The previous post was so long, I decided not to "update" but to do a new post. First: I've been meaning to mention that it's June, month dedicated to the Sacred Heart, and therefore worth noting that Benedict recently asked the Jesuits to promote that devotion. Here's the letter (Spanish) and an English-language story. This has been on my mind recently because the statutes of Regnum Christi, to which I belong, emphasize devotion to the Sacred Heart as the surest means of coming to what's known in American parlance as "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ." For those of us who associate this devotion mostly with hideous artwork, it can be hard to see the connection, but here's what the Pope says:
Contemplation of the "pierced side of the Redeemer," the Pope wrote, is an apt way of "fixing our gaze on Him," and recognizing his love. The mystery of Christ's love, he continued, is "the content of all true Christian spirituality and devotion." Pope Benedict added: "In fact, being Christian is only possible with our gaze fixed on the cross of our Redeemer."
Recognizing and accepting God's love, the Pontiff continued, leads to an inner transformation. "The experience of God's love is lived by man as a 'call' to which he must respond." Thus contemplation of the Sacred heart "safeguards us from the risk of closing in on ourselves, and makes us open to a life lived for others." Devotion to the Sacred Heart, the Pope concluded, "cannot then be considered as a passing form of veneration or devotion." Rather, it is "irreplaceable for a living relationship with God."
I'd no idea the Jesuits had any connection to the Sacred Heart devotion (apart from the general sense in which all Catholics are), but spreading it is an official part of their mission. See? Learn something new every day.
On a radically different note, ninme just sent me this commentary on the Pope's address at Auschwitz, discussed previously in this space. The Pope's address itself is powerful, and I've been asking myself why it was so, when usually references to the Shoah leave me flat. Don't get me wrong, my blood is Jewish enough for the ovens, so I feel a personal connection to the victims, but I get tired of the "reductio ad Hitleram" as some wag called it. Especially since no one is more apt to say "never again" than someone advocating some new fascist cause.
Take this guy, for instance (another curtsy ninme's way). He writes:
no amount of theological reflection will render future generations immune from the atavistic forces that aimed at the destruction of every last Jew in Europe, and to which the Church certainly made a historical contribution. I have no interest at all in the fortunes of Judaism, but a great concern in the resilience of historically persecuted peoples. Only by removing the accumulated detritus of malign ideologies can that happen.
As I wrote in ninme's combox, it's interesting that his answer to the disgusting claim "the Jews are Christ-killers" is the equally disgusting claim "the Christians are Jew-killers." I'd like to know what final solution for "removing accumulated detritus" he and his editors propose. In the meanwhile, he utterly fails to engage what Benedict said, including this:
Deep down, those vicious criminals, by wiping out this people, wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid. If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone - to those men, who thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world. By destroying Israel, by the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful.
Coming back to the point of the original commentary, what makes the Pope's words powerful is that he resists enlisting the Holocaust as an argument in some current debate, but instead listens to what it has to say to us.
