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Some quotes from the works of Pope Benedict XVI as a Cardinal:
God
and the World
On Christmas: "As a mere exchange of material goods,
Christmas is coming under the power of wanting-for-oneself; it is
becoming the instrument of an insatiable egoism and has fallen under
the sway of possessions and of power––whereas this event in fact
brings us exactly the opposite message. Pruning back Christmas so
that it is once again simple would be an enormous achievement."
The Wrath of God: "The wrath of God is a way of saying that I
have been living in a way that is contrary to the love that is God.
Anyone who begins to live and grow away from God, who lives away
from what is good, is turning his life toward wrath."
On True Love: "Love, in the true sense, is not always a matter
of giving way, being soft, and just acting nice. In that sense, a
sugar-coated Jesus or a God who agrees to everything and is never
anything but nice and friendly is no more than a caricature of real
love. Because God loves us, because he wants us to grow into truth,
he must necessarily make demands on us and must also correct
us."
The Feminine: "It is theologically and anthropologically
important for woman to be at the center of Christianity. Through
Mary, and the other holy women, the feminine element stand at the
heart of the Christian religion. And this is not in competition with
Christ. To think of Christ and Mary as being in competition means
ignoring the essential distinctions between these two figures. . . .
That is not a competition, but a more profound kind of intimacy. The
Mother and Virgin forms an essential part of the Christian picture
of man."
On Liturgy: "We do at least need a new liturgical
consciousness, to be rid of this spirit of arbitrary fabrication.
Things have gone so far that Sunday litugy groups are cobbling
together the liturgy for themselves. . . . The most important thing
today is that we should regain respect for the liturgy and for the
fact that it is not to be manipulated."\
The Spirit of the Liturgy
The Christian faith can never be separated from the soil of
sacred events, from the choice made by God, who wanted to speak to
us, to become man, to die and rise again, in a particular place and
at a particular time. . . . The Church does not pray in some kind of
mythical omnitemporality. She cannot forsake her roots. She
recognizes the true utterance of God precisely in the concreteness
of its history, in time and place: to these God ties us, and by
these we are all tied together. The diachronic aspect, praying with
the Fathers and the apostles, is part of what we mean by rite, but
it also includes a local aspect, extending from Jerusalem to
Antioch, Rome, Alexandria, and Constantinople. Rites are not,
therefore, just the products of inculturation, however much they may
have incorporated elements from different cultures. They are forms
of the apostolic Tradition and of its unfolding in the great places
of the Tradition.
Unspontaneity is of their essence. In these rites I discover that
something is approaching me here that I did not produce myself, that
I am entering into something greater than myself, which ultimately
derives from divine revelation. This is why the Christian East calls
the liturgy the "Divine Liturgy", expressing thereby the
liturgy's independence from human control.
Dancing is not a form of expression for the Christian liturgy. In
about the third century, there was an attempt in certain Gnostic-Docetic
circles to introduce it into the liturgy. For these people, the
Crucifixion was only an appearance. . . . Dancing could take the
place of the liturgy of the Cross, because, after all, the Cross was
only an appearance. The cultic dances of the different religions
have different purposes - incantation, imitative magic, mystical
ecstasy - none of which is compatible with the essential purpose of
the liturgy as the "reasonable sacrifice". It is totally
absurd to try to make the liturgy "attractive" by
introducing dancing pantomimes (wherever possible performed by
professional dance troupes), which frequently (and rightly, from the
professionals' point of view) end with applause. Wherever applause
breaks out in the liturgy because of some human achievement, it is a
sure sign that the essence of liturgy has totally disappeared and
been replaced by a kind of religious entertainment. Such attraction
fades quickly - it cannot compete in the market of leisure pursuits,
incorporating as it increasingly does various forms of religious
titillation.
This action of God, which takes place through human speech, is
the real "action" for which all creation is in
expectation. The elements of the earth are transubstantiated,
pulled, so to speak, from their creaturely anchorage, grasped at the
deepest ground of their being, and changed into the Body and Blood
of the Lord. The New Heaven and the New Earth are anticipated. The
real "action" in the liturgy in which we are all supposed
to participate is the action of God himself. This is what is new and
distinctive about the Christian liturgy: God himself acts and does
what is essential.
“The Cross is the approbation of our
existence, not in words, but in an act so completely radical that it
caused God to become flesh and pierced this flesh to the quick;
that, to God, it was worth the death of his incarnate Son. One who
is so loved that the other identifies his life with this love and no
longer desires to live if he is deprived of it; one who is loved
even unto death – such a one knows that he is truly loved. But if
God so loves us, then we are loved in truth. Then love is truth, and
truth is love. Then life is worth living. This is the evangelium.
This is why, even as the message of the Cross, it is glad tidings
for one who believes; the only glad tidings that destroy the
ambiguity of all other joys and make them worthy to be joy.
Christianity is, by its very nature, joy – the ability to be
joyful.”
Formal Principles of Catholicism
“Jesus dies because there are forces hostile
to truth; his obedience is fiedelity to truth in conflict with the
tangled web of untruth. But it is precisely by obeying truth that he
obeys both the Father and the Scripture that he interprets by virtue
of his immediate relationship to God, that he thereby opens anew to
his inmost foundation, filling it with a new reality by his living
of its word. His relationship to the fundamental ground of being is
a relationship of real union with the fundamental truth – that is,
“Sonship”: in this relationship to God, the very letter becomes
flesh.”
Introduction to Christianity
In Jesus’ life from the Father, in the
immediacy and closeness of his association with him in prayer and
indeed face to face, he is God’s witness, through whom the
intangible has become tangible, the distant has drawn near.
And further: he is not simpl7y the witness whose evidence we mtrust
when he tells us what he had seen in an existence which had already
made the about-turn from a false concentration on the foreground of
life to the depths of the whole truth; he is the presence of the
eternal itself in this world
God is Near Us: The Eucharist the Heart of Life
“But that means that the Eucharist is far
more than just a meal; it has cost a death to provide it, and the
majesty of death is present in it. Whenever we hold it, we
should be filled with reverence in the face of this mystery, with
awe in the face of this mysterious death the becomes a present
reality in our midst.” Page 44
The Christian feast, the Eucharist, plumbs the
very depths of death. It is not just a matter of pious discourse and
entertainment, of some kind of religious beautification, spreading a
pious gloss on the world; it plumbs the very depths of existence,
which it call death . . . . what the tradition sums up in the
sentence: The Eucharist is a sacrifice, the presentation of Jesus
Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. “ page 44
“The Eucharist is not itself the sacrament of
reconciliation, but in fact it presupposes that sacrament. It
is the sacrament of the reconciled, to which the Lord invites all
those who have become one with him; who certainly still remain weak
sinners, but yet have give their hand to him and have become part of
his family. That is why, form the beginning, the Eucharist has
been preceded by a discernment.” Page 66
“Thus he makes his word come true: “I, when
I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself” (Jn
12:32). That is why we do not need to harbor the fear that
motivated Luther to protest against the Catholic idea of Mass as
sacrifice, that thereby the glory of Christ might be diminished, or
that the “sacrifice was not enough and that we ought to, or could,
add something to it. Such mistaken ideas may well have been
current, but they have nothing to do with the real meaning of the
concept of the sacrificial character of the Mass.” Page 50
God and the World: A Conversation with Peter
Seewald
“man was not just thrown up into the world by
some quirk of evolution. The underlying truth is that each
person is meant to exist. Each person is God’s own idea.
Within everything that just for the moment exist factually, a plan
and an idea are at work, and this gives meaning to my search for my
own ideal self and to my coexistence with the world and with the
onward path of history.” Page 75
“There is one thing we must not forget: it
has always been the Mother who reached people in missionary
situations and made Christ accessible to them. That is
especially true of Latin America. Here, to some extent,
Christianity arrived by way of Spanish swords, with deadly heralds.
In Mexcio, at first, absolutely nothing could be done about
missionary work – until the occurrence for the phenomenon at
Guadalupe, and then the Son was suddenly near by way of his
Mother.” Page 300
“You can never predict in advance how things
will turn our. Anyone who is extrapolating the decline of the church
in academic, statistical fashion from the situation in Europe is
failing to recognize the unpredictable nature of human history in
general – and in particular, God’s power to take the initiative
by intervening, as he is always able to do. page 459
“Initially, it was possible for people to
think, with respect to Lourdes, that this little girl had fantasized
something. And then it turned out after all the she herself
was really there, the Mother -Mary. It is certainly not by
chance that people are nowadays turning again to Mary, in whom
Christianity becomes loveable again and close to us, and we really
do find the door again through the Mother.” Page 459
“The Church does not invent sins but
recognizes the will of God and has to declare it. Of course, the
great thing . . . is that upon the Church, which has to declare the
will of God in its full magnitude, in its unconditional rigor, so
that man should know his true measure, is bestowed as a gift, at the
same time, the task of forgiving.” Page 67
Salt of the Earth: Christianity and the Catholic
Church at the End of the Millennium : An Interview With Peter Seewald
“when you are studying theology, your
intention is not to learn a trade but to understand the faith, and
this presupposes, as we said a while ago, using the words of
Augustine, that the faith is true, that, in other words, it opens
the door to a correct understanding of your own life, of the world
and of men.” Page 59
For me [becoming Perfect of the Congregation
for the Faith] the cost was that I couldn’t do full time what I
hand envisaged for myself, namely really contributing my thinking
and speaking to the great intellectual conversation of our time, by
developing an opus of my own. I had to descend to the little
and various things pertaining to factual conflicts and events. I had
to leave aside a great part of what would interest me and simply
serve and to accept that as my task. And I had to free myself
from the idea that I absolutely have to
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