Rome Newsroom, Jun 1, 2023 / 10:15 am (CNA).
Cardinal Robert Sarah urged students studying at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas to ask in prayer for “an intimate and profound union with the Lord and with one another.”
Speaking at a Mass to mark the close of the academic year at the university in Rome known as the Angelicum, the Guinean cardinal spoke about the danger of division in the Church and the importance of prayer.
“Jesus asks that each person may live in love and in true unity, a deep communion, in the image of the Trinitarian communion. A union that immerses our lives fully in Jesus, just as Jesus’ life is immersed in the Father,” Sarah said in his homily.
He added: “Such a union is undoubtedly expressed in a Christian life of deep and intense prayer addressed to the Lord, which in daily life is manifested in a gaze of charity toward the brothers and sisters we meet.”
Seminarians, priests, religious, and laypeople studying philosophy and theology at the pontifical university attended the Mass on May 25.
The prefect emeritus of the Vatican Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments reflected on Jesus’ priestly prayer at the Last Supper in which the Lord prayed: “that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me” (John 17:21).
Sarah said: “Jesus calls for them to be a family of God … Jesus knows well that the spirit of division, hatred, or mutual contempt would destroy his Church and mission. It does not matter how the devil is dressed. Everything that divides is still inspired by him.”
“The danger of division, of infighting, of confusion in doctrinal and moral teaching is so grave that Jesus ventures an ambitious, lofty, almost impossible prayer: He asks the Father that his disciples have the same unity that exists between the two of them.”
The 77-year-old cardinal reminded the students that “if theological study does not make us grow in the love of God and neighbor, if we only work hard to pass the exams, then we are killing ourselves for nothing.”
“In our time, it is urgent to restart the missionary commitment to courageously bring the Gospel of Christ everywhere, but preaching must begin with prayer and the concrete witness of that evangelical love expressed with the death of Jesus on the cross and which impels us to look at others before themselves, to spend one’s life for the Gospel and not for one’s own interest or advantages,” he said.
Sarah is the author of a number of books on the spiritual life, including “The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise.”
He said: “Jesus tells us that we should always be able to begin our prayer with this attitude of raising our eyes to heaven, detaching our attention, even physically, from our worries, from our earthly worries and turning towards the high, towards heaven, towards the Father who dwells in it.”
“A gaze bowed and closed in on ourselves does not open us up to God, it does not allow us to enter into a deep and intimate relationship with him. Before we begin to pray, we must, like Jesus, lift our eyes, take them away from our thoughts, even the thought of study and exams, so that we can truly and fully immerse ourselves in him, in his divine dimension.”
Sarah told the students that “the more we know the Lord the more we can love him.”
The Angelicum, which is one of seven pontifical universities in Rome, has 1,000 students coming from almost 100 countries around the world.
“We are called, like St. Paul, to have courage and to give our life for the Lord in everything that we are given to live, without fearing the cross, but like Jesus, embracing it tenderly, since that cross is the road to eternity, to fullness of God’s glory,” Sarah said.
“Let us ask the Lord, through the intercession of the Virgin Mary, to tend through our lives to an intimate and profound union with the Lord and with one another, to become credible witnesses of the Risen One.”
Matthew Santucci contributed to this story.
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It was not until Pentecost that Jesus started His own Catholic Church. During His life of the flesh, Jewish Jesus, Jewish John the Baptist and the Jewish Apostles weekly celebrated the Sabbath at the Synagogue with their Jewish religious brothers, their God authorized Jewish Church leaders, the Jewish Pharisees. Were Jewish Jesus, John the Baptist and the Apostles, and their Jewish Pharisee brothers united or divided in the Jewish faith? Did Jewish Jesus, John the Baptist and the Apostles, love or hate their fellow Jewish Pharisee brothers of their combined Jewish faith? I would say that Jewish Jesus, John the Baptist and the Apostles, loved their Jewish Pharisee brothers, by pointing out their failures, but remained united in their Jewish faith, until Pentecost.
Just because Jesus, John the Baptist, and the Apostles, are in this huge religious struggle with the evil Jewish Pharisees, doesn’t automatically mean there is hatred or disunity. This is just how religion works.
Matthew 3:7
When he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce good fruit as evidence of your repentance.
Matthew 23:1 Denunciation of the Scribes and Pharisees.
Then Jesus spoke to the crowds and to his disciples, saying, “The scribes and the Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses. Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example. For they preach but they do not practice.
Matthew 23:13
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You lock the kingdom of heaven before human beings. You do not enter yourselves, nor do you allow entrance to those trying to enter. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You traverse sea and land to make one convert, and when that happens you make him a child of Gehenna twice as much as yourselves…
…“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You pay tithes of mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier things of the law: judgment and mercy and fidelity. [But] these you should have done, without neglecting the others. Blind guides, who strain out the gnat and swallow the camel! “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of plunder and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee, cleanse first the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may be clean. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and every kind of filth. Even so, on the outside you appear righteous, but inside you are filled with hypocrisy and evildoing.
Jesus was crucified by Jewish God authorized Church leaders for not shrouding Jewish God authorized leaders sins in darkness.
Jesus, John the Baptist and the Apostles were all members of the Jewish Church, observing the Sabbath with their fellow God authorized Church leader Jewish brothers, the Pharisees, Sadducees and Jewish High Priest. Did Jesus, John the Baptist or Christ’s Disciples commit sin, hate, or ‘cause division’, by not shrouding Jewish God Authorized Church leader’s sins in darkness? I am sure that the Jewish people were all talking about the evil which Jewish God authorized Church leaders were committing, once Jesus, John the Baptist and Christ’s Disciples pointed out Jewish God Authorized Church leaders, evils out to them.
When any of God’s Prophets entered Judah, or Israel, they were usually pointing out the sins and wrongdoings of Israel’s God authorized Church leaders, Israel’s kings, and the people of Israel’s sins and wrongdoing. Did God Will His Prophets to point out the sins and wrongdoings of Jewish God Authorized Church leaders, or not? Pointing out all the sins of Israel, especially Jewish God authorized Church leaders, generally got Prophets martyred.
Jesus’ Matthew 24 sign for His Second Coming is, ‘When you see the Desolating Abomination’ ‘Standing in the Holy Place’. Well if we see the ‘Desolating Abomination’ ‘Standing in the Holy Place’, does not God Will us to warn our fellow Catholics and all the people of the world, about what we see?
Matthew 23:29
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the memorials of the righteous, and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have joined them in shedding the prophets’ blood.’ Thus you bear witness against yourselves that you are the children of those who murdered the prophets; now fill up what your ancestors measured out! You serpents, you brood of vipers, how can you flee from the judgment of Gehenna? Therefore, behold, I send to you prophets and wise men and scribes; some of them you will kill and crucify, some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and pursue from town to town, so that there may come upon you all the righteous blood shed upon earth, from the righteous blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Amen, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.
The theology of Paul Tillich, “being and becoming” and whatnot, is not the Catholic faith and not Catholic religion. A Pope can not endorse Tillich, nor canonize his theology, nor rehabilitate their wrongness. Attempts by a Pope to do it “because it is done by a Pope” are both fraught and bad.