God loved us so much …”; the apodosis, or the consequence, is: “we too must love him and love one another”. But we have so many opportunities to talk about the exercise of charity that for once we can leave aside “duty” to deal only with the “gift”. I will therefore limit myself only to a few brief considerations on the social and ecclesial implications of the theological virtue of charity.
It is said of charity that it edifies: “Knowledge inflates with pride, but love builds up” (1 Cor 8: 2). First of all, it builds up the edifice of God which is the Church. “Living the truth in love, we should grow in every way into him who is the head, Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, with the proper functioning of each part, brings about the body’s growth and builds itself up in love” (Eph 4: 15- 16).
Charity is what constitutes the invisible reality of the Church, the societas sanctorum, or communion of saints, as Augustine calls it. It is the reality of the sacrament (the res sacramenti), the meaning of the sign which is the visible Church. “Charity remains”, says Saint Paul (1 Cor 13:13). It is the only one that remains. Once the Scriptures, faith, hope, charisms, ministries and everything else cease, charity remains. Everything will disappear, as when the scaffolding that was used to build is dismantled and the building appears in all its glory.
For a certain time, in ancient times, the whole reality of the Church was designated by the simple term of charity, agape. This immediately brings to mind the famous saying of St. Ignatius of Antioch: “The Church of Rome is that which presides over charity (agape)” . This sentence is usually used in function of the primacy of Rome and the pope. But it affirms not only the fact of primacy (“presides”), but also its nature, or the way of exercising it (“in charity”). This is what the Church of Rome did in its best moments and which it certainly intends to do today, having chosen – also in the new constitution Praedicate Evangelium – fraternal dialogue, synodality and service as a method of governance.
However, charity not only edifies the spiritual society which is the Church, but also civil society. In his work The city of God, Saint Augustine explains that two cities coexist in history: the city of Satan, symbolized by Babylon, and the city of God, symbolized by Jerusalem. What distinguishes the two realities is the different love from which they are moved. The first has as its motive the love of self pushed to the point of contempt of God (amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei), the second has as its motive the love of God pushed to the point of contempt for oneself (amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui) .
The opposition, in this case, is between the love of God and the love of oneself. In another work, however, St. Augustine partially corrects this contrast, or at least balances it. The real contrast that characterizes the two cities is not between the love of God and the love of oneself. These two loves, correctly understood, can – indeed, must – exist together. No, the real contrast is that internal to self-love, and it is the difference between the exclusive love of self – amor privatus, as he calls it – and the love of the common good – amor socialis . It is private love – that is, selfishness – that creates the city of Satan, Babylon, and it is social love that creates the city of God where harmony and peace reign.
Social sentiment was born on the soil irrigated by the Gospel, and it is strange that in modern times this conquest has been used as an argument to be thrown in the face of Christianity. In the early centuries and throughout the Middle Ages, the means par excellence, to act in the social field and to help the poor, was almsgiving. It is a biblical value and always retains its relevance. However, it can no longer be proposed as the ordinary way of practicing social love, or the love of the common good, because it does not safeguard the dignity of the poor and keeps them in their state of dependence.
It is up to politicians and economists to initiate structural processes that reduce the scandalous gap between a small number of the very rich and the endless number of the disinherited of the earth. The ordinary means for Christians is to create the conditions in the heart of man for this to happen. For those involved in the social sphere, it is a question of promoting the so-called “social doctrine of the Church”. For Christian entrepreneurs, for example, it means creating jobs, as the Holy Father reiterated in the meeting in Assisi last September, for young economists who are inspired by his social teaching.

Only love can save us

Before concluding, I would like to mention another beneficial effect of the theological virtue of charity on the society in which we live. Grace, says a famous theological axiom, presupposes nature, it does not destroy it, but perfects it . Applied to the third theological virtue, this means that charity presupposes the capacity and natural predisposition of the human being to love and be loved. This ability can save us today from an ongoing trend that would lead, if not corrected, to a real “dehumanization”.
I took part in a public debate in London a few years ago. The moderator posed a series of questions to a number of theologians, including a professor of theology from the American University of Yale, an Anglican bishop and theologian and myself. The crucial question was the following. After replacing man’s operational abilities with robots, the technique is now on the verge of replacing his mental abilities with artificial intelligence. What remains, therefore, of its own and exclusive to the human being? Is there still reason to consider it separately in the universe? Is it still indispensable, or not quite harmful, to nature?
When it came my turn to answer, with my poor and broken English, I added a simple reflection. We are working, I said, on a computer that thinks: but can we imagine a computer that loves, that is moved by our pains and rejoices in our joys? We can conceive of an artificial intelligence: but can we conceive of an artificial love? Perhaps it is then precisely here that we must place the specific of the human and the inalienable attribute of him. For a biblical believer, there is a reason that explains this fact: it is that we were created in the image of God, and “God is love”! (1 Jn 4, 8).
Despite all our mistakes and misdeeds, we humans are not – and never will be – a nuisance to earth! At the end of his philosophical reflections on the danger of technology for modern man, Martin Heidegger, almost throwing in the towel, exclaimed: “Only a god can save us!” We can paraphrase: only love can save us! God’s love, however, certainly not ours.

“For us as Child was born

Let us now turn our thoughts to Christmas which is upon us. With the coming of Christ, the great river of history has reached a lock and starts again at a higher level. “Old things have passed away, new ones are born” (2 Cor 5:17). The great “gap” that separated God from man, the Creator from the creature is filled. Not for nothing, from then on, human history is divided into “before Christ” and “after Christ”.
There are naive Christmas images, but with a profound meaning. In them, we see the Child Jesus who, barefoot, with snow around his feet and a lantern in his hand, at night, after knocking, is waiting in front of a door. The pagans imagined love as a child to whom they gave the name of Eros. It was a symbolic representation, an idol. We know that love has truly become a child; that it is now a reality, an event, indeed a person. “The love of the Father became flesh”, so a second century author paraphrased the verse of John 1:14. Love really became a child: the baby Jesus.
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, [then] I will enter his house and dine with him, and he with me”(Rev 3:21). Let us open the door of the heart to that Child who knocks. The most beautiful thing we can do at Christmas is not, I said, to offer ourselves something to God, but to welcome with amazement the gift of his Son that God the Father gives to the world.
A legend says that among the shepherds who went to see the Child on Christmas Eve, there was a shepherd boy so poor that he had nothing to offer his Mother, and he stood aside in shame. Everyone competed to give Mary their gift. The Mother could not hold them all, having to hold the Child Jesus in her arms. Seeing the little shepherd next to him with empty hands, she then takes the Child and puts him in his arms. Having nothing was his luck. Let’s make this luck be ours too!
Let us join in the amazement and joy of the liturgy which at Christmas repeats – as an accomplished fact and no longer a simple prophecy – the words of Isaiah (9: 5):
For a child* is born to us, a son is given to us;
upon his shoulder dominion rests.
They name him Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero
Father-Forever, Prince of Peace.

Happy Christmas to you, Holy Father and to you all brothers and sisters!

1.Aristotle, Metaphysics, XII, 7, 1072b
2.Henri de Lubac, Histoire et Esprit, Aubier, Paris 1950, cap. V.
3.Giacomo Leopardi, The Infinite (Transl. by Henry Reed).
4.Ignace of Antioch, Letter to the Romans.
5.Augustine, De civitate Dei, 14,28.
6.Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, 11, 15, 20 (PL 32, 582).
7.Cf. Tommaso d’Aquino, S.Th. I, q. 2. a. 2 ad 1 (gratia [praesupponit] naturam”); I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2 (gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit).
8.Martin Heidegger, Antwort. Martin Heidegger im Gespräch, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 16, Frankfurt 1975.
9.Evangelium Veritatis, 23.

We have taken this verse of the psalm as the guideline of the Advent meditations, meaning by the doors to be opened those of the theological virtues: faith, hope and charity. The temple of Jerusalem – we read in the Acts of the Apostles – had a door called “the Beautiful Gate” (Acts 3: 2). The temple of God which is our heart also has a “beautiful gate”, and it is the door of hope. This is the door that today we want to try to open to Christ who comes.

Waiting for the blessed hope

What is the proper object of “the blessed hope”, which we proclaim to be “waiting for” at every Mass? To realize the absolute novelty brought by Christ in this field, we need to place the Gospel revelation against the background of ancient beliefs about the hereafter.

On this point, even the Old Testament had no answer to give. It is well known that only towards the end of it one can find some explicit statement about a life after death. Before then, the belief of Israel did not differ from that of neighboring peoples, especially those of Mesopotamia. Death ends life forever; we all end up, good and bad, in a kind of dismal “common grave” which elsewhere is called Arallu and in the Bible the Sheol. No different is the dominant belief in the Greco-Roman world contemporary of the New Testament. It calls that sad place of shadows Inferi, or Hades.

The great thing that distinguishes Israel from all other peoples is that, despite everything, it continued to believe in the goodness and love of its God. It did not attribute death, as the Babylonians did, to the envy of the divinity which reserves immortality only to itself, but rather attributed it to man’s sin (Gen 3), or simply to one’s own mortal nature. At times, the biblical man did not keep silent, it is true, in the face of a fate that seemed to make no distinction between righteous and sinners. However, Israel has never come to rebellion. In some biblical prayers, it seems to have gone so far as to desire and glimpse the possibility of a relationship with God beyond death: a being “torn from hell” (Ps 49:16), “to be with God always” (Ps 73, 23 ) and “be satisfied with joy in his presence” (Ps 16, 11).

When, towards the end of the Old Testament, this expectation, matured in the subsoil of the biblical soul, finally comes to light, it does not express itself, in the manner of the Greek philosophers, as the survival of the immortal soul which, freed from the body, returns to its celestial world. In harmony with the biblical conception of man, as an inseparable unity of soul and body, survival consists in the resurrection – body and soul – from death (Dan 12, 2-3; 2 Macc 7, 9).

Jesus suddenly brought this certainty to its noon and – what matters most – he gave it an irrefutable proof by rising from the dead. After him, for the believer, death is no longer a landing, but a take-off!

The most beautiful gift and the most precious legacy that Queen Elizabeth II of England left to her nation and to the world, after 70 years of reign, was her Christian hope in the resurrection of the dead. In the funeral rite, followed live by almost all the powerful of the earth and, on television, by hundreds of millions of people, the following words of Paul were proclaimed, by her express will, in the first reading:

Death is swallowed up in victory.
Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God who gives us the victory
through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Cor 15:54-57).

And in the Gospel, still by her will, the words of Jesus:

In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places…And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be. (Jn 14: 2-3).

Hope, an active virtue

Precisely because we are still immersed in time and space, we lack the categories necessary to represent ourselves in what this “eternal life” with God consists of. It is like trying to explain what light is to someone who was born blind. St. Paul simply says:

It is sown dishonorable; it is raised glorious.
It is sown weak; it is raised powerful.
It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.
(1 Cor 15:43-44).

Some mystics, already in this life, have been given to experience a few drops of the infinite ocean of joy that God keeps prepared for his people, but all unanimously affirm that nothing can be said about it in human words. The first of them is the apostle Paul. He confides to the Corinthians that, fourteen years earlier, he was taken to the “third heaven”, in paradise, and to have heard “unspeakable words that it is not lawful for anyone to pronounce”. (2 Cor 12, 2-4). The memory that that experience left in him is perceptible in what he writes on another occasion:

What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard,
and what has not entered the human heart,
God has prepared for those who love him. (1 Cor 2:9).

But let’s leave aside what will be in the afterlife (about which we can say so little) and come instead to our present life. Reflecting on Christian hope means reflecting on the ultimate meaning of our existence. One thing is common to all, in this regard: the longing for living “well”, for “wellbeing”. However, as soon as you try to understand what is meant by “good”, two classes of people immediately arise: those who think only of the material and personal good and those who also think of the moral good of all, the so-called “common good”.

Regarding the former, the world has not changed much since the time of Isaiah and St. Paul. Both carry the saying that used to run in their time: “Let us eat and drink because tomorrow we will die” (Is 22, 13; 1 Cor 15, 32). More interesting is to try to understand those who propose – at least as an ideal – to “live well” not only materially and individually, but also morally and together with others. There are sites on the internet where elderly people are interviewed about how, while arrived at sunset, they evaluate the life they have lived. They are, in general, men and women who have lived a rich and dignified life, at the service of the family, culture and society, but without any religious reference. It is pathetic to see them trying to make people believe that one is happy to have lived thus. The sadness of having lived – and soon not living anymore! – hidden by their words, screamed from their eyes.

Saint Augustine expressed the core of the problem: “What is the use of living well, if it is not given to live always?” . Before him, Jesus had said: “What good is it for man to gain the whole world if he then loses his life?” (Lk 9:25). This is where the response of theological hope fits – and how it differs. It assures us that God created us for life, not death; that Jesus came to reveal eternal life to us and to give us the guarantee with his resurrection.

One thing must be emphasized in order not to fall into a dangerous misunderstanding. Living “always” is not opposed to living “well”. The hope of eternal life is what makes also present life beautiful, or at least acceptable. Everyone in this life has his or her share of the cross, believers and non-believers. But it is one thing to suffer without knowing for what purpose, and another to suffer knowing that “the sufferings of the present time are not comparable to the future glory that will be revealed in us” (Rom 8:18).

Theological hope has an important role to play in relation to evangelization. One of the determining factors in the rapid spread of the faith, in the early days of Christianity, was the Christian announcement of a life after death that was infinitely fuller and more joyful than the earthly one.

Emperor Hadrian had built spectacular villas for himself in various parts of the world and had prepared what is now Castel Sant’Angelo, a stone’s throw from here, as his mausoleum. Close to his death he wrote a kind of epitaph for his grave. Speaking to his soul, he exhorted it to take a last look at the beauties and the amusements of this world, because – he said – you are about to go down “to colorless, arduous and bare places” . Hades! One can imagine the spiritual shock that must have caused, in an atmosphere like this, the promise of a life that is infinitely fuller and brighter than the one that was left with death. This explains why the idea and symbols of eternal life are so frequent in the Christian burials of the catacombs.

In the First Letter of St. Peter, the activity of the Church externally, that is, the propagation of the message, is presented as “giving reason for hope”: “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence” (1Pt 3: 15-16). Reading what happened after Easter, one has the clear feeling that the Church is born from a surge of “a living hope” (1Pt 1:3) and with this hope they set out to conquer the world. Even today we need a regeneration of hope if we want to undertake a new evangelization. Nothing is done without hope. Men go where there is an air of hope and flee where they do not feel its presence. Hope is what gives young people the courage to form a family or to follow a religious and priestly vocation, what keeps them away from drugs and other similar surrender to despair.
The letter to the Hebrews compares hope to an anchor: “This we have as an anchor of the soul, sure and firm” (Heb 6, 18-19). Sure and firm because thrown into eternity. But we have another image of hope, in a certain sense opposite: the sail. If the anchor is what gives the boat safety and keeps it steady between the swaying of the sea, the sail is what makes it walk, and advance in the sea. Both of these things does hope with the boat of the Church.
Compared to the past, we are today in an better situation with respect to hope. We no longer have to spend our time defending Christian hope from external attacks; we can therefore do the most useful and fruitful thing which is to proclaim it, to offer it and to radiate it in the world. Making not so much an apologetic as a kerygmatic discourse on hope.
Let’s take a look at what has happened with regard to Christian hope for over a century now. At first there was the frontal attack on it by men like Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche. Christian hope was, in many cases, the direct target of their critique. Eternal life, hereafter, paradise: all these things were seen as the illusory projection of man’s unsatisfied desires and needs in this world, as a “wasting in heaven the treasures destined for the earth”. Christians tried to defend the content of Christian hope, often with ill-concealed unease. Christian hope was “in the minority”. Eternal life was rarely spoken of and preached.
After having demolished Christian hope, however, the Marxist culture was not slow to realize that human persons could not be left without hope. And they invented the “Hope Principle” . With it, Marxist culture did not claim to have demolished Christian hope, but, worse, to have gone beyond it and to be its legitimate heir. For the author of the “Principle of hope” (principle, mind you, not virtue) it is certain that hope is vital for man. It is real and has an outlet which is “the revelation of the hidden man”, that is, of the still latent possibilities of humanity. The manifestation of the Son of man, Christ, is replaced by the manifestation of the hidden man, the parousia is replaced by utopia.
For a couple of decades, I remember, there was a lot of talk on the topic in universities and to many Christians thinkers it seemed very encouraging that there was someone on the other side who accepted to take hope seriously and to establish a dialogue on it. Especially since the reversal was so subtle and the language often similar. The heavenly homeland became the “homeland of identity”; not the place where man finally sees, face to face, God, but where he sees the real man, that in which perfect identity between what human being can be and what it is is achieved. The so-called “theology of hope” was born in response to this challenge, accepting, unfortunately, at times, its approach. The thing that is least perceived in all these writings is precisely what Peter calls “living hope” (1 Pt, 1,3), the thrill of hope, that is, life not ideology.
Now, I said, the situation has partly changed. The task we have before us, with regard to hope, is no longer that of defending it and justifying it philosophically and theologically, but of announcing it, of showing it and of giving it to a world that has lost the sense of hope and is sinking more and more into pessimism and nihilism, the true “black hole” of the universe.

Gaudium et spes

One way of making hope active and contagious is that formulated by St. Paul when he says that “charity hopes all” (1 Cor 13: 7). This is true not only for the individual, but also for the Church as a whole. The Church hopes for everything, believes everything, endures everything. It cannot limit itself to denouncing the possibilities of evil that exist in the world and in society. We must certainly not neglect the fear of punishment and hell and stop warning people of the possibility of harm that an action or situation entails, such as wounds caused to the environment. Experience, however, shows that more is achieved positively, by insisting on the possibilities of good; in evangelical terms, by preaching mercy. Perhaps the modern world has never shown itself so well disposed towards the Church and so interested in her message, as in the years of the Vatican Council. And the main reason is that the Council gave hope.
But in this way, do we not expose ourselves – some say – to be disappointed and to appear naive? This is the great temptation against hope, suggested by human prudence, or by the fear of being proven wrong by the facts and it is what is happening in part also towards the Council. As if daring to speak of “joy and hope” (gaudium et spes) had been a naivety of which we should even be a little ashamed. This is what many thought of Pope John XXIII at his announcement of the Council.
We must resume the movement of hope initiated by the Council. Eternity is a very large measure; it allows us to hope for everyone, not to abandon anyone without hope. The Apostle gave the Christians of Rome the command to abound in hope. “May the God of hope – he wrote – fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Rom 15:13).
The Church cannot give the world a better gift than to give it hope; not human, ephemeral, economic or political hopes, over which she has no specific competence, but pure and simple hope, the one that also, without knowing it, has eternity as its horizon and as guarantor Jesus Christ and his resurrection. It will then be this theological hope that will support all other legitimate human hopes. Anyone who has seen a doctor visit a seriously ill person knows that the greatest relief that he can provide, best of all medicines, is to say to him: “The doctor hopes; he has good hopes for you! ”.
Hope, understood in this way, transforms everything it touches. Its effect is beautifully described in this passage from Isaiah:
Though young men faint and grow weary,
and youths stagger and fall,
They that hope in the LORD will renew their strength,
they will soar on eagles’ wings;
They will run and not grow weary,
walk and not grow faint. (Is 40:30-31)

God does not promise to remove the reasons for weariness and exhaustion, but he gives hope. The situation remains in itself what it was, but hope gives the strength to rise above it. In the Apocalypse we read that
When the dragon saw that it had been thrown down to the earth, it pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. But the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle, so that she could fly to her place in the desert (Rev 12:13-14).
The image of the eagle’s wings is clearly inspired by the text of Isaiah. It is therefore said that the great wings of hope have been given to the whole Church, so that with them it can, every time, escape the attacks of evil, overcome difficulties with enthusiasm.

“Get up and walk!”

The door of the temple called “the beautiful gate” is known for the miracle that occurred near it. A cripple lay before it begging for alms. One day Peter and John passed by and we know what happened. The cripple, healed, jumped to his feet and finally, after many years he had been lying there abandoned, he too went through that door and entered the temple “jumping and praising God” (Acts 3: 1-9).
Something similar could also happen to us with regard to hope. We too often find ourselves, spiritually, in the position of the cripple on the threshold of the temple: inert, lukewarm, as if paralyzed in the face of difficulties. But here the divine hope passes by us, carried by the word of God, and says to us too, like Peter to the cripple: “Get up and walk!” And we jump to our feet and finally enter into the heart of the Church, ready to take on, once again and joyfully, tasks and responsibilities. They are the daily miracles of hope. She is truly a great miracle worker; she puts thousands of cripples back on their feet, thousands of times.
In addition to evangelization, hope helps us on our personal journey of sanctification. It becomes, in those who exercise it, the principle of spiritual progress. It allows you to always discover new “possibilities for good”, always something that can be done. It does not let us settle down in lukewarmness and apathy. When you are tempted to say to yourself: “There is nothing more to be done”, hope comes forward and tells you: “Pray!”. You answer: “But I prayed already!” and she: “Pray again!”. And even when the situation should become extremely hard and such that it seems that there is nothing more to be done, hope still points you to a task: to endure until the end and not lose patience, uniting yourself with Christ on the cross. The Apostle, we have heard, recommends “abounding in hope”, but he immediately adds how this becomes possible: “by virtue of the Holy Spirit”. Not by our efforts.
Christmas can be the occasion for a leap of hope. The great modern poet of the theological virtues, Charles Péguy, wrote that Faith, Hope and Charity are three sisters, two adults and a little girl. They go down the street holding hands: the two big ones, Faith and Charity, on the sides and the little girl Hope in the center. Everyone, seeing them, thinks that it is the two big ones that drag the little one in the center. They are wrong! It is she who drags everything . Because if hope fails, everything stops.
If we want to give a proper name to this little girl, we can only call her Mary, the one who down here – says the other great poet of theological virtues, Dante Alighieri – “to mortal men” is ” of hope a living spring ” .

1.Augustine, On the Gospel of John, 45, 2 (Quid prodest bene vivere si non datur semper vivere?).
2.Cit. in Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian.
3.Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 3 vol. Berlin 1954–1959.
4.Ch. Péguy, Le porche de la deuxième vertu.
5.Paradise, XXXIII.

In the spiritual interpretation of the Fathers and the liturgy, the gates spoken of in the psalm are those of the human heart: “Blessed is the one at whose door Christ knocks”, commented Saint Ambrose. “Our door is faith … If you want to lift up the gates of your faith, the king of glory will come to you” . St. John Paul II made the words of the psalm the manifesto of his pontificate. “Open wide the doors to Christ!”, he shouted to the world, on the day of the inauguration of his ministry.
The great door that man can open or close to Christ is one and is called freedom. However, it opens in three different ways, or according to three different types of decisions that we can consider as three doors: faith, hope and charity. These are all special doors: they open from inside and outside at the same time: with two keys, one of which one is in the hand of man, the other in the hand of God. Man cannot open them without the help of God and God does not want to open them without the cooperation of man.

Christ, origin and fulfillment of faith

Let us therefore begin our reflection from the first of the three doors: faith. God – we read in the Acts of the Apostles – ” had opened the door of faith to the gentiles” (Acts 14:27). God opens the door of faith in that he gives the possibility of believing by sending those who preach the good news; man opens the door of faith by accepting this possibility.
With the coming of Christ, there is a leap in quality with regard to faith. Not in the nature of it, but in its content. Now it is no longer a question of a generic faith in God, but of faith in Christ born, died and risen for us. The Letter to the Hebrews makes a long list of believers: “By faith Abel … By faith Abraham … By faith Isaac … By faith Jacob … By faith Moses …” But he concludes by saying: ” Yet all these, though approved because of their faith, did not receive what had been promised. “(Heb 11, 39). What was missing? Jesus was missing who – as the same Letter says – is ” the leader and perfecter of faith. ” (Heb 12: 2).
The Christian faith therefore does not consist only in believing in God; it consists in believing also in the one whom God has sent. When, before performing a miracle, Jesus asks: “Do you believe?” and, after having accomplished it, he affirms: “Your faith has saved you”, he does not refer to a generic faith in God (this was taken for granted in every Israelite); it refers to faith in him, in the divine power granted to him.
This is now faith that justifies the wicked, faith that gives birth to new life. It is placed at the end of a process of which, in the tenth chapter of the Letter to the Romans, St. Paul traces, almost visually, the various phases, drawing them on the map of the human body. Everything begins, he says, from the ears, from hearing the proclamation of the Gospel: “Faith comes from listening”, fides ex auditu. From the ears, the movement passes to the heart, where the fundamental decision is made: corde creditur, “with the heart one believes”. From the heart, the movement goes back to the mouth: “with the mouth one makes the profession of faith”: ore fit confessio.
The process does not end there, but – from the ears, the heart and the mouth – it passes to the hands. Yes, because “faith works though love “, says the Apostle (Gal 5: 6). Saint James can feel comfortable. There is also room for “works”: not before, however, but after (logically if not chronologically) faith. “One does not arrive at faith – says Saint Gregory the Great – starting from the virtues, but to the virtues starting from faith” .
At this point, a very topical question arises. If faith that saves is faith in Christ, what to think of all those who have no chance of believing in him? We live in a pluralistic society, even religiously. Our theologies – Eastern and Western, Catholic and Protestant alike – developed in a world where practically only Christianity existed. It was, however, aware of the existence of other religions, but they were considered false from the start, or were not taken into consideration at all. Apart from the different way of understanding the Church, all Christians shared the traditional axiom: ” There is no salvation outside the Church “: Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus.

Today this is no longer the case. For some time there has been a dialogue between religions, based on mutual respect and recognition of the values present in each of them. In the Catholic Church, the starting point was the declaration “Nostra aetate” of the Second Vatican Council, but a similar orientation is shared by all the historical Christian Churches. With this recognition, the conviction has taken ground that even people outside the Church can be saved.

Is it possible, in this new perspective, to maintain the role until now attributed to “explicit” faith in Christ? Wouldn’t the ancient axiom: “outside the Church there is no salvation” end up surviving, in this case, in the axiom: “outside faith there is no salvation”? In some Christian circles, the latter is, in fact, the dominant doctrine and it is what motivates missionary commitment. In this way, however, salvation is limited from the start to a very small minority of people.

This cannot leave us satisfied and it does wrong to Christ, depriving him of a large part of humanity. One cannot believe that Jesus is God, and then limit his actual relevance to a single narrow sector of it. Jesus is “the savior of the world” (Jn 4:42); the Father sent the Son “that the world may be saved through him” (Jn 3:17): the world, not some few people in the world!

Let us try to find an answer in Scripture. It affirms that whoever has not known Christ, but acts on the basis of his own conscience (Rm 2: 14-15) and does good to his neighbor (Mt 25: 3 ff.) Is acceptable to God. In the Acts of the Apostles we hear, from the mouth of Peter, this solemn declaration: “In truth, I see that God shows no partiality. Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him” (Acts 10: 34-35).
Even adherents to other religions generally believe that “God exists and rewards those who seek him” (Heb 11: 6); therefore, they realize what Scripture considers the fundamental and common datum of every faith. This applies, of course, in a very special way, to the Jewish brothers who believe in the same God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that we Christians believe.
The main reason for our optimism is not based, however, on the good that adherents to other religions are able to do, but on the “God’s varied grace” (1Pt 4: 10). Sometimes I feel the need to offer the sacrifice of the Mass precisely in the name of all those who are saved through Christ, but do not know it and cannot thank him. The liturgy also urges us to do so. In Eucharistic Prayer IV, to the prayer for the pope, the bishop and the faithful, a prayer is added “for all who seek you with a sincere heart”.

God has far more ways to save than we can think of. He has established “channels” of his grace, but he has not bound himself to them. One of these “extraordinary” means of salvation is suffering. After Christ has taken it upon himself and redeemed it, it is also, in some way, a universal sacrament of salvation. He who descended into the waters of the Jordan sanctifying them for every baptism, he also descended into the waters of tribulation and death, making them a potential instrument of salvation. Mysteriously, every suffering – not only that of believers – accomplishes, in some way, “what is lacking* in the afflictions of Christ ” (Col 1:24). The Church celebrates the feast of the Holy Innocents; neither they did know they were suffering for Christ!
We believe that all those who are saved are saved by the merits of Christ: “There is no salvation through anyone else, nor is there any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved.” (Acts 4:12). However, it is one thing to affirm the universal need of Christ for salvation and another thing to affirm the universal necessity of faith in Christ for salvation.
Is it superfluous, then, to continue proclaiming the Gospel to every creature? Far from it! It is the reason that must change, not the fact. We must continue to proclaim Christ; not so much for a negative reason – otherwise the world will be condemned – as for a positive reason: for the infinite gift that Jesus represents for every human being. Interreligious dialogue is not opposed to evangelization, but it determines its style. This dialogue – wrote Saint John Paul II, in his encyclical “Redemptoris mission” – “is part of the evangelizing mission of the Church”.
Christ’s mandate: “Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature” (Mk 16:15) and “Make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:19) retains its perennial validity, but must be understood in its historical context. These are words to refer to time they were written, when “the whole world” and “all peoples” was a way of saying that Jesus’ message was not intended only for Israel, but also for the rest of the world. They are always valid for everyone, but for those who already belong to a religion, it takes respect, patience and love. Francis of Assisi had understood this and put it into practice. He envisaged two ways of going towards “the Saracens and the other infidels”. He writes in his Rule:
The brothers, however, who go among the Saracens and other infidels may conduct themselves in two ways spiritually among them. One way is not to make disputes or contentions; but let them be “subject to every human creature for God’s sake,” yet confessing themselves to be Christians. The other way is that when they see it is pleasing to God, they announce the Word of God, that they may believe in Almighty God,—Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost, the Creator of all, our Lord the Redeemer and Saviour the Son, and that they should be baptized and be made Christians .

The challenge of science

With this open heart, let us now return to our Christian faith. The great challenge that faith has to face in our age does not come so much from philosophy, as in the past, but from science. It was sensational news a few months ago. A telescope launched into space on December 25, 2021 and positioned one and a half million kilometers from the earth, sent extraordinary images of the universe on July 12 of the current year that sent the scientific world into raptures.
“The new telescope – we read in the news – has opened a new window on the cosmos, able to catapult us back in time, until shortly after the initial Big Bang of the world. It is the most detailed view of the early universe ever obtained. It represents the first taste of a new and revolutionary astronomy that will reveal the universe as we have never seen it before “.
We would be foolish and ungrateful if we did not participate in the just pride of humanity for this as for any other scientific discovery. If faith – as well as from listening – is born, as has been said, from amazement, these scientific discoveries should not diminish the possibility of believing, but increase it. If he lived today, the psalmist would sing with even more enthusiasm: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the firmament proclaims the works of his hands” (Ps 19: 2) and Francis of Assisi: “Praised be you, my Lord, with all your creatures ”.
God wanted to give us a tangible sign of his infinite greatness with the immensity of the universe and a sign of his “elusiveness” with the smallest particle of matter which, even once reached – assures physics – maintains its “uncertainty ” . The cosmos did not make itself. It is the quality of being, not the quantity that decides; and the quality of creation is to be… created! Billions of galaxies, billions of billions of light years away, do not change this quality.
We make these reflections on faith and science not to convince non-believing scientists (none of them are here to hear or read these words), but to confirm us believers in our faith and not be disturbed by the clamor of contrary voices. It is the same purpose for which Saint Luke tells the “illustrious Theophilus” that he wrote his Gospel: “so that you may realize the certainty of the teachings you have received ” (Lk 1: 4).
Faced with the unfolding before our eyes of the boundless dimensions of the universe, the greatest act of faith for us Christians is not to believe that all this was created by God, but to believe that “all things were created through Chris and for him. “(Col 1:16), that “without him nothing came to be” (Jn 1: 3). The Christian has a much more convincing proof of God than that obtained from the cosmos: the person and life of Jesus Christ.
Believers are not ostriches. We do not hide our heads in the sand so as not to see. We share with each person the bewilderment in front of the many mysteries and contradictions of the universe: of natural evolution, of history, of the Bible itself … We are however able to overcome the bewilderment with a certainty stronger than all uncertainties: the credibility of the person of Christ, of his life and of his word. Full and joyful certainty does not come before, but after having believed.

The righteous shall live by faith

Faith is the only criterion capable of making us relate correctly, not only to science, but also to history. In speaking of the faith that justifies, St. Paul quotes the famous oracle of Habakkuk: “The righteous one will live by faith” (Ab 2: 4). What does God mean by that prophetic word, since it is God himself who utters it?
The message opens with a lament from the prophet, for the defeat of justice and because God seems impassive to witness violence and oppression from above. God replies that all of this is about to end because a new scourge will soon arrive – the Chaldeans – which will wipe out everything and everyone. The prophet rebels against this solution. Is this God’s answer? An oppression that takes the place of another?
But right here God was waiting for the prophet: “See, the rash have no integrity; the righteous one will live by faith (Ab 2, 2-4). The prophet is asked to take the leap of faith. God does not solve the enigma of history, but asks us to trust him and his justice, despite everything. The solution lies not in the cessation of the trial, but in the increase of faith.
History is a continuous struggle between good and evil, of the wicked who triumph and the righteous who suffer. The stable victory of good over evil is not to be found in history itself, but beyond it. Let us leave behind all forms of millennialism. However, God is so sovereign and in control of events that even the agitation of the wicked serves his mysterious plans. Truly, God writes straight with crooked lines! Situations can get out of hand to men, but not to God.
Habakkuk’s message is singularly relevant for us today. Humanity experienced in the last years of the last century the liberation from the oppressive power of the communist totalitarian systems. But we didn’t have time to breathe a sigh of relief that other injustices and violence have arisen in the world. There were those who, at the end of the “cold war”, had naively believed that the triumph of democracy would now definitively close the cycle of great upheavals and that history would continue its course without major shocks. Exactly without more “history”. This thesis was soon pitifully disproved by events, with the appearance of other dictatorships and the outbreak of other wars, starting with the “Gulf” one, up to this year’s unfortunate one in Ukraine.
In this situation, the heartfelt question of the prophet is stirred in us too: “Lord, until when? You with eyes so pure that you cannot see evil! Why so much violence, so many human bodies skeletonized by hunger, so much cruelty in the world, without you intervening? ” God’s answer is still the same: those who do not have a right heart with God succumb to pessimism and are scandalized, while the just will live by faith and find the answer in his faith. He will understand what Jesus meant when, before Pilate, he said: “My kingdom does not belong to this world” (Jn 18:36).
But let’s put it well in our heads and remember it, if necessary, to the world: God is just and holy; he will not allow evil to have the last word and evildoers get away with it. There will be a judgment at the conclusion of the story, “a written book will be opened, in which everything is contained and by which the world will be judged”: Liber scriptus proferetur – in quo totum continetur – unde mundus judicetur.
A first judgment, imperfect but within the reach of all, believers and non-believers, is already in place now, moreover, in history. The benefactors of humanity who have worked for the true good of their country and for world peace are remembered with honor and blessing from generation to generation; the name of tyrants and evildoers continues over the centuries to be accompanied by ignominy and reprobation. Jesus has forever reversed the roles. “Winner because victim”, thus St. Augustine defines Christ: Victor quia victima. In the light of eternity – and also of history – it is not the executioners who are the real winners, but their victims.
What the Church can do, in order not to passively witness the unfolding of history, is to take sides against oppression and arrogance and always put herself, “in time and out of time”, on the side of the poor, the weak, the victims, those who bear the brunt of every misfortune and every war.
What the Church can do is also removing one of the factors that has always fomented conflicts and that is the rivalry between religions, the notorious “religious wars”. A moral thrust can come from the understanding and loyal collaboration between the great religions that imprints on history that new course we in vain expect from political powers. In this sense must be seen the usefulness of the initiatives for a constructive dialogue between religions initiated by saint John Paul II and accelerated today by the current Supreme Pontiff.
Faith is the weapon of the Church. Even the Church, like the righteous of Habakkuk, “lives by her faith”. In Italian, the word “faith” has come to mean a second thing, namely the wedding ring that the spouses exchange on their wedding day. Faith, the theological virtue, is the wedding ring of the Bride of Christ! Rome has long ceased to be caput mundi, capital of the world, but it must remain caput fidei, capital of faith. Not only of right faith, that is, of orthodoxy, but also of the intensity of believing.
What the faithful immediately grasp in a priest and a pastor is if he “believes in it”, if he believes in what he says and in what he celebrates. Today there is a lot of use of wireless transmission (WiFi, we say in English). Faith too is better transmitted in this way: without strings, without many words and arguments, but through a current of grace that is established between two people.
The greatest act of faith that the Church can do – after having prayed and done everything possible to avoid or stop conflicts – is to surrender to God with an act of total trust and serene abandonment, repeating with the Apostle: ” I know in whom I have placed my trust! ”: Scio cui credidi (2 Tim 1:12). God never draws back to make those who throw themselves into his arms fall into the void.
Let us go therefore to meet Christ who comes, with an act of faith which is also a promise of God and therefore a prophecy: “The world is in the hands of God and when, misusing his freedom, man has hit the bottom, he will intervene to save him”. Yes, he will intervene! This is why he came into the world two thousand twenty-two years ago.

1.Ambrose of Milan, Commentary to Psalm 118, XII, 14.
2.Gregory the Great, Hom. on Ezechiel, II, 7 (PL 76, 1018).
3.Rule without a Bull, XVI.
4.Sequence Dies irae.

In the Bible, the expression “born of a woman” underscores that the individual belongs to the human condition which comprises both weakness and mortality. To appreciate the significance of those words, we have only to remove them from the text. Without them, what would Christ be – a heavenly, disembodied illusion. The angel Gabriel “was sent” by God but returned to heaven in the same form that he had when he came down from heaven. It is the woman, Mary, who “anchored” the Son of God forever to humanity and history.

That is how the Fathers of the Church understood Paul’s words in arguing against the Gnostic-Docetist heresy. They correctly emphasized the parallelism that exists between the expression “born of a woman” and the expression Paul uses in Roman 1:3: “from the seed of David, according to the flesh.” Ignatius of Antioch uses a startling expression when he says that Jesus “was [born] of Mary and of God,” almost as we might say that someone is the child of so-and-so and so-and-so. The fact is that, in the entire universe, Mary is the only person who can address Jesus in the same way that the heavenly Father does: “You are my son, I have begotten you.”

Tertullian points out that the Apostle does not say “factum per mulierem,” but “factum ex muliere,” that is, born of a woman, not through a woman. His use of the word stemmed from the fact that the Docetist heresy gradually evolved and took on a less radical form. It claimed that Jesus’ flesh was of heavenly, not earthly origin, only passing through Mary as if through a channel, being a guest rather than a child of Mary. Saint Leo the Great placed the Pauline expression “born of woman” at the heart of the Christological dogma, writing in his Tome to Flavian that Christ is man because he was “born of a woman and born under the Law’… Birth in the flesh is clear proof of his human nature.”

Concerning the Pauline expression “born of a woman”, also at work is the great exegetical principle formulated by St. Gregory the Great, namely that “Scripture grows with the persons reading.” Already Saint Irenaeus read Galatians 4:2, “born of a woman” in light of Genesis 3:15, “I will place enmity between you and the woman.” Mary appears as the woman who is the aggregate of Eve, mother of all the living! We are not talking about a minor representation that appears in a single scene and then vanishes into thin air. It is the product of a Biblical tradition that spans the entire Bible from one end to the other. It begins with the woman called the “daughter of Zion” who personifies the entire People of Israel and ends with the woman “clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet” representing the Church in the Book of Revelation (Rv 12:1).

“Woman” is the term Jesus used to address his mother both at Cana and as she stood beneath the cross. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to fail to see the link in John’s way of thinking between the two women: the symbolic woman who is the Church and the actual woman who is Mary. This link was not only acknowledged in Lumen gentium of Vatican II but also explains why Mary is dealt with within the Constitution on the Church.

Christ must be born of the Church

For some time there has been a lot of discussion regarding the dignity of women. Saint John Paul II wrote an Apostolic Letter on that theme, Mulieris dignitatem. However much dignity we human creatures can attribute to women, it would still be infinitesimal compared with what God did in choosing a woman to be the mother of his Son who became human. “Even if we possessed as many tongues as there are blades of grass.”
Much has been done in recent times to increase the presence of women in the decision-making process of the Church, and more, perhaps, needs to be done. We need not delve into that here. Instead, we have to turn our attention to another area where the distinction between men and women is immaterial because the woman we are talking about represents the entire Church, that is, men and women alike.

In short, this is the heart of the matter: Jesus who was once physically and corporally born of Mary must now be born spiritually of the Church and of each believer. There is an exegetical tradition whose initial nucleus dates back to Origen which is crystallized in this adage: “Mary, or the Church, or the soul.” Let us listen to how one medieval author, Isaac of Stella, describes this teaching:

In the inspired Scriptures, what is said in a universal sense of the virgin mother, the Church, is understood in an individual sense of the Virgin Mary, and what is said in a particular sense of the virgin mother Mary is rightly understood in a general sense of the virgin mother, the Church… In a way, every Christian is also believed to be a bride of God’s Word, a mother of Christ, his daughter, and sister, at once virginal and fruitful. These words are used in a universal sense of the Church, in a special sense of Mary, in a particular sense of the individual Christian.

Let us begin with the ecclesial application. If in “the fullest sense” (the so-called sensus plenior), the woman in Scripture suggests the Church, then the affirmation that Jesus was born of a woman implies that today, he must be born of the Church!

Among Orthodox Christians, there is a very common icon called the Panhagia, that is, the Most Holy. It depicts Mary standing at full stature. On her breast, as if bursting from within, is a medallion showing the child Jesus who bears all the majesty of an adult. The devotee’s gaze is drawn to the child, even before the mother. With her arms outstretched, she even seems to be inviting us to look at him and make room for him. That is how the Church should be. Whoever sees her ought not to stop there, but should look to Jesus. This is the struggle against the Church becoming self-referential, a theme often underscored by the last two Supreme Pontiffs, Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis.

The author Franz Kafka tells a story that has powerful religious symbolism in this regard. It is entitled, “An Imperial Message.” It speaks about a king who, on his deathbed, calls a subject to his side and whispers a message into the subject’s ear. That message is so important that the king makes him repeat it into his ear. Then he nods to the messenger who sets out on a journey. Let us listen to the rest of the story directly from the author, written in a dreamlike, almost nightmarish style, typical of this writer:

The messenger set out at once; a strong, an indefatigable man; thrusting forward now this arm, now the other, he cleared a path through the crowd; every time he meets resistance he points to his breast, which bears the sign of the sun; and he moves forward easily, like no other. But the crowds are so vast; their dwellings know no bounds. If open country stretched before him, how he would fly, and indeed you might soon hear the magnificent knocking of his fists on your door. But instead, how uselessly he toils; he is still forcing his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; never will he overcome them; and were he to succeed at this, nothing would be gained: he would have to fight his way down the steps; and were he to succeed at this, nothing would be gained: he would have to cross the courtyard and, after the courtyard, the second enclosing outer palace, and again stairways and courtyards, and again a palace, and so on through thousands of years; and if he were to burst out at last through the outermost gate—but it can never, never happen—before him still lies the royal capital, the middle of the world, piled high in its sediment. Nobody reaches through here, least of all with a message from one who is dead. You, however, sit at your window and dream of the message when evening comes.

Reading this account, you cannot help but think of Christ who, before departing this world, entrusted to the Church the message: “Go throughout the world; proclaim the good news to every creature” (Mk 16:15). And you also cannot help but think of the countless people who stand at the window and dream, without knowing it, of a message such as hers.

We must do everything possible to make sure that the Church never becomes as complicated and cluttered as the castle described by Kafka so that the message can be spread as freely and joyfully as when the journey first began. We know what the “walls of division” are that can restrain the messenger. First of all, they include the walls that keep the various Christian churches separated from each other; then there is the excess bureaucracy, the remnants of meaningless ceremonials, including vestments, former laws, and disputes that by now have become nothing more than debris.

Something similar happens with older buildings. Over centuries, to adapt to emerging needs, people install partitions, stairways, rooms, cubicles, and storage space under the stairs. The time comes when you realize that all these adaptations no longer correspond to the current needs, and have, on the contrary, become obstacles. That is when you need the courage to tear them down and restore the building to its original simplicity and design, in keeping with its renewed purpose.

I shared that story and its application to the Church in the homily I gave in St. Peter’s on Good Friday of 2013, during the first year of the pontificate of the current Supreme Pontiff. If I have allowed myself to repeat these thoughts it is only to thank God for the steps forward that the Church, in the meantime, has made in that direction, to “to reach out to the existential peripheries of the world”, bringing them the message of Christ.

Christ must be born of the individual

It remains for us now to reflect on something that concerns all of us without distinction, something that touches each of us very personally: Christ being born of the believer. Saint Maximus the Confessor wrote: “Christ is always mystically born in the individual, taking flesh from those who are saved, making the person who generates him a virgin mother.”
In the Gospel Jesus explains to us how to become a mother of Christ, He says that it happens by listening to the Word and putting it into practice (see Lk 8:21). It is important to note that two things need to take place. Even Mary became the mother of Christ through these two processes: first, by conceiving him, and then by giving birth to him.
There are two types of pregnancy loss or termination. The first, age-old and well-known, is abortion. It happens when someone conceives a life but does not give birth because the fetus died either due to a natural cause or human sin. Until more recently this was the only known condition leading to pregnancy loss. Nowadays we know of a second, almost reverse, process whereby someone gives birth to a child while by-passing conception. This occurs when a child is conceived in a test tube and then introduced into a woman’s womb, or also when a surrogate uterus is loaned, perhaps for a fee, to play host to a human life conceived elsewhere. In this case, what the woman gives birth to does not come from her; it is not conceived “first in the heart and then in the body,” as Augustine said of Mary.
Unfortunately, these two sorry possibilities also exist on the spiritual level. The person who conceives Jesus without giving birth to him is the person who welcomes the Word without putting it into practice. Repeatedly making resolutions to change and then systematically forgetting them or abandoning them halfway is a type of ongoing spiritual abortion. Saint James says that they are like people who fleetingly glance at themselves in a mirror and then walk away forgetting what they looked like (see Jas 1:23-24).
On the contrary, people who give birth to Christ without having conceived him are those who do many things – even good things –, but their deeds are not done out of the kindness of their heart or for the love for God or with the right intention. Rather, they act out of habit or hypocrisy, seeking their own glory or self-interest, or simply for the satisfaction of having done something. Our deeds are “good” only if they come from the heart if they are conceived for the love of God and in faith. In other words, if the intention that guides us is right, or if we at least try to make it right.
Saint Francis of Assisi said something that sums up well what I am trying to highlight. He said:
We are mothers of Christ when, through divine love and pure and sincere conscience, we bear him in our heart and in our body; we give birth to him by means of holy deeds that need to shine before others as an example.
This means that we conceive Christ when we love him with heartfelt sincerity and a right conscience; we give birth to him when we do good deeds that reveal Christ to the world and give glory to the Father in heaven (see Mt 5:16). Saint Bonaventure developed this thought of the Seraphic Father in a work entitled, “The five feasts of the child Jesus.” These are the feasts according to Bonaventure: the conception, the birth, the circumcision, the Epiphany, and the Presentation in the Temple. The saint explains how to celebrate each of these feasts spiritually in your own life. I will limit myself to what he says about the first two feasts: the conception and the birth.
When a person feels dissatisfied with the life they are leading and, moved by holy inspiration and on fire with holy determination, they finally make a resolute break from their old habits and flaws, in that person, according to Saint Bonaventure, Jesus is conceived. Having been fertilized with the grace of the Holy Spirit, conception takes place when they resolve to lead a new life.
Once conceived, the blessed Son of God is born in that person’s heart if after a sound discernment, asking for spiritual advice and for God’s help, the resolution that had been churning inside the person for some time but had always been put off for fear of not succeeding, is resolutely put into practice.
We must insist on one thing, however: the determination or resolution to lead a new life must be translated without delay into concrete action, into a change in the way we live and in our habits, possibly even in external and visible ways. If our resolution is not acted upon, Jesus is conceived, but not brought to birth. It will be one of many spiritual abortions. The “second feast” of the child Jesus, namely Christmas, will never be celebrated! It will be but one more of the many postponements that have perhaps peppered our life.
A small change to start with could be to make a little silence around us and within us. “How good it would be” – said the Holy Father in the last General Audience – if each one of us, following the example of Saint Joseph, were able to recover this contemplative dimension of life, opened wide in silence”. An ancient antiphon of Christmas time said that the Word of God descended from heaven “dum medium silentium tenerent omnia”: “while all around was silence”.
First of all, let’s try to silence the noise that is within us, the processes that are always going on in our minds, about people and facts, from which we always emerge as winners. Let us transform ourselves sometimes from accusers into defenders of the brothers, thinking about how many things others could blame us. In canonical trials – at least in the past – after the accusation, the judge pronounced the formula: “Audiatur et altera pars”: Now let us listen to the opposite part. When we catch ourselves judging someone, let us peremptorily repeat that formula to ourselves: Audiatur et altera pars! Try putting yourself in the brother’s shoes!
Let us return with our thoughts to Mary. Tolstoy makes an observation on the pregnant woman that can help us understand and imitate the Virgin in these last days of Advent. The look of the expectant woman, he says, has a strange sweetness and is turned more inside than outside of herself, because inside is the most beautiful reality in the world for her. So it was Mary’s gaze that bore the creator of the universe in her womb. Let us imitate her by carving out for ourselves moments of true recollection to make Jesus be born in our hearts. The best response to secularized culture’s attempt to erase Christmas from society is to interiorize it and bring it back to its essence.
The year celebrating the seventh centenary of Dante Alighieri’s death is coming to a close. Let us end by making our own the wonderful prayer to the Virgin from the last canto of his Paradiso. He, too, like Paul and John, simply refer to Mary as the Lady, that is the Woman:
O Virgin Mother, Daughter of your Son,
humbler and loftier than any creature,
eternal counsel’s predetermined goal

thou are the one that such nobility
didst lend to human nature, that its Maker
scorned not to make Himself what He had made.

Within thy womb rekindled was the Love,
through whose warm influence in the eternal Peace
this Flower hath blossomed this. Here unto us

thou are a noonday torch of Charity;
and down below ’mong mortal men,
thou art a living fount of Hope. Lady, so great

thou are, and hast such worth, that one who longs
for Grace, and unto thee hath not recourse,
wingless would wish to have his longing fly.

Not only doth thy Kindliness give help
to him that asketh it, but many times
it freely runs ahead of his request.

In thee is Mercy, Pity is in thee,
in thee Magnificence, and all there is
of Goodness in a creature meets in thee.

Holy Father, Venerable Fathers, brothers and sisters, Merry Christmas!

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Translated by Br. Patrick McSherry, ofmcap

1.See Job 14:1; 15:14; 25:4.
2.Ignatius of Antioch, Tralliani 9,1; Smirnesi 1, Irenaeus of Lyon, Adv. Haer. III, 16,3.
3.Ignatius of Antioch, Ephesians, 7,1
4.See Tertullian, De carne Christi, 20.
5.Leo the Great, Letter 28 to Flavian, 4.
6.Gregory the Great, Moral Commentary on Job, XX, 1
7.Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. IV,40,3.
8.Luther, The Magnificat (ed. Weimar 7, p. 572 f.).
9.Isaac of Stella, Discourses 51 (PL, 194, 1863f)
10.F. Kafka, An Imperial Message. English translation found at https://apps.exe-coll.ac.uk/Media/PDF/FlyingStart/EnglishLiteratureShortStories.
11.St. Maximus the Confessor, Commentary on the Our Father (PG 90, 889).
12.St. Augustine, Discourses 215,4 (PL 38, 1074)
13.St. Francis of Assisi, Letter to all the Faithful, 1.
14.St. Bonaventure, De quinque festivitatibus Pueri Jesu (ed. Quaracchi 1949, pp. 207ff).
15.The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. A Translation in English Blank Verse by Courtney Langdon, Vol. 3 Paradiso (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 19211).

The same Council reminds us that the Church is made up of saints and sinners; indeed, she herself – as a concrete, historical reality – is holy and sinful, a “chaste harlot” as some Fathers called her, and those two aspects – sin and sanctity – are present in every single member, not just between one category of Christians and the other. It is right, then, that we are saddened by and weep over the sins of the Church, but it is also right and necessary to rejoice in her holiness and beauty. Once more we must choose this second aspect which, in our day and age, is perhaps more difficult and often forgotten.

The proof that we are God’s children

Let us return to our commentary on the text from Galatians:
When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. The proof that you are children is that God has sent into your hearts his Son’s Spirit which cries out: “Abba! Father!” Therefore you are no longer a slave but a child; and if a child, then also an heir, by God’s grace.

During our last meditation, we reflected on the first part of the text, our being children of God. Now let us reflect on the second part, namely, the role that the Holy Spirit plays in all this. We need to call to mind the almost twin passage from Romans 8:15-16:

You did not receive a spirit of bondage to fear; no, you received a Spirit that makes you adopted children, that empowers you to cry out, “Abba! Father!” The same Spirit, united with our spirit, bears witness that we are children of God.
Last time I spoke of the important role that God’s Word plays in savoring the delight of knowing that we are children of God and in experiencing God as a good father. Now Saint Paul tells us that there is yet another way, without which even the Word of God is insufficient, – the Holy Spirit!
St. Bonaventure ends his treatise, Journey of the Mind to God, with an allusive and mysterious phrase. He wrote: “No one knows this very secret mystical wisdom except the person who receives it; no one receives it except the one who desires it; no one desires it except the one who is inwardly set on fire by the Holy Spirit whom Christ sent to earth.” In other words, we might want to have a living knowledge of being God’s children and to experience it, but actually having all this is solely the work of the Holy Spirit.
What does it mean when we say that the Spirit “bears witness” to the fact that we are children of God? Clearly, it is not like an external, legal document that proves human adoption or a baptismal certificate. If the Spirit is “the proof” that we are children of God, if he “bears witness” to our spirit, it cannot be something that takes place “somewhere” without our being aware of it or without some confirmation.
Unfortunately, that is how we have come to think of it. It is true that in Baptism we became children of God, members of Christ and God’s love was poured into our hearts…, we believe this by faith, even if nothing moves within us. Believed in the mind, but not lived in the heart. How can we change this situation? The Apostle gave us the answer: the Holy Spirit! Not just the Holy Spirit we once received in Baptism, but the Holy Spirit that we must ask for and receive over and over again. The Spirit “bears witness” that we are children of God, meaning he bears witness right here and now, not once and for all at the moment of Baptism.
Let us attempt to understand how the Holy Spirit works this miracle of opening our eyes to the reality we bear within. I discovered the best description of how the Holy Spirit brings this about in the believer in a discourse on Pentecost by Luther. (Let us follow, with him, the Pauline criterion for “examining everything, retaining what is good.”) (1 Thess 5,21).
As long as people live under the regime of sin, under the law, God seems to be a severe supervisor who opposes all their earthly desires with divine peremptory ones: “You must…; you must not….” You must not desire another’s possessions or woman… This being the case, people accumulate in the depths of their hearts a muted animosity towards God who seems to be opposed to their every happiness, to the point that, if it were up to them, they would be just as happy if God did not exist.
If this all seems like an exaggeration, perhaps in reference only to “great” sinners which does not touch us personally, let us look inside ourselves and see what rises out of the dark depths of our hearts as we stand before God’s will and a difficult obedience courses through our plans. During the retreats I preach, I usually propose to the participants that they take a psychological test on their own to discover what idea is their prevailing image of God. I invite each person to ask: “During the recitation of the Our Father, what ideas, what feelings spontaneously, without reflecting on it come to mind when I get to the words, ‘Your will be done’”?

It is not farfetched to understand how, unconsciously, we connect the will of God with everything unpleasant, painful, everything that outs us to the test, that requires renunciation and sacrifice, in short, everything that can be seen as curbing our personal freedom and development. We essentially perceive God as being opposed to all festivity, delight, and enjoyment. If at that moment, we could look at ourselves as if in a mirror, we would see ourselves as people with heads bowed in resignation, muttering through clenched teeth: “If there’s nothing else I can do about it…ok, your will be done.”

Let’s take a look at what the Holy Spirit does to heal us of this terrible distortion that we inherited from Adam. When the Spirit comes to us, – in Baptism and then in all the other means of sanctification, – he begins by showing us a different face of God, the face revealed to us by Jesus in the Gospel. He has us discover God as an ally of our joy, as the one who, for our sake “did not spare his own Son” (Rom 8:32).

Little by little, the feeling a child experiences blossoms in us which spontaneously translates into the cry: Abbà, Father! With Job at the end of his story we are ready to exclaim, “By hearsay I had heard of you, but now my eye has seen you.” (Jb 42,5). A child has replaced the slave, love has replaced fear. The person ceases to be antagonistic toward God and becomes God’s ally. The covenant with God is no longer just a religious system into which one is born, but a discovery, a choice, a source of unshakable security. “If God is with us, on our side, who can be against us” (see Rom 8:31)?

The prayer of children

Prayer is the privileged place where the Holy Spirit works always anew the miracle of making us feel like God’s children. The Spirit does not give prayer as a law, but as a grace. Prayer does not come to us primarily through external, analytical learning; it comes to us by infusion, as a gift. What comes to us is the very source of prayer, namely that “God has sent into our hearts the Spirit of his Son who cries out: Abbà, Father!” (Gal 4:6).

The cry of the believer, Abbà!, in itself shows that the one who is praying in us, through the Spirit, is Jesus, the only-begotten Son of God. Since the Holy Spirit is not begotten of God but rather proceeds from the Father, the Spirit could not turn to God and cry out Abba, Father. But as the Spirit of the only-begotten Son, the Spirit can prolong the prayer of the head in the members.

Therefore, it is the Holy Spirit who imbues our hearts with the feeling of divine adoption as children, the one who makes us experience (and not only know!) that we are children of God. At times, this radical activity of the Spirit takes place suddenly and intensely in a person’s life, and then it can be contemplated in all its splendor. It might occur during a retreat, or when a person is well-disposed to receive a sacrament, or while listening to the Word of God with an open heart, or while praying for the outpouring of the Spirit (the so-called “baptism in the Spirit”). The soul is inundated with a new light in which God is revealed to the person in a new way, as Father. The person experiences what it really means to say God is Father; their heart becomes tender and the person has the sensation of being born again by this experience. He or she experiences deep inner confidence and a never-before-felt sense of God’s condescension.

At other times, however, this revelation of the Father is accompanied by such a sense of God’s majesty and transcendence that the person feels overwhelmed and is silent. (I am not describing my own experiences, but those of the saints!). One begins to understand why some saints could start to pray the Our Father, and even after hours had passed, were still glued to those opening words. The confessor and biographer of St. Catherine of Siena, Blessed Raymond of Capua, wrote that “it was difficult to finish an “Our Father” without her already being in ecstasy.”

This dramatic way of knowing the Father usually does not last long, not even in the saints. The time soon returns when the believer says Abbà! without feeling anything and continues to repeat it simply on the word of Jesus. That is when it is important to remember that the less that utterance delights the person who prays it, the more it delights the Father who hears it because it is then that is it comes out of pure faith and abandonment.

It is then that we are like that famous musician (I’m speaking of Beethoven) who, having lost his hearing, continued to compose and perform splendid symphonies to the delight of his audiences without being able to savor a single note himself. At one point, after listening to one of his works (the celebrated Ninth Symphony), the audience exploded into applause and someone had to tug on the hem of Beethoven’s robe to get him to notice and thank them. His loss of hearing, rather than muting his music, made it all the purer. The same is true for dryness in our prayer if we persevere in it.
When we talk about the exclamation, “Abbà, Father!”, we usually think in terms of self-reference, that is, what it means to us who pronounce it. We hardly ever think about what it means to the One who hears it, to what it produces in God. No one reflects on the joy it brings God to be called “Dad”. But anyone who is a father knows how it feels to hear himself being called in that unmistakable tone of voice of his own boy or girl. It’s like becoming a father again each time because every time that exclamation is pronounced, it reminds you and makes you realize who you are. It calls forth into existence what lies at the core of your being.

Jesus knew this and so he often called God Abbà! and taught us to do likewise. We give God a simple and unique joy by calling him “Dad”: the joy of paternity. At the sound of these words, God’s heart “is touched” and his compassion grows “warm and tender” (see Hos 11:8). And we can do all this even when we do not “feel” anything.

It is precisely at this time of seeming distance from God and dryness that we discover the great importance of the Holy Spirit for our life of prayer. Unseen and unheard by us, the Spirit “comes to our rescue in our weakness,” filling our words and sighs with desire for God, humility, and love, “and the One who searches hearts knows what the Spirit desires” (see Rom 8:26-27). The Spirit, then, becomes the power behind our “weak” prayer, light for our “dimmed” prayer; in a word, the very soul of our prayer. In the words of the Pentecost Sequence, the Spirit “irrigates what is parched.”

All this happens by faith. It suffices for me to say or think: “Father, you have given me the Spirit of Jesus your Son. Thereby making me “one spirit with him” (1 Cor 6:17) I am praying this psalm or celebrating this holy Mass, or simply standing in silence here in your presence. I want to give you that glory, that joy, that Jesus would give you if he were praying to you again here on earth.”

What the Spirit is saying to the Church

Before concluding, I would like to mention a pastoral application of this reflection on the role of the Holy Spirit. On other occasions, I quoted something that the Orthodox Metropolitan, Ignatius IV of Latakia, said at the solemn ecumenical gathering in 1968. It bears repeating here:
“Without the Holy Spirit:
God is far away,
Christ stays in the past,
the Gospel is a dead letter,
the Church is simply an organization,
Authority is a matter of domination,
Mission a matter of propaganda,
Liturgy is no more than an evocation,
Christian living a slave morality.

But with the Holy Spirit:
The cosmos is resurrected and groans with the birth-pangs of the Kingdom,
humans struggle against the flesh,
the risen Christ is there,
the Gospel is the power of life,
the Church shows forth the life of the Trinity,
Authority is a liberating service,
Mission is a Pentecost,
The liturgy is both memorial and anticipation,
Human action is deified.”

We must base everything on the Holy Spirit. It is not enough to recite one Our Father, one Hail Mary, and one Glory Be at the start of our pastoral meetings and then move quickly on to the agenda. When circumstances allow, we need to spend some time disclosing ourselves to the Holy Spirit, to give the Spirit time to manifest himself, to synchronize ourselves with him.
Without this prep work, all of our resolutions and documents remain just an accumulation of words. Think of the sacrifice of Elijah on Carmel. Elijah gathered wood and soaked it several times. He did everything he could. Then he prayed to the Lord to send down fire from heaven to consume the sacrifice. Without that fire from on high, everything else would have remained just dampened wood (see 1 Kg 18:20ff).
These are things that are beginning to take place in the Church without a lot of commotion. This year I received a letter from a pastor in a French archdiocese. He wrote: “Almost three years ago, our archbishop launched all of us into a missionary adventure and established a fraternity of diocesan missionaries. We decided to start a course in preparation for baptism in the Spirit. It was a beautiful experience with 300 Christians from all over the archdiocese, together with the archbishop. A short time later, all 28 Poor Clares of a nearby convent asked to have the same experience.”
Immediate and spectacular results are not to be expected. It’s not a fire dance like that of the priests of Baal on Carmel. The “when” and “how” are known only to God. Let us remember what Christ told his apostles: “It is not for you to know the times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:7-8). The important thing is that we ask for and receive strength from on high; the rest is up to God.
This is especially true as the Church embarks on the synodal adventure. It suffices to re-read and reflect on the words already spoken by the Holy Father in his homily opening the Synodal Path last October 10th. He urged us to take “time to devote to prayer and to adoration, and to hearing what the Spirit wants to say to the Church.”
I wonder if it would be possible, at least during the plenary gatherings of each local or universal circumscription, to designate a spiritual animator who would organize times of prayer and listening to the Word. As it says in the Book of Revelation: “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Rv 19:10). The spirit of prophecy preferably is manifested in the context of community prayer.
We have a wonderful example of this occurring during the first crisis that the Church had to face in its mission of proclaiming the Gospel. Peter and John had been arrested and put in prison for having “proclaimed in Jesus the resurrection of the dead.” They were freed by the Sanhedrin with the warning “in no way are you to speak about or teach in the name of Jesus.” The apostles find themselves facing a situation that has been repeated many times in the course of history: either to remain silent and thus disregard the command of Jesus or to speak out at the risk of a brutal reaction on the part of the authorities which could spell the end of everything.
What did the apostles do? They gathered the community together. It prayed. Someone shared a verse from the Psalm: “earthly rulers take counsel together against the Lord and his Anointed One” (Ps 2:2). Someone else made the connection with the agreement between Herod and Pontius Pilate regarding Jesus. Then we read: “When they had finished the prayer, the place where they were gathered shook and all were filled with the Holy Spirit and proclaimed the word of God with boldness (parresia )” (see Acts 4:1-31). Paul reminds us that this was not an isolated practice in the Church. He wrote to the Corinthians: “When you gather together, one of you has a psalm, another a word of instruction: one has a revelation, one has the gift of tongues, another the gift of interpreting the tongues” (1 Cor 14:26).
The ideal with every synodal resolution would be to be able to repeat to today’s Church – at least ideally – the same words used at the Church’s first council: “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…” (Acts 15:28). The Holy Spirit is the only one who opens new paths, without ever denying the former ones. Rather than doing new things, the Spirit renews things! That is, the Spirit does not create new doctrines and new institutions, but renews and breathes new life into those instituted by Jesus. Without the Spirit, we would always lag behind history. As the Holy Father said in that same homily, “It means discovering with amazement that the Holy Spirit always surprises us, to suggest fresh paths and new ways of speaking.” I would add, he is a master of the updating aggiornamento that St. John XXIII set as the goal of the Council. The Council had to bring about a new Pentecost, now the new Pentecost must translate the Council into reality!
The Latin Church possesses a treasure for this purpose: the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus. Ever since its composition in the ninth century, this has resonated unceasingly in Christianity, like a prolonged epiclesis over all creation and the Church. Beginning with the early years of the second millennium, every new year, every century, every conclave, every ecumenical council, every synod, every priestly or episcopal ordination, every important meeting in the life of the Church opened with the chanting of this hymn. It took on all the faith, devotion, and ardent desire of the Spirit of the generations who sang it before us. And now, when it is sung, even by the most modest choir of the faithful, God hears it as the immense “orchestration” which is the communion of saints.

Venerable Fathers, brothers, and sisters, I ask you kindly to stand and sing it with me, asking for a new outpouring of the Spirit on us and the entire Church…

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Translated by Br. Patrick McSherry, ofmcap

1.In Enchiridion Fontium Historiæ Ecclesiasticæ Antiquæ, Herder 1965, pp. 92-94.
2.See H.U. von Balthasar, “Casta meretrix”, in Sponsa Christi, Morcelliana, Brescia, 1969.
3.Bonaventure, Journey of the Mind to God 7,4.
4.See Luther, Sermon on Pentecost (WA, 12, p. 568f).
5.Raymond of Capua, Legenda maior, 113.
6.Metropolitan Ignatius of Latakia, in The Uppsala Report, Geneva 1969, p. 298.

‘God is with us,’ namely on man’s side, as a friend and an ally against the forces of evil. We need to rediscover the primeval and simple meaning of the incarnation of the Word, beyond all the theological explanations and dogmas built on it. God made his dwelling among us! He wanted to turn this event into his own name: Emmanuel, God-with-us. What Isaiah had prophesied: ‘the young woman, pregnant and about to bear a son, shall name him Emmanuel.’ (Is 7:14) became accomplished fact.

As I said, we need to go back to the first of all the Christological controversies of the fifth century – before the Councils of Ephesus and of Chalcedon – to rediscover the paradox and the scandal contained in the claim: ‘The Word made his dwelling among us.’ It is worth reading the reaction of an educated second-century pagan, after learning about this claim by Christians. The philosopher Celsius was horrified and cried out: ‘Son of God – a man who lived just a few years ago?’ The eternal Logos – one who was around “yesterday or the day before yesterday”?’, a man who was ‘born of a poor spinner, in a village of Judea?’ Quite understandable: the perfect union between divinity and humanity in the person of Christ was the greatest of all possible novelties, “the only new thing under the sun”, as St. John of Damascus defines it.
The first great battle that the faith in Christ had to face was not about his divinity, but about his humanity and about the truth of the incarnation. At the root of that refusal was Plato’s own dogma, stating that ‘no God ever mixes with man.’ From personal experience St Augustine discovered that the ultimate root of the difficulty he felt in believing in the incarnation was a lack of humility. As he writes in his Confessions, ‘failing to be humble I could not understand God’s own humility.’

St Augustine’s experience can help us to understand the ultimate root of modern atheism and shows us the only possible way of overcoming it. The historical truth of the Gospel and the divinity of Christ have been attacked ever since the times of Hermann Samuel Reimarus, in the eighteenth century. Jesus said: ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’ (Jn 14:6). Once it was said that this only way to God was shut, it was easy to shift first to deism and then to atheism.

Augustine’s experience – as I said – points to the way of overcoming that obstacle, namely by giving up pride and accepting God’s own humility. ‘I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike’ (Mt 11:25): the entire history of human disbelief is explained by these words of Christ. Humility provides the key to understanding the incarnation. It takes little power to show off; on the other hand, it takes a lot of power to step aside and to efface yourself. God is this infinite power of self-effacement: ‘He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave … He humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross’ (Phil 2:7-8).

God is love and hence humility! Love creates dependence on the person you love, and that kind of dependence does not humiliate but uplifts. The two claims ‘God is love’ and ‘God is humility’ are like two sides of the same coin. However, what does the word humility mean, if it is applied to God and in what sense can Jesus say: ‘learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves.’ (Mt 11:29)? The key is that, in essence, humility is not about ‘being little (one can be little and insignificant without being humble); nor is it about considering yourself little (that can depend on a negative self-image); or about claiming to be little (you can say that without actually believing it); rather, it is about making yourself little and about doing that out of love, to let other people emerge. In that sense only God is truly humble. Indeed,

Who is like the Lord our God,
enthroned on high,
looking down on heaven and earth?
He raises the needy from the dust,
lifts the poor from the ash heap (Ps 113: 5-7).

Without much of an education, Francis of Assisi had got that. In his Praises to God the Most High, at some point he addresses God himself saying: ‘You are humility!” and in his Letter to the whole Order he cries out: ‘My brethren, look at God’s humility.’ As he writes in the first of his Admonitions: ‘He humbles himself, just as he did when he descended into the Virgin’s womb.’

Christmas is the feast of God’s humility. To celebrate it in spirit and in truth we need to become like children, as you need to lower your head to go through the little narrow door into the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

“There is one among you whom you do not recognize!”

Yet, let us go back to the heart of that mystery: ‘the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.’ God is with us for good, and that is irreversible. From now on that is the central focus of Christian prophecy. Zechariah greets the Precursor calling him ‘prophet of the Most High’ (Lk 1:76) and Jesus says of him that he is ‘more than a prophet’ (Mt 11:9). But in what sense is John the Baptist a prophet? Where does the element of prophecy lie in his case? The Old Testament prophets proclaimed a future salvation; John the Baptist does not proclaim a future salvation; rather, he points to one who is present there before him. The early prophets helped the people of Israel to cross the barrier of time; John the Baptist helps them to cross the even thicker barriers of what looks the opposite of what it is. Would the long-awaited Messiah – awaited by the patriarchs, proclaimed by the prophets, praised by the Psalms – then be that man who looks so humble and ordinary, about whom we know everything including the village he is from?
It is relatively easy to believe in something great and divine, if it is envisaged in an indefinite future: ‘in those days,’ ‘in the latter days,’ within a cosmic framework, with the heavens dripping sweetness and the earth opening and salvation budding forth (cf. Is 45:8). It is more difficult if you have to say: ‘Here he is! It’s him!’. It is so human to be tempted to say immediately afterwards: ‘Is that all?’. ‘Can anything good come from Nazareth?’ (Jn 1:46); ‘we know where he is from’ (Jn 7:27).
That was a prophetic task beyond human limits and that is why the Precursor is defined as ‘more than a prophet.’ He is the one that points to a person and utters a decisive “Ecce! Here he is’. ‘Here is the Lamb of God!’ (Jn 1:29). Can you imagine what shiver must have run through the first people who received that revelation? The power of the Holy Spirit resounded in the words of the Precursor as he revealed that truth to well-disposed hearts. Past and future, a long wait and accomplishment converged and touched each other. The voltaic arc of the history of salvation was closed.
I believe that John the Baptist left us his very own prophetic task, which is to keep crying: ‘There is one among you whom you do not recognize!’ (Jn 1:26). He started the new prophecy. As I said, that prophecy is not about proclaiming a future salvation, but it is about revealing Christ’s presence in history: ‘I am with you always, until the end of the age’ (Mt 28:20). Christ is not present just because people continuously speak and write about him, but because he is risen and he lives according to the Spirit. It is not only an intention, but a reality. Evangelization starts there.
At the time of the Baptist, the main stumbling block was Jesus’s physical body, his flesh, which was so much like ours, except for sin. Nowadays the main stumbling block is his mystical body, the Church. The latter is so much like the rest of humanity, including sin as well! As the Precursor made it possible for his own contemporaries to recognize Christ in his humble flesh, so nowadays does he also need to be recognized in the poverty and misery of his Church and in the poverty and misery of our own lives.

What Paul adds to John

However, we need to add something to what we have said so far. It is not enough to be aware that God was made man, but we also need to know what kind of man God was made. I think it is significant to see how John and Paul differ and complement each other in the way each of them describes the incarnation. For John it consists in the fact that the Word who was God was made flesh (cf. Jn 1:1-14); for Paul, it consists in the fact that ‘Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, emptied himself, taking the form of a slave’ (cf. Phil 2:5ff.). For John, the Word, being God, was made man; for Paul ‘Christ…became poor although he was rich’ (cf. 2Cor:8-9).
The distinction between the fact of the incarnation and the way it was accomplished, between its ontological dimension and the existential one, concerns us because it sheds a special light on the current issue of poverty and on how Christian respond to it. It is helpful to provide a Biblical and theological foundation on the preferential choice for the poor, as proclaimed in the Second Vatican Council. As Jean Guitton, a layman who attended the Second Vatican Council as an observer, wrote: ‘The Council Fathers have rediscovered the sacrament of poverty, that is the presence of Christ under the species of those who suffer.’
The ‘sacrament’ of poverty! These are strong words, but they are well-founded. If indeed, by the fact of the incarnation, the Word has, in a certain way, taken upon himself every man (as some Greek fathers claimed), as for the way it was enacted, he took upon himself the poor, the humble, the suffering. The “institution” of this sign by Jesus matched his institution of the Eucharist. He who said on the bread: ‘This is my body’ used the same words about the poor as well. He did so when he was speaking about what people did – or failed to do – for those who were hungry, or thirsty, or in prison, or naked or strangers, by solemnly adding: ‘whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me’ and ‘what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me’ (Mt 25:31ff.).
Let us draw the consequence of this at an ecclesiological level. Saint John XXIII, at the Second Vatican Council itself, coined the phrase ‘the Church of the poor.’ Its meaning goes well beyond the usual interpretation. The Church of the poor does not consist only of the poor within the Church itself! In a certain sense, all the poor of the world belong to it, whether they are baptized or not. Some object: ‘How come? They have not received the faith or received Baptism!” That is true, but neither had the Holy Innocents whom we celebrate after Christmas. In God’s eyes, their poverty and suffering, if it is free from guilt, is their own baptism of blood. God has many more ways of saving than those we imagine, even though all these ways, without exception and ‘in a way that is known to God alone,’ pass through Christ.
The poor belong ‘to Christ,’ not because they themselves claim to belong to him, but because he declared they belonged to himself, he declared them his own body. This does not mean that it is enough to be poor in this world to automatically enter God’s final kingdom. The words: ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father,’ (Mt 25:34) are addressed to those who took care of the poor, not necessarily to the poor themselves simply because they were materially poor in their lives.
Therefore, Christ’s own Church is far bigger than numbers and statistics say. This is not a platitude or a triumphalist statement, which would be inconvenient, especially in these times. No-one but Jesus has ever proclaimed: ‘whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me’ (Mt 25:40), where ‘these least brothers’ are not only the people believing in Christ, but every human being.
Hence the Pope – along with every pastor in the Church – is truly the ‘father of the poor.’ We all rejoice and feel encouraged by seeing how seriously this role has been taken by recent Popes and especially by the pastor who is currently sitting on the chair of Peter. He is the strongest advocate of the poor in a world that is only familiar with selection and rejection. He has certainly not ‘forgotten the poor’! In Scripture we find a special blessing for those who are concerned for the poor:

Blessed the one concerned for the poor…
The Lord keeps and preserves him,
makes him blessed in the land,
and does not betray him to the enemies. (Ps 41:2-3).

In the Gospel we read of Mary and Joseph that ‘there was no room for them in the inn” (Lk 2:7). Nowadays, there is no room for the poor in the inn of the world, but history has shown on which side God was and on which side the Church is meant to be. To go to the poor is to imitate God’s humility. It is making oneself small out of love, to raise those who are below.

But let’s not delude ourselves: this is something that can be easier said than done. An ancient Father of the desert, Isaac of Nineveh, gave this advice to those forced by duty to speak of spiritual things to which they have not yet reached with life: “Speak of it as one who belongs to the class of disciples and not with authority, after having humiliated your soul and made yourself smaller than any of your listeners » . And that’s how I dared talk about it.

‘We will come to him and make our dwelling with him’

‘The Word was made flesh and made his dwelling among us.’ Before closing, we need to shift from the plural to the singular. The Word did not come into the world indistinctly, but personally into each believing soul. Jesus said: ‘Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him’ (Jn 14: 23). Christ, therefore, is not only present on the boat of the world or of the Church; it is present on the small boat of my life. What a thought! If only we could really believe in it! Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity discovered that the secret of her holiness lay there. As she wrote to a friend: ‘I seem to have found my own heaven on earth, because heaven is God and God is in my soul. The day I understood this, everything was filled with light.’
With the restrictions to public worship and to church attendance it has caused the pandemic may be an opportunity for many of us to discover that we do not meet God only by going to church, but that we can worship God ‘in spirit and in truth’ and converse with Jesus even locked in our homes, or even in our rooms. A Christians will never be able to do without the Eucharist and the community, but when this is prevented by force majeure, they should not think that Christian life is interrupted. If you have never met Christ in your heart before, you will never meet him – in the strong sense of this word – anywhere else.
There is a bold statement about Christmas that has bounced across times in the mouths of the great doctors and spiritual masters of the Church: Origen, saint Augustine, saint Bernard. Angelus Silesius and many more. Basically, it goes like this: ‘What use is that for me, that Christ was born of Mary once in Bethlehem, if he is not born of faith in my heart too?” . ‘Where else is Christ born, in the deepest sense, other than in your heart and in your soul?’, as saint Ambrose wrote . Saint Maximus the Confessor echoes that: ‘The Word of God wishes to repeat the my¬stery of his incarnation in all men and women.’ As you can see, it is a truly ecumenical truth.
Echoing the same tradition, St John XXIII, in his Christmas message of 1962, raised this burning prayer: ‘O Eternal Word of the Father, Son of God and of Mary, renew once again today, in the secret of our soul, the wondrous prodigy of your birth’. Let us make this prayer our own, but, in the dramatic situation we are experiencing, let us also add the burning plea of the Christmas liturgy: “ O King of the nations, the ruler they long for, the cornerstone uniting all people: Come and save us all, whom You formed out of clay.”. Come and raise mankind, exhausted by the long trial of the present pandemic!
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Translated from Italian, by Paolo Zanna

1.In Origen, Against Celsus, I,26.28; VI,10.
2.De fide orthodoxa, 45,
3.Plato, Symposium, 203°; cf. Apuleius, De deo Socratis, 4: “Nullus deus miscetur hominibus”.
4.Confessions, VII, 18.24).
5.J. Guitton, cit. da R. Gil, Presencia de los pobres en el concilio, in “Proyección” 48, 1966, p.30.
6.In AAS 54, 1962, p. 682.
7.Gaudium et spes, 22.
8.Isaac of Nineveh, Ascetic Discourses 4 ,
9.Letter 107 of 1902 to Countess De Sourdon.
10.Cf. Origen, Homilies on Luke 22,3 (SCh 87, p. 302); Angelus Silesius, The Cherubinic Wanderer, I, 61: “Wird Christus tausendmal zu Bethlehem geborn / und nicht in dir: du bleibst noch ewiglich verlorn“.
11.St Ambrose, In Lucam, 11,38.
12.St Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua (PG 91,1084).
13.http://www.vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/it/messages/urbi_et_orbi/documents/hf_j-xxiii_mes_19621222_urbi-natale.html
14.Antiphon to Evening Prayer of 22nd December.

The second ‘eternal truth’ that the situation of the pandemic has brought back to the surface is the instability and transience of all things. Everything is transitory: wealth, good health, beauty, physical strength… It is something we are faced with all the time. To realize this one just has to compare any pictures of today – our own or those of any celebrities – with those of twenty or thirty years ago. Shocked by the pace of life we do not pay attention to this, we do not dwell on it to draw the necessary conclusions.

And lo and behold, all of a sudden, all that we took for granted has shown its fragile side, just as a pane of ice you are cheerfully skating on that suddenly breaks under your feet and you are plunged into chilly water. As the Holy Father said during that memorable “urbi et orbi” blessing on March 27th: ‘The storm exposes our vulnerability and uncovers those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and priorities.’

The worldwide crisis we are going through can be an opportunity to discover with relief that there is, despite anything else, a firm point, some solid ground, or rather a rock on which we can build our life on earth. The word for Easter – Pesach in Hebrew – means passage / transit and the Latin word for it is transitus. This word per se evokes something ‘passing’ and ‘transitory’, therefore something rather negative. Saint Augustine felt this difficulty and resolved it in an enlightening manner. He explained that living out the Easter experience does indeed mean passing / shifting, but ‘passing to what does not pass’; it means ‘passing from the world, in order not to pass together with the world.’ Passing with your heart, before passing with your body!

What ‘never passes’ is, by definition, eternity. We have to rediscover faith in the afterlife. This is one of the contributions religions can make together to the effort to create a better and more fraternal world. It makes us understand that we are travelling together on our way to a common homeland, where there are no distinctions of race or nationality. We not only share the route, but also the destination. With very different concepts and contexts, this truth is common to all great religions, at least those that believe in a personal God. ‘Anyone who approaches God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Hb 11:6). This is how the Letter to the Hebrews sums up the common base – and the minimum common denominator – of every faith and every religion.

For Christians faith in everlasting life is not based on philosophical arguments about the immortality of the soul. It is based on a precise fact, that is the resurrection of Christ, and on his promise: ‘In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If there were not, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be’ (Jn 14:2-3). For us Christians everlasting life is not an abstract category, but rather a person. It means going to live with Jesus, ‘making one body’ with him, sharing the life of the Risen one in the fullness and joy of the life of the Trinity: “Cupio dissolvi et esse cum Christo”, as saint Paul said to his dear Philippians: “I long to depart this life and be with Christ’ (Phil 1:23).

An eclipse of faith

We may well wonder what has happened to the Christian truth of eternal life. In times such as ours, dominated by physics and cosmology, atheists express above all their denial of the existence of a creator of the world; in the 19th century they preferred to deny the afterlife. Hegel had claimed that ‘Christians waste in Heaven the energy meant for the earth.’ Taking up this criticism, Feuerbach and above all Marx fought against the belief in a life after death, claiming that it alienates from earthly commitments. The idea of personal survival in God was replaced by a survival within the species and within future society. Little by little, the word ‘eternity’ was not only regarded with suspicion, but also forgotten and silenced.

Secularization has then brought this process to completion and done so to such an extent that it is even inconvenient to continue to speak about eternity amongst educated people, those who keep up with the times. Secularization is a complex phenomenon in its ambivalence. It can refer to the autonomy of earthly matters and to the separation between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar, and in this sense not only is it not against the Gospel, but finds in it one of its deepest roots. On the other hand, the word secularization can also refer to a whole set of social attitudes that are hostile to religion and to faith. In this sense, it is preferable to use the word secularism. Secularism is in the same relation to secularization as scientism is to scientific precision and rationalism to rationality.

Even within such limits, the multi-faceted aspects of secularization appear in as many fields as theology, science, ethics, Biblical hermeneutics, expressions of culture and daily life. Its primeval meaning, though, is only one and it is clear. ‘Secularization,’ just like ‘secularism,’ stems from the word saeculum which in everyday language has ultimately come to refer to the present time – ‘the current eon,’ according to the Bible –, in opposition to eternity – the future eon, or ‘the saeculum saeculorum,’ ‘the time of times, everlasting life,’ as Scripture calls it. In this sense, secularism is a synonym of temporalism, that is a reduction of reality exclusively to its earthly dimension. Which means a radical fall of the horizon of eternity.

All of this has had a clear impact on the faith of believers. That very faith, on this point, has become shy and timid. When did we last hear someone preach on eternal life? The philosopher Kierkegaard was right: ‘The afterlife has turned into a joke, a need so uncertain that not only is it no longer respected, but not even considered. People are even amused by the thought that there was a time when this idea shaped the whole of life.’ We keep saying in the Creed: ‘We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come,’ but without really appreciating the importance of those words. The fall of the horizon of eternity has the same effect on Christian faith that sand has on a fire: it chokes it off.

What is the practical consequence of this eclipse of the idea of eternity? Saint Paul refers to the intention of those who do not believe in the resurrection of the dead: ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’ (1Cor 15:32). When it is distorted, the natural desire to live for ever becomes a desire, or frenzy, to live well, that is pleasantly, even at the expense of others, if necessary. The entire earth becomes what Dante Alighieri said of Italy at his time: “the little threshing floor that so incites our savagery.’ Once the horizon of eternity has fallen, human suffering appears doubly absurd and without remedy. The world looks like ‘a crumbling ant-heap’ and ‘a wave’s drawing on the seashore erased by the next wave.’

Faith in eternity and evangelization

Faith in eternal life is one of the conditions that make evangelization possible. As saint Paul the Apostle writes: ‘If Christ has not been raised, then empty [too] is our preaching; empty, too, your faith. […] If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all.’ (1Cor 15: 14 and 19). The proclamation of eternal life is the strength and the grit of Christian preaching. Let us look at what happened in the earliest Christian preaching. The oldest and most widespread idea in Greek and Roman paganism was that real life ended with death; thereafter there is only a life as larvae, in a world of shadows, without shape and colour. As he was approaching death, the Roman emperor Hadrian addressed to himself the well-known words in the epitaph on his tomb:

Little soul, gentle and drifting, guest and companion of my body, now you will dwell below in pallid places, stark and bare; there you will abandon your play of yore. But one moment still, let us gaze together on these familiar shores, on these objects which doubtless we shall not see again.

For a man who, in his lifetime, had had luxurious homes built for himself – just visit Villa Adriana in Tivoli to be sure -, such prospect was even more disheartening than for common folk. For his own tomb he erected the Mausoleum of Hadrian, present-day Castel Sant’Angelo, but he was perfectly aware that this would not change his fate of drifting towards ‘pallid places, stark and bare.’

On this backdrop, you understand the impact the Christian proclamation of a life after death infinitely richer than the earthly one, with no more tears, or death or anxiety, must have had (cf. Rev 21:4). You also understand why the subject and the symbols of eternal life – the palm tree, the peacock, the words “requies aeterna”, ‘eternal rest’ – are so frequent in the Christian burials in the catacombs.

In proclaiming eternal life not only can we leverage our faith, but also its affinity with the deepest yearning of the human heart. We are indeed ‘finite being capable of inifinity” (ens finitum, capax infiniti), mortal beings with a secret yearning for immortality. In a letter in reply to an Argentinian friend who reproached him for his apparent pride and presumption in wallowing in the problem of eternity, Miguel de Unamuno, who was by no means a champion of Christianity, wrote:
I am not saying we deserve an afterlife, nor that logic proves it for us; I am saying that we need it – whether we deserve it or not, and that’s all. I am saying that what is only transitory does not satisfy me, in my longing for eternity, and that without it I am indifferent to everything else and everything else makes no difference to me. I need it, I really do! Without it there is no more joy in life and life joys have nothing to tell me anymore. It is just too easy to say: ‘You just have to live and be content with life.’ And what about those who are not content?
And he himself added that it is not those who yearn for eternity that show that they despise the world and life on earth, but in fact it is those who do not: ‘I love life so much that losing it seems to me the worst of all evils. Those who enjoy life, day by day, and do not care to know whether they are going to lose it all or not do not really love it.’ Saint Augustine said much the same thing: ‘What is the advantage of living well if one is not to live for ever?’ ‘Everything but eternity in the world is vain’, as one of our poets proclaimed . To our contemporaries who nurture this need for eternity in the deep of their hearts, without perhaps daring to confess it even to themselves, we can repeat what Paul said to the Athenians: ‘What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you.’ (cf. At 17:23).

Faith in eternity as a path to holiness

We don’t need a renewed faith in eternity only to evangelize, that is to proclaim the Good News to other people; first of all, we need it to give ourselves new momentum on the path to holiness. Its first fruit is to make us free from any attachment to transient things, such as the increase of possessions and prestige.

Let us imagine this situation. A person receives an eviction letter and is asked to leave the house they live in quite soon. Fortunately, a good option for a new house comes up immediately. And what does that person do? They spend all their money to refurbish and redecorate the house they are to leave, instead of furnishing the one they are to move into! Wouldn’t that be silly? Well, we are also asked to “leave” this world and we look like that silly person if we only think about decorating our earthly home, without caring about doing good works which will follow us after our death.

As the concept of eternity fades away, this has an impact on believers, as it reduces their ability to face the suffering and trials of life with courage. We have to rediscover some of the faith of saint Bernard and saint Ignatius of Loyola. In any situation or faced with any obstacles, they would say to themselves: “Quid hoc ad aeternitatem?”, what is this compared to eternity?

Let us imagine a man holding scales: one of those called steelyard balances that you hold with only one hand and that have on one side a plate on which you put things to weigh and on the other a graded bar supporting the weight or measurement. If it falls, or the measurement is lost, all that you put on the plate lifts the bar and upsets the balance. Anything prevails, even a fistful of feathers.

We too are just like that, whenever we lose measurement of all that eternity is: our soul can be easily cast down by earthly things and suffering. Everything seems to be too heavy, too much for us to bear. Jesus said: “If your hand or foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter into life maimed or crippled than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into eternal fire.’ (cf. Mt 18:8-9). Yet, having lost sight of eternity, we find it too much even to be asked to close our eyes before an immoral show, or to bear with a small cross in silence.
Saint Paul finds the courage to write: ‘For this momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to what is seen but to what is unseen; for what is seen is transitory, but what is unseen is eternal’ (2Cor 4:17-18). The weight of affliction is ‘light’ precisely because it is momentary, the weight of glory is ‘beyond all comparison’ precisely because it is eternal.
Many ask: ‘What will eternal life consist of and what will we do all the time in heaven?’ The answer is in those apophatic words of the Apostle: ‘What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him’ (1Cor 2: 9). If it is permitted to stammer something, we will say that we will live immersed in the shoreless and bottomless ocean of Trinitarian love. ‘But won’t we be bored?’ Let us ask true lovers if they are bored at the height of their love and if they would rather not want that moment to last forever.

Eternity: hope and presence

Before closing, I want to clear up a doubt weighing on the belief in eternal life. For a believer eternity is not only a promise or a hope, as Carl Marx thought, seen as a way of pouring on heaven all our disappointments on earth. It is also presence and experience. In Christ ‘the eternal life that was with the Father and was made visible to us’ — what we have seen and heard it and touched, says John (cf. 1Jn 1:1~3).

With Christ, the Word made flesh, “eternity has entered time”. We experience that every time we really put our trust in Christ, because those who believe in him already have eternal life (cf. 1Jn 5:13); every time we receive Communion, because in it ‘we have a pledge of future glory’; every time we listen to the words of the Gospel, which are ‘words of eternal life’ (cf. Jn 6:68). Saint Thomas Aquinas says that ‘grace is the beginning of [heavenly] glory.’

That presence of eternity in time is called the Holy Spirit. He is defined as ‘the first installment of our inheritance’ (Eph 1:14; 2Cor 5:5), and it has been given us so that, after receiving the first fruits, we yearn for fullness. “Christ – as saint Augustine writes – gave us the first installment of the Holy Spirit by which he, who could not deceive us anyway, wanted to make us certain of the fulfillment of his promise. What did he promise? He promised eternal life of which the Spirit that is given us is the first installment.’

Between the life of faith in time and eternal life there is a relationship which resembles that between the life of the embryo in the mother’s womb and that of the newborn baby. As the great Medieval Byzantine theologian Nicola Cabasilas wrote:
This world bears in its womb the new spiritual man, created according to God, until he is born to that perfect unperishable world, once he has been formed, fashioned and made perfect here. Just as an embryo, while he or she is in that dark and fluid existence, is prepared by nature to life in the light, the same happens to the saints […]. For an embryo, though, future life is absolutely future: the embryo is not reached by any ray, by anything pertaining to this life. It is not like that for us, since the future world has, as it were, been poured on and mixed with the present one […]. Thus, the saints are already allowed not only to set about and prepare for life, but to live and work in it.
There is a short story that illustrates this comparison between gestation and birth and I take the liberty of telling in all its simplicity.

There were two boy/girl twins who were so smart and early in their growth, that in their mother’s womb they would already talk to each other. The girl asked her little brother: ‘The way you see it, is there going to be life after birth?”. He replied: ‘Don’t be ridiculous! What makes you think there is anything outside this narrow dark space we are in?’. The girl, trying to be brave, said: ‘Who knows, perhaps there is a mother, someone in other words who has placed us here and who will take care of us.’ And he rebutted: ‘Do you happen to see a mother anywhere? All you see is all there is.’ She said again: ‘But can’t you sometimes feel a kind of pressure on your chest that grows day by day and pushes us forward?’ He replied: ‘Actually, if I pay more attention, it is true; I can feel it all the time.’ ‘You see – his little sister concluded triumphantly – this pain cannot be in vain. I think it is preparing us for something greater than this tiny space.’

The Church should be that baby who helps human beings to become aware of this yearning they have which remains unconfessed and sometimes is even ridiculed. It is also essential to deny the accusation giving rise to the modern suspicion against the notion of eternal life that the expectation of eternity distracts from the commitment to the planet and from the care of creation. Before modern societies took direct responsibility for promoting health and culture and for improving agricultural methods and people’s standards of living, who performed such tasks more and better than the monks who lived on their faith in eternal life?

Not many know that Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Sun or of the Creatures sprang from a sudden gasp of faith in eternal life. Franciscan sources describe the origins of the canticle as follows. One night, as Francis was particularly in pain for his many painful infirmities, he said in his heart: ‘Lord, come to my aid in my many infirmities, so that I may bear with them patiently!’. And immediately he heard these words in spirit: ‘Francis, tell me: if someone gave you a large precious treasure in return for your infirmities and suffering, would you not hold the earth and stones and waters as nothing compared to that treasure? Wouldn’t you be filled with joy?’. Francis answered: ‘Lord, that would be a great treasure without comparison, precious and lovely and desirable’. The voice ended: ‘Then, be happy and rejoice in your infirmities and troubles; from now on live happily, as if you were already in my Kingdom.’
On getting up the following morning, Francis said to his companions: ‘I am to rejoice greatly now amid my infirmities and pain, and always give thanks to God for the amazing grace and blessing that has been bestowed on me. Indeed, He deigned in his mercy to give myself, His little unworthy servant still living down here, the certainty of possessing His eternal Kingdom. Therefore, to His praise and to my consolation and for the upbuilding of our neighbor, I wish to compose a new ‘Lauda’, a poem in praise of the Lord for his creatures. Every day we enjoy God’s creatures and we cannot live without them. And every day we prove ungrateful for such great benefit, and we don’t give praise for it to our Creator as we should “. And he sat down, plunged in deep thought, and then he said: ‘Altissimo, onnipotente, bon Segnore…’ [Most high, all powerful, good Lord]. The thought of eternal life had not inspired in him the contempt of this world and of creation, but an even greater enthusiasm and gratitude for them making the present pain easier to endure.
Today’s meditation on eternity certainly does not exempt us from experiencing with all other inhabitants of this planet how hard it is to bear with this trial we are going through; yet it should at least help us as believers not to be overwhelmed by it and to be able to pass our courage and hope on to those who do not have the comfort of faith. Let us end with a beautiful prayer from the liturgy:
O God, who cause the minds of the faithful to unite in a single purpose, grant your people to love what you command and to desire what you promise, that, amid the uncertainties of this world, our hearts may be fixed on that place where true gladness is found. Through Christ our Lord. AMEN’
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Translated from Italian by Paolo Zanna

1.[http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2020/documents/papa-francesco_20200327_omelia-epidemia.html].
2.St Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 55, 1 (CCL 36, pp. 463 s.).
3.Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, Frühe Schriften, 1, in Gesammelte Werke, 1, Hamburg 1989, p. 372.
4.S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 2nd part, chap. 4 .
5.Paradiso, XXII, 151 (Allen Mandelbaum’s translation).
6.Marguerite Yourcenar’s translation in https://followinghadrian.com/2013/07/10/animula-vagula-blandula-hadrians-farewell-to-life.
7. Miguel de Unamuno, “Cartas inéditas de Miguel de Unamuno y Pedro Jiménez Ilundain”, edited by H. Benítez, Revista de la Universidad de Buenos Aires 3 (9/1949) 135.150.
8.St Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 45, 2 (PL 35, 1720).
9.A. Fogazzaro, “A Sera” [At night], in Le poesie [Poems], Mondadori, Milano 1935, 194-197.
10.St. Jean-Paul II in. in. http://www.vatican.va/jubilee_2000/magazine/documents/ju_mag_01121997_p-20_en.html).
11.St Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, II-II, q. 24, a. 3, ad 2.
12.St Augustine, Sermo 378, 1 (PL 39, 1673).
13.N. Cabasilas, Life in Christ, I, 1-2 (PG 150, 496).
14.Legenda Perugina 43.
15.Collect for the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time.