Vatican City, Apr 30, 2025 / 18:34 pm (CNA).
Cardinal Leonardo Sandri on Wednesday recalled one of the traditional titles for the pope, the “servant of the servants of God,” and emphasized the papal roles of service and confirming Catholics in the faith.
In several days, Sandri said, the cardinal proto deacon will announce to the Church and the world the “‘gaudium magnum’ (‘great joy’) of having a new pope.”
“It is from the paschal experience of Christ,” he continued, “that the ministry of the successor of Peter finds meaning, called at all times to live out the words just heard in the Gospel: ‘And you, once converted, confirm your brothers.’”
Sandri celebrated Mass for the College of Cardinals and the Papal Chapel (members of the Papal House) in St. Peter’s Basilica for the fifth day of the Novendiales, the nine days of mourning for Pope Francis, which include daily Masses for the repose of his soul.
Sandri is vice dean of the College of Cardinals. At 81 years of age, he is not a cardinal elector and thus will not participate in the conclave beginning May 7, but he is attending pre-conclave meetings with the rest of the cardinals in Rome.
In his homily at Mass, Sandri said: “Today it is the cardinal fathers who are called to participate in the Novendiales, almost a central stage of this ecclesial journey, huddling together in prayer as a collegium and entrusting to the Lord the one whose first collaborators and advisers they have been, or at least have sought to be, in the Roman Curia as well as in dioceses throughout the world.”
According to the Argentinian cardinal, just as Pope Francis exemplified the title of “servant” in many ways during his pontificate, the cardinals, too, are “called to serve, witnessing to the Gospel ‘usque ad effusionem sanguinis’ (‘even to the shedding of blood’), as we swore on the day of the creation of cardinals and is signified by the red we wear, offering ourselves, collegially and as individuals, as the first collaborators of the successor of the blessed Apostle Peter.”
Sandri also pointed out that the next pope will be entrusted with fulfilling Pope Francis’ vision for the rest of the 2025 Jubilee of Hope, which has continued in a modified way during the time of the sede vacante and which points to an upcoming, important anniversary for the life of the Church: the 2,000-year anniversary of Redemption through Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection in 2033.
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A supportive side note about this year’s Jubilee of Hope–and the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea….
It’s a good time to recall both our encounter with the irreducible nature of the Trinitarian God and the irreducible nature of ourselves as Man as totally united and embodied souls. So, three incarnational thoughts, and a Question:
FIRST, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger gave us this several decades ago in “Introduction to Christianity”:
“For the Christian, the interplay of faith and reason is most evident in the doctrine that a Trinitarian God is revealed by a definitive encounter with Christ in human history. The doctrine of the Trinity did not arise out of speculation about God, out of an attempt by philosophical thinking to figure out what the fount of all being was like; it developed out of the effort to digest historical experiences [an event]…”
SECOND, now, 2025 years after that singular event—and 1700 years after Nicaea, the Church is confronted by a secularist, fluid, and Arian-like redefinition of the human person as also no longer including the complementary union of binary man and woman in the vocation of marriage. The discounting of our inborn and universal natural law as also involving receptivity to supernatural grace. (Instead, the informal half-blessing of irregular couples as “couples” of every stripe–a wedge dividing the unity of the Church itself?)
THIRD, providentially today, just as with the writing of St. Athanasius (De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, c. 317) shortly prior to Nicaea (325), in 1993 St. Pope John Paul II already explicitly incorporates the permanence of our inborn natural law and moral absolutes directly into the Magisterium of the unified Church:
“The relationship between faith and morality shines forth with all its brilliance in the unconditional respect due to the insistent demands of the personal dignity of every man, demands protected by those moral norms which prohibit without exception actions which are intrinsically evil [….] The Church is no way the author or the arbiter of this norm [….] This is the first time, in fact, that the Magisterium of the Church [!] has set forth in detail the fundamental elements of this teaching, and presented the principles for the pastoral discernment necessary in practical and cultural situations which are complex and even crucial” (Veritatis Splendor, n. 90, 95, 115).
QUESTION: how will the hopeful conclave choose, as between this living Magisterium versus the hopeless fluidities of invertebrate der synodale weg/synodalism?
Note the photo: Donald Wuerl and Wilton Gregory together again. Lord, spare us from apostate Popes.
The Cardinal Wuerl story quite possibly is not the image many assume…
In the mid-1980s and as a deputized auxiliary bishop, Wuerl was part of the solution (including a formal Visitation) to the ongoing drift in the Archdiocese of Seattle. He was disrespected by the entrenched establishment and by the media. Later, at Pittsburgh, he traveled to Rome to convince higher-ups not to reverse one of his many (I think 18 or 19 in all) disciplinary actions against sexual abuses within his new diocese. (His pragmatic mistake—as I recall—was to not also clean out the closet of historical abuses from before his tenure.)
Wuerl is the author of the excellent handbook: “New Evangelization: Passing on the Catholic Faith Today” (Our Sunday Visitor, 2013). As the American cardinal invited to Rome as relator to launch the 2012 Year of Faith, he summarized well our current moment: “It is as if a tsunami of secular influence has swept across the cultural landscape, taking with it such societal markers as marriage, family, the concept of the common good and objective right and wrong.”
Not bad, for an “apostate.”