Pope Francis says Mass for the feast of the Presentation of the Lord in St. Peter’s Basilica, Feb. 2, 2022. / Vatican Media
Vatican City, Feb 2, 2022 / 16:41 pm (CNA).
The amazed joy of Simeon and Anna at encountering and embracing Christ at the Temple is a virtue that consecrated religious should remember and imitate, the pope said in a homily addressed to religious brothers and sisters.
He encouraged consecrated religious to renew their consecration with enthusiasm and to scrutinize themselves for worldliness, bitterness, and empty rigidity.
“Even if we experience fatigue and weariness—this happens: even disappointments, it happens—we do as Simeon and Anna, who patiently await the Lord’s fidelity and do not allow themselves to be robbed of the joy of the encounter,” Pope Francis said in his homily during a Feb. 2 Mass for the feast of the Presentation of the Lord.
The occasion marked the 26th Day of Consecrated Life.
“Let us go towards the joy of the encounter: this is very beautiful! Let us put (the Lord) back at the center and go forward with joy,” the pope said. His homily drew on the reading from the Gospel of Luke recounting the Presentation of Christ in the Temple.
Simeon welcomed Christ in his arms, the pope noted.
“God placed his Son in our arms because welcoming Jesus is the essential, the central point of faith,” he continued. “Sometimes we risk getting lost and dispersed in a thousand things, fixing ourselves on secondary aspects or immersing ourselves in things to do, but the center of everything is Christ, to be welcomed as the Lord of our life.”
Those in consecrated life must not lose their ability to be amazed, the pope said. Simeon had this ability: he uttered words of blessing, praise, and amazement when he took Christ into his arms.
“Ask for the grace of amazement, the amazement at the wonders that God is doing in us, hidden like that of the temple, when Simeon and Anna met Jesus,” the pope told the congregation of consecrated religious brothers and sisters.
“If the consecrated lack words with which they bless God and others, if there is no joy, if the momentum is lacking, if fraternal life is only fatigue, if there is no amazement, it is not because we are victims of someone or something,” he said. “The real reason is that our arms do not hold Jesus more tightly. And when the arms of a consecrated person do not hold Jesus, they hold emptiness. They try to fill their arms with other things, but there is emptiness. Clasp Jesus with our arms: this is the sign, this is the path, this is the ‘recipe’ for renewal.”
The failure to embrace Christ means “the heart closes in bitterness,” the pope warned. Consecrated persons who are bitter “always complain about something,” like the community superior, its religious brothers, the community in general, or its kitchen.
“If they have no complaints, they do not live,” the pope lamented. “But we must embrace Jesus in adoration and ask for eyes that know how to see good and see God’s ways. If we welcome Christ with open arms, we will also welcome others with trust and humility. Then conflicts do not escalate, distances do not divide and the temptation to abuse and hurt the dignity of some sister or brother is extinguished. Let us open our arms, to Christ and to the brothers and sisters!”
Simeon and Anna waited in an active way, not a passive one, according to Pope Francis. He stressed the action of the Holy Spirit in the gospel reading: “it is He who makes God’s desire burn in Simeon’s heart… it is He who pushes his steps towards the temple and makes his eyes capable of recognizing the Messiah, even if he presents himself as a small and poor child.”
The Holy Spirit, the pope continued, “makes one capable of perceiving the presence of God and his work not in the great things, in the showy exterior, in the displays of strength, but in littleness and fragility.”
The pope encouraged consecrated religious to scrutinize their motivations and to ask themselves whether they let themselves be moved by the Holy Spirit or by “the spirit of the world.”
“While the Spirit leads us to recognize God in the smallness and fragility of a child, we sometimes risk thinking about our consecration in terms of results, goals, success: we move in search of spaces, visibility, numbers: it is a temptation. The Spirit, on the other hand, does not ask for this. He wants us to cultivate daily fidelity, docile to the little things that have been entrusted to us,” Pope Francis said.
He also praised the beautiful fidelity of Simeon and Anna, as shown in their daily visits to the temple to wait and pray even if nothing seems to happen. They waited their whole life without discouragement or complaint.
The pontiff offered more questions for reflection: “What love drives us to move forward? The Holy Spirit or the passion of the moment, which is anything? How do we move in the Church and in society?”
“Sometimes, even behind the appearance of good works, the worm of narcissism or the craving to be the leading character can be hidden,” he warned. Other religious communities, even while doing good things, seem motivated by “mechanical repetition” rather than “the enthusiasm to adhere to the Holy Spirit.”
He encouraged the congregation to reflect on what their eyes see.
“Simeon, moved by the Spirit, sees and recognizes Christ. And he prays, saying: ‘My eyes have seen your salvation’,” the pope continued. “Here is the great miracle of faith: he opens his eyes, transforms the gaze, changes the view.”
“As we know from many encounters of Jesus in the Gospels, faith is born from the compassionate gaze with which God looks at us, melting the hardness of our heart, healing his wounds, giving us new eyes to see ourselves and the world.”
This new vision is not naïve, but wise. It sees even the “most painful” things. It does not ignore reality or pretend that problems are invisible. Rather, one’s eyes must know how to “see within” and to see beyond appearances.
“The elderly eyes of Simeon, although tired from the years, see the Lord, they see salvation,” the pope said.
He lamented some worldly attitudes that see religious life as a “waste” for men or women, or see it as outdated or something useless. He also warned religious communities against “looking backwards” or nostalgia “for what no longer exists.” Rather, they should be capable of “a far-sighted gaze of faith,” capable of hopeful vision that is open to the future.
God gives signs inviting us “to cultivate a renewed vision of consecrated life.”
He warned about a rigid approach to tradition that pretends not to see these signs and continues“as if nothing had happened, “repeating the same things as always, dragging ourselves by inertia into the forms of the past, paralyzed by the fear of change.”
He also warned against “the temptation to go backwards, out of security, out of fear, to keep the faith, to keep the founding charism.”
“Let’s get it right: rigidity is a perversion, and under every rigidity there are serious problems,” he said.
Even in their old age, Simeon and Anna did not show regret for the past but “they open their arms to the future that comes to meet them.”
“Neither Simeon nor Anna were rigid, no, they were free and had the joy of celebrating: him, praising the Lord and prophesying with courage to his mother; and she, like a good old lady, going from side to side saying: ‘Look at these, look at this!’ They gave the proclamation with joy, their eyes full of hope. No past inertia, no stiffness.”
Even behind genuine crises, including a lack of vocations, the Holy Spirit “invites us to renew our life and our communities,” and God will show the way to do this for those who open their hearts with courage and without fear.
“Let us place ourselves before the Lord, in adoration, and ask for eyes that know how to see the good and see the ways of God. The Lord will give them to us, if we ask for it,” said the pope.
[…]
@ Why they hated Benedict The Critic.
The Peter Hullermann case remains a flaw since the child rapist continued as pastor long after his second arrest by police when serving in Munich. Hullermann later was reinstated and continued until exposed by Der Spiegel. When the issue of Benedict’s legacy was recently assessed on WorldOver Robert Royal answered “at the time, Benedict’s record was acceptable” words to that effect. None of our best pontiffs were perfect.
Author Paul Sapper goes directly to philosophy after defending Benedict’s record against accusations. Although he doesn’t clearly define the nexus with Benedict regarding, for example, David Hume. Sapper quotes Hume’s premise that Man knows primarily through the senses secondarily and less certain via the intellect. Hume was correct regarding the senses not regarding the intellect. Man in accord with Aristotle and Aquinas identify sense perception as the first principle of all knowledge. Although apprehension of the moral good or evil of an act, requiring sensible perception is simultaneously an apprehension of the intellect’s inherent capacity to distinguish between good and evil, inherent as prescient knowledge realized in the act of apprehension [reasoned deliberation generally preceding] of the morality of the given act.
I haven’t come across Benedict acknowledging this process, Benedict generally in favor of the thought of Augustine. Josef Pieper is among the few who have acknowledged Aquinas’ doctrine of intuitive moral apprehension. Otherwise Benedict was in tandem with the moral intellectual thought of Aquinas.
Benedict was a great intellectual with superb acumen, that inherent gift came through regardless of a specifying philosophy in his work, for this writer seen in his identity of truth, ultimately in all its variations to the self revelation of God in the Person of Christ.
#4 Active Participation:
We read of the “Frascati report…the product of two weeks’ worth of work in late September by its authors at a retreat center in Frascati, Italy, not far from Rome. It was there that a few dozen select interpreters—mostly theologians—were asked to ‘authentically’ synthesize …” etc., etc., etc.!
The interpreters, mostly theologians (authentic!)—cast elsewhere as “experts” (all genuflect!) except for one window-dressing bishop—Are they now to replace the “hierarchical communion” (Lumen gentium), synodally marginalized “primarily as facilitators”?
The Apostolic Succession—the new “periphery”! Parsing Orwell: all peripheries are equal, but some peripheries are more equal than others. Behold, soon their “continental” “syntheses” (!) will be spin-cycled into a homogenized kitchen-blender plebiscite, thrown up (so to speak) at the fluid Synod on Synodality.
Ressourcement and aggiornamento—pioneered by the Council and worked now by three popes, but now running off course. Ice berg ahead! Captain to the bridge! If there is a bridge…
@Police State Tentacles
Michael Lesher Brownstone Institute rediscovered meaningful Judaism in Orthodox Judaism rather than Conservative, which is more humanistic than religious. Apparently intuiting [from my perspective] the entirely radical transformation of American Liberty, the once political light of the world, into the police state polity. Why, he asks, do we not defend liberty?
Response to this question may best be answered by borrowing a title from another article Driven by Catholics, the work of many fighting for the lives of the innocent. Whereas Liberty in once freedom loving America has been driven to the extreme dictatorship and all the horrors of the police state primarily by whom? By Catholics. Politics Biden, Pelosi, Durbin, [Ed] Kennedy, Judiciary A Kennedy, Church McElroy, Tobin [the elder] et al. All have left the traditional God of the Gospels and convinced themselves of a better God, a god who cherishes liberty. In effect the concept of Liberty is deified. Catholics, traditionally convinced in the unsurpassable good of the divinity possessed an unusual fervor, though tempered by justice.
The new found faith in the god goddess [we must watch our pronouns] of Liberty anomalously possesses no justification in the limitation of the practice of Liberty, nor limitation in the defense of goddess Liberty. Restrictions on a free press, the right to worship Christ with its limitations to behavior as well as its [coercive] requirements becomes the enemy of limitless Liberty. Voila the police state, the restrictive, punitive laws, the expected [looming before us] incarcerations.
A great anomaly. Vatican polity seems to favor the new found version of liberty oriented Catholicism. What must we do? Steel the will and prepare for sanctification.
Pope Benedict XVI was right. Atheist scientists are hiding the truth about the subatomic particle ‘double slit’ experiment. One hundred years ago, in the double slit experiment, scientists discovered that the universe does not exist when man is not looking at it. According to factual science, our realities are only a Creation from our All Powerful God, which only come into physical existence, when we go to look, touch, smell, hear, taste, them. When we are not experiencing our universe, as when we are sleeping, our universe does not exist. Though your unconscious body may still exist in other people’s, individual, shared, reality from God. God’s Creation is so scientifically counterintuitive that atheist scientists easily hide from Christianity, the scientifically proven fact that the universe does not exist when man is not looking at it.
Neils bohr VS Albert Einstein. Neils Bohr says that there is no universe when a conscious man is not looking at it. Albert Einstein says, “I’d like to think the moon was there even when I wasn’t looking at it.” After over a century of fierce debate and mountains of scientific research to settle this debate, Neils Bohr’s ‘ ‘Peek A Boo’ universe, a universe which does not exist when man is not looking at it, is dominating the debate, over Albert Einstein’s “I’d like to think the moon was there even when I wasn’t looking at it.”, ‘Realism”. By the end of the PBS video, the narrator indicates that there is only a slim chance that Albert Einstein’s ‘Realism’ can be salvaged. Proven science says there is no universe when Adamkind is not looking at it and experiencing it.
https://youtu.be/tafGL02EUOA
Proven science has now shown us that our reality is more like a tv picture, with God holding the remote control. God can show two different people, two different realities, using the same subatomic particles of the universe.
Science has now observed multiple realities, from two different observers observing the same subatomic particles. In the lab, scientists have mimicked ‘The miracle of the Sun’, where 60000 people witnessed one reality, while the rest of the world witnessed an alternative reality. Wow!
Physicists have long suspected that quantum mechanics allows two observers to experience different, conflicting realities. Now they’ve performed the first experiment that proves it.
https://www.technologyreview.com/…/a-quantum…/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4IbOzuNlmE
Neils Bohr, “It is meaningless to assign Reality to the universe in the absence of observation; in the intervals between measurement, quantum systems truly exist as a fuzzy mixture of all possible properties.”
Subatomic particles make up everything physical in the universe. Science has proven, through the double slit experiment, that all subatomic particles exist only as a wave of all possibilities. It is only when Adamkind, look, touch, hear, smell, that subatomic particles switch to become specific physical particles, and put themselves together to make up all that we physically sense in the universe.
Like our Omnipresent to all physical time God, so do subatomic particles carry all possible physical time, presents, pasts and futures in their makeup, which scientists see as the ‘Multiverse’. It is only a specific, present, past and future, which becomes a specific Reality to an individual, when that individual observes them. The combined Realities of all people on earth then becomes our combined timeline history. There is only one timeline with a multiverse of possibilities at any given moment.
When you look at a star 13.8 billion light years away, it is only at the moment you look at the star, that a specific past, present and future comes into existence for that star. Yes! Proven science tells us that a star, even 13 billion light years away, knows when Adamkind is looking at it, and it is Adamkind looking at it which causes ‘wave collapse’, which is subatomic particles putting themselves together to build a star, for Adamkind to look at. Wow! When the star is no longer observed, it no longer exists as a collection of physical subatomic particles, and we are simply back to a soup of all possibilities.
The universe is just a soup of all possibilities, until Adamkind, conscious observers, open their eyes and senses to see, touch, hear and smell the universe. Once Adamkind goes to experience our universe, this is when subatomic particles switch into physical particles, joined together to make up our physical universe reality. Different people can have different realities, which do not collapse into a common reality, until the two different people tell one another what they are experiencing. Once an observer opens their eyes, this is when subatomic particles go back in physical time to make up a specific, past, present and future, reality. How on earth can atheist scientists not see that it takes God to do all this! It is their atheist pride, of course.
Science has proven that, If there was a universe six days before Adam opened his eyes to look at it, it would have to be a six day miracle from God. This is because it takes conscious man to cause ‘wave collapse’, which ‘wave collapse’ is subatomic particles switching to become physical particles, to build complex structures, for Adamkind to look at and experience. The universe and Adamkind are linked together and you cannot have one without the other, unless it is a miracle from God.
An Electron cannot ‘evolve’ to know how to go back in physical time, to produce an individual Reality, for an individual observer, which collapses into a common Reality with another individual’s Reality, when they share their realities with one another. ‘Scientism’,’ Realism’, atheist scientists are deceiving the world away from our All Powerful God.
A few verses on reality! We ponder, yet God provides us with comprehension if we are willing to humble ourselves and listen to what He is saying.
1 Corinthians 2:14 The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.
Hebrews 4:12 For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
Philippians 4:8 Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.
Romans 1:20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.
Psalm 27:1-4 Of David. The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? When evildoers assail me to eat up my flesh, my adversaries and foes, it is they who stumble and fall. Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war arise against me, yet I will be confident. One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.
Blessings
Hello Brian,
Very good Biblical quotes!
It is the pride of atheist scientists which leads them into error.
Albert Einstein (Determinism) says,
“God does not throw dice!”
Neils Bohr (Chance) replies,
“Nor is it our business to prescribe to God how He should run the world.”
Albert Einstein hated the fact that, if Quantum Mechanics sees everything in the quantum world, (subatomic particles), as ‘chance’, ‘weird’, ‘in determinant’, yet we get high precision at our macro level of the world we experience, this is because God is controlling everything, at the Quantum level, every millisecond of the day. It is not by ‘chance’ that the world is the way that it is; It is God very actively making the world the way that it is, every millisecond of the day.
Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein were actually good friends and colleagues. Neils Bohr just accepted proven science at the subatomic level and then used this knowledge to go to bank on inventions and discoveries, like computers, x ray machines and the like. While Albert Einstein fought God at the subatomic level. Niels Bohr felt bad for his good friend Albert Einstein, who wasted his later decades of life, focused on trying to debunk the scientifically proven fact that the universe does not exist when man is not looking at it, which meant that there is a God controlling everything in the universe. Now, 100 years later, we see that Albert Einstein has failed.
Battle over Quantum Mechanics Albert Einstein VS Neils Bohr
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBgC0PyIomU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj7jd7opGOQ
Always a pleasure to read your words at CWR.
In my twenties, enjoyed reading the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer. In one of his novels he maintained that Einstein had plagiariized the idea of the theory of relativity. Whether or not this is the case, he did work in the Swiss Patent Office. Perhaps none of his colleagues understood the concept that had been submitted. Yet, he not only understood it but was able to formulate the logical sequence of events and present it. Of course this is only speculation on my part, never the less, why would Singer otherwise offer the argument?
We should acknowledge God as the author, as all great ideas come from the Lord, yet man likes to take the credit.
Blessings,
Brian
So true!
Thanks Brian.
I think Albert Einstein, as a science patent clerk, started to see all the repetitive physical time variations, in the massive amount of scientific data, from multiple patent claimants research, and then figured out what was causing the repetitive physical time variations. He then published his ‘Theory of Relativity’. I see no foul play in doing so. Einstein was simply in the right place to feed off all the modern scientific data research of others, and apply it to his ‘Theory of Relativity’, which was unrelated to what the patent claimants were filing for.
But Yes! Albert Einstein being angry with God, “God does not throw dice!”, for leaving nothing but ‘chance’, indetermination and chaos, below the level where God Himself Creates the infinite wonder of our massive universe in all its precision, through ‘wave collapse’, is a catastrophic blow to Atheist scientists. Atheist scientists have nowhere to go. Christian Scientists who believe in God as our Creator, on the other hand, “Oh! There is the Hand of God our Creator!”
Would like to hear more of what the physicists Einstein and Bohr had to say about metaphysics, if anything…
As in, if a guy in a white robe averts his eyes from the ultrasound, does the child not “exist” and the pending abortion not actually happen? You know the line: “it’s [only] my body!” Or as in, if I do not see you, do you even exist? As in, I am “the All Powerful God”!
Metaphysics is about stuff being organized within the next level up, not only the next level down (e.g., only waves and particles and multiple universes). Can we think in both of these dimensions? Is it possible to walk and chew gum at the same time? This multi-layered question even applies to churchy stuff like a prevalent version of synodally “synthesizing” (!) our “walking together.” Synthesis, what’s that, Real-ly?
Modern sophistry no longer depends on clever argument. Impressionistic language bleaches the mind from coherent challenges since there was never any coherent content in the original propositions.