Vatican City, Apr 10, 2020 / 11:23 am (CNA).- Here is the full text of the Good Friday homily of Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap., delivered April 10 at St. Peter’s Basilica.
“I have plans for your welfare and not for woe”
St. Gregory the Great said that Scripture “grows with its readers”, cum legentibus crescit. [1] It reveals meanings always new according to the questions people have in their hearts as they read it. And this year we read the account of the Passion with a question—rather with a cry—in our hearts that is rising up over the whole earth. We need to seek the answer that the word of God gives it.
The Gospel reading we have just listened to is the account of the objectively greatest evil committed on earth. We can look at it from two different angles: either from the front or from the back, that is, either from its causes or from its effects. If we stop at the historical causes of Christ’s death, we get confused and everyone will be tempted to say, as Pilate did, “I am innocent of this man’s blood” (Mt 27:24). The cross is better understood by its effects than by its causes. And what were the effects of Christ’s death? Being justified through faith in him, being reconciled and at peace with God, and being filled with the hope of eternal life! (see Rom 53:1-5).
But there is one effect that the current situation can help us to grasp in particular. The cross of Christ has changed the meaning of pain and human suffering—of every kind of suffering, physical and moral. It is no longer punishment, a curse. It was redeemed at its root when the Son of God took it upon himself. What is the surest proof that the drink someone offers you is not poisoned? It is if that person drinks from the same cup before you do. This is what God has done: on the cross he drank, in front of the whole world, the cup of pain down to its dregs. This is how he showed us it is not poisoned, but that there is a pearl at the bottom of this chalice.
And not only the pain of those who have faith, but of every human pain. He died for all human beings: “And when I am lifted up from the earth,” he said, “I will draw everyone to myself” (Jn 12:32).
Everyone, not just some! St. John Paul II wrote from his hospital bed after his attempted assassination, “To suffer means to become particularly susceptible, particularly open to the working of the salvific powers of God, offered to humanity in Christ.”[2] Thanks to the cross of Christ, suffering has also become in its own way a kind of “universal sacrament of salvation” for the human race.
—
What light does all of this shed on the dramatic situation that the world is going through now? Here too we need to look at the effects more than at the causes—not just the negative ones we hear about every day in heart-wrenching reports but also the positive ones that only a more careful observation can help us grasp.
The pandemic of Coronavirus has abruptly roused us from the greatest danger individuals and humanity have always been susceptible to: the delusion of omnipotence. A Jewish rabbi has written that we have the opportunity to celebrate a very special paschal exodus this year, that “from the exile of consciousness” [3]. It took merely the smallest and most formless element of nature, a virus, to remind us that we are mortal, that military power and technology are not sufficient to save us. As a psalm says, “In his prime, man does not understand. / He is like the beasts—they perish” (Ps 49:21). How true that is!
While he was painting frescoes in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the artist James Thornhill became so excited at a certain point about his fresco that he stepped back to see it better and was unaware he was about to fall over the edge of the scaffolding. A horrified assistant understood that crying out to him would have only hastened the disaster. Without thinking twice, he dipped a brush in paint and hurled it at the middle of the fresco. The master, appalled, sprang forward. His work was damaged, but he was saved.
God does this with us sometimes: he disrupts our projects and our calm to save us from the abyss we don’t see. But we need to be careful not to be deceived. God is not the one who hurled the brush at the sparkling fresco of our technological society. God is our ally, not the ally of the virus! He himself says in the Bible, “I have . . . plans for your welfare and not for woe” (Jer 29:11). If these scourges were punishments of God, it would not be explained why they strike equally good and bad, and why the poor usually bring the worst consequences of them. Are they more sinners than others?
No! The one who cried one day for Lazarus’ death cries today for the scourge that has fallen on humanity. Yes, God “suffers”, like every father and like every mother. When we will find out this one day, we will be ashamed of all the accusations we made against him in life. God participates in our pain to overcome it. “Being supremely good” – wrote St. Augustine – “God would not allow any evil in his works, unless in his omnipotence and goodness, he is able to bring forth good out of evil.”[4]
Did God the Father possibly desire the death of his Son in order to draw good out of it? No, he simply permitted human freedom to take its course, making it serve, however, his own purposes and not those of human beings. This is also the case for natural disasters like earthquakes and plagues. He does not bring them about. He has given nature a kind of freedom as well, qualitatively different of course than that of human beings, but still a form of freedom—freedom to evolve according to its own laws of development. He did not create a world as a programmed clock whose movements could all be anticipated. It is what some call “chance” but the Bible calls instead “the wisdom of God.”
—
The other positive fruit of the present health crisis is the feeling of solidarity. When, in human memory, have the people of all nations ever felt themselves so united, so equal, so less in conflict than at this moment of pain? Never so much as now have we experienced the truth of the words of a great Italian poet: “Peace, you peoples! Too deep is the mystery of the prostrate earth.”[5] We have forgotten about building walls. The virus knows no borders. In an instant it has broken down all the barriers and distinctions of race, nation, religion, wealth, and power. We should not revert to that prior time when this moment has passed. As the Holy Father has exhorted us, we should not waste this opportunity. Let us not allow so much pain, so many deaths, and so much heroic engagement on the part of health workers to have been in vain. Returning to the way things were is the “recession” of which we should have the most fear.
“They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; One nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again.” (Is 2:4)
This is the moment to put into practice something of the prophecy of Isaiah whose fulfillment humanity has long been waiting for. Let us say “Enough!” to the tragic race toward arms. Say it with all your might, you young people, because it is above all your destiny that is at stake. Let us devote the unlimited resources committed to weapons to the goals that we now realize are most necessary and urgent: health, hygiene, food, the poverty fight, stewardship of creation. Let us leave to the next generation a world poorer in goods and money, if need be, but richer in its humanity.
—
The word of God tells us the first thing we should do at times like these is to cry out to God. He himself is the one who puts on people’s lips the words to cry out to him, at times harsh words and almost of accusation: “Awake! Why do you sleep, O Lord? / Rise up! Do not reject us forever! . . . Rise up, help us! / Redeem us in your mercy” (Ps 44, 24, 27). “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” (Mk 4:38).
Does God perhaps like to be petitioned so that he can grant his benefits? Can our prayer perhaps make God change his plans? No, but there are things, St. Matthew explains, that God has decided to grant us as the fruit both of his grace and of our prayer, almost as though sharing with his creatures the credit for the benefit received.[6] God is the one who prompts us to do it: “Seek and you will find,” Jesus said; “knock and the door will be opened to you” (Mt 7:7).
When the Israelites were bitten by poisonous serpents in the desert, God commanded Moses to lift up a serpent of bronze on a pole, and whoever looked at it would not die. Jesus appropriated this symbol to himself when he told Nicodemus, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life” (Jn 3:14-15). We too at this moment have been bitten by an invisible, poisonous “serpent.” Let us gaze upon the one who was “lifted up” for us on the cross. Let us adore him on behalf of ourselves and of the whole human race. The one who looks on him with faith does not die. And if that person dies, it will be to enter eternal life.
“After three days I will rise”, Jesus had foretold (cf. Mt 9:31). We too, after these days that we hope will be short, shall rise and come out of the tombs our homes have become. Not however to return to the former life like Lazarus, but to a new life, like Jesus. A more fraternal, more human, more Christian life!
—
Footnotes:
[1] Moralia in Job, XX, 1. [2] John Paul II, Salvifici doloris [On the Meaning of Human Suffering], n. 23. [3] https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/coronavirus-a-spiritual-message-from-brooklyn (Yaakov Yitzhak Biderman). [4] See St. Augustine, Enchiridion 11, 3; PL 40, 236. [5] Giovanni Pascoli, “I due fanciulli” [“The Two Children”]. [6] See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologicae, II-IIae, q. 83, a. 2
[…]
Does wishing the Church were one, holy, catholic and apostolic again make me a backwardist?
Depends. But aren’t you proud to be one? I am. I think Deacon Ed Peltier is one too; for many months he added the word to his name.
meiron: I’m as backwardist as ever. In fact, my motto is: “Backwardist and proud.” I belong to the Backwardist Branch of the Catholic Church. (Please don’t confuse this as saying that I am an adherent to Mass celebrated in the Extraordinary Form as I am not. But I’m also against suppressing it.)
I’m fully intending to proselytize. In fact, the Backwardist Catholic Church believes that Jesus Christ is the only path to God; salvation is through Jesus Christ. He is the Way, the Truth and Life. I make no apologies to anyone that I am a follower of Christ. My aim is not to make other people feel better but to speak the truth at all times.
I hate the phrase me too, but me too. Since truth is eternal, an idea abhorrent to the synodal/syncretistic/pseudo-Catholic religion of this pontificate, we have to look backward to recognize ourselves.
There are only two philosophies. Everything else is derivative. Either God is a fool or we are. Were it the first, truth would be meaningless. Since it is the latter, it is for this reason that we fail to see that God did not and could not abandon us to a capricious understanding of how we ought to order our lives together. Moral truth never changes.
Those who primarily worship themselves rather than God lose or discover they never had faith in the idea that all truth originates exclusively within the mind of God, so they pursue revolutionary fantasies that promise to eliminate evil in the human condition once and for all.
Brilliantly said!
No, Brineyman. It makes you Catholic.
About the theologian Chiodi and his special-circumstances squint, the hole in the Titanic was only one-quarter of an inch wide…but also below the waterline and 300 feet long. (At least the little Dutch Boy on the leaking dike knew where to put his thumb.)
For helpful perspective, from an earlier Anglican (say what!) gathering we have the following from dissenters to the incremental approval of mutual masturbation (pontificated at the 1930 Lambeth Conference). Said the minority at a later such gathering in 1948:
“It is, to say the least, suspicious that the age in which contraception has won its way is not one which has been conspicuously successful in managing its sexual life. Is it possible that, by claiming the right to manipulate his physical processes in this manner, man may, without knowing it, be stepping over the boundary between the world of Christian marriage and what one might call the world of Aphrodite, the world of sterile eroticism?” (Cited in Wright, “Reflections on the Third Anniversary of a Controverted Encyclical,” St. Louis: Central Bureau Press, 1971).
And, how dare Chiodi refer to some homosexual relations as “fruitful” !? Indeed, a backwardist, fixistic, bigoted, and homophobic double-entendre of hurtful slang.
What more needs to be said about this papacy? We await…
I strive often to maintain a charitable perception of Pope Francis. However, when I read the following paragraph, “Chiodi was made a theology professor at the Pontifical John Paul II Theological Institute for Marriage and the Family Sciences in 2019 following its refounding by Pope Francis. He has also been a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life since 2017.”
Saint John Paul II was not simply a spiritual giant to me and whose writings led to my conversion to the Church, but he was a towering academic relative to Bergoglio. When Bergoglio “refounds” Pope John Paul II’s Theological Institute for Marriage and the Family Sciences, staffing it with those similar to Chiodi, the jig is up and I cannot attempt to provide further charity. It is a pathway leading to heresey and acceptance of evil. I give up. I cannot continue to make excuses for Bergoglio.
Serious question here:
Has the Catholic Church ever before had a pope who was actively seeking to undermine the Church and subvert her teachings?
I know we’ve had corrupt, self-serving popes, but I don’t know whether any have been actively engaged in sabotage.
Before now, I mean.
The Renaissance popes kept their excesses between the sheets.
Peter: That’s not only true but humorous as well (although we should never conclude that sin is ever something that is funny.)
But even our good popes preceding Francis kept the excesses of dissenting theologians in place, without meaningful consequences to their careers, implicitly validating their corruption of young minds in universities while Baggio selected faithless men to be rubber-stamped into the episcopate. A fool ending up in the Chair of Peter is the logical result of a long process of indifference to real consequences.
brineyman: Please be ever-reminded that the election of one Jorge Bergoglio to the Chair of St. Peter was orchestrated by one Theodore Cardinal McCarrick (now known in the Church as MR. Theodore McCarrick a known homosexual predator).
I predict in 10 years or so, the Church will change her teachings on contraception–even is “okay” to use though not optional given certain marital conditions (rather like the Anglicans did so many years ago).
Folks who are loyal Catholics will say this is nothing to worry about since the teaching on contraception is part of natural law teaching and was never taught infallibly, etc.
Something like that.
I had thought that Humanae vitae’s teaching against willful contraception WAS infallible teaching. Maybe I was wrong. Paul VI was clear in what he said and wrote not like the current occupier of Peter’s Chair.
I think this is in doubt, “cuz reasons.”
I remember listening to a series of talks given at an NFP conference, and one of the speakers, a priest who was on the board of an NFP group, was asked the question about HV being “infallible.” And I clearly remember him saying that No, it was not, contraception being part of the natural law teachings–like you can’t go around putting water in the gas tank of your car and expect it to run properly (he didn’t say that last, but that is what I understood.)
.
Before I wrote the above, I looked up the part about contraception being infallible, and it would appear that points of view vary, unlike the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception–which I believe everyone understands to be infallibly taught.
.
The overwhelming majority of Catholics–clergy and laity alike–do not support the “ban” on contraception and view it as nothing more than a nice traditional discipline or whatever, completely optional. So I think it will be somewhat “formally” loosened (like Fudicia Supplicans did for gay marriage) in 10 years, and then maybe officially overturned another 10 years after.
That is pretty much guaranteed.
The good news will be that people will flee the sinking ship, and join the SSPX and other Catholic societies. The bad new will be, that the Church will promote the damnation of God knows many by her false & deadly teaching.
People are capable of justifying any falsehood whatsoever. Justifying the belief that Jesus was only a great prophet, would be a much tougher proposition, but I don’t doubt the Church would try it, if need be. The Papacy has shown itself to be worthless as a guardian of and guide to religious truth.
The world has long gone the way of the Pied Piper of Gomorrah. The Vatican in relative slow motion. We know who the Piper is. Does the Vatican?
The Vatican stands as a pariah in the midst of the Apostolic faithful [to differentiate from the progressive], the remaining few in the pews and at the altar. Fr Maurizio Chiodi chosen as representative of a less unsophisticated, blunt perspective for a more finesse, intellectually appealing approach. He speaks of “homosexual relationships under certain conditions to enjoy good relations”, the exception in pleasant contrast to the rampant orgy that emblazons the morally dissolute.
Now we’ve dealt with Francis’ exceptions to the rule in Amoris Laetitia and know where that narrow exception has taken us. Obviously it’s not the exception that’s at issue, because an exception that undermines the rule is a new rule. It’s not a slippery slope analogy. That’s due to the destruction of the principles that make for the rule. In this case as explicated by Chiodi an unlawful act is instead by nature a moral good.
If the Lord will be propitious to us, what other assistance do we need -St. Basil.
The Church will not change her teachings and positions and what we see presently pushed at the forefront of everything will not survive. The latter is predicated on the 4 “outlooks” in Evangelii Gaudium which are heralded as “against proselytism” that at the same time teach being brought to God and the Commandments through sterilizing relationships and exchange that is “reality”. These 4 altogether and individually –
1. don’t totally reconcile with any one parable or the Beatitudes but also are internally self-contradicting
2. admit conventual and individualist processes not of the Gospel to transfix them as of some universal or destined virtue or moment or wonder
3. serve and advance the methods and causes of the enemies of salvation in their obliquity ratiocination and
4. misread the signs of the times.
See the sower and seed, or the prodigal son, or the widow’s mite, etc.
It substitutes the medicine of God for being medicinal and inclusionary. So as if to not offend the 1st Commandment as if by not offending the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 8th Commandments because it is a collectivity all at once.
(The St. Basil quote is from MAGNIFICAT of September 6 2007.)
If Fr Chiodi says God made same sex attraction, perceived as a divine good, then it becomes intrinsic with natural law. As Pope Francis told the gay seminarian God made you that way. As if to say if you’re born with no arms, with Downs Syndrome God intentionally made you that way. That mistakes of nature and all the ills of Mankind are not really the result of original sin.
Christ says differently as recorded in the Gospels, that he freed those born with or who acquired physical, mental defects – from ‘the grip of the devil’. In effect the result of evil coming into the world. Evil, moral as well as physical features of the kingdom of Satan.
Actually it was Fr Radcliffe OP who made the assertion that same sex attraction “is God given”.
“God given?” Do the math…
The percentage of anti-binary LGBTQ in recent age groups vastly outstrips (so to speak) the percentage in earlier age groups and times past. Since such sexual fluidity doesn’t spread biologically (!), then the what pray tell, might be the reason?
Maybe we can tease a clue from Andre Gide, prominent and conflicted bisexual novelist? About whom, a biographer wrote thusly:
“[Gide] emphatically protests that he has not a word to say against marriage and reproduction (but then) suggests that it would be of benefit to an adolescent, before his desires are fixed, to have a love affair with an older man, instead of with a woman. . . the general principle admitted by Gide, elsewhere in his treatise, that sexual practice tends to stabilize [!] in the direction where it has first found satisfaction; to inoculate a youth with homosexual tastes seems an odd way to prepare him for matrimony” (Harold March, “Gide and the Hound of Heaven,” 1952).
Is it God or, instead, is it sociological?
Sociological as in exploitation, sexual abuse, early-age experimentation and getting locked in (stabilized), and stuff like that? This is God? Ironically, Cardinal Hollerich might be onto something when he pontificates, “I believe that the sociological-scientific foundation of this teaching [basic sexual morality] is no longer correct.” https://www.newwaysministry.org/2022/02/04/leading-cardinal-in-synod-seeks-change-in-church-teachings-on-homosexuality/ What this luminary meant to say, surely, was that social research doesn’t so much upend sexual morality–as it might uncover the actual causes of the multiplying behavioral pandemic. Then there’s the role of locking-in brain chemistry associated with all kinds of addictions, even video games, and pornography which is found to be more addictive than cocaine.
Even Church hirelings are in the act of indirectly grooming (the double-speak of the DDF’s Fiducia Supplicans?). And, thereby outfitting themselves with fashionable millstone neckties to go with their red and purple hats.
“Since such sexual fluidity doesn’t spread biologically (!), then the what pray tell, might be the reason?”. This is such a telling indicator about the origins of LGBT, which points to psychology [or sociology as you suggest] and a growing mindset rather than a biological disorder from the normative.
EDWARD: Brilliantly said!
Thank You! Always like your comments too.