The Wisdom of Pope Benedict XVI

The Wisdom of Pope Benedict XVI
Monday, March 24, 2008
Besides clarifying and enriching our Catholic Faith, Pope Benedict’s mind towers in reason, common sense, and natural law advocacy. Here are some gems of wisdom from March 16th to 21st of his Co-Workers of the Truth, Meditations for Every Day of the Year, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1990.

March 16th entry: At the Last Supper, the Lord described the mission of the Holy Spirit in these words: “… He will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come” (Jn. 16:13) … To become a Christian means to open oneself to the receive the whole Church or – better – to let oneself be received heart, mind, and soul into the Church. When I speak, think, or act as a Christian, I do it always in union with the whole Church and in the grace of that union. … truth reveals itself only when we share the thinking of those who have gone before us. The greatness of an individual depends on the measure of his ability to share; only by becoming small, by becoming a part of the whole, does he become great.

March 17th entry: The Cross is revelation. It does not reveal any particular thing, but God and man. It reveals who God is and who man is. There is a curious presentiment of this situation in Greek philosophy: Plato’s image of the crucified “just man.” In the Republic the great philosopher asks what is likely to be the position of a completely just man in this world. … So according to Plato the just man must be misunderstood, and persecuted in this world; indeed, Plato goes to far as to write: “They will say that our just man will be scourged, racked, fettered, will have his eyes burnt out, and at last, after all manner of suffering, will be crucified …. “ The fact that when the perfectly just man appeared he was crucified, delivered up by justice to death, tells us pitilessly who man is: thou art such, man, that thou canst not bear the just man – that he who simply loves becomes a fool, a scourged criminal, an outcast.

March 18th entry: In our time, the word “hope” has become a kind of magnet that attracts to itself all manner of intellectual movements. … Since the revolution of 1789 and even more through the teachings of Hegel and Marx, the dominant theme of world history has become the building of a new world…. No century before ours has known such brutal means of torture, murder, and human self destruction…. Christian hope has nothing to do with anarchy or fanaticism…. To be a Christian means to be realistic. The Christian does not flee to utopia and does not let the present world go to ruin in the name of utopias. His life is built day by day on love and responsibility. Without such Christian realism and the humble love in the small coins of everyday life, the great treasure of new life and its eternal love cannot come into being.

March 21st entry: Without God man is stunted…. For when a person no longer rises above himself in his search for God, he becomes changed – narrower, smaller. Essential organs become atrophied in him. His soul becomes coarser and less discriminating. … Only when we see God in other people despite all their faults can we be genuinely human. … we must relearn the noblest use of language – that of speaking with God. To do so , we must let ourselves be guided by the traditional Christian prayers already in existence. … I am referring to the words “our Father”, which are the source from which all further prayer flows and by which it is sustained.
George H. Kubeck, Duplicate and or translate into Spanish and Vietnamese.