Some ancient Fathers of the Church enclosed in an image the whole mystery of the redemption. Imagine, they said, that an epic fight took place in the stadium. A courageous man confronted a cruel tyrant who had the city enslaved and, with enormous effort and suffering, defeated him. You were on the terraces; you did not fight, or make an effort or get wounded. However, if you admire the courageous man, if you rejoice with him over his victory, if you intertwine crowns, arouse and stir the assembly for him, if you kneel joyfully before the triumphant one, kiss his head and shake his right hand; in a word, if you rave so much as to consider his victory yours, I tell you that you will certainly have part of the victor’s prize.

However, there is more: imagine that the victor had himself no need of the prize he had won, but wished more than anything to see his supporter honored and considers as the prize of his combat the crowning of his friend, in that case, perhaps, will that man not obtain the crown also though he has not toiled on been wounded? He certainly will obtain it![1]

It happens thus, say the Fathers, between Christ and us. On the cross, he defeated the ancient enemy. “Our swords – exclaims Saint John Chrysostom – were not bloodied, we were not in agony, we were not wounded, we did not even see the battle and yet we obtain the victory. His was the fight, ours the crown. And because we are also the conquerors, let us imitate what soldiers do in such cases: with joyful voices let us exalt the victory, let us intone hymns of praise to the Lord!”[2] It is not possible to explain better the meaning of the liturgy we are celebrating.

* * *

However, is what we are doing itself an image, a representation of a reality of the past, or is it the reality itself? It is both things! “We – said Saint Augustine to the people – know and believe with very certain faith that Christ died only once for us […]. You know perfectly that all that happened only once, and yet the solemnity renews it periodically […]. Historical truth and liturgical solemnity are not opposed to one another, as if the second is fallacious and the first alone corresponds to the truth. In fact, of what history says occurred only once in reality, the solemnity repeatedly renews the celebration in the hearts of the faithful.”[3]

The liturgy “renews” the event: how many discussions have taken place for the past five centuries on the meaning of this word, especially when it is applied to the sacrifice of the cross and to the Mass! Paul VI used a verb that could smooth the way to an ecumenical agreement on such an argument: the verb “to represent,” understood in the strong sense of re-presenting, namely to render what happened again present and operative.[4]

There is an essential difference between the representation of Christ’s death and that, for example, of the death of Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s tragedy of the same name. No one celebrates as a living person the anniversary of his own death; Christ does because he is risen. Only he can say, as he does in Revelation: “I died, and behold I am alive ever more” (Revelation 1:18). We must be careful on this day, visiting the so-called sepulchers or taking part in processions of the dead Christ, not to merit the reproach that the Risen One addressed to the pious women on Easter morning: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” (Luke 24:5).

The affirmation of certain Orthodox authors is bold but true. The anamnesis, namely the liturgical memorial, “renders the event truer than when it happened historically the first time.” In other words, it is more true and real for us who relive it “according to the Spirit,” than it was for those who lived it “according to the flesh,” before the Holy Spirit revealed the full meaning to the Church.

We are not only celebrating an anniversary but a mystery. Again, it is Saint Augustine who explains the difference between the two things. In the celebration “by way of anniversary,” nothing else is required – he says – than to “indicate with a religious solemnity the day of the year in which the recollection of the event itself takes place;” in the celebration by way of mystery (“in sacrament”), “not only is an event commemorated but it is also done in a way in which its meaning is understood and it is received devoutly.”[5]

This changes everything. It is not just a question of attending a representation, but of “accepting” the significance, of passing from spectators to actors. It is up to us therefore to choose what part we want to play in the drama, who we wish to be: Peter, Judas, Pilate, the crowd, the Cyrenean, John, Mary … No one can remain neutral; not take a position, means to take a very precise one: Pilate’s who washes his hands or the crowd “standing by, watching” (Luke 23:35).

If when going home this evening, someone asks us “Where are you coming from? Where have you been?” We must also answer, at least in our heart: “on Calvary!”

* * *

However, all this does not happen automatically, just because we have taken part in this liturgy. It is a question of “accepting” the meaning of the mystery. This happens with faith. There is no music where there is no ear to hear it, no matter how loud the orchestra sounds; there is no grace where there is no faith to receive it.

In an Easter homily of the 4thcentury, the bishop pronounced these extraordinarily modern, and one could say existentialist, words: “For every man, the beginning of life is when Christ was immolated for him. However, Christ is immolated for him at the moment he recognizes the grace and becomes conscious of the life procured for him by that immolation.”[6]

However, let us stay on the safe side; let us listen to a doctor of the Church. “What I cannot obtain by myself – writes Saint Bernard –, I appropriate (literally, I usurp!) with confidence from the pierced side of the Lord., because he is full of mercy. Hence my merit is the mercy of God. I am certainly not poor in merits, as long as he is rich in mercy. If the mercies of the Lord are many (Psalm 119:156), I will also abound in merits. And what about my own righteousness? O Lord, I will remember only your righteousness. In fact, it is also mine, because you are righteousness for me on behalf of God” (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:30).[7]

Did this way of conceiving holiness make Saint Bernard, perhaps, less zealous in good works, less committed to the acquisition of virtues? Did perhaps the apostle Paul neglect to mortify his body and reduce it to slavery (cf. 1 Corinthians 9:27), he who, before all and more than all, had made of this appropriation of Christ’s righteousness the purpose of his life and of his preaching (cf. Philippians 3:7-9)?

In Rome, as unfortunately in all big cities, there are so many homeless people, human persons who only have a few rags upon their body and some poor belongings that they carry along in a plastic bag. Let us imagine that one day this voice spreads: on Via Condotti (everyone knows what Via Condotti represents in Rome!) there is the owner of a fashion boutique who, for some unknown reason, whether out of interest or generosity, invites all the homeless of Termini rail way station to come to her shop; she invites them to take off their soiled rags, to have a good shower and then choose the garment they want among those displayed and take it away free of charge.

All say in their heart: “This is a fairy-tale, it never happens!” Very true, but what never happens among men is what can happen every day between men and God, because, before Him, we are those homeless people! This is what happens in a good confession: you take off your dirty rags, your sins, receive the bath of mercy and rise “clothed in the garments of salvation, covered with the robe of righteousness” (Isaiah 61:10).

The tax collector of the parable went up into the temple to pray; he said simply but from the depth of his heart: “God, be merciful to me a sinner!”, and “he went down to his house justified” (Luke 18:14), reconciled, made new, innocent. The same could be said of us, if we have his same faith and repentance, when we go home after this liturgy.

* * *

Among the personages of the Passion with whom we can identify, I realize that I have neglected to name one that more than all awaits those who will follow his example: the good thief.

The good thief made a complete confession of sin; he says to his companion who insults Jesus: “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong” (Luke 23:40f.). Here the good thief shows himself an excellent theologian. Only God in fact, if he suffers, suffers absolutely as innocent; every other being who suffers should say: “I suffer justly,” because even if he is not responsible for the action imputed to him, he is never altogether without fault. Only the pain of innocent children is similar to God’s and because of this it is so mysterious and so sacred.

How many atrocious crimes in recent times remained anonymous, how many unresolved cases exist! The good thief launches an appeal to those responsible: do like me, come out into the open, confess your fault; you also will experience the joy I had when I heard Jesus’ word: “”today you will be with me in Paradise!” (Luke 23:43). How many confessed offenders can confirm that it was also like this for them: that they passed from hell to heaven the day that they had the courage to repent and confess their fault. I have known some myself. The paradise promised is peace of conscience, the possibility of looking at oneself in the mirror or of looking at one’s children without having to have contempt for oneself.

Do not take your secret to your grave; it would procure for you a far more fearful condemnation than the human. Our people are not merciless with one who has made a mistake but recognizes the evil done, sincerely, not just for some calculation. On the contrary! They are ready to be merciful and to accompany the repentant one on his journey of redemption (which in every case becomes shorter). “God forgives many things, for a good work,” says Lucia to the Unnamed in Manzoni’s novel “The Betrothed”; with greater truth we can say, he forgives many things by one act of repentance. He promised it solemnly: “though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool” (Isaiah 1:18).

Let us take up now and do what we heard at the beginning, it is our task this day: with joyful voices let us exalt the victory of the cross, intone hymns of praise to the Lord. “O Redemptor, sume carmen temet concinentium”[8]: And you, O our Redeemer, receive the song we raise to you.

— — —

1. Nicholas Cabasilas, Vita in Christo, I. 9 (PG 150, 517)

2. Saint John Chrysostom, De coemeterio et de cruce (PG, 49, 596).

3. Saint Augustine, Sermon 220 (PL 38, 1089).

4. Cf. Paul VI, Mysterium fidei (AAS 57, 1965, p. 753 ff).

5. Augustine, Epistle 55, 1, 2 (CSEL 34, 1, p. 170).

6. Paschal Homily of the year 387 (SCh 36, p. 59 f.).

7. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Canticle, 61, 4-5 (PL 183, 1072).

8. Hymn of Palm Sunday and of the Chrism Mass of Maundy Thursday.

1. The Two Dimensions of Faith

In regard to faith, Saint Augustine made a distinction which has remained classic up to today: the distinction between things that are believed and the act of believing in them: “Aliud sunt ea quae creduntur, aliud fides qua creduntur”[1], the fidea quae and the fides qua, as is said in theology. The first is also said to be objective faith, the second faith is subjective. All Christian reflection on faith takes place between these two poles.

Delineated are two orientations, with different names and accentuations. On one hand we have those who accentuate the importance of the intellect in believing, hence, objective faith, as assent to revealed truths, on the other, those who accentuate the importance of the will and affection, hence, subjective faith, to believe in someone (“to believe in”), rather than believing something (“believe that”) — on one hand, those who accentuate the reasons of the mind and, on the other, those that, as Pascal, accentuate “the reasons of the heart.”

This oscillation reappears in different forms at every turn of the history of theology: in the Medieval Age, in the different accentuation between the theology of Saint Thomas and that of Saint Bonaventure; at the time of the Reformation between the faith-trust of Luther and the Catholic faith informed by charity; later between Kant’s faith in the limits of simple reason and faith founded on the sentiment of Schleiermacher and of Romanticism in general; and, closer to us, between the faith of liberal theology and Bultmann’s existential theology, practically devoid of all objective content.

Contemporary Catholic theology makes an effort, as in other times in the past, to find the right balance between the two dimensions of faith. The phase has been surmounted in which, for contingent controversial reasons, the whole attention of theology manuals ended up by concentrating on objective faith (fides quae), that is, on the set of truths to be believed. “The act of faith — one reads in an authoritative critical dictionary of theology — in the prevailing current of all Christian confessions, appears today as the discovery of a divine You. Hence, the apologetics of proof tends to situate itself behind a pedagogy of spiritual experience that tends to initiate to a Christian experience, the possibility of which is recognized inscribed a priori in every human being.”[2] In other words, more than appealing to the person on the strength of external arguments, what is sought is to help him find in himself the confirmation of the faith, seeking to rekindle that spark which is in the “restless heart” of every man by the fact of being created “in the image of God.”

I made this introduction because once again it enables us to see the contribution that the Fathers can make to our effort to give back to the faith of the Church its splendor and impetus. The greatest among them are unsurpassed models of a faith that is both objective and subjective, concerned, that is, about the content of the faith, namely, its orthodoxy but, at the same time believed and lived with all the ardor of the heart. The Apostle Paul proclaimed: “corde creditor” (Romans 10:10), one believes with the heart, and we know that with the word heart, the Bible understands both spiritual dimensions of man, his intelligence and his will: the heart is the symbolic place of knowledge and love. In this sense the Fathers are an indispensable link to rediscover the faith as Scripture intends it.

2. “I believe in one God”

In this last meditation we approach the Fathers to renew our faith in its primary object, in what is commonly understood with the word “believe” and on the basis of which we distinguish persons between believers and non-believers: faith in the existence of God. In the preceding meditations we reflected on the divinity of Christ, on the Holy Spirit and on the Trinity. However, faith in the Triune God is the final stage of faith, the “more” on God revealed by Christ. To attain this fullness it is necessary first to believe in God. Before faith in the Triune God, there is faith in the One God.

Saint Gregory of Nazianz reminded us of God’s pedagogy in revealing himself gradually. First, in the Old Testament, the Father is revealed openly and the Son, then, in the New, the Son is revealed openly and the Holy Spirit in a veiled way, now, in the Church, the whole Trinity is revealed openly. Jesus also says that he refrains from telling the Apostles those things of which they are still unable to “bear the weight” (John 16:12). We must also follow the same pedagogy in addressing those to whom we wish to proclaim the faith today.

The Letter to the Hebrews says what the first step is to approach God: “For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Hebrews 11:6). This is the foundation of all the rest that remains, also after having believed in the Trinity. Let us see how the Fathers can be of inspiration to us from this point of view, always keeping present that our main purpose is not apologetic but spiritual, oriented, that is, to consolidate our faith, more than to communicate it to others. The guide we choose for this path is Saint Gregory of Nyssa.

Gregory of Nyssa (331-394), blood brother of Saint Basil, friend and contemporary of Gregory of Nazianz, is a Father and Doctor of the Church, whose intellectual stature and decisive importance in the development of Christian thought is being discovered ever more clearly. He is “one of the most powerful and original thinkers known in the history of the Church” (L. Bouyer), “the founder of a new mystical and ecstatic religiosity” (H. von Campenhausen).

Unlike us, the Fathers did not have to demonstrate the existence of God, but the oneness of God; they did not have to combat atheism but polytheism. We will see, however, how the path traced by them to attain knowledge of the one God is the same one that can lead the man of today to the discovery of God tout court.

To assess the contribution of the Fathers and, in particular, of Gregory of Nyssa, it is necessary to know how the problem of the oneness of God presented itself at the time. While the doctrine of the Trinity was being affirmed, Christians saw themselves exposed to the same accusation that they had always addressed to pagans: that of believing in more divinities. Here is why the creed of Christians, which for three centuries, in all its various formulations, began with the words “I believe in God” (Credo un Deum), beginning in the 4th century, registers a small but significant addition which would never be omitted afterwards: “I believe in one God” (I believe in unum Deum).

It is not necessary to go over the path again here that led to this result; we can begin from its conclusion. Concluded toward the end of the 4thcentury was the transformation of the monotheism of the Old Testament into the Trinitarian monotheism of Christians. The Latins expressed the two aspects of the mystery with the formula “one substance and three persons,” the Greeks with the formula “three hypostasis, only one ousia.” After a long confrontation, the process concluded apparently with a total agreement between the two theologies. “Can one conceive — exclaimed Gregory of Nazianz — a fuller agreement and say more absolutely the same thing, even if with different words?”[3]

In reality a difference remained between the two ways of expressing the mystery. Today it is usual to express it thus: in the consideration of the Trinity, the Greeks and the Latins move from opposite sides: the Greeks begin from the divine persons, namely from plurality, to attain the unity of nature; and, vice versa, the Latins begin from the unity of the divine nature, to arrive at the three persons. “The Latin considers the personality as a way of the nature; the Greek considers the nature as the content of the person.”[4]

I think the difference can be expressed in another way. Both Latins and Greeks begin from the unity of God. Both the Greek and the Latin symbol begin saying “I believe in one God” (Credo in unum Deum”!). Only that for the Latins this unity is conceived as impersonal or pre-personal; it is the essence of God that is specified then in Father, Son and Holy Spirit, without, of course, being thought as pre-existing to the persons. For the Greeks, instead, it is a unity that is already personalized, because for them “the unity is the Father from whom and to whom the other persons are counted.”[5] The first article of the Greek Creed also says this ”I believe in one God the Father almighty” (Credo in unum Deum Patrem omnipotentem”), only that here “the Father almighty” is not detached from ‘unum Deum,’ as in the Latin Creed, but it makes a whole with it: I believe in one God who is the Almighty Father.”

This was the way all three Cappadocians conceived the oneness of God, but more than all of them Saint Gregory of Nyssa. For him, the unity of the three divine persons is given by the fact that the Son is perfectly (substantially) “united” to the Father, as is also the Holy Spirit through the Son.”[6] It is, in fact, this thesis that creates a difficulty for the Latins who see in it the danger of subordinating the Son to the Father and the Spirit to one and the other: “The name ‘God’ — wrote Augustine — indicates the whole Trinity, not just the Father.”[7]

God is the name we give the divinity when we consider it not in itself, but in relation to men and to the world, because all that it does outside of itself it does together, as one sole efficient cause. The important conclusion we can draw from all this, apart from the different point of departure of Latins and Greecs, is that the Christian faith is also monotheistic; Christians have not given up the Jewish faith in one God, rather, they have enriched it, giving content and a new and marvelous sense to this unity. God is one, but not solitary!

3. “Moses entered the cloud”

Why choose Saint Gregory of Nyssa as guide in knowledge of this God in front of whom we stay as creatures before the Creator? The reason is that this Father, first of all in Christianity, has traced a way to knowledge of God that appears to be particularly respondent to the religious situation of the man of today: the way of knowledge that passes through … non-knowledge.

The occasion was offered to him by the controversy with the heretic Eunomius, the representative of a radical Arianism against whom all the great Fathers wrote who lived in the last period of the 4thcentury: Basil, Gregory of Nazianz, Chrysostom and, more acutely than all, Gregory of Nyssa. Eunomius identified the divine essence in the fact of being “un-begotten” (agennetos). In this connection, for him it was perfectly knowable and did not represent a mystery; we can know God no less than he knows himself.

The Fathers reacted as one, holding the thesis of the “incomprehensibility of God” in his intimate reality. But while the others halted at a confutation of Eunomius, based more than anything on the words of the Bible, Gregory of Nyssa, went beyond demonstrating that precisely the recognition of this incomprehensibility is the way to the true knowledge (theognosia) of God. He did so taking up a theme already sketched by Philo of Alexandria[8]: that of Moses who encounters God on entering the cloud. The biblical text is Exodus 24:15-18 and here is his comment:

“The manifestation of God happens first for Moses in the light; then He spoke with him in the cloud, finally having become more perfect, Moses contemplates God in the darkness. The passage from darkness to light is the first separation of the false and erroneous ideas about God; the intelligence more attentive to hidden things, leading the soul through visible things to the invisible reality, is like a cloud that darkens all the sensible and accustoms the soul to the contemplation of what is hidden; finally the soul that has walked on this path toward heavenly things, having left earthly things in so far as possible to human nature, penetrates the sanctuary of divine knowledge (theognosia) surrounded from all sides by the divine darkness.”[9]

True knowledge and the vision of God consist “in seeing that He is invisible, because He whom the soul seeks transcends all knowledge, separated from every part by his incomprehensibility as by a darkness.”[10]

In this final stage of knowledge, there is no concept of God, but that which Gregory of Nyssa, with an expression that has become famous, defines as “a certain feeling of presence” (aisthesin tina tes parusias).[11] A feeling not with the senses of the body, it is understood, but with the interior ones of the heart. This feeling does not go beyond faith but is its highest accomplishment. “With faith — exclaims the Bride of the Canticle (Canticle 3:6) — I have found the Beloved.” She does not “understand” him”; she does better, she “holds” him![12]

These ideas of Gregory of Nyssa had an immense influence on subsequent Christian thought, to the point of his being considered the very founder of Christian mysticism. Through Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor who take up his theme, his influence spread from the Greek world to the Latin. The subject of the knowledge of God in darkness returns in Angela of Foligno, in the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, in the subject of “learned ignorance” of Nicolas Cusanus, and in that of the “dark night” of John of the Cross and in many others.

4. Who really humiliates reason?

Now I would like to show how Saint Gregory of Nyssa’s intuition can help us, believers, to deepen our faith and to indicate to modern man, who has become skeptical of the “five ways” of traditional theology, to rediscover a path that leads him to God.

The novelty introduced by Gregory of Nyssa in Christian thought is that to encounter God it is necessary to go beyond the confines of reason. We are at the antipodes of Kant’s plan to keep religion “within the confines of simple reason.” In today’s secularized culture we have gone beyond Kant: in the name of reason (at least practical reason) he “postulated” the existence of God, subsequent rationalists even deny this.

From this we understand how timely Gregory of Nyssa’s thought it. He demonstrates that the highest part of the person, reason, is not excluded from the search for God; that we are not constrained to choose between following the faith and following the intelligence. Entering the cloud, that is, by believing, the human person does not give up his rationality but transcends it, which is something very different. It stretches the resources of reason to the extreme, permitting it to perform its most noble act, because, as Pascal affirms, “the supreme act of reason lies in recognizing that there is an infinity of things that surpass it.”[13]

Saint Thomas Aquinas, rightly considered one of the most strenuous defenders of the exigencies of reason, wrote: “It is said that at the end of our knowledge, God is known as the Unknown because our spirit has arrived at the extreme of its knowledge of God when in the end it understands that his essence is beyond all that which it can know down here.”[14]

In the very instant that reason recognizes its limit, it breaks through it and surpasses it. It understands that it cannot understand, “it sees that it cannot see,” said Gregory of Nyssa, but it also understands that a comprehensible God would no longer be God. It is the work of reason that produces this recognition which is, because of this, an exquisitely rational act. It is, to the letter, a “learned ignorance.”[15]

Hence, what should be said, instead, is the contrary, the one who puts a limit to reason and humiliates it is he who does not recognize its capacity to transcend itself. “Up to now — wrote Kierkegaard — we have always spoken thus: ‘To say that one cannot understand this or that thing does not satisfy science which wants to understand.’ Here is the mistake. In fact, the contrary should be said: if human science does not want to recognize that there is something that it cannot understand, or — in a still more precise way — something of which with clarity it can ‘understand that it cannot understand,’ then everything is thrown into confusion. Hence it is a task of human knowledge to understand that there are, and to identify which are, the things that it cannot understand.”[16]

However, what sort of darkness is this? It is said of the cloud that, at a certain point, interposed itself between the Egyptians and the Jews, that it was “dark for some and luminous for others” (cf. Exodus 14:20). The world of faith is dark for one who looks at it from outside, but it is luminous for one who goes inside, a special luminosity, of the heart more than of the mind. In the Dark Night of Saint John of the Cross (a variant of Gregory of Nyssa’s theme of the cloud!) the soul declares it is proceeding on its new path, “without any other guide and light than the one that shines in my heart.” A light, however, that is “more luminous than the sun at midday.”[17]

Blessed Angela of Foligno, one of the highest representatives of the vision of God in darkness, says that the Mother of God “was so ineffably united to the total and absolutely ineffable Trinity, that in life she enjoyed the joy that the saints enjoy in heaven, the joy of incomprehensibility (Gaudium incomprehensibilitatis), because they understand that it cannot be understood.”[18]

It is a stupendous complement to the doctrine of Gregory of Nyssa on the unknowability of God. It assures us that far from humiliating us and depriving us of something, this unknowability is made to fill man with enthusiasm and joy; it tells us that God is infinitely greater, more beautiful, more good than we can think, and that all this is for us, so that our joy will be full and we will never be touched by the thought that we will be bored in spending eternity with him!

Another idea of Gregory of Nyssa, which is useful for a comparison with modern religious culture, is that of the “feeling of a presence” that he puts at the summit of knowledge of God. Religious phenomenology has brought to light the existence of a primary fact, present in different degrees of purity, in all the cultures and in all the ages that he calls “feeling of the numinous,” that is the sense, mixed with terror and attraction, which grips the human being suddenly in face of the manifestation of the supernatural and the super-rational.[19] If the defense of the faith, according to the latest guidelines of apologetics recalled at the beginning, “is placed behind a pedagogy of spiritual experience, of which the possibility is recognized inscribed a priori in every human being,” we cannot neglect the link that modern religious phenomenology offers us.

Certainly, the “feeling of a certain presence” of Gregory of Nyssa is different from the confused sense of the numinous and the thrill of the supernatural, but the two things have something in common. One is the beginning of a path toward the discovery of the living God, the other is the end. Knowledge of God, said Gregory of Nyssa, begins with the passing from darkness to light and ends with the passing from light to darkness. The second passage is not attained without passing through the first; in other words, without first being purified from sin and the passions. “I would already have abandoned pleasures — says the libertine — if I had faith. But I respond, says Pascal: You would already have faith if you had abandoned pleasures.”[20]

The image that accompanied us in the whole of this meditation, thanks to Gregory of Nyssa, was that of Moses who goes up to mount Sinai and enters the cloud. The proximity of Easter pushes us to go beyond this image, to pass from the symbol to the reality. There is another mount where another Moses has encountered God while “there was darkness over all the land” (Matthew 27:45). On Mount Calvary the man-God, Jesus of Nazareth, united man forever with God. At the end of his Journey of the Mind to God, Saint Bonaventure writes:

“After all these considerations, what stays in our mind is to elevate it speculating not only beyond this sensible world, but also beyond itself; and in this ascent Christ is the way and door, Christ is ladder and vehicle … He who looks attentively at this propitiation hanging on the cross, with faith, hope and charity, with devotion, admiration, exultation, veneration, praise and rejoicing celebrates Easter with him, that is, the passage.”[21]

May the Lord grant us to make this beautiful and holy “Passover” with him!

— — —

1. Augustine, De Trinitate, XIII, 2, 5.

2. J. Y. Lacoste and N. Lossky, “Fois,” in Dictionnaire critique de Theologie, Presses Universitaires de France, 1988, p. 479.

3. Gregory of Nazianzen, Oratio 42, 16 (PG 36, 477).

4. Th. De Regnon, Etudes de theologie positive sur la Sainte Trinité, I, Paris 1892, 433.

5. Saint Gregory of Nazianzen, Oratio 42, 15 (PG 36, 476).

6. Cf. Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium 42 (PG 45, 464).

7. Augustine, De Trinitate, I6,10; cf. also IX,1,1 (“credamus Patrem et Filium et Spiritum Sanctum esse unum Deum”).

8. Cf. Philo Al., De posteritate, 5, 15.

9. Gregory of Nyssa, Homily XI on the Canticle )(PG 44, 1000 C-D).

10. Life of Moses, II, 163 (SCh 1 bis, p. 210 f.).

11. Homily XI on the Canticle (PG 44, 1001 B).

12. Homily on the Canticle (PG 44, 893 B-C).

13. B. Pascal, Pensees 267 Br.

14. Thomas Aquinas, In Boet. Trin. Proem., q. 1, a.2, to 1.

15. Augustine, Epistle 130, 28 (PL 33, 505).

16. S. Kierkegaard, Diary VIII A 11.

17. John of the Cross, Dark Night, Song of the Soul, stanza 3-4

18. Il libro della beata Angela da Foligno, Quaracchi publishers, 1985, p. 468.

19. R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy (1923), Oxford University Press.

20. Pascal, Pensees, 240 Br.

21. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, VII, 1-2 (Opere de S. Bonaventura, V, 1, Rome, Citta Nuova, 1993, p. 564.

1. Faith tends to reality
Philosopher Edmund Husserl summarized the program of his phenomenology in the motto: Zu den Sachen selbst!, to go to things themselves, to things as they are in reality, before their conceptualization and formulation. Another philosopher who came after him, Sartre, says that “words and with them the meaning of things and the ways of their use” are but “the tiny signs of recognition that men have traced on their surface”: one must go beyond them to have the unexpected revelation, which leaves one breathless, of the “existence” of things.[1]

Saint Thomas Aquinas formulated much earlier a similar principle in reference to things or to the objects of faith: “Fides non terminatur ad enunciabile, sed ad rem”: faith does not end in enunciations, but in reality.[2] The Fathers of the Church are unsurpassable models of this faith which does not stop at formulas, but which goes to reality. The Golden Age of the Fathers and Doctors having past, we witness almost immediately what a scholar of Patristic thought describes as “the triumph of formalism.”[3] Concepts and terms, such as substance, person, hypostasis, are analyzed and studied for themselves, without constant reference to the reality that the architects of the dogma tried to express with them.

Athanasius is, perhaps, the most exemplary case of a faith that is more concerned with the thing than with its enunciation. For some time, after the Council of Nicaea, he seemed to ignore the term homousios, consubstantial, although defending its contents tenaciously as we saw last time, namely the full divinity of the Son and his equality with the Father. He is quick also to accept terms that for him are equivalent, in order to make clear that his intention was to maintain firm the faith of Nicaea. Only in a second moment, when he realized that the term was the only one that left no way out for heresy, did he made ever greater use of it.

This fact is worth noticing because we know the damages caused to ecclesial communion from giving more importance to agreement on terms than to the contents of the faith. In recent years it has been possible to re-establish communion with some Eastern Churches, the so-called Monophysite or Nestorian, having recognized that their quarrel with the faith of Chalcedon was in the different meaning attributed to the terms ousia and hypostasis, and not with the substance of the doctrine. Also the agreement between the Catholic Church and the World Federation of Lutheran Churches on the subject of justification through faith, signed in 1998, showed that the secular quarrel on this point was more in the terms than in the reality. Once formulas are coined, they tend to fossilize, becoming banners and signs of membership, more than expressions of a lived faith.

2. Saint Basil and the Divinity of the Holy Spirit

Today we climb onto the shoulders of another giant, Saint Basil the Great (329-379), to scrutinize with him another reality of our faith, the Holy Spirit. We will see right away how he is also a model of faith that does not stop at formulas but goes to the reality.

On the divinity of the Holy Spirit, Basil does not say the first or the last word, that it, it is not with him that the debate opens or with him that it is closed. The one who opened the discourse on the ontological status of the Spirit was Saint Athanasius. Before him, the doctrine on the Paraclete remained in the shadow and one can also understand why: the position of the Holy Spirit in the divinity could not be defined before the Son’s was defined. Because of this, one was limited to repeat in the symbol of the faith: “and I believe in the Holy Spirit,” without other additions.

In the Letter to Serapion, Athanasius opened the debate that would lead to the definition of the divinity of the Holy Spirit in the Council of Constantinople of 381. He teaches that the Spirit is fully divine, consubstantial with the Father and the Son, that he does not belong to the world of creatures, but to that of the Creator and the proof, here as well, is that his contact sanctifies us, divinizes us, something he would be unable to do if he himself were not God.

I said that Basil does not even say the last word. He avoids applying to the Paraclete the title of “God” and that of “consubstantial.” He affirms clearly faith in the full divinity of the Spirit using equivalent expressions, such as equality with the Father and the Son in adoration (the isotimia), his homogeneity, and not heterogeneity, in relation to them. These are terms with which the divinity of the Holy Spirit was defined in the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople of 381 and which articulate the article of faith on the Holy Spirit that we still profess today in the Creed:

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of Life,
who proceeds from the Father (and the Son).
With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.

Basil’s prudent attitude, meant to avoid distancing the opposing party of the Macedonians even more, drew the criticism of Gregory of Nazianz who places his friend among those who had enough courage to think that the Holy Spirit is God, but not enough to proclaim him such explicitly. Shattering any delay, he writes “Is the Spirit therefore God? Certainly! Is he consubstantial? Yes, if it is true that he is God.”[4]

Hence, if on the theology of the Holy Spirit, Basil does not say either the first or the last word, why should we choose him as our teacher of faith in the Paraclete? It is because Basil, as Athanasius before him, is more concerned with the “thing” than with its formulation, more concerned with the full divinity of the Spirit than with terms with which to express such faith. The thing, to express ourselves in the terms of Thomas Aquinas, is of greater interest to him than its enunciation. He transports us to what is central to the person and action of the Holy Spirit.

Basil’s is a concrete pneumatology, lived, not scholastically but “functionally” in the most positive sense of the term, and it is what renders him particularly timely and useful for us today. Because of the known question of the Filioque, pneumatology ended by restricting itself in the course of the centuries almost solely to the problem of the way of procession of the Holy Spirit: from the Father alone, as the Orientals say, or also from the Son (Filioque), as the Latins profess. Something of the concrete pneumatology of the Fathers has passed to the treatises on “the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit,” but limited to the ambit of personal sanctification and the contemplative life.

Vatican Council II initiated a renewal in this field, for example, when it moved the charisms from hagiography, that is, the life of the saints, to ecclesiology, that is, the life of the Church, speaking of them in Lumen Gentium.[5] However, it was just a beginning; there is still a long way to go to bring to light the action of the Holy Spirit in all the experience of the people of God. On the occasion of the 16th centenary of the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople of 381, Blessed John Paul II wrote an Apostolic Letter in which he said, among other things: “All the work of renewal of the Church that Vatican Council II so providentially proposed and initiated … cannot be realized except in the Holy Spirit, that is, with the help of the his light and his strength.”[6] We will see that Basil is, in fact, our guide on this path.

3. The Holy Spirit in the History of Salvation and in the Church

It is interesting to know the origin of his treatise on the Holy Spirit. It is curiously linked to the prayer of the Gloria Patri. During a liturgy, Basil pronounced the doxology sometimes in the form: “Glory be to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit,” at other times in the form: “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.” This second form brought more clearly to light than the first the equality of the three Persons, coordinating rather than subordinating them among themselves. In the overly heated climate of the discussions on the nature of the Holy Spirit, this sparked protests and Basil wrote his work to justify his operation; in practice, to defend against the Macedonian heretics the full divinity of the Holy Spirit.

However, we come immediately to the point for which, I said, Basil’s doctrine reveals itself as particularly timely: his capacity to bring to light the action of the Spirit in every moment of the history of salvation and in every sector of the life of the Church. He begins with the work of the Spirit in creation.

“In the creation of beings the first cause of all that comes into existence is the Father, the instrumental cause is the Son, and the perfecting cause is the Spirit. It is by the will of the Father that created spirits subsist; it is by the operative strength of the Son that they are led to being and it is by the presence of the Spirit that they attain perfection … If one tries to subtract the Spirit from creation, all things are confused and their life appears without law, without order, without any determination.”[7]

Saint Ambrose would take up this thought of Basil, bringing it to a thought-provoking conclusion. Referring to the first two verses of Genesis (“The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep”) he observes:

“When the Spirit began to hover over it, creation did not yet have any beauty. Instead, when creation received the operation of the Spirit, it obtained all this splendor of beauty that makes it shine as ‘world.’”[8]

In other words, the Holy Spirit is he who makes creation pass from chaos to the cosmos, which makes of it something beautiful, ordered: a world that is “clean” (mundus), according to the original meaning of this word and of the Greek word cosmos. We now know that the creative action of God is not limited to the initial instant, as the deist and mechanistic view of the universe thought. God was not “once” but always a Creator. This means that the Holy Spirit is he who continually fashions the universe, the Church and every person to pass from chaos to cosmos, that is, from disorder to order, from confusion to harmony, from deformity to beauty, from oldness to newness. Not of course mechanically and all at once, but in the sense that he is at work in it and guides to an end its very evolution. He is the one who always “creates and renews the face of the earth” (cf. Psalm 104: 30).

This does not mean, Basil explained in the same text, that the Father created something imperfect and “chaotic” which was in need of corrections; it was simply the design and will of the Father to create through the Son and lead beings to perfection through the Spirit.

From creation the holy Doctors pass to illustrates the presence of the Spirit in the work of redemption:

“In regard to the plan for man’s salvation (oikonomia), the work of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, established according to the will of God, who could contest its fulfillment through the grace of the Spirit?”[9]

At this point, Basil abandons himself to a contemplation of the presence of the Spirit in the life of Jesus which is one of the most beautiful passages of his work and opens to pneumatology a field of research which only recently has begun to be taken into consideration again.[10] The Holy Spirit was already at work in the proclamation of the prophets and in the preparation for the coming of the Savior; it was by his power that the incarnation in Mary’s womb was realized; he was the chrism with which Jesus was anointed by God in baptism. Every work of Jesus was realized with the presence of the Spirit. He “was present when Jesus was tempted by the devil, when he worked miracles; the Spirit did not leave him when he rose from the dead, and on the day of Easter he poured the Spirit on the disciples (cf. John 20:22f.). The Paraclete was “the inseparable companion” of Jesus during his whole life.

From the life of Jesus, Saint Basil passes to illustrate the presence of the Spirit in the Church:

“Does not the organization of the Church make clear the incontestable work of the Spirit? He himself has given the Church, says Paul, in the first place the Apostles, then the prophets, then the teachers … This order is organized in keeping with the diversity of the gifts of the Spirit.”[11]

In the Anaphora that bears the name of Saint Basil, which our present Eucharistic Prayer IV has followed closely, the Holy Spirit has a central place.

The last description is concerned with the presence of the Paraclete in eschatology: “Also at the moment of the event of the awaited manifestation of the Lord of the heavens – writes Basil – the Holy Spirit will not be absent.” This moment will be, for the saved, the passage from the “first fruits to the full possession of the Spirit” and for the reprobates the definitive separation, between the soul and the Spirit.[12]

4. The Soul and the Spirit

However, Saint Basil does not stop at the action of the Spirit in the history of salvation and in the Church. As an ascetic and spiritual man, his main interest is in the action of the Spirit in the personal life of every Christian. Although not yet establishing the distinction and order of the three stages of the spiritual life that will become classic later on, he brings marvelously to light the action of the Holy Spirit in the purification of the soul from sin, in its illumination and divinization that he also calls “intimacy with God.”[13]

We can do no less than read the page in which, in continuous reference to Scripture, the Saint describes this action, and allow ourselves to be transported by his enthusiasm:

“The relationship of familiarity of the Spirit with the soul, is not a drawing close in space – as if one comes close, in fact, to the incorporeal corporally – but consists, rather, in the exclusion of the passions, which, as a consequence of their attraction for the flesh, enslave the soul and separate it from union with God. Purified from the filth of which it was riddled through sin and returned to its natural beauty, as if restoring to a royal image its old form through purification, only in this way is it possible to draw near to the Paraclete. In the blessed contemplation of the image, you will see the unspeakable beauty of the archetype. Through him hearts are raised, the weak are taken by the hand, those who are progressing reach perfection. He, illuminating those who have been purified from every stain, renders them spiritual through communion with him. And as limpid and transparent bodies, when a ray strikes them, become splendid themselves and reflect another ray, thus souls bearers of the Spirit are illumined by the Spirit; they themselves become fully spiritual and return grace to others. From here stems their foreknowledge of future things; understanding of mysteries; perception of hidden things; the distribution of charisms, heavenly citizenship; dance with the angels; endless joy; permanence in God, likeness to God; fulfillment of desires: becoming God.”[14]

It was not difficult for scholars to discover behind Basil’s text, images and concepts derived from Plotinus’ Enneads and to talk, in this connection, of an extraneous infiltration in the body of Christianity. In reality, it is an exquisitely biblical and Pauline topic that is expressed, as was right and proper, in familiar and meaningful terms for the culture of the time. At the base of everything, Basil does not put man’s action — contemplation — but the action of God and the imitation of Christ. We are poles apart from Plotinus’ vision and from every philosophy. For him, everything begins with Baptism which is a new birth. The decisive act is not at the end, but at the beginning of the journey:

“As in the double race of the stadiums, a stop and a rest separate the courses in the opposite sense, so also in the changing of life it seems necessary that a death come between the two lives to put an end to what preceded and to give a start to subsequent things. How is one able to descend into hell? By imitating the burial of Christ through Baptism.”[15]

The background is the same as Paul’s. In the sixth chapter of the Letter to the Romans, the Apostle speaks of the radical purification from sin that occurs in Baptism and in the eighth chapter he describes the battle that, sustained by the Spirit, the Christian must engage in for the rest of his life, against the desires of the flesh, to advance in the new life:

“Those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, indeed it cannot; and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. […] So then, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh – for if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live” (Romans 8:5-13).

We should not be surprised if to illustrate the task described by Saint Paul, Basil made use of an image of Plotinus. It is at the origin of one of the most universal metaphors of the spiritual life and it speaks to us today no less than it did to the Christians of that time:

“Come now!, return to yourself and look; and if you still do not see yourself beautiful, imitate the author of a statue that must succeed in being beautiful: he in part chisels, in part levels; here he polishes, there he sharpens, until he has expressed a beautiful face in the statue. Similarly, you also must take away the superfluous, straighten that which is crooked, and, in the fury of purifying what is dark, make it become lucid and do not cease to torment your statue until the divine splendor of virtue shines before you.”[16]

If, as Leonardo da Vinci said, sculpture is the art of removing, the philosopher is right in comparing purification and holiness to sculpture. For the Christian, however, it is not about attaining an abstract beauty or building a beautiful statue, but about bringing to light and rendering ever more resplendent the image of God that sin tends continually to cover.

It is said that one day Michelangelo, strolling in a courtyard of Florence, saw a block of rough stone covered with dust and mud. He stopped suddenly to look at it, then, as if illuminated by a flash of lightning, said to those present: “An angel is hidden in this mass of stone. I want to bring him out!” And he began to work with his scalpel to give shape to the angel he had glimpsed. So it is with us. We are still masses of rough stone, with so much “dirt” and useless pieces on our back. God the Father looks at us and says: “Hidden in this piece of stone is the image of my Son; I want to bring it out, so that it will shine in eternity beside me in heaven!” And to do this he uses the scalpel of the cross, he prunes us. (cf. John 15:2).

The most generous not only endure the blows of the scalpel that come from outside, but they also collaborate because of all that has been given them, imposing on themselves little or great voluntary mortifications and breaking their old will. A desert Father said:

“If we wish to be completely liberated, let us learn to break our will and thus, little by little, with the help of God, we will advance and arrive at full liberation from the passions. It is possible to break one’s will ten times in a very brief time and I will tell you how. One is strolling and sees something; his thought says to him: ‘Look there!’ but he answers his thought: ‘No, I will not look!’ and he breaks his will.”[17]

This ancient Father gives other examples drawn from his monastic life. If someone is speaking badly of somebody, perhaps of the Superior, your old man tells you: “Take part also. Say what you know.” But you answer: “No!” And you mortify the old man” … But it is not difficult to lengthen the list with other acts of self-denial, according to the state in which one lives and the office one holds.

Hence, if we live complying with the desires of the flesh we are like the two famous “Bronzes of Riace,” at the moment in which they were rescued from the bottom of the sea, all covered with incrustations and barely recognizable as human figures. If we also wish to shine, as these two masterpieces after their restoration, Lent is the opportune time to get to work.

5. A “Spiritual” Mortification

There is a point in which the transformation of Plotinus’ ideal into a Christian ideal remained incomplete, or at least not very explicit. Saint Paul, we heard, says: “If through the Spirit you make the works of the body die, you will live.” The Spirit, hence, is not only the fruit of mortification but also that which makes it possible; it is not only at the end of the journey but also at the beginning. The Apostles did not receive the Spirit at Pentecost because they had become fervent; they became fervent because they had received the Spirit.

The three Cappadocian Fathers were essentially ascetics and monks. Basil, in particular, with his monastic Rules (Asceticon!), was one of the founders of Christian asceticism. This led him to emphasize strongly the importance of man’s effort. Gregory of Nyssa, brother and disciple of Basil, would write in this line: “In the measure that you develop your struggles for piety, in this same measure is also developed the grandeur of the soul through these struggles and these efforts.”[18]

In the following generation, this vision of ascesis was taken up and developed by spiritual authors, such as John Cassian, but removed from the solid theological base that it had in Basil and Gregory of Nyssa. It is from this point – notes Bouyer – that Pelagianism, putting human effort before grace, got its start.”[19] However, this negative success cannot be imputed to Basil or the Cappadocians.

To conclude we return to the reason that renders Basil’s doctrine on the Holy Spirit perennially valid and today, I said, more than ever, timely and necessary: its concreteness and adherence to the life of the Church. We Latins have a privileged means to make our own and to transform into prayer this same type of pneumatology: the hymn of the Veni creator.

It is from beginning to end a praying contemplation of what the Spirit does concretely throughout the earth and in humanity as the creator Spirit; in the Church, as Spirit of sanctification (gift of God, living water, fire, love and spiritual unction) and as charismatic Spirit (multi-form in your gifts, finger of the right hand of God, who puts the word on lips); in the life of the individual believer, as light for the mind, love for the heart, healing for the body; as our ally in the fight against evil and guide in discerning the good.

Let us invoke him with the words of the first stanza, asking him to make our world and our soul pass from chaos to the cosmos, from dispersion to unity, from the ugliness of sin to the beauty of grace.

Veni, Creator Spiritus,
O Spirit that quickens creation,
Mentes tuorum visita,
permeate your faithful in their innermost being
Imple superna gratia
pour the fullness of grace
Quae tu creasti pectora.
into the hearts you created for yourself.

— — —

[1] J.P. Sartre, La Nausea, Ital. trans., Milan 1984, p. 193 f.
[2] Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, II-IIae, q. 1, a. 2, ro 2.
[3] Cf. G. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought, London 1936, chapt. XIII (Ital. trans., Dio nel pensiero dei Padri, Bologna, il Mulino, 1969, pp. 273 ff).
[4] Gregory Nazianzen, Oratio 31, 5.10; cf. also Oratio 6: “Until when will we keep the lamp hidden under the bushel and not proclaim in a loud voice the full divinity of the Holy Spirit?”
[5] Cf. Lumen Gentium, 12.
[6] John Paul II. “To the Constantinopolitan Council I,” in AAS 73, 1981, p. 521.
[7] Basil, On the Holy Spirit, XVI, 38 (PG 32, 137B); Ital. Trans. By E. Cavalcanti, L’esperienza di Dio nei Padri Greci, Rome, 1984.
[8] Ambrose, On the Holy Spirit, II, 32.
[9] Basil, On the Holy Spirit, XVI, 39.
[10] J. D. G. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit, London 1988.
[11] Basil, On the Holy Spirit, XVI, 39.
[12] Ibid. XVI, 40.
[13] Ibid., XIX, 49.
[14] Ibid., IX, 23.
[15] Ibid., XV, 35.
[16] Plotinus, Enneads I, 9 (Ital. trans. By V. Cilento, vol. I, Laterza, Bari 1973, p. 108).
[17] Doroteus of Gaza, Teachings 1,20 (SCh 92, p. 177).
[18] Gregory of Nyssa, De instituto christiano (ed. W. Jaeger, Two Rediscovered Works, Leida 1954, p. 46.
[19] L. Bouyer, La spiritualita dei Padri, Edizioni Dehoniane, Bologna 1968, p. 295.

Not too many years ago, there were theological proposals that, despite the profound differences between them, had a common scheme as background, sometimes clear, sometimes implicit. The scheme is extremely simple because it is reductive. The two greatest mysteries of our faith are the Trinity and the Incarnation: God is One and Triune; Jesus Christ is God and man. In the proposals I referred to, this nucleus was articulated thus: God is one, and Jesus Christ is man: the divinity of Christ collapses and with it, the Trinity.

The result of this process is that one ends by accepting tacitly and hypocritically the existence of two faiths, and two different Christianities, which have nothing in common except the name: the Christianity of the Creed of the Church, of joint ecumenical declarations in which, with the words of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan symbol, one continues to profess faith in the Trinity and in the full divinity of Christ, and the Christianity of a wide strata of culture, also exegetic and theological, in which these same truths are ignored or interpreted in a wholly different way.

In such a climate, how opportune it is to revisit the Fathers of the Church, not only to know the content of the dogma in its nascent state, but even more so to rediscover the vital unity between professed faith and lived faith, between the “thing” and its “enunciation.” For the Fathers, the Trinity and the unity of God, the duality of the natures and the unity of the person of Christ were not truths to be decided at table or discussed in books in dialogue with other books; they were vital realities. Paraphrasing a phrase that circulates in sports environments, we can say that such truths were not questions of life or death for them, they were much more!

1. Gregory of Nazianzen, Singer of the Trinity

The giant on whose shoulders we wish to climb today is Saint Gregory of Nazianzen; the horizon we wish to scrutinize with him is the Trinity. His is the grandiose picture that shows the unfolding of the revelation of the Trinity in the history and the pedagogy of God who reveals itself in it. The Old Testament, he writes, proclaims openly the existence of the Father and begins to proclaim, in a veiled manner, that of the Son. The New Testament proclaims the Son openly and begins to reveal the divinity of the Holy Spirit. Now, in the Church, the Spirit grants us distinctly his manifestation and the glory of the Blessed Trinity is confessed. God has measured out his manifestation, adapting it to the times and the receptive capacity of men.[1]

This threefold division has nothing to do with the thesis, known under the name of Gioacchino da Fiore, of the three different periods: that of the Father, in the Old Testament, that of the Son in the New and that of the Spirit in the Church. Saint Gregory’s distinction refers to the order of the manifestation, not of the being or acting of the Three Persons, who are present and act together throughout the span of time.

In the Tradition, Saint Gregory of Nazianzen has received the appellative “the Theologian” (ho Theologos), precisely because of his contribution to the clarification of the Trinitarian dogma. His merit is to have given Trinitarian orthodoxy its perfect formulation, with phrases destined to become common patrimony of theology. The pseudo-Athanasian symbol “Quicumque,” composed about a century later, owes not a little to Gregory of Nazianzen.

Here are some of his crystalline formulas:

“He was, and was, and was: but was only one. He was light and light and light: but only one light. This is what David imagined when he said: ‘in thy light do we see light’ (Psalm 35:10). And now we have contemplated it and proclaim it, from the light that is the Father understanding the light that is the Son in the light of the Spirit: here is the brief and concise theology of the Trinity […] God is, if it is licit to speak succinctly, undivided in beings divided one from the other.”[2];

The main contribution of the Cappadocians in the formulation of the Trinitarian dogma is that of having clarified the distinction of the two concepts of ousia and hypostasis, substance and person, creating the permanent conceptual base with which faith in the Trinity is expressed. It is one of the most grandiose innovations that Christian theology introduced in human thought. Developed from it was the modern concept of persons as relationships.

The weak side of their Trinitarian theology, which they themselves were aware of, was the danger of conceiving the relationship between the one divine substance and the three hypostasis of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit on a level with the relationship that exists in nature between the species and individuals (for example, between the human species and individual men), thus leaving themselves open to the accusation of tritheism.[3]

Gregory of Nazianzen makes an effort to respond to this difficulty, asserting that each one of the three Divine Persons is not less united to the other two than he is united to himself.[4] For the same reason, he refutes the traditional similitudes of “source, stream, river” or “sun, ray, light.”[5] In the end, however, he admits candidly that he prefers this risk to the opposite one of modalism: “It is better, he says, to have an idea, even if insufficient, of the union of the Three, rather than risking an absolute blasphemy.”[6]

Why should we choose Saint Gregory of Nazianzen as a teacher of faith in the Trinity? The reason is the same as that for choosing Athanasius as a teacher of faith in the divinity of Christ. It is because for Gregory, the Trinity is not an abstract truth or just a dogma. It is his passion, his vital environment, something that makes his heart vibrate just to name it.

The Orthodox call him “the singer of the Trinity.” This corresponds perfectly with what we know of his human personality. Gregory was a man with a heart that was even greater than his mind, a sensitive temperament to the point of excess, so much so as to procure for himself not a few disappointments and sufferings in his relations with others, beginning with his friend Saint Basil.

It is in his poetic production, above all, that his enthusiasm for the Trinity is revealed. He uses expressions such as “my Trinity,” “the dear Trinity.”[7] Gregory was in love with the Trinity. He wrote of himself:

“Since the day in which I gave up the things of this world to consecrate my soul to luminous and heavenly contemplations, when the supreme intelligence stole me from down here to set me down far from all that is carnal, from that day my eyes have been dazzled by the light of the Trinity … From its sublime seat it sheds its ineffable radiance on everything … Since that day, I have been dead to the world and the world is dead to me.”[8]

Suffice it to compare these words with the technically perfect but cold words of the “Quicumque” symbol which was once recited in Sunday’s Divine Office to realize the distance that separates the lived faith of the Fathers from the formal and repetitive one that was instituted after them, even if the latter also carried out an important task.

2. We Cannot Live without the Trinity

Now, as usual, some reflections on what the Fathers can offer us in this field for a renewal of our faith. It is well-known that Western theology has always had to defend itself from the risk opposite to that of tritheism from which, we saw, Gregory of Nazianzen had to defend himself, that is, the risk of accentuating the unity of the divine nature, to the detriment of the distinction of the persons.

In this area the deistic vision of Descartes and the followers of the Enlightenment was able to develop, which does not consider the Trinity at all but concentrates solely on God, conceived as Supreme Being or as “the divinity.” Kant came up with the noted conclusion, according to which “from the Trinitarian doctrine, taken literally, it is not possible to draw anything practical.”[9] In other words, it is a mystery irrelevant for the life of men and of the Church.

This was undoubtedly one of the factors that smoothed the path for modern atheism. If the idea of the One and Triune God had been kept alive in theology, rather than speaking of a vague “Supreme Being,” it would not have been so easy for Feuerbach to have his thesis triumph that God is a projection that man makes of himself and of his essence. What need would man have, in fact, to split himself into three: in Father, Son and Holy Spirit? And in what sense can the Trinity be the projection and sublimation that the human spirit makes of itself? It is the vague deism that is demolished by Feuerbach, not faith in God One and Triune.

However, if on one hand the Latin vision of the Trinity leaves itself open to this deistic deviation, on the other it contains the most effective remedy against it. We will never be sufficiently grateful to Augustine for having based his discourse on the Trinity on John’s words: “God is love” (1 John 4:10). God is love: because of this, concludes Augustine, he is Trinity! “Love implies one who loves, that which is loved and love itself.”[10] In the Trinity the Father is he who loves, the source and principle of everything; the Son is he who is loved; the Holy Spirit is the love with which they love one another.

All love is love of someone or something, just as all knowledge, explained Husserl, is knowledge of something. Love is not given “to a void,” without object. Now who does God love, to be defined love? Man? But then he would be love for some hundreds of millions of years. The universe? But then he would only have been love for some tens of billions of years. And before who loved God to be love? The Greek thinkers and, in general, the religious philosophies of all times, conceiving God above all as “thought,” could answer: God thought of himself; he was “pure thought,” “thought of thought.” But this is no longer possible the moment in which it is said that God is first of all love, because “pure love of himself” would be pure egoism, which is not the highest exaltation of love, but its total negation.

And here is the answer of revelation, made explicit by the Church with her doctrine of the Trinity. God has always been love, ab eterno, because before an object existed outside of him to love, he had in himself the Word, the Son whom he loved with an infinite love, that is, “in the Holy Spirit.” This does not explain how unity can be contemporaneously Trinity (this is an unknowable mystery for us because it happens only in God), but it is enough at least to intuit why unity in God must also be plurality, also Trinity.

A God who was pure Knowledge and pure Law, or pure Power would certainly have no need to be triune (this, in fact, would greatly complicate things); but a God who is first of all Love does, because with less than between two, there cannot be love.” “The world– wrote de Lubac – needs to know this: the revelation of God as Love upsets all that it had conceived of the divinity.”[11]

Love is certainly a human analogy, but it is, undoubtedly, the one that best enables us to cast a look on the mysterious profundity of God. Seen in this is how Latin theology integrates Greek theology, and the two cannot do without one another. The concept of love is almost totally absent from the Trinitarian theology of the Orientals who prefer to use the analogy of light. We must wait for Gregory Palamas to read, in the Greek ambit, something analogous to what Augustine says on love in the Trinity.[12]

Some today would like to set aside the dogma of the Trinity to facilitate the dialogue with the other great monotheistic religions. It is a suicidal operation. It would be like removing a person’s spinal cord to make him walk faster! The Trinity has so imprinted itself on theology, the liturgy, spirituality and the whole of Christian life that to renounce it would mean to initiate another completely different religion.

What should be done, rather, as the Fathers teach us, is to bring this mystery from the books of theology to our life, so that the Trinity is not just a mystery that is studied or correctly formulated, but lived, adored, enjoyed. Christian life unfolds, from beginning to end, in the sign and the presence of the Trinity. At the dawn of life we were baptized “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” and at the end, if we have the grace to die in a Christian way, these words will be recited at our bedside: “Go forth, Christian soul, from this world: in the name of the Father who created you, of the Son who redeemed you and of the Holy Spirit who sanctified you.”

Between these two extreme moments, there are other so-called moments “of passage” that, for a Christian, are all countersigned by the invocation of the Trinity. In the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit spouses are joined in marriage and exchange rings, and priests and bishops are consecrated. There was a time when contracts, sentences and every important act of civil and religious life began in the name of the Trinity. The Trinity is the womb in which we were conceived (cf. Ephesians 1:4) and it is also the port towards which all of us navigate. It is “the ocean of peace” from which everything flows and to which everything flows back.

3. “O Blessed Trinity!”

Saint Gregory of Nazianzen should have awakened in us an ardent desire for the Trinity: to make it “our” Trinity, the “dear” Trinity, the “beloved” Trinity. Some of these accents of overwhelming adoration and wonder resound in texts of the solemnity of the Most Blessed Trinity. We must make them pass from the liturgy to life. There is something more blessed that we can do in regard to the Trinity than to seek to understand it, and it is to enter into it! We cannot embrace the ocean, but we can enter into it; we cannot embrace the mystery of the Trinity with our mind, but we can enter into it!

The “door” to enter into the Trinity is one, Jesus Christ. With his death and resurrection he inaugurated for us a new a living way to enter into the holy of holies which is the Trinity (cf. Hebrews 10, 19-20), and he has left us the means to be able to follow him on this path of return. The first and most universal is the Church. When one wishes to go across a strait of the sea, Augustine said, the most important thing is not to be on the bank and to point our sight to see what is on the opposite shore, but it is to get into the boat that takes one to the other bank. Also for us the most important thing is not to speculate about the Trinity, but to remain in the faith of the Church which goes to it.[13]

In the Church, the means par excellence is the Eucharist. The Mass is a Trinitarian action from beginning to end; it begins in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and it ends with the blessing of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. It is the offering that Jesus, Head and Mystical Body, makes of himself to the Father in the Holy Spirit. Through it we truly enter into the heart of the Trinity.

For our Orthodox brothers an important means to enter into the mystery is the icon. Rublev’s Trinity is a visual synthesis of the Trinitarian doctrine of the Cappadocians and, in particular, of Gregory the Nazianzen. In it one perceives, in equal measure, incessant movement and superhuman stillness, transcendence and condescendence. The dogma of the unity and Trinity of God is expressed by the fact that the figures present are three and clearly distinct, but very like one another. They are contained ideally within a circle that brings their unity to light; but with their different movement and disposition also proclaims their distinction.

Saint Sergius of Radonez, for whose monastery the icon was painted, is distinguished in Russian history for having brought unity between the leaders in discord among themselves and thus having made possible the liberation of Russia from the Tartars that had invaded her. His motto – which Rublev made an effort to interpret with the icon – was: “Contemplating the Most Holy Trinity, conquer the hateful discord of this world.” Saint Gregory of Nazianzen expressed a similar thought in these verses, which are as his spiritual testament:

I seek solitude, a place inaccessible to evil,

Where with undivided mind I seek my God

And alleviate my old age with the sweet hope of heaven.

What will I leave to the Church? I will leave my tears! …

I turn my thoughts to the abode that does not fade,

To my dear Trinity, only light,

Of which only the dark shadow now moves me.”[14]

Latin spirituality is no less rich of aids to make the Trinity a close, loved mystery. It also insists on the reverse movement: not us who enter the Trinity but the Trinity who enters us. In the Orthodox tradition, the doctrine of the indwelling is referred by preference to the person of the Holy Spirit. It is Latin theology that developed in all its potentiality, the biblical doctrine of the indwelling of the whole Trinity in the soul: “my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23).[15] Pius XII reserved a place for it in his encyclical Mystici corporis, saying that thanks to it we “participate from now on in the joy and blessedness of the Trinity.”[16]

Saint John of the Cross says that “the love that was poured into our heart through the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5) is none other than the love with which the Father has always loved the Son. It is an overflowing of the divine love of the Trinity in us. God communicates to the soul “the same love that he communicates to the Son, even though this does not happen by nature, but by union … The soul participates in God, fulfilling, together with him, the work of the Most Holy Trinity.”[17] Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity suggests a simple method to us to translate all this into a program of life: “All my exercise consists in entering into myself and losing myself in the Three who are there.”[18]

I see in this another motive, and among them the most profound, to evangelize. A few days ago I read in the Liturgy of the Hours, the words of God in Isaiah: “But this is the man to whom I will look, he that is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word” (Isaiah 66:2). I was struck by a thought. Look, I said to myself, in what the great difference consists between one who is baptized and one who is not: on one who is not baptized, God “turns his gaze,” is present intentionally, with his love and his Providence; on one who is baptized, he does not only turn his gaze but comes to dwell in him in person, with all three divine Persons. It is true that a corresponded intentional presence can be more accepted by God than a neglected or rejected baptismal presence (and this must fill us with responsibility and humility), but it would be ingratitude not to recognize the difference that exists between being and not being Christians.

We end by reciting together the doxology that concludes the canon of the Mass, which is the briefest and densest Trinitarian prayer of the Church: “Through Christ, with Christ, in Christ to you, God the Father Almighty, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen”

— — —

1. Cf. Gregory of Nazianzen, Oratio 31, 26. Ital. trans. By C. Moreschini, Five Theological Discourses, Rome, Citta Nuova, 1986.

2. Oratio 31, 3.14.

3. Cf. Basil, Epistola 236, 6.

4. Gregory of Nazianzen, Oratio, 31, 16.

5. Ibid., 31, 31-33.

6. Ibid., 31, 12.

7. Gregory of Nazianzen, Poemata de seipso, I, 15; I, 87 (PG 37, 1251 f.; 1434).

8. Ibid., I, 1 (PG 37, 984-985).

9. E. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, A 50 (WW, ed. W. Weischedel, VI, p. 303).

10. Augustine, De Trinitate, VIII, 10, 14.

11. H. de Lubac, Historie et Espirt, Aubier, Paris 1950, chapt. 5.

12. Gregory Palamas, Capita physica, 36 (PG 150, 1144f.).

13. Augustine, De Trinitate, IV, 15, 30; Confessions, VII, 21.

14. Gregory of Nazianzen, Poemata de seipso, I, 11 (PG 37, 1165 f.).

15. Cf. R. Moretti – G. M. Bertrand, Inhabitation, in “Dict. Spir.”, 7, 1735.1767.

16. Pius XII, Mystici corporis, AAS, 35, 1943, pp. 231 f.

17. Saint John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle A, stanza 38.

18. Elizabeth of the Trinity, Letters, 151, (Scritti, Rome 1967, p. 274).

We will put ourselves each time in the school of one of the four great Doctors of the Eastern Church — Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa — to see what each one of them says to us today, in regard to the dogma of which he was champion, that is, respectively, the divinity of Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, knowledge of God. At another time, God willing, we will do the same for the great Doctors of the Western Church: Augustine, Ambrose and Leo the Great.

What we wish to learn from the Fathers is not so much how to proclaim the faith to the world, namely, evangelization, or how to defend the faith against errors, namely, orthodoxy; but, rather, how to deepen our faith, to rediscover, behind them, the richness, beauty and happiness of believing, to pass, as Paul says, “through faith for faith” (Romans 1:17), from a believed faith to a lived faith. It will spell, in fact, growth in the “volume” of faith within the Church, which will then constitute the major strength of its proclamation to the world and the best defense of its orthodoxy.

Father de Lubac affirmed that there was never a renewal of the Church in history which was not also a return to the Fathers. Vatican II, whose 50th anniversary we are about to celebrate, is no exception. It is interwoven with quotations from the Fathers; many of its protagonists were Patristic scholars. After Scripture, the Fathers constitute the second layer of soil on which theology, liturgy, biblical exegesis and the whole spirituality of the Church rest and draw their lymph. In certain Medieval Gothic cathedrals curious statues can be seen: personages of imposing stature who rule, seated on the shoulders of very small men. It is the representation in stone of a conviction that theologians of the time formulated with these words: “We are like dwarfs seated on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more things and farther than they, not because of the acuteness of our sight or the height of our body, but because we are borne higher and are raised to a gigantic height.”[1] The giants of course were the Fathers of the Church. So it is also for us today.

1. Athanasius, the Champion of the Divinity of Christ

We begin our review with Saint Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, who was born in 295 and died in 373. Few Fathers have left such a profound mark on the history of the Church as he. He is remembered for many things: for his influence in the spread of monasticism, thanks to his “Life of Anthony,” for having been the first to claim the liberty of the Church also in a Christian State,[2] for his friendship with Western bishops, fostered by the contacts he had during his exile, which marked a reinforcement of the bonds between Alexandria and Rome. However, it is not with all of this that we wish to be concerned. In his Diary, Kierkegaard expresses a curious thought: “The dogmatic terminology of the primitive Church is like an enchanted castle, where the most lovely princes and princesses rest in a profound sleep. Suffice it only to wake them, for them to leap to their feet in all their glory.[3]

The dogma that Athanasius helps us to “reawaken” and to have shine in all its glory is that of the divinity of Christ; for it he suffered exile seven times. The bishop of Alexandria was thoroughly convinced that he was not the discoverer of this truth. On the contrary, all his work would consist in showing that this has always been the faith of the Church, that the truth is not new but what is new is the opposing heresy. His chief merit, in this field, has been that of removing the obstacles that had impeded up to then a full recognition without reticence of the divinity of Christ in the Greek cultural context. One of these obstacles, perhaps the main one, was the Greek habit of defining the divine essence with the term “agennetos”, not begotten. How to proclaim that the Word is true God, from the moment that he is Son, namely begotten by the Father? For Arius it was easy to establish the equivalence: begotten = made, that is to pass from “gennetos” to “genetos”, and conclude with the famous phrase which made the case explode: “There was a time when he was not!” This was equivalent to making Christ a creature, even though not “as the other creatures.” Athanasius defended with drawn sword the “genitus non factus” of Nicaea, “begotten, not made.” He resolved the controversy with the simple observation: “The term ‘agenetos’ was invented by the Greeks who did not know the Son.”[4]

Another cultural obstacle to the full recognition of the divinity of Christ, less perceived at the time but not less operative, was the doctrine of an intermediate divinity, the deuteros theos, linked to the creation of the material world. From Plato onward it became a common given in many religious and philosophical systems of antiquity. The temptation to assimilate the Son, “through whom all things were created,” to this intermediate entity remained latent in Christian speculation, even if not in the life of the Church. The result was a threefold scheme of being: at the summit of everything, the un-begotten Father — after him, the Son (and later also the Holy Spirit) and finally the creatures.

The definition “One in being with the Father” ( homoousios), and “begotten not made,” (genitus, non factus) removed forever the main obstacle of Hellenism in recognizing the full divinity of Christ and brought about the Christian catharsis of the metaphysical world of the Greeks. With such a definition, only one line of demarcation is drawn on the vertical of being and this line does not divide the Son from the Father, but the Son from creatures. Wishing to enclose in a phrase the everlasting meaning of the definition of Nicaea, we can formulate it thus: in every age and culture, Christ must be proclaimed “God,” not in some derived or secondary meaning, but in the strongest meaning that the word “God” has in such a culture. Athanasius made the maintenance of this conquest the purpose of his life. When everyone — emperors, bishops and theologians — oscillated between a rejection and an attempt at accommodation, he remained immovable. There were times when the future common faith of the Church lived in the heart of only one man: his. One’s attitude toward him determined the side one was on.

2. The Soteriological Argument

However, more important than insisting on the faith of Athanasius in the full divinity of Christ, which is a noted and peaceful thing, is to know what motivated him in the battle, from where he got such absolute certainty — not from speculation, but from life; more precisely, from reflection on the experience that the Church makes of salvation in Christ Jesus. Athanasius shifts the interest of theology from the cosmos to man, from cosmology to soteriology. Reconnecting himself with the ecclesiastical tradition antecedent to Origen, especially Irenaeus, Athanasius appreciates the results elaborated in the long battle against Gnosticism, which had led to concentration on the history of salvation and of human redemption. Christ is no longer placed, as in the age of the apologists, between God and the cosmos, but rather between God and man. That Christ is Mediator does not mean that he is between God and man (ontological mediation, often understood in a subordinate sense), but that he unites God and man. In him God becomes man and man becomes god, that is, he is divinized.[5]

Placed on this ideal background is the application that Athanasius makes of the soteriological argument dependent upon the demonstration of the divinity of Christ. The soteriological argument is not born with the Arian controversy; it was present in all the ancient Christological controversies, from the anti-Gnostic to the anti-Monothelite. In its classical formulation is sounds thus: “Quod non est assumptum non est sanatum,” “What is not assumed is not saved.”[6] It is adapted to the various cases, so as to counter the error of the moment, which can be the negation of the human flesh of Christ (Gnosticism), or of his human soul (Apollinarianism), or of his free will (Monothelitism).

In the use that Athanasius makes of it, it can be formulated thus: “What is not assumed by God is not saved,” where the force is in all that brief addition “by God.” Salvation exacts that man not be assumed by any intermediary, but by God himself: “If the Son is a creature –writes Athanasius — man would remain mortal, not being united to God,” and again: “Man would not be divinized, if the Word that became flesh were not of the same nature of the Father.”[7] Athanasius formulated it many centuries before Heidegger, and took much more seriously the idea that “only a God can save us,” nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten.[8]

The soteriological implications that Athanasius draws from the homoousios of Nicaea are many and very profound. To describe the Son as “consubstantial” with the Father means to put him on a level in which absolutely nothing could remain outside his ray of action. It also means rooting the meaning of Christ on the same foundation in which the being of Christ is rooted, that is, in the Father. Jesus Christ, we then say, does not constitute in the history of the universe a second additive presence in regard to that of God; on the contrary, he is the very presence of the Father. Athanasius writes: “Good as he is, the Father, with his Word that is also God, guides and sustains the whole world, because creation, illuminated by his guidance, by his Providence and by his order, is able to persist in being … The omnipotent and Most Holy Word of the Father, penetrating all things and reaching everywhere with his strength, gives light to every reality and contains everything and embraces it in himself. There is no being whatsoever that can subtract itself from his dominion. All things receive life entirely from him and are maintained in it by him: single creatures in their individuality and the created universe in its totality.”[9]

However, it is important to make a specification. The divinity of Christ is not a practical “postulate,” as the existence itself of God is for Kant.[10] It is not a postulate, but the explanation of a “given.” It would be a postulate and hence a human theological deduction, if one began from a certain idea of salvation and if the divinity of Christ was not deduced as the only one capable of bringing about such salvation; it is, instead, the explanation of a given if one begins, as Athanasius does, from an experience of salvation and it is demonstrated how it would not be able to exist if Christ were not God. It is not on salvation that the divinity of Christ is founded, but it is on the divinity of Christ that salvation is founded.

3. Corde creditur!

However, it is time for us to return to see what we can learn today of the epic battle sustained in his time by Athanasius. The divinity of Christ is today the real “articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae,” the truth on which the Church stands or falls. If in other times, when the divinity of Christ was peacefully admitted by all Christians, one could think that this “article” was the “gratuitous justification by faith,” now it is no longer thus. Can we say that the vital problem for the man of today is to establish in what way the sinner is justified, when people no longer believe they need being justified or are convinced of finding justification in themselves? “I myself accuse myself today — Sartre has one of his personages cry out from the stage — and only I can also absolve myself, I the man. If God exists man is nothing.”[11]

The divinity of Christ is the cornerstone that supports the two principal mysteries of the Christian faith; the Trinity and the Incarnation. They are like two doors that open and close together. If that stone is discarded, the whole edifice of the Christian faith collapses on itself: if the Son is not God, by whom is the Trinity formed? Saint Athanasius had already denounced this when writing against the Arians: “If the Word does not exist together with the Father from all eternity, then an eternal Trinity does not exist, but first there was unity and then, with the passing of time, by addition, the Trinity began to be.”[12]

(An idea — this of the Trinity that is formed “by addition” — that began to be proposed, not so many years ago, by some theologian who applied to the Trinity Hegel’s dialectic scheme of becoming!). Well before Athanasius, Saint John established this bond between the two mysteries: “He who denies the Son, does not possess the Father either; he who professes his faith in the Son also possesses the Father” (1 John 2:23). The two things are or fall together, but if they fall together, then we must say sadly with Paul that we Christians, “we are of all men most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:19). We must allow ourselves to be confronted directly by that very respectful but very direct question of Jesus: “But you, who do you believe I am?” and by that even more personal one: “Do you believe?” Do you really believe? Do you believe with all your heart? Saint Paul says that “man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved”(Romans 10:10). In the past, the profession of the correct faith, namely the second moment of this process, has been so highlighted at times as to leave in the shadow that first moment which is the most important and which unfolds in the recondite profundity of the heart. “It is from the roots of the heart that faith arises,” exclaims Saint Augustine.[13]

It is necessary perhaps to demolish in us, believers, and in us, men of the Church, the false persuasion of believing already, to be fine in regard to the faith. It is necessary to provoke doubt — not, of course, about Jesus but about ourselves — to then be able to go in search of a more authentic faith. Who knows if it might not be a good thing, for some time, not to wish to demonstrate anything to anyone, but to internalize our faith, to rediscover its roots in our heart! Jesus asked Peter three times: “Do you love me?” He knew that the first and second time the answer came out too hastily, to be the true one. Finally, on the third time, Peter understood. The question about the faith should also be asked of us three times, with insistence, until we also realize and enter into the truth: “Do you believe? Do you believe? Do you really believe?” Perhaps at the end we will answer: “No, Lord, I do not really believe with all my heart and with all my soul. Increase my faith!”

Athanasius reminds, however, of yet another important truth: that faith in the divinity of Christ is not possible, if one does not also have the experience of salvation wrought by Christ. Without this, the divinity of Christ becomes easily an idea, a thesis, and we know that an idea can always be opposed by another idea, and a thesis by another thesis. Only to a life — said the desert Fathers –is there nothing that can be opposed.
The experience of salvation is made by reading the word of God (and taking it for what it is, the word of God!), administering and receiving the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, the privileged place of the presence of the Risen One, exercising the charisms, keeping in contact with the life of the believing community, praying. In the 4th century, Evagrius formulated the famous equation: “If you are a theologian, you will truly pray and if you truly pray you will be a theologian.”[14]
Athanasius prevented theological research from remaining a prisoner of the philosophical speculation of the different “schools” in order to have it become instead a deepening of the revealed truth in the line of the Tradition. An eminent Protestant historian recognized in Athanasius a singular merit in this field: “Thanks to him — he wrote — faith in Christ has remained rigorous faith in God and, in keeping with its nature, clearly different from all the other forms — pagan, philosophical, idealistic — of faith … With him, the Church became again an institution of salvation, that is, in the rigorous sense of the term, ‘Church,’ whose own and determinant content is constituted by the preaching of Christ.”[15]

All this draws us in today in a particular way, after theology was defined as a “science” and is professed in academic environments, very much more disengaged from the life of the believing community than was, at the time of Athanasius, the theological school, called “Didaskaleion”, which flourished in Alexandria with the work of Clement and Origen. Science exacts from the scholar that he “dominate” his material and that he be “neutral” in face of the object of science itself; however, how can one “dominate” one who shortly before, you adored as your God? How can one remain neutral in face of the object, when this object is Christ? This was one of the reasons that pushed me, at a certain point of my life, to abandon academic teaching and dedicate myself full time to the ministry of the word. I remember the thought that surfaced in me, after having taken part in theological and biblical congresses and debates, especially abroad: “Because the university world has turned its back on Jesus Christ, I will turn my back on the university world.” The solution to this problem is not, certainly, that of abolishing the academic studies of theology. The Italian situation makes us see the negative effects produced by the absence of a Faculty of Theology in state universities. Catholic and religious culture in general is relegated to a ghetto; in secular bookstores one does not find a single religious book, unless it is on some esoteric or fashionable topic. The dialogue between theology and human, scientific and philosophical learning is carried out “long distance,” and this is not the same thing. Speaking in university environments, I often say that they should not follow my example (which remains a personal choice), but to appreciate to the maximum the privilege they enjoy, trying when possible to supplement their study and teaching also with some pastoral activity that is compatible with it.

If one cannot and one must not remove theology from academic environments, there is, however, something that academic theologians can do, and it is to be sufficiently humble to recognize their limits. Theirs is not the only or the highest expression of the faith. Father Henri de Lubac wrote: “The ministry of preaching is not the vulgarization of a doctrinal teaching in a more abstract way, which would be anterior and superior to it. It is, on the contrary, the doctrinal teaching itself, in its highest form. This was true of the first Christian preaching, that of the Apostles, and it is equally true of the preaching of those who are their successors in the Church: the Fathers, the Doctors and our Pastors in the present hour.”[16] H.U. von Balthasar, in turn, speaks of the “mission of preaching in the Church, to which the theological mission itself is subordinated.”[17]

4. “Courage, It Is I!”

To conclude, let us turn to the divinity of Christ. It illumines,
clarifies the whole of Christian life.
Without faith in the divinity of Christ:
God is remote,
Christ remains in his time,
The Gospel is one of many religious books of humanity,
The Church is a simple institution,
Evangelization is propaganda,
The liturgy is evocation of a past that is no longer,
Christian morality is a burden that is anything but light
and a yoke that is anything but gentle.

However, with faith in the divinity of Christ:
God is Emmanuel, God with us,
Christ is the Risen One who lives in the Spirit,
The Gospel is definitive word of God to the whole of humanity,
The Church is the universal sacrament of salvation,
Evangelization is the sharing of a gift,
The liturgy is a joyful encounter with the Risen One,
Present life is the beginning of eternity.
Written, in fact, is that “He who believes in the Son has eternal
life” (John 3:36).

Faith in the divinity of Christ is indispensable above all in this moment to keep alive hope about the future of the Church and of the world. Against the Gnostics who denied the true humanity of Christ, Tertullian raised, in his time, the cry: “Parce unicae spei totius orbis,” do not take away from the world its only hope!”[18.] We must say it today to those who refuse to believe in the divinity of Christ.

To the Apostles, after having calmed the storm, Jesus addressed a word that he repeats today to their successors: “Take heart, it is I; have no fear” (Mark 6:50).

— — —

1. Bernard of Chartres, in John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, III, 4
(Corpus Chr. Cont. Med., 98, p. 116).
2. Athanasius, Historia Arianorum, 52, 3: “What does the emperor have
to do with the Church?”
3. S. Kierkegaard, Diary, II A 110 (Trans. Ital. by C. Fabro,
Brescia, 1962, nr. 196).
4. Athanasius, De decretis Nicenae synodi, 31.
5. Cf. Athanasius, De incarnatione 54, cf. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. V, praef.
6. Gregory of Nazianzen, Letter to Cledonius (PG 37, 181).
7. Athanasius, Contra Arianos II 69 and I 70.
8. Antwort. Martin Heidegger im Gesprach, Pfullingen 1988.
9. Athanasius, Contra gentes 41-42.
10. I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, chapts. III,VI.
11. J. P. Sartre, The Devil and the Good God, X, 4, Gallimard, Paris
1951, p. 267 f.
12. Athanasius, Contra Arianos I, 17-18 (PG 26, 48).
13. Augustine, Commentary on the Gospel of John, 26, 2 (PL 35, 1607).
14. Evagrius, De oratione 61 (PG 79, 1165).
15. H. von Campenhausen, The Greek Fathers, Brescia 1967, pp. 103-104.
16.H. de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, I, 2, Paris 1959, p. 670.
17. H.U. von Balthasar, Contemplative Prayer, quoted Ibid. by de Lubac.
18. Tertullian, De carne Christi, 5, 3, (CC 2, p. 881).

“Prope est iam Dominus: venite, adoremus” (The Lord is close at hand; come, let us worship him). We begin this meditation just as the Liturgy of the Hours begins in the days that precede Christmas in such a way that it may also serve as part of our preparation for the solemnity.

I have tried to recount in the preceding meditations three great waves of evangelization in the history of the Church. Other great missionary enterprises can certainly be recalled as well: the mission of St. Francis Xavier in the 16th century in the East — India, China, and Japan — and the evangelization of the African continent in the 19th century by Daniel Comboni, Cardinal Guglielmo Massaia, and so many others. Nevertheless, there is a reason for the selection I made that I hope has emerged in the course of our reflection.

The thing that changes and distinguishes the various waves of evangelization mentioned is not the content of the proclamation — “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” as the Letter to Jude verse 3 says — but those to whom that proclamation is addressed: the Greco-Roman world, the barbarian world, and the new world, that is, the American continent, respectively.

We can ask ourselves, therefore, who comprises the new group that allows us to speak of the proclamation today as a fourth wave of new evangelization? The answer is the western world that has been secularized and in some respects is post-Christian. This analysis, which already appeared in the writings of Blessed John Paul II, has become explicit in the teaching of the Holy Father Benedict XVI. In the Motu Proprio with which he established the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelization, he speaks of many traditionally Christian countries that now “seem particularly resistant to many aspects of the Christian message.”[1]

During Advent last year, I tried to demonstrate what characterizes this new group to be evangelized, summarizing into three categories — scientism, secularism, and rationalism — the three mindsets that lead to a common result, relativism.

Paralleling the appearance of a new world to evangelize, we have also observed the emergence of a new category of heralds with each wave: bishops in the first three centuries (especially in the third century), monks in the second wave, and friars in the third. Today as well, we can observe the emergence of a new category of primary agents in evangelization: the laity. This does not mean, of course, that one group displaces another but rather that a new component of the people of God is being joined to the others, while the bishops, with the leadership of the pope, always remain the authorized guides and the ones ultimately responsible for the missionary task of the Church.

2. A parallel to the wake behind a large ship

I said that over the centuries, those to whom the proclamation was addressed has changed but not the message itself. I must, however, clarify this last statement. It is true that the essence of the proclamation cannot change, but its mode of presentation, the priorities, and the departure point of the proclamation can and must change.

Let us summarize the unfolding progression of the gospel proclamation up to our time. There is first of all the proclamation by Jesus whose central theme is the news that “The kingdom of God has come to you.” After this unique and unrepeatable period that we call “the time of Jesus” comes “the time of the Church” after Easter. In this second period, Jesus is no longer the one who proclaims but is the one proclaimed. The word “gospel” no longer means “the good news” brought by Jesus but the good news about Jesus that has Jesus as its focus, and his death and resurrection in particular. That is what St. Paul always means by the word “gospel.”

We need to be careful, however, not to separate too strictly the two phases and the two proclamations — of Jesus and of the Church or what is sometimes called the “historical Jesus” and the “Christ of faith.” Jesus is not just the focus of the Church’s proclamation, that which is proclaimed. We dare not reduce him merely to that! It would mean forgetting the Resurrection. It is the risen Christ who, by his Spirit, still speaks in the Church’s proclamation; he is also the one who is doing the proclaiming. As one Vatican Council text says, “He is present in his word since it is he himself who speaks when the holy scriptures are read in church.”[2]

Beginning with the initial proclamation of the Church, that is, the kerygma, we can summarize the successive unfolding of the preaching of the Church through an image. Let us picture the wake made by a large ship. It begins as one point, and that point is the ship itself, but it grows wider and wider until it spreads out across the horizon and touches the opposite shores of the sea. This is what has happened with the Church’s proclamation. It begins with one point, the kerygma: “[Christ] was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Romans 4:25; cf. 1 Corinthians 15:1–3) or, in a phrase that is even more concise and pregnant with meaning, “Jesus is Lord!” (Romans 10:9; cf. Acts 2:36).

An initial expansion of this one point occurs with the appearance of the four Gospels, written to explain that original nucleus, and then with the rest of the New Testament. After this comes the Tradition of the Church, with its magisterium, its theology, its institutions, its laws, its spirituality. The final result is an enormous patrimony that can make us think precisely of a ship’s wake in its maximum distension.

So now, if we want to evangelize a secularized world, there is a choice to make. Where do we begin? From some place within that expanded wake or from its initial point? The immense wealth of doctrine and institutions can become a handicap if we are trying to present all of that to a person who has lost all contact with the Church and no longer knows who Jesus is. That would be like clothing a baby with one of those enormous, heavy brocaded copes that priests and bishops used to wear.

Instead, it is necessary to help this person establish a relationship with Jesus. We need to do what Peter did on the day of Pentecost when 3,000 people were present: to speak about Jesus whom we have crucified and whom God has raised and to bring that person to the point that he or she, cut to the heart, asks, “Brethren, what shall we do?” (Acts 2:37). We will respond as Peter does, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you” (Acts 2:38) if you have not been baptized, or if you have already been baptized, go to confession.

Those who respond to the proclamation will join themselves — today as in that day — to the community of believers. They will listen to the teaching of the apostles and will partake in the breaking of the bread. Depending on each person’s calling and response, little by little they will be able to make the immense heritage arising from the kerygma their own. Jesus is not accepted on the word of the Church, but the Church is accepted on the word of Jesus.

We have an ally in this effort: the failure of all the attempts by the secular world to substitute other “calls” and “manifestos” for the Christian kerygma. I often mention the example of the famous painting by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch called “The Scream.” Against a reddish background, a man on a bridge with his hands cupped around his mouth is emitting a scream that we immediately recognize is a cry of anguish, a hollow-sounding cry without words. This seems to me the best description of the situation of human beings in modern times who, having forgotten the cry of the kerygma that is full of meaning, find themselves having to scream their existential anguish in a vacuum.

3. Christ, our Contemporary

I would like now to explain why it is possible in Christianity to start over at any time from the point of the ship, without this being either a mental pretense or a mere exercise in archeology. The reason is simple: that ship is still sailing on the sea and its wake still begins with one point!

There is an issue about which I do not agree with the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, although he has said some very wonderful things about faith and about Jesus. One of his favorite themes is the contemporaneity of Christ, but he conceives of that contemporaneity as our making ourselves contemporaneous with Christ: “He who believes in Christ,” he writes, “must be contemporary with Him in His humiliation.”[3] His idea is that in order to truly believe with the same faith required of the apostles, we need to ignore 2,000 years of history and of affirmations about Christ and to put ourselves in the shoes of the very ones to whom Jesus addressed his word: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28). Dare you believe a man uttering such incredible promise while he himself has not even a stone upon which to lay his head?

The true contemporaneity with Christ is something quite other than that: It is Christ who makes himself our contemporary because, having risen, he lives in the Spirit and in the Church. If it were up to us to make ourselves contemporaries of Christ, it would be a contemporaneity that was merely intentional; if it is Christ who makes himself our contemporary, it is a real contemporaneity. According to a bold idea in Orthodox spirituality, “anamnesis is a joyful remembrance that makes the past even more present than when it was lived.” This is not an exaggeration. In the liturgical celebration of the Mass, the event of the death and resurrection of Christ becomes more real for me than it may have been for those who were actually physically present at the event, because they were present “in the flesh,” but now we are present “in the Spirit.”

The same thing is true when someone proclaims with faith, “Christ died for my sins, he was raised for my justification, and he is Lord.” A fourth-century author writes, “For every man the beginning of life is the moment when Christ was immolated for him. But Christ is immolated for him at the moment he acknowledges grace and becomes conscious of the life obtained for him by means of that immolation.”[4]

I realize that it is not easy and may perhaps not even be possible to say such things to people, much less to the secularized world of today. But it is what those of us who evangelize need to be very clear about so that we can draw courage from it and believe the word of John the Evangelist that says, “he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4).

4. The laity, the primary agents of evangelization

I said at the beginning that in terms of the protagonists, the novelty in today’s period of evangelization consists in the laity. Their role in evangelization has been described by the Council in Apostolicam actuositatem ["Decree on the Apostolate of Lay People"], by Paul VI in Evangelii nuntiandi ["Evangelization in the Modern World"], and by John Paul II in Christifideles laici ["The Lay Members of Christ's Faithful People"].

The basis for this universal call to mission is already found in the Gospel. After Jesus first sent the apostles out on mission, we then read in the Gospel of Luke that Jesus “appointed seventy-two others, and sent them on ahead of him, two by two, into every town and place where he himself was about to come” (10:1). Those seventy-two disciples were probably all the disciples he had gathered at that point, or at least all those who were disposed to commit themselves seriously to him. Jesus thus sent all his disciples.

I know a layman in the United States, the father of a family, who alongside his profession also carries on powerful evangelization. He is the kind of man who has a good sense of humor and evangelizes to the sound of loud laughter that can only happen with Americans. When he goes to a new place, he begins by saying very seriously, “Twenty-five hundred bishops gathered in Rome have asked me to come proclaim the gospel to you.” People are of course intrigued. He then explains that the 2,500 bishops are those who participated in the Second Vatican Council and wrote the decree on the apostolate of the laity in which they exhort every Christian layperson to participate in the evangelizing mission of the Church. He was perfectly correct when he said, “they asked me.” Those words are not blowing in the wind, addressed to everyone but no one in particular. They are personally addressed to every Catholic lay person.

We all know about the nuclear energy that is released by the fission of the atom. An atom of uranium absorbs a high energy neutron and splits in two, creating two new elements from the original; energy and more neutrons are released though this process. This begins a chain reaction. The two new elements in turn can themselves absorb neutrons and break into four new atoms, and so on to the point where the energy released in the end is enormous. It is not necessarily destructive energy because nuclear energy can be used for peaceful purposes on behalf of the human race.

Similarly, we can say that laypeople are a kind of nuclear energy in the Church on a spiritual level. A layperson caught up with the gospel and living next to other people can “contaminate” two others, and these two, four others, etc. Since lay Christians number not only tens of thousands like the clergy but hundreds of millions, they can truly play a decisive role in spreading the beneficial light of the gospel in the world.

The apostolate of the laity did not begin to be discussed only by the Second Vatican Council; it had already been discussed for a long time. However, what the Council brought forth that was new about this topic concerned the qualification for laypeople to work alongside the apostolate of the hierarchy. They are not merely collaborators who are called upon for their professional contributions, their time, and their resources. They are bearers of charisms through which, Lumen gentium says, they are made “fit and ready to undertake various tasks and offices for the renewal and building up of the church.”[5]

Jesus willed that his apostles would be pastors of the sheep and fishers of men. For the clergy it is easier to be pastors than to be fishermen, that is, it is easier to nourish those who come to Church through the word and the sacraments than it is to seek out those who are far off in cultural environments that are very different. The parable of the lost sheep is reversed today: ninety-nine sheep have gone off and one remains in the sheepfold. The danger for us is to spend all our time nourishing this one remaining sheep and not to have time — also because of the scarcity of clergy — to seek out those who are lost. The contribution of the laity in this situation seems providential.

The most developed expression along these lines is found in ecclesial movements. Their specific contribution to evangelization is to offer adults an opportunity to rediscover their baptism and to become active and committed members of the Church. Many adult conversions and the return of nominal Catholics to religious practice are occurring through these movements.

Recently the Holy Father Benedict XVI has returned to the topic of the importance of the family in evangelization, speaking of the central role of the Christian family: “Just as the eclipse of God and the crisis of the family are linked,” he said, “so the new evangelization is inseparable from the Christian family.”[6]

Commenting on the text in Luke about the seventy-two disciples, St. Gregory the Great writes that he sent them two by two because “there can be no love where there are fewer than two people,”[7] and love is how people can recognize that we are disciples of Christ. This is true of everyone, but in a very special way for the two parents. If they can do nothing more to help their children in their faith, they would already be accomplishing a great deal if their children, seeing them, could say among themselves, “Look how Dad and Mom love each other.” The scripture says, “love is of God” (1 John 4:7), and that explains why wherever there is some genuine love, God is being proclaimed there.

The first evangelization begins within the walls of the home. Jesus said to a young man who asked him one day what he needed to do to be saved, “go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, . . . and come, follow me” (Mark 10:21). However, in the case of another young man, who wanted to leave everything and follow him, Jesus did not permit him to do that but told him, “Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you” (Mark 5:19).

There is a famous Negro spiritual called “There is a Balm in Gilead.” Some of the words can encourage lay people, and not just them, in the task of person-to-person, door-to-door evangelization:

“If you can’t preach like Peter, if you can’t pray like Paul, go home and tell your neighbor, he died to save us all.”

In two days it will be Christmas. It is a comfort to lay brothers and sisters to remember that in addition to Mary and Joseph around Jesus’ cradle, their representatives were also there, the shepherds and the magi.

Christmas brings us back to the point of the ship’s wake because everything began there with that Baby in the manger. In the liturgy we will hear proclaimed, “Hodie Christus natus est, hodie Salvator apparuit” (Today Christ is born, today the Savior appeared). Hearing these words, let us ponder again what we said about anamnesis that makes an event more present than when it happened the first time. Yes, Christ is born today, because he is truly born for me in the moment when I recognize and believe the mystery. “What good does it do me if Christ was born in Bethlehem once if he is not born again in my heart through faith?” This idea was expressed by Origen [8] and repeated by St. Augustine and St. Bernard.

Let us make our invocation the one chosen by the Holy Father for his Christmas greeting this year, and let us repeat it with all the yearning of our hearts: “Veni ad salvandum nos” (Come, Lord, and save us!).

[English translation by Marsha Daigle Williamson]

— — —

[1] Benedict XVI, Motu Proprio, “Ubicunque et semper,” September 21, 2010.

[2] “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy” [Sacrosanctum concilium], 7, in Vatican Council II: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations, gen. ed. Austin Flannery (Northport, NY: Costello Publishing Co., 1995), p. 12.

[3] Søren Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, trans. Walter Lowrie, pref. Richard John Neuhaus (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 29.

[4] Easter Homilies of the year 387 (SCh 36, p. 59ff).

[5] Lumen gentium ["Dogmatic Constitution on the Church"]. 12, in Vatican Council II: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations, p. 17.

[6] Benedict XVI, “New Evangelization Inseparable from Family,” Address to the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for the Family,” L’Osservatore Romano, December 2, 2011, p. 8.

[7] Gregory the Great, Morals on Job, 34, 41, quoted in Gregory the Great, John Moorhead (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 148.

[8] See Origen, Homilies on Luke, 22, 3, trans. Joseph T. Lienhard (Washington DC: the Catholic University Press of America, 1996), 94: “For what profit is it to you, if Christ came once in the flesh, unless he also comes into your soul?”

Four days ago the American continent celebrated the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which in Mexico is also a holy day of obligation. This is a happy coincidence, when our subject in this meditation is the third great wave of evangelization that followed the discovery of the New World. Never more than in the history of this devotion did Mary deserve the title of “Star of Evangelization.”

I will briefly summarize the main headings of the growth of this missionary enterprise. Let me begin with an observation. Along with the faith, Christian Europe also exported its own divisions. By the end of the great missionary wave, the American continent would exactly reproduce the situation that existed in Europe: a Catholic majority in the south, and a corresponding Protestant majority in the north. We will only deal here with the evangelization of Latin America, which happened first, immediately after the discovery of the New World.

After Christopher Columbus, in 1492, returned from his journey with the news of the existence of the new territories (at that time still thought to be part of India), Catholic Spain took two decisions that were inseparably linked: to bring the Christian faith to the new peoples, and to extend to them their own political sovereignty. For this purpose, they obtained from Pope Alexander VI a decision by which Spain was given the right to all lands discovered one hundred miles beyond the Azores, and Portugal to those on this side of the line. The line was later moved in favour of Portugal, in order to legitimize its possession of Brazil. Thus were drawn the outlines of the future face of the Latin American continent, including its languages.

Each time they entered a country, the troops would issue a proclamation (requerimiento), ordering the inhabitants to embrace Christianity and recognise the sovereignty of the King of Spain.[1] Only a few great spirits, notably the Dominicans Antonio de Montesino and Bartolomeo de Las Casas, had the courage to raise their voices against the abuses of the conquerors in defence of the rights of the natives. In little over fifty years, also on account of the weakness of the local kingdoms, the continent was under Spanish dominion and, at least nominally, Christian.

Recent historians have tended to dilute the somber tones in which this missionary enterprise was painted in the past. First they point out that in Latin America, unlike what was to happen with the “Indian” tribes of North America, most of the native populations, though they were decimated, survived with their own language and territory and were subsequently able to reclaim and recover their identity and independence. One must also take into account that the missionaries were conditioned by their theological formation. Taking the adage “Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus” literally and rigidly, they were convinced of the need to baptize as many people as possible, and in the shortest time possible, in order to ensure their eternal salvation.

It is worth dwelling for a moment on this axiom, which has had so much weight in evangelization. It was formulated in the 3rd century by Origen, and above all by St. Cyprian. To begin with, it was not about the salvation of non-Christians, but on the contrary, about that of Christians. In fact it was aimed directly and exclusively at the heretics and schismatics of the time, to remind them that by breaking ecclesial communion they were guilty of a grave sin by which they were excluding themselves from salvation. It was therefore directed against those who were leaving the Church, not against those who were coming in.

It was only later, when Christianity had become the state religion, that the axiom began to be applied to pagans and Jews, based on the then common, even if objectively erroneous, conviction that the message was by now known to everyone and that therefore to refute it meant that one was culpable and deserving of condemnation.

It was precisely following the discovery of the New World that those geographical boundaries were drastically broken. The discovery of entire peoples who had lived outside of any contact with the Church forced a review of such a rigid interpretation of the axiom. The Dominican theologians of Salamanca, and later a few Jesuits, began to adopt a critical position, recognizing that it was possible to be outside the Church, without being necessarily culpable and therefore excluded from salvation. Not only that, but in the face of the manner and the methods whereby the gospel had sometimes been announced to the native people, someone for the first time raised the question of whether those who, while knowing the Christian message, had not adhered to it, could really be considered culpable.[2]

2. The friars as protagonists

This is certainly not the place to make a historical judgement on the first evangelization of Latin America. On the occasion of its fifth centenary, in May 1992, an international symposium of historians specializing in the subject was held here in Rome. In his speech to the participants, Pope John Paul II stated: “Of course, in that evangelization, as in any human undertaking, there were mistakes as well as successes, ‘lights and shadows,’ but more lights than shadows, to judge from the fruits that we find there five hundred years later: a Church that is alive and dynamic which today represents a considerable portion of the universal Church.”[3]

From the opposite side, on that occasion, some spoke of the need for a “de-colonization” and a “de-evangelization,” giving the impression that they would have preferred it if the evangelization of the continent had not happened at all, instead of happening as we know it did. With all the respect due to the love for the peoples of Latin America which moved these authors, I believe that such an opinion must be vigorously refuted.

To a world without sin but without Jesus Christ, theology has shown that it prefers a world of sin, but with Jesus Christ. “O happy fault,” exclaims the paschal liturgy in the Exsultet, “which gained for us so great a Redeemer.” Shouldn’t we say the same about the evangelization of both Americas, South and North? Which is preferable: a continent without “the mistakes and shadows” that accompanied the preaching of the Gospel, but also a continent without Christ, or a continent with those shadows, but with Christ? Surely anyone would prefer the latter? Could any Christian, of the left or of the right (especially a priest or religious) say the opposite without by that very fact betraying his own faith?

I read somewhere this statement, which I fully agree with: “The greatest thing that happened in 1492 was not that Christopher Columbus discovered America, but that America discovered Jesus Christ.” True, it was not the whole Christ of the Gospel, for which freedom is the very pre-requisite of faith, but who can claim to be the bearers of a Christ free of all historical conditioning? Aren’t those who propose a revolutionary Christ, who challenges structures and is directly involved in the political struggle, perhaps also forgetting something about Christ, for example, his statement that “my kingdom is not of this world”?

If in the first wave of evangelization the protagonists were the bishops, and in the second the monks, the undoubted protagonists in this third wave were the friars, i.e. religious from the mendicant Orders, in first place the Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians, and at a later stage the Jesuits. Church historians recognise that in Latin America “it was the members of the religious Orders who determined the history of the missions and churches”[4]

John Paul II’s judgement that “there were more lights than shadows” can well be applied to them. It would be dishonest to underestimate the personal sacrifice and heroism of so many of these missionaries. The conquistadores were moved by a spirit of adventure and a thirst for profit, but what could they expect for leaving their homelands and their friaries? They were not going there to take, but to give; they wanted to win souls for Christ, not subjects for the king of Spain, even if they shared the patriotic enthusiasm of their fellow countrymen. When you read the stories of the evangelization of a particular territory, you realize how unjust and far from the truth are generalised judgements. I once had occasion to read, on the very spot, the chronicle of the beginnings of the Guatemala mission and in the neighboring regions — stories of sacrifices and mishaps that can scarcely be recounted. Of a batch of 20 Dominicans who left for the New World, bound for the Philippines, 18 died on the way.

In 1974 a Synod was held on “Evangelization in the contemporary world”. In a hand-written note added to the final document (which the Prefecture of the Papal Household had published together with the programme for these sermons), Paul VI wrote:

“Is what is said [in the document] enough for religious? Shouldn’t we add a word about the voluntary, enterprising, generous character of the evangelization done by religious men and women? Their evangelization must depend on that of the hierarchy and be co-ordinated with it, but the originality, the genius, the devotion, often in the front line and entirely at great risk to themselves, is surely praiseworthy.”

This recognition fully applies to the religious who were the protagonists of the evangelization of Latin America, especially if we think of some of the things they achieved, such as the famous “reductions” of the Jesuits in Paraguay, villages where the Christian Indians, protected from the injustices of the civil authorities, could be instructed in the faith, but could also invest their human talents.

3. Current problems

Now, as usual, we will try to move on and look at what this briefly reconstructed history of the Church’s missionary experience has to say to us today. The social and religious conditions of the continent have changed so profoundly that, instead of insisting on what we should learn or unlearn from those times, it is useful to reflect on the current task of evangelization in the Latin American continent.

On this subject there has been, and still is, such a vast amount of reflection and documentation, produced by the pontifical magisterium, by CELAM and the individual local Churches, that it would be presumptuous of me even to think I could add anything new. But I can share a few thoughts from my own experience in the field, having had occasion to preach retreats to episcopal conferences, clergy and people in nearly all the countries of Latin America, in some cases several times. Also, the problems that arise in this field in Latin America are not so very different from those in the rest of the Church.

One reflection concerns the need to overcome an excessive polarization, which is present everywhere in the Church, but is particularly acute in Latin America, especially in recent years: the polarization between the active and the contemplative souls, between the Church of social commitment to the poor, and the Church that proclaims the faith. When we are faced with differences, we are instinctively tempted to come down on one side or the other, exalting the one and despising the other. The doctrine of charisms should save us from getting into that battle. The gift of the Catholic Church is to be precisely that — Catholic, in other words, open to welcome the most diverse gifts given by the Holy Spirit.

This is shown by the history of religious Orders, which have accommodated very different and at times opposing demands: involvement with the world and flight from the world, apostolate among the learned, like the Jesuits, and apostolate among the people, like the Capuchins. There is room for both. Besides, we need each other; no-one can embody the entire gospel and represent Christ in every aspect of His life. Everyone ought therefore to rejoice that others are doing what he or she could not do: that some cultivate the spiritual life and proclaim the word, and that others devote themselves to justice and social development, and vice versa. The Apostle’s warning is always valid: “It is not for you to condemn anyone else!” (cf. Rom 14:13).

Another observation concerns the problem of Catholics leaving the Church for other Christian denominations. First we should remember that these different denominations cannot all be called “sects” without distinction. With some of them, including Pentecostals, the Catholic Church has maintained an official ecumenical dialogue for years, which it would not do if it simply considered them to be sects.

The promotion of this dialogue, even at the local level, is the best way to improve the climate, to isolate the more aggressive sects and discourage the practice of proselytism. A few years ago an ecumenical prayer meeting and Scripture sharing took place in Buenos Aires, attended by the Catholic archbishop and leaders of other churches, with seven thousand people present. One clearly saw the possibility of a new relationship among Christians, far more constructive for faith and evangelization.

In one of his documents, John Paul II said that the proliferation of sects forced us to ask why, to ask what is lacking in our pastoral methods. My own conviction, based on experience — and not only in Latin American countries — is as follows. What is attractive outside the Church are not certain alternative forms of popular piety, which the majority of other churches and sects reject and fight against. It is a proclamation, partial perhaps, but powerful, of the grace of God, the possibility of experiencing Jesus as one’s personal Lord and Saviour, belonging to a group of people who personally take care of your needs, who pray over you when medicine has nothing more to say.

If on the one hand we can rejoice that these people have found Christ and have been converted, it is sad that in order to do so they felt they had to leave their Church. In the majority of churches where these brothers and sisters end up, everything revolves around first conversion and the acceptance of Jesus as Lord. In the Catholic Church, thanks to the sacraments, the magisterium, and the wealth of spirituality, there is the advantage of not stopping at that initial stage, but one can reach the fullness and perfection of the Christian life. The saints are proof of this. But it is necessary to take that conscious and personal initial step, and this is precisely where we are challenged and stimulated by the evangelical and Pentecostal communities.

In this respect, the Charismatic Renewal has proved to be, in the words of Paul VI, “a chance for the Church.” In Latin America, the pastors of the Church are realising that the Charismatic Renewal is not (as some believed at the beginning) “part of the problem” of the exodus of Catholics from the Church, but is rather part of the solution to the problem. Statistics will never show how many people have remained faithful to the Church because of it, because they found within its ranks what others were looking for elsewhere. The numerous communities that have sprung up from within the Charismatic Movement, albeit with the limitations and at times the drifting that one finds in any human venture, are at the front line of service to the Church and of evangelization.

4. The role of religious in the new evangelization

As I said, I don’t want to talk only about first evangelization. But there is one lesson we need to learn from it: the importance of the traditional religious Orders for evangelization. To them Blessed John Paul II devoted his Apostolic Letter on the occasion of the fifth centenary of the first evangelization of the continent, entitled, in the original, “Los caminos del Evangelio”. The final part of the letter deals precisely with “religious in the new evangelization”: “Religious,” he writes, “who were the first evangelisers and contributed so considerably to keeping the faith alive in the continent – cannot fail to keep this appointment with the Church for the new evangelization. The diversity of charisms in the consecrated life make the message of Christ come alive, making it present and relevant in every time and place.”[5]

Community life, a centralized government and formation houses of high quality were the factors that gave the religious Orders at the time such a vast missionary outreach. But what has happened to their strength today? Speaking from the inside of one of these ancient Orders, I can venture to speak with a certain freedom. The rapid decline in vocations in western countries is causing a dangerous situation: nearly all their resources are being spent on meeting the internal needs of their own religious family (formation of the young, the maintenance of structures and works), with few active forces available for service in the wider Church. The result is that they tend to turn in on themselves. In Europe the traditional religious Orders are forced to merge several provinces and face the pain of having to close one house after another.

Secularization is, of course, one of the causes of the decline in vocations, but not the only one. There are religious communities of recent foundation that attract scores of young people. In the letter quoted earlier, John Paul II encouraged the men and women religious of Latin America to “evangelize by starting from a profound experience of God.” And that, I believe, is the point: “a profound experience of God.” This is what attracts vocations and lays the foundations for a new and effective wave of evangelization. The adage “nemo dat quod non habet,” you can only give what you have, has never been truer than in this field.

The Capuchin provincial superior of the Marches, who is also my superior, has written an Advent letter this year to his brothers. In it he makes a challenge which I believe all traditional religious communities would do well to heed:

“As you read these lines, imagine you are the Holy Spirit. Yes, you heard right: imagine not just that you are ‘full of the Holy Spirit’ thanks to the sacraments you have received, but that ‘you are’ the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, and in that guise, imagine that you have the power to call a young person to embark on a way that will help him to grow toward the perfection of charity — I mean of course, the religious life. Would you be brave enough to send him to your fraternity, in the sure certainty that your fraternity would be the place that would seriously help him attain the fullness of charity in the concrete reality of everyday life? Poorly expressed, what I mean is: if a young man were to come and live for a few days or months in your fraternity, sharing in your prayer, your fraternal life, your apostolates …would he fall in love with our way of life?”

When the mendicant Orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans, were born at the beginning of the 13thcentury, even the existing monastic Orders benefited from them and made their own the call to greater poverty and a more evangelical life, while living according to their own charism. Should we not do the same today, we the traditional Orders, in the face of the new forms of consecrated life which have come to life in the Church?

The grace of these new realities takes many forms, but it has a common denominator called the Holy Spirit, the “new Pentecost.” After the Council nearly all the existing religious Orders revised and renewed their Constitutions, but already in 1981, Blessed John Paul II warned: “The whole work of renewal of the Church, so providentially set forth and initiated by the Second Vatican Council — a renewal that must be both an updating and a consolidation of what is eternal and constitutive of the Church’s mission — can be carried out only in the Holy Spirit, that is to say, with the aid of His light and His power.”[6]

“The Holy Spirit,” as St Bonaventure wrote, goes “to where He is loved, where He is invited, where He is awaited.”[7] We must open up our communities to the breath of the Spirit who renews prayer, fraternal life, and love for Christ, and together with this, renews missionary zeal. Of course we do need to look back, to our origins and our founders, but we must also look ahead.

Observing the situation of the ancient Orders in the western world, the question Ezekiel heard as he surveyed the heaps of dry bones spontaneously arises: “Can these bones live?” The dry bones spoken of in the text are not the bones of the dead, but of the living; they are the exiled people of Israel, who keep saying: “Our bones are dried up, our hope has gone, we are doomed!” Sometimes the same sentiments arise in those of us who belong to the ancient religious Orders.

We know the hope-filled reply that God gives to the question: “‘I will put my Spirit in you, and you will revive; and I will resettle you on your own soil. Then you will know that I, the Lord, have spoken and done this,’ declares the Lord God.” We must believe and hope for the fulfilment of the last part of the prophecy, for us too, and for the whole Church: “The Spirit entered them: they came to life and stood up on their feet, a great, an immense army” (cf. Ez 37:1-14).

Four days ago, as I recalled at the beginning, Latin America celebrated the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. There is much discussion about the historicity of the facts underlying the origins of this devotion. We need to understand what is meant by an historical fact. There are so many facts that are historical but not historic, because not everything that happened is “historic” in the truest sense, but only that which, in addition to having happened, has had an impact on the life of a people, has created something new, has left its mark on history. And what a mark has left the devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe in the religious history of the Mexican and Latin American peoples!

It is of great symbolic significance that, at the dawn of the evangelization of the American continent, in 1531, on the hill of Tepeyac to the north of Mexico City, an image of the Virgin Mary was imprinted on the cloak, or tilma, of St. Juan Diego as “La Morenita,” in other words, with the features of a humble half-caste girl. There could have been no more expressive way of saying that the Church, in Latin America, is called to become — and wishes to become — indigenous with the indigenous, Creole with the Creoles, all things to all peoples.

[Translation by Charles Serignat]

[1] Cfr. J. Glazik, in Storia della Chiesa, ed. H. Jedin, vol. VI, Milano Jaca Book, 1075, p. 702.

[2] F. Sullivan, Salvation outside the Church? Tracing the History of the Catholic Response, Paulist Press, New York 1992.

[3] John Paul II, Speech to the participants at the International Symposium on the evangelisation of Latin America, 14 May 1992.

[4] Cfr. Glazik, op. cit., p. 708.

[5] John Paul II, “Los caminos del Evangelio”, nr. 24 (AAS 83, 1991, pp. 22 ss.)

[6] John Paul II, Apostolic Letter “A Concilio Constantinopolitano I”(25 March 1981).

[7] St. Bonaventure, Sermon for the IV Sunday after Easter,2 (ed. Quaracchi, IX, p.311).

The second, great wave of Evangelization, after the Barbarian invasions.

In this meditation I want to talk of the second great wave of Evangelization in the history of the Church, that which followed the fall of the Roman Empire and the mix of nations caused by the Barbarian invasions. I want to do this with a view to how we can learn from this today. Given that vast historical period under examination and the brevity imposed on a sermon, I am able to treat this only as a broad overview.

1. An epoch-making decision

At the official end of the Roman Empire in 476, Europe had been showing, for some time already, a new face. Instead of a single Empire, there were many kingdoms called Roman-barbarian. Broadly speaking, and starting from the North, the situation was as follows: instead of the Roman province of Britannia, there were Anglos and Saxons and in the ancient provinces of Gaul, the Francs; to the east of the Rhine, the Frisians and Germans; in the Iberian peninsula, the Visigoths; in Italy the Ostrogoths and later the Lombards; in northern Africa the Vandals. In the East was still resisting the Byzantine Empire.

The Church found itself before an epoch-making decision: What attitude would she adopt in front of this new situation? The determination which opened the Church to the future was not immediately arrived at without scars. It repeated, in part, what had happened at the moment of separation from Judaism and the welcoming of the Gentiles into the Church. With the sacking of Rome in 410 by Alaric, king of the Visigoths, the general confusion among Christians was at its apex. It was thought to be the end of the world since the ‘world’ was identified with the Roman world and the Roman world with Christianity. St. Jerome is the most representative voice of this general disarray. “Who would have believed,” he wrote, “that this Rome, built through the victories attained throughout the entire universe, had to fall one day?”[1]

From an intellectual point of view, with his work, The City of God, St. Augustine contributed most to taking the Faith to this new world. His vision, which marks the beginning of the philosophy of history, distinguishes the City of God from the earthly city, identified (somewhat forcing his own thought), with the city of Satan. By earthly city, he understands every political order, including that of Rome. Therefore, the fall of Rome was not the end of the world, but just the end of a world!

In practice, the determining factor in opening the Faith to the new reality that confronted it was a coordination of initiatives of the Roman Pontiff. St. Leo the Great was convinced that Christian Rome would survive pagan Rome and would even “preside with her divine religion more broadly than she had with her terrestrial domination.”[2] Little by little the attitude of Christians towards the Barbarians changed; from inferior beings, incapable of civilization, they would begin to be considered possible brothers in the Faith. From permanent threat, the Barbarian world begins to appear to the Christians a new, large field of mission. Paul had proclaimed the end of the distinctions of race, religion, culture, social class brought about by Jesus, “Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all” (Colossians 3:11). But how difficult it was to translate this revolution into practice! And not just then!

2) The re-evangelization of Europe

Confronted by the Barbarian nations, the Church found herself fighting two battles; the first was against the Arian heresy. Many of the Barbarian tribes, above all the Goths, before penetrating the heart of the Empire as conquerors, had had exposure to Christianity in the East and had embraced it in its Arian version, booming at that time, especially through the work of Bishop Ulfila (311-383), the translator of the Bible to the Goths. Once introduced to the Western territories, they took with them this heretical version of Christianity.

Arianism had no united organization, not even a culture or theology comparable to that of the Catholics. Throughout the 6thcentury, one after another, the Barbarian kingdoms abandoned Arianism to adhere to the Catholic faith, thanks to the great work of a few bishops and Catholic writers and also, at times, for political reasons. A decisive moment was the Council of Toledo in 589, called for by Leandro of Seville, which marked the end of the Visigoths Arianism in Spain and practically in the entire western world.

The battle against Arianism however was nothing new, having begun much earlier in the year 325. Evangelization of the pagans became the true new work of the Church after the fall of the Roman Empire. This took place in two directions, that is to say, ad intra and ad extra, in the regions of the old Empire and in those that had more recently appeared on the scene. In the territories of the old Empire, Italy and the provinces, the Church up till then had established itself mostly in the cities. It now extended its presence into the countryside and villages. The term “pagan,” as we know, comes from “pagus,” village, and took its current meaning from the fact that evangelization of the villages, in general, came long after that of the cities.

It would be very interesting to follow also this kind of evangelization that gave birth to the development of the system of parishes, as sub divisions of dioceses, but given the objective I have set myself, I must limit my discourse to the other direction of evangelization, that ad extra, destined to take the Gospel to the Barbarian territories situated in the aisles and in central Europe, that is to say, England, Holland, France and Germany.

In this new task, the conversion of the Merovingian King Clovis on Christmas Eve of 498 or 499 baptized by the bishops of Reims, St. Remigius, proved a crucial moment. This decided, as was the custom of the time, not only the religious future of the Francs, but also of other peoples on both sides of the river Rhine. There is a famous phrase pronounced by Bishop Remigius at the moment of Clovis’ baptism: Mitis depone colla, Sigamber; adora quod incendisti, incende quod adorasti: “Humbly bow your head, wild Sicamber, adore what you have burned, and burn what you adored.”[3] To this event the French nation owes her title of ” the eldest daughter of the Church.”

Thanks to the work of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, the Christianization of the continent culminated in the 9th century with the conversion of the Slavic peoples who had occupied Eastern Europe and the territories left freely by the preceding waves of migrants who had moved to the West.

The evangelization of the Barbarians presented a new condition, with respect to the previous Greco-Roman world. There, Christianity had before it a highly educated world, well organized, with an order, a common law and a common language; it had, in short, a culture with which to dialogue. Now it finds itself having to civilize and evangelize at the same time, having to teach reading and writing while teaching Christian doctrine. Inculturation presented itself in an entirely new form.

3) The monastic epic

This gigantic work, which I have only traced in broad outline, was completed with the participation of all the faithful of the Church. In first place, the Pope who promoted the first mission to the Anglos and played an active role in the evangelization of the Germans (through the work of St. Boniface) and of the Slavic peoples through the work of Sts. Cyril and Methodius; afterwards, the bishops, the parish priests, in the measure local communities were formed. A silent but decisive role was exercised by some women. Behind the great conversions of the Barbarian kings, we frequently find the influence exercised by their respective wives: St. Clotilde, in the case of Clovis; St. Theodolinda, in the case of the Lombard king Autari; the Catholic wife of King Edwin, who introduced Christianity to the north of England.

But the leading protagonists of the re-evangelization of Europe after the Barbarian invasions were the monks. In the West, monasticism, beginning in the fourth century, spread rapidly in two distinct periods and directions. The first wave starts from middle and central Gaul, especially Lerin (410) and Auxerre (418), and thanks to St. Patrick who formed himself in those two centers, Christianity arrived in Ireland whose whole future religious life was shaped by him. From here, in a first phase, the Irish monks went to Scotland and England and afterward returned to the Continent.

The second monastic wave, destined to absorb and unify the different forms of Western monasticism, had its origin in Italy from St. Benedict (+547). From the 5th to the 8th centuries Europe would be literally covered by monasteries, many of which developed a primary task in the formation of the Continent, not just of its faith but also of its art, culture and agriculture. For this reason, St. Benedict was proclaimed the patron of Europe and the Holy Father in 2005 chose Subiaco for his lesson on the Christian roots of Europe.

The great evangelizing monks of our period belong, almost all of them, to the first of the two mentioned currents, that which returns to the Continent from Ireland and England. The most representative names are those of St. Columbanus and St. Boniface. The first, starting from Luxeuil, evangelized numerous regions of the north of Gaul and the tribes of middle Germany, arriving at Bobbio in Italy; the second, considered the evangelizer of Germany, extended his missionary work from Fulda to Frisia, today’s Holland. To him, the Holy Father Benedict XVI dedicated one of his catecheses during the public audiences of Wednesday, on March 11, 2009, highlighting his close collaboration with the Roman Pontiff and the civilizing work among the peoples evangelized by him.

Reading their lives one has the impression of reliving the missionary adventure of the Apostle Paul; the same longing to take the Gospel to every creature on Earth, the same courage to confront every type of danger and inconvenience and, for St. Boniface and many others, also the same end, martyrdom. The weak points of this evangelization of such wide embrace are well known, and the comparison with St. Paul highlights the most serious one. The Apostle, together with Evangelization, established everywhere a Church that assured its continuity and development. Often, for lack of resources and the difficulty of acting in a society still in a state of magma, these pioneers were not capable of assuring a follow-up to their work.

The Barbarian nations were inclined to put into practice only one part of the program indicated by St. Remigius to Clovis; they adored what they had burned, but did not burn what they had adored. Much of their idolatrous and pagan baggage would remain, and would surface at the first opportunity. The most long lasting work left by these great evangelizers was precisely the foundation of a network of monasteries and, with Augustine in England and St. Boniface in Germany, the erection of dioceses and the celebration of synods that assured a deeper and more durable evangelization in the future.

4) Mission and contemplation

Now is the time to extract some lessons for today from the historical overview we have made. To begin with, we note a certain analogy between the period we have covered and the situation today. Then, the movement of peoples was from East to West, today it is from South to North. Now again, the Church, through its Magisterium, has made its decision opening itself to the new reality.

The difference is that today, the new arrivals to Europe are not pagans or Christian heretics but often nations in possession of a well constituted self-conscious religion. Therefore the new element is the dialogue that does not oppose evangelization but rather determines its style. Blessed John Paul II, in his encyclical Redemptoris Missio, about the perennial validity of the missionary mandate, expressed himself clearly: “Inter-religious dialogue is a part of the Church’s evangelizing mission. Understood as a method and means of mutual knowledge and enrichment, dialogue is not in opposition to the mission ad gentes; indeed, it has special links with that mission and is one of its expressions. … In the light of the economy of salvation, the Church sees no conflict between proclaiming Christ and engaging in interreligious dialogue. Instead, she feels the need to link the two in the context of her mission ad gentes. These two elements must maintain both their intimate connection and their distinctiveness; therefore they should not be confused, manipulated or regarded as identical, as though they were interchangeable.”[4]

What happened in Europe after the Barbarian invasions shows us above all the importance of the contemplative life in view of evangelization. With respect to this, the conciliar decree Ad Gentes, says about the missionary activity of the Church: “Worthy of special mention are the various projects for causing the contemplative life to take root. There are those who in such an attempt have kept the essential element of a monastic institution, and are bent on implanting the rich tradition of their order; there are others again who are returning to the simpler forms of ancient monasticism. But all are studiously looking for a genuine adaptation to local conditions. Since the contemplative life belongs to the fullness of the Church’s presence, let it be put into effect everywhere.”[5]

This invitation to look for new ways of monasticism with a view to evangelization, inspired even by ancient monasticism, has not been ignored.

One of the forms in which it has been realized is the “Monastic Fraternities of Jerusalem,” known as the monks and nuns of the city. Their founder, Father Pierre-Marie Delfieux, after having spent two years in the Sahara desert, in the company only of the Eucharist and the Bible, understood that the true deserts today are the great secularized cities. These Fraternities which began in Paris on the Feast of All Saints 1975 are present already in various great cities of Europe, including Rome, where they are situated at the Trinita dei Monti. Their charism is to evangelize through the beauty of art and the liturgy. What is traditionally monastic is their habit, their style of life simple and austere, the balance between work and prayer; what is new is their location at the center of the cities, generally in ancient churches of grand artistic value, and the collaboration between nuns and monks in the liturgy, even within their total reciprocal autonomy insofar as living and juridical dependence is concerned. Not a few conversions of unbelievers or nominal only Christians have taken place around these centers.

Of a distinct type, but one which also forms part of this flourishing of new monastic forms, is the monastery of Bose in Italy. In the field of ecumenism, the monastery of Taizé in France is an example of the contemplative life also directly involved on the front lines of evangelization.

In Avila, on the 1st of November 1982, receiving in audience a wide representation of the feminine contemplative life, John Paul II expounded on the possibility, also in the feminine cloistered life, of a more direct involvement in the work of evangelization. “Your monasteries,” he said, “are communities of prayer amid Christian communities to which you give help, nutrition and hope. They are consecrated places and they can also be centers of Christian welcome for those, above all the young, who often seek a simple and transparent life in contrast to that which is offered by the consumer society.”

The calling was not ignored and has grown into original initiatives of the feminine contemplative life open to evangelization. One of these was able to give a presentation here in the Vatican at a recent Congress, organized by the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelization. All these new forms do not substitute the traditional monastic realities, many of which are also spiritual centers of evangelization, but they accompany and enrich them.

It is not enough in the Church that there be some dedicated to contemplation and some dedicated to mission; it is necessary that the synthesis between these two things be present in the same life of a missionary. In other words, it is not enough to pray “for” the missionaries, what is needed is the prayer “of” the missionaries. The great monks who re-evangelized Europe after the Barbarian invasions were men coming from the silence of contemplation who returned to silence as soon as circumstances permitted. In fact, with the heart they never left the monastery. They put into practice, in fact they anticipated, the advice that St. Francis of Assisi gave to his brothers before sending them to the streets of the world: “We have a hermitage always with us wherever we go, and every time we wish, we can, like hermits return to this hermitage. Brother body is the hermitage and the soul is the hermit which inhabits it to pray to God and meditate.”[6]

Of this however we have a much more authoritative example than the saints. The daily life of Jesus was an admirable conjoining of prayer and preaching. He did not only pray before preaching, he prayed to know what to preach, to receive in prayer the messages to proclaim to the world. “What the Father has told me is what I speak” (John 12:50). From there came that “authority” of Jesus that was so impressive in his speech.

The effort for a new evangelization is exposed to two dangers. One is inertia, laziness, of not doing anything and leaving everything to others. The other is launching into a feverish and empty human activism, with the result of losing little by little the contact with the source of the Word and of its efficacy. It is said: How can I pray in stillness when so many demands lay claim to my attention, how can I not run when the house is burning? It is true, but let us imagine a group of firefighters who would run to put out a fire and who discovered that they had not one drop of water in their tanks. This is how we are when we run to preach without first praying. Prayer is fundamental for evangelization because “Christian preaching is not primarily a communication of doctrine but of existence.” He evangelizes more who prays without speaking than he who speaks without praying.

5) Mary, star of evangelization

We end with a thought suggested by the liturgical time we are living and by the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, which we celebrated yesterday.

Once in an ecumenical dialogue a Protestant brother asked me, without being polemical, just to understand it, “Why do you Catholics say that Mary is the star of evangelization? What has Mary done to deserve this title?”. For me it was an occasion to reflect about the subject and it did not take long to find the answer. Mary is the star of evangelization because she has brought the Word, not to this or that nation, but to the whole world!

And not only for this reason. She carried the Word in her womb not in her mouth. She was full, physically, of Christ and irradiated Him with just her presence. Jesus came out from her eyes, her face and her entire person. When one perfumes oneself it is not necessary to announce it; it is enough simply to stand near the person to sense it, and Mary, most especially during the time she carried Him in her womb, was full of the perfume of Christ. One can say that Mary was the first cloistered nun of the Church. After Pentecost, she entered as if into a cloister. Through the letters of the Apostles we come to know innumerable persons and also many women of the primitive Christian community. Once we find mentioned one called Mary (cf. Romans 16:6), but this is not her. Of Mary, the mother of Jesus, nothing. She disappears in a most profound silence. But what must it have meant for John to have her by his side while he wrote the Gospel and what it might mean for us to have her close while we proclaim the Gospel! “First amongst the Gospels,” writes Origen, “is that of John, the profound meaning of which cannot be understood by any who has not rested his head on the breast of Jesus and has not received Mary from Him as his proper mother.”[7]

Mary has inaugurated in the Church that second soul, or vocation, which is the hidden praying soul, together with the apostolic or active soul. It marvelously expresses the traditional icon of the Ascension, of which we have a representation to the right of this “Redemptoris Mother” chapel. Mary stands with open arms in an attitude of prayer. Around her the Apostles, all with a foot or hand elevated, that is to say in movement, they represent the Church active, missionary, which speaks and acts. Mary is motionless beneath Jesus, in the exact point from where he ascended into heaven, almost as if to preserve a living memory of Him and keep alive the hope of his return.

We end listening to the final words of Paul VI in Evangelii Nuntiandi, in which for the first time in a pontifical document, Mary receives the title Star of Evangelization: “On the morning of Pentecost she watched over with her prayer the beginning of evangelization prompted by the Holy Spirit: may she be the Star of the evangelization ever renewed which the Church, docile to her Lord’s command, must promote and accomplish, especially in these times which are difficult but full of hope!”

— — —

[1] St. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, III, 25, pref.; cf. Epistole LX,18; CXXIII,15-16; CXXVI,2

[2] St. Leo the Great, Sermon 82

[3] Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum, II, 31

[4] John Paul II Redemptoris Missio, 55

[5] A.G. 18

[6] Legenda Perugina, 80 (FF, 1636)

[7] Origen, Commentary on the Gospel of John, I, 6,23 (SCh, 120, p. 70)

In response to the Supreme Pontiff’s call for a renewed commitment to evangelization and by way of preparation for the 2012 synod of bishops on the same issue, I intend to identify in these Advent meditations four waves of evangelization in the history of the Church, that is, four moments in which we witness an acceleration or a taking up again of the missionary commitment. These are:

1) The spread of Christianity in the first three centuries, until the eve of Constantine’s edict, which is led by, first, the itinerant prophets, and then the bishops;

2) The 6th to 9th centuries in which we witness the re-evangelization of Europe after the Barbarian invasions — evangelization led by the work above all of monks;

3) The 16th century, with the discovery and conversion to Christianity of the peoples of the “New World” — the work above all of friars;

4) The present age, which sees the Church committed to a re-evangelization of the secularized West, with the decisive participation of the laity.

In each of these moments I shall attempt to illumine what we can learn in the Church of today: the errors that must be avoided and the examples to be imitated and the specific contribution that pastors, monks, religious of active life and the laity can make to evangelization.

1.The spread of Christianity in the first three centuries.

We begin today with a reflection on Christian evangelization in the first three centuries. There is a reason that makes this period a model for all times. It is the period in which Christianity gains grounds by its own strength. There is no “secular arm” that supports it; conversions are not determined by external, material or cultural advantages; to be Christian is not a custom or fashion, but a decision to swim against the current, often at the risk of one’s life. In some ways, it is the same situation that is happening again in many parts of the world.

The Christian faith was born with a universal openness. Jesus had said to his Apostles to go into “all the world” (Mark 16:15), and “make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19), and be witnesses “to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8), and “that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached to all nations” (Luke 24:47).

This universality was already lived out in principle during the apostolic generation, though not without difficulties and struggles. The first barrier, race, was surmounted on the day of Pentecost (the 3,000-some converts belonged to different nations, but they were all Jewish believers); in Cornelius’ house and in the so-called Council of Jerusalem, especially at Paul’s prodding, the most difficult barrier of all was surmounted — the religious one, which divided the Jews from the Gentiles. The Gospel had before it the whole world, although momentarily this world was limited in men’s knowledge to the Mediterranean basin and to the borders of the Roman Empire.

It is more complex to follow the expansion of Christianity in fact or geographically in the first three centuries which, however, is less necessary for our objective. The most complete and so far unsurpassed study in this respect is that of Adolph Harnack, “Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries.”[1]

A strong intensification of the Church’s missionary activity took place under the rule of Emperor Commodus (180-192), and then afterward, in the second half of the 3nd century, that is, until the eve of the great persecution of Diocletian (302). Apart from sporadic local persecutions, this was a period of relative peace that enabled the nascent Church to consolidate herself interiorly, carrying out a missionary activity in a new way.

Let us see in what this novelty consisted. In the first two centuries the propagation of the faith was entrusted to personal initiative. There were itinerant prophets, of which the Didache speaks, who went from place to place; many conversions were due to personal contact, fostered by the common work in which individuals were engaged — journeys and commercial relations, military service and other circumstances of life. Origen gives us a moving description of the zeal of these first missionaries.

“Christians make every possible effort to spread the faith on earth. To this end, some of them pose formally to themselves as a duty of their lives to go from city to city, also from village to village, to win new faithful to the Lord. It cannot be said that they do it to benefit themselves, because they often reject even what is most necessary to live.”[2]

Now, that is in the second half of the 3rd century, these personal initiatives were increasingly coordinated — and substituted in part — by the local communities. The bishop, reacting also to the disintegrating effects of the Gnostic heresy, took the lead over the teachers as the director of the internal life of the community and the propelling center of its missionary activity. The community was the evangelizing subject to such a point that a scholar such as Harnack, not suspected of sympathy for the institution, stated: “We must take as certain that the sole existence and constant work of the local communities was the principal coefficient in the propagation of Christianity.”[3]

Toward the end of the 3rd century, the Christian faith virtually penetrated every level of society, had its literature in Greek and, although just beginning, in Latin; it had a solid internal organization; it began to build increasingly larger buildings, a sign of the growth of the number of believers. Diocletian’s great persecution, apart from the numerous victims, did no more than demonstrate the insuppressible strength of the Christian faith. The last confrontation between the Empire and Christianity had given the proof of that.

Constantine did no more than confirm the new relationship of forces. It was not he who imposed Christianity on the people, but the people who imposed Christianity on him. Affirmations such as Dan Brown’s in the novel “The Da Vinci Code” and of other writers, according to whom it was Constantine who, for personal reasons, transformed with his edict of tolerance and with the Council of Nicaea, an obscure Jewish religious sect into the religion of the Empire, are based on total ignorance of what preceded these events.

2. Reasons for the Success

A subject that has always impassioned historians is the reason for the triumph of Christianity. A message born in a contemptible corner of the empire, among simple people, with no culture or power, spread in less than three centuries throughout the known world, subjugating the most refined culture of the Greeks and the imperial power of Rome!

Among the different reasons for the success, there are those that emphasize Christian love and the active exercise of charity, to the point of making it “the most powerful individual factor of the success of the Christian faith,” to the point that later it induced the Emperor Julian the Apostate to endow paganism with similar charitable works to compete with this success.[4]

For his part, Harnack gives great importance to what he calls the “syncretistic” nature of the Christian faith, namely, the capacity to reconcile in itself opposite tendencies and different values present in the religions and culture of the time. Christianity presents itself at once as the religion of the Spirit and of power, that is, supported by supernatural signs, charisms and miracles, and as the religion of reason and of the integral Logos, “the true philosophy,” as Justin Martyr said. Christian authors are “the rationalists of the supernatural,”[5] states Harnack quoting St. Paul’s saying on the faith “as rational worship” (Romans 12:1).

Thus Christianity brings together in itself, in perfect balance, what the philosopher Nietzsche describes as the Apollonian and Dionysian element of the Greek religion, the Logos and Pneuma, order and enthusiasm, measure and excess. It is, at least in part, what the Fathers of the Church understood by the “sober intoxication of the Spirit.”

“From the beginning, the Christian religion,” writes Harnack at the end of his monumental research, “presented itself with a universality that enabled it to seize in itself the whole of life, with its functions, its heights and depths, sentiments, thoughts and actions. This was the spirit of universality that assured its victory. This is what led it to profess that the Jesus it proclaimed was the divine Logos … Illumined thus with a new and seeming almost as a necessity also is the powerful attraction with which it even absorbs and subordinates Hellenism in itself. All that was capable of life entered as an element in its construction … Could this religion not conquer?”[6]

The impression one has on reading this synthesis is that the success of Christianity was due to a combination of factors. Some have gone further in the search of reasons for such success to the point of specifying 20 reasons in favor of the faith and as many others that acted in a contrary way, as if the final success depended on the first prevailing over the second.

I would now like to show the inherent limit to such a historical focus, including when it is done by believing historians as those I have already taken into account. The limit, due to the same historical method, is that of giving more importance to the subject than the object of the mission, more to the evangelizers and the conditions in which it is carried out, than to its content.

The reason that drives me to insist on this point is that this is also the limit and the danger inherent in so many present and media focuses, when there is talk of a New Evangelization. A very simple thing is forgotten: that Jesus himself gave, in anticipation, an explanation of the spread of his Gospel, and we must go back to it again every time a new missionary commitment is assumed.

Let us hear again two brief Gospel parables, that of the seeds that grow also at night and that of the mustard seed. “And he said: The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how. The earth produces of itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come” (Mark 4:26-29).

This parable on its own says that the essential reason for the success of the Christian mission does not come from the exterior but from the interior, it is not the work of the sower and not even primarily of the earth but of the seed. The seed cannot sow itself and yet, it germinates by itself. After having sown the seed, the sower can go to sleep because the life of the seed no longer depends on him. When this seed is “the seed that falls to the earth and dies,” that is Jesus Christ, nothing will be able to impede its bearing “much fruit.” One can give all the explanation one wishes for these fruits, but they will always remain superficial and will never reach the essential.

It was the Apostle Paul who perceived with lucidity the priority of the object of the proclamation over the subject: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.” These words seem to be a commentary to Jesus’ parable. It is not a question of three operations of the same importance. In fact, the Apostle adds: “So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:6-7). The same qualitative distance between the subject and the object of the proclamation is present in another of the Apostle’s statements: “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us” (2 Corinthians 4:7). All this is translated into the exclamations: “We do not preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus Lord!” and again “We preach Christ crucified.”

Jesus pronounced a second parable based on the image of the seed that explains the success of the Christian mission and that today must be taken into account, given the great task of re-evangelizing the secularized world.

“And he said, with what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all the shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade” (Mark 4:30-32).

The teaching Christ gives us with this parable is that his Gospel and his very person are the smallest that exist on earth because there is nothing smaller or weaker than a life that ends in death on a cross. However, this small “mustard seed” is destined to become an immense tree, which is able to shelter in its branches the birds that take refuge in it. This means that the whole of creation, absolutely all of it, will go to seek refuge there.

What a difference in regard to the historical reconstructions mentioned earlier! There everything seemed uncertain, accidental, suspended between success and failure. Here everything is decided and assured from the beginning! As the conclusion of the episode of the anointing of Bethany, Jesus pronounced these words: “Truly, I say to you, wherever this Gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her” (Matthew 26:13): the same tranquil awareness that one day his message would spread “to the whole world.” And it is certainly not about a “post eventum” prophecy, because at that moment everything seemed to presage the contrary.

Also on this occasion the one who grasped “the hidden mystery” was Paul. There is an event that always calls my attention. The Apostle preached in the Areopagus of Athens and witnessed a rejection of the message, courteously expressed with the promise to hear him on another occasion. From Corinth, where he went immediately after, he wrote the Letter to the Romans in which he said he received the commission to bring about “the obedience of faith among all the nations” (Romans 1:5-6). Failure did not discourage his confidence in the message: “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel: it is the power of God for salvation to every one who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16).

“Each tree, Jesus says, is known by its own fruit” (Luke 6:44). This is true of all trees, except for the one born from him, Christianity (in fact he speaks here of men); this unique tree is not known by its fruit, but by its roots. In Christianity plenitude is not at the end, as in the Hegelian dialectic of becoming (“only the entire is true”), but it is at the beginning; no fruit, not even the greatest saints, add something to the perfection of the model. In this sense, those are right who say “Christianity is not perfectible.”[7]

3. Sow and … Go to Sleep

What the historians of the Christian origins do not recount or give little importance to is the indestructible certainty that the Christians of that time had, at least the best of them, of the goodness and final victory of their cause. “You can kill us but you cannot destroy us,” the Martyr Justin said to the Roman judge who sentenced him to death. In the end it was this tranquil certainty that assured them of victory and that convinced the political authorities of the uselessness of the efforts to suppress the Christian faith.

This is what we most need today: to awaken in Christians, at least those who attempt to dedicate themselves to the work of re-evangelization, the profound certainty of the truth of what they proclaim. “The Church, Paul VI once said, needs to take up again the yearning, the pleasure and the certainty of her truth.”[8] We must believe, we first of all, in what we proclaim; but really believe it, “with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind.” We must be able to say with Paul: “since we have the same spirit of faith as he had who wrote, I believed, and so I spoke, we too believe, and so we speak” (2 Corinthians 4:13).

The practical task that Jesus’ two parables assign to us is to sow. To sow widely “in season and out of season” (2 Timothy 4:2). The sower of the parable who goes out to sow is not worried by the fact that part of the seed ends up on the road or among thorns. And to think that the sower, outside the metaphor, is Jesus himself! The reason is that in this case one cannot know which terrain is the adequate one, or which will be hard as asphalt and asphyxiating as a bush. In between is human liberty that man cannot foresee and that God doesn’t want to violate. How many times among people who have heard a certain preaching or have read a certain book, we discover that the one who has taken it most seriously or has changed his life is the person we least expected, one who, perhaps, was there by chance and against his will. I myself could count a dozen cases.

Sow and then … go to sleep! That is, sow and do not stay there the whole time looking to see where the seed arises and how many centimeters it grows by the day. Its rooting and growth is not our concern but God’s — and the one who listens. Jerome Klapka Jerome, a great English humorist of the 19th century, said that the best way to delay the boiling of water is to look over it and wait for it with impatience.

To do the contrary is the inevitable source of disquiet and impatience: all the things that Jesus does not like and that he never did when he was on earth. In the Gospel he never seems to be in a hurry. “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day” (Matthew 6:34).

Related to this, the believing poet Charles Péguy puts in God’s mouth some words that we would do well to meditate:

“I am told that there are men

Who work well and sleep badly,

Who do not sleep. What a lack of faith in me!

It would almost be better if they did not work but slept, because laziness is not a more serious sin than anxiety …

I am not speaking, God says, of those men who do not work and do not sleep.

These are sinners, of course …

I am speaking of those who work and do not sleep.

I feel sorry for them. They have no confidence in me …

They govern their affairs very well during the day.

But do not want to entrust to me their governance during the night …

He who does not sleep is unfaithful to Hope …”[9]

The reflections developed in this meditation drive us, in conclusion, to put at the base of the commitment to a New Evangelization a great act of faith and hope and to shake off every sense of impotence and resignation. We have before us, it is true, a world enclosed in its secularism, inebriated by the successes of technology and the possibilities offered by science, which rejects the Gospel proclamation. But, perchance — was the world in which the first Christians lived, the Greeks with their wisdom and the Roman Empire with its power, less certain of itself and less refractory to the Gospel?

If there is something we can do, after having “sown,” it is to “irrigate” with prayer the seed sown. This is why we end with the prayer that the liturgy brings us to recite in the Mass “for the evangelization of peoples”:

“O God, you who will all men to be saved,

And come to the knowledge of truth;

See how great is the harvest and send your laborers,

So that the Gospel is proclaimed to all creatures

And your people gathered by the word of life

And molded by the strength of the sacrament,

Will proceed on the path of salvation and love.

Through Christ our Lord. Amen

—

[1] A. von Harnack.

[2] Origen, C. Cels. III, 9.

[3] Op. cit. p. 321- s.

[4] H. Chadwick, The Early Church, Penguin Books 1967, pp. 56-58.

[5] A. von Harnack, Mission and Propagation of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, Rist. Anast., Cosenza 1986, p. 173.

[6] Harnack, op. cit., p. 370.

[7] S. Kierkegaard, Diary, X5 A 98 (ed. C. Fabro, Brescia II, 1963, pp. 386 ff).

[8] Address at the general audience of November 29, 1972 (Teachings of Paul VI, Vatican Polyglot Typography, X, pp. 1210f.).

Death testifies not to the truth of Christ, but to his love. Of that love, in fact, it is the supreme proof. “No-one can have greater love than to lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15, 13). One could object that there is a greater love than giving your life for your friends, and that is to give your life for your enemies. But that is precisely what Jesus has done: “Christ died for the godless”, writes the Apostle in the Letter to the Romans. “You could hardly find anyone ready to die, even for the upright; though it is just possible that, for a really good person, someone might undertake to die. So, it is proof of God’s own love for us that Christ died for us while we were still sinners. (Rm 5, 6-8). “He loved us while we were enemies, so that he could turn us into friends”[1], exclaims St Augustine.

A certain one-sided “theology of the cross” can make us forget the essential point. The cross is not only God’s judgement on the world and its wisdom; it is more than the revelation and condemnation of sin. It is not God’s NO to the world, it is the YES God speaks to the world from the depths of his love: “That which is wrong”, writes the Holy Father in his latest book about Jesus, “the reality of evil, cannot simply be ignored; it cannot just be left to stand. It must be dealt with; it must be overcome. Only this counts as true mercy. And the fact that God now confronts evil himself, because men are incapable of doing so – therein lies the “unconditional” goodness of God”[2].

But how can we have the courage to speak about God’s love, with so many human tragedies before our eyes, like the disaster that has struck Japan, or the shipwrecks and drownings of these last few weeks? Should we not mention them at all? But to stay completely silent would be to betray the faith and to be ignorant of the meaning of the mystery we are celebrating today.

There is a truth that must be proclaimed loud and clear on Good Friday. The One whom we contemplate on the cross is God “in person”. Yes, he is also the man Jesus of Nazareth, but that man is one person with the Son of the Eternal Father. As long as the fundamental dogma of the Christian faith is not recognised and taken seriously – the first dogma defined at Nicea, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and is himself God, of one substance with the Father – human suffering will remain unanswered.

One cannot say that “Job’s question has remained unanswered”, or that not even the Christian faith has an answer to give to human pain, if one starts by rejecting the answer it claims to have. What do you do to reassure someone that a particular drink contains no poison? You drink it yourself first, in front of him. This is what God has done for humanity: he has drunk the bitter cup of the passion. So, human suffering cannot be a poisoned chalice, it must be more than negativity, loss, absurdity, if God himself has chosen to savour it. At the bottom of the chalice, there must be a pearl.

We know the name of that pearl: resurrection! “In my estimation, all that we suffer in the present time is nothing in comparison with the glory which is destined to be disclosed for us”. (Rom 8, 18), and again: “He will wipe away all tears from their eyes; there will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness or pain. The world of the past has gone.” (Ap 21, 4).

If life’s race ended here below, we would have every reason to despair at the thought of the millions, if not billions, of human beings who start off at a great disadvantage, nailed to the starting line by poverty and underdevelopment, without even a chance to run in the race. But that is not how it is. Death not only cancels out differences, but overturns them. “The poor man died and was carried away by the angels into Abraham’s embrace. The rich man also died and was buried …in Hades” (cf. Lk 16, 22-23). We cannot apply this scheme of things to the social sphere in a simplistic way, but it is there to warn us that faith in the resurrection lets no-one go on living their own quiet life. It reminds us that the saying “live and let live” must never turn into “live and let die”.

The response of the cross is not for us Christians alone, but for everyone, because the Son of God died for all. There is in the mystery of redemption an objective and a subjective aspect. There is the fact in itself, and then awareness of the fact and our faith-response to it. The first extends beyond the second. “The Holy Spirit – says a text of Vatican II – offers to all the possibility of being made partners, in a way known to God, in the paschal mystery”[3].

One of the ways of being associated with the paschal mystery is precisely through suffering: “To suffer”, wrote John Paul II in the days following the attempt on his life and the long convalescence that ensued, “means to become particularly susceptible, particularly open to the working of the salvific powers of God, offered to humanity in Christ”[4]. Suffering – all suffering, but especially that of the innocent and of the martyrs – brings us into contact with the cross of Christ, in a mysterious way “known only to God”.

After Jesus, those who have “given their noble witness” and “have drunk from the chalice” are the martyrs! The account of a martyr’s death was called “Passio”, a passion, like that of the sufferings of Jesus to which we have just listened. Once more the Christian world has been visited by the ordeal of martyrdom, which was thought to have ended with the fall of totalitarian atheistic regimes. We cannot pass over their testimony in silence. The first Christians honoured their martyrs. The records of their martyrdom were circulated among the churches with immense respect. In this very day, in a great Asian country, Christians have been praying and marching in the streets to avert the threat hanging over them.

One thing distinguishes genuine accounts of martyrdom from legendary ones composed later, after the end of the persecutions. In the former, there is almost no trace of polemics against the persecutors; all attention is concentrated on the heroism of the martyrs, not on the perversity of the judges and executioners. Saint Cyprian even ordered his followers to give twenty-five gold coins to the executioner who beheaded him. These are the disciples of the one who died saying: “Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing”. Truly, “Jesus’ blood speaks a different language from the blood of Abel (Heb 12:24): it does not cry out for vengeance and punishment; it brings reconciliation”[5].

Even the world bows before modern witnesses of faith. This explains the unexpected success in France of the film “Of Gods and Men”, which tells the story of the seven Cistercian monks slain in Tibhirine on the night of the 26th and 27th March 1996. And who can fail to admire and be edified by the words of Shahbaz Bhatti, a Catholic politician in Pakistan who was recently killed for his faith? His testament is a legacy to us, his brothers and sisters in the faith, and it would be an act of ingratitude to allow it to be quickly forgotten.

He wrote: “I was offered high government positions and asked to quit my struggle but I always refused to give up, even at the cost of my life. I do not want popularity; I do not want any position. I just want a place at Jesus’ feet. I want my life, my character, my actions to speak for me and indicate that I am following Jesus Christ. Because of this desire, I will consider myself most fortunate if – in this effort and struggle to help the needy and the poor, to help the persecuted and victimized Christians of Pakistan – Jesus Christ will accept the sacrifice of my life. I want to live for Christ and I want to die for Him”.

We seem to hear again the martyr Ignatius Antioch, when he came to Rome to suffer martyrdom. The powerlessness of the victims doesn’t however justify the indifference of the world toward their fate. “The upright person perishes –lamented the prophet Isaiah – and no one cares. The faithful is taken off and no one takes it to heart” (Is 57: 1).

Christian martyrs are not the only ones, as we have seen, to suffer and die around us. What can we believers offer to those who have no faith, apart from the certainty our own faith gives us that there is a ransom for suffering? We can suffer with those who suffer, weep with those who weep (Rom 12, 15). Before proclaiming the resurrection and the life, with the weeping sisters of Lazarus before Him, “Jesus wept” (Jn 11, 35). At this time we can suffer and weep, most of all with the Japanese people, now recovering from one of the most devastating natural disasters in history. We can also tell those brothers and sisters in humanity that we admire the example of dignity and composure which they have given to the world.

Globalisation has at least this positive effect: the suffering of one people becomes the suffering of all, arouses the solidarity of all. It gives us the chance to discover that we are one single human family, joined together for good or ill. It helps us overcome all barriers of race, colour or creed. As one of our poets put it: “Peace, you peoples! Too deep the mystery of the prostrate earth”[6].

But we must take in the teaching contained in such events. Earthquakes, hurricanes and other disasters that strike the innocent and the guilty alike are never punishments from God. To say otherwise would be to offend both God and humanity. But they do contain a warning: in this case, against the danger of deluding ourselves that science and technology will be enough to save us. Unless we practise some restraint in this field, we see that they can become more devastating than nature itself.

There was an earthquake also at the moment when Christ died: “The centurion, together with the others guarding Jesus, had seen the earthquake and all that was taking place, and they were terrified and said: “In truth, this man was son of God” (Mt 27,54). But there was an even bigger one at the moment of his resurrection: “And suddenly there was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled away the stone, and sat on it” (Mt 28, 2). This is how it will always be. Every earthquake that brings death will always be followed by an earthquake of resurrection and life. Someone once said: “Only a god can save us now”. (“Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten”)[7]. We have the sure and certain guarantee that he will do exactly that, because “God loved the world so much that he gave His only-begotten Son” (Jn 3,16).

Let us, then, prepare to sing the ancient words of the liturgy with new conviction and heartfelt gratitude: “Ecce lignum crucis, in quo salus mundi pependit: See the wood of the cross, on which hung the saviour of the world. Venite, adoremus: Come, let us worship.

[English translation by Fr. Charles Serignat, ofmcap]

NOTES

[1] St. Augustine, Commentary on the First Letter of John 9,9 (PL 35, 2051).
[2] Cf. J. Ratzinger – Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, Part II, Ignatius Press, San Francisco 2011, p.133.
[3] Gaudium et spes, 22.
[4] Salvifici doloris, 23.
[5] J.Ratzinger – Benedict XVI, op. cit. p.187.
[6] G. Pascoli, I due fanciulli (The two children).
[7] Antwort. Martin Heidegger im Gespräch, Pfullingen 1988.