The Christian Experience by Pope Benedict XVI

The Christian Experience by Pope Benedict XVI
Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2008

Christian experience begins in the everyday world of communal experience. Today, the interior space in which Church is experienced is, for many, a foreign world.

Nevertheless, this world continues to be a possibility, and it will be the task of religious education to open doors on the experiential space Church and to encourage people to take an interest in this kind of experience.

When people share the same faith, when they pray, celebrate, rejoice, suffer, and live together, Church becomes “community,” and thus a real living space that enables humanity to experience faith as life-bringing force in daily life and in the crisis of existence.

One who truly believes, who opens himself to the maturing effects of faith, begins to be a light for others; he becomes a bulwark where others can find help. The saints, as the living models of a faith that has been tried and found steadfast, of transcendence that has been experienced and confirmed, are, so to speak, the living spaces in to which one can turn, in which faith as experience is simultaneously stored up, anthropologically conditioned, and approximated to our life.

Specifically Christian experience, in the intrinsic meaning of the word, can ultimately grow by its gradually maturing and deepening participation in such experiences – this is what the language of the Psalms and of the New Testament calls “tasting the heavenly gifts” (Ps 34:8, 1 Pet 2:3; Heb 6:4).

By it one touches reality itself and is no longer merely a “secondhand” believer. Admittedly, we must say with Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and the great mystical teachers of all times that this can be only “a short moment, a rare experience”.

In this life it remains a preliminary anticipation that must never become an end itself. For if it did, faith would become self-gratification rather than self-transcendence and would thus betray its own nature. Such moments stand under the sign of the Tabor-experience.
They are not places to linger, but are encouragement, strengthening, for going anew into the everyday world to preach the word of Jesus Christ and to understand that the brightness of the divine nearness is present wherever someone Is bringing the word of God. (1980)

The above is from the January 25th entry of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s Co-Workers of the Truth – Meditations for Every Day of the Year - Ignatius Press, San Francisco 1992

The above book is a classic on the mind and heart of this up coming pontiff. Couple this with his daily pronouncement as Pope we can surmise that for the Catholic laity and the bishops that our role model in the public arena ought to be the life of Pope John Paul the Great.
This brings us to Maxim # 6 of this blog. The pro-life movement’s role model is Pope John Paul the Great.
George H. Kubeck, Duplicate and translate into Spanish.