Rome, Italy, Jan 28, 2010 / 03:24 am (CNA).-
A new book released by a Vatican official on Wednesday details lesser known facts about the late John Paul II, including his self-mortification practices, hand written instructions for his resignation in case of incurable illness, and a plot by Italian militants to kidnap him in the 1980's.
"Why he is a Saint: The True story of John Paul II," by Monsignor Slawomir Oder, a Church official heading the cause for John Paul II's canonization, was made available in Italian bookstores on Jan. 27. According to the Italian news agency ANSA, Fr. Oder discusses how the late pontiff used to practice self-mortification as part of his devotion.
“Members of his closest entourage, both in Poland and the Vatican, heard with their own ears how Karol Wojtyla used to whip himself,” wrote Msgr. Oder. “There used to be a particular belt, intended for trousers, hanging from a hook in his wardrobe among all his robes.”
Msgr. Oder spoke of how the late Holy Father “used this as a whip and always brought it with him when he went to (the papal summer residence) Castel Gandolfo.” Oder also cites the testimony of Sister Tobiana Sobodka who was in the neighboring room at the summer residence, and witnessed to the Vatican assembly considering John Paul II's cause for canonization. “We would hear the sound of the blows,” she testified.
In his new book, Msgr. Oder also outlines the other self-mortification practices the late Pontiff would undergo such as fasting during Lent – eating only one meal a day, abstention from food before ordinations and sleeping on a hard, cold floor as opposed to a bed. The Polish monsignor wrote that John Paul II began to sleep on the floor as far back as the 1960's and would often rumple the covers of his bed to make it look like he has slept in it.
The book also details hand written documents from John Paul II conveying his determination to continue with his papal duties as long as his health allowed. One document from 1989 states that he would only cease in his ministry “in the case of a lengthy illness, thought to be incurable that prevents me from carrying out my duties sufficiently.” In a 1994 letter, the late Pope also stated “I feel it is a serious conscientious obligation to continue carrying out the task given to me (by God).”
Msgr. Oder also discusses how John Paul II learned shortly before the 1981 assassination attempt that an Italian militant group called the Red Brigades planned to kidnap him.
“Shortly before the attack, the Italian secret services warned that the Red Brigade terrorists has a plan to kidnap John Paul,” Msgr. Oder wrote, explaining that that was why the late pontiff remarked “just like Bachelet” to his secretary on his way to the hospital after being shot. Catholic Judge Vittorio Bachelet was previously assassinated by the Red Brigades.
While presenting his book on Wednesday, Msgr. Oder stated that there has not been an official date set for John Paul II's beatification. Though the process is “well under way” the Congregation of Saints has yet to recognize a miracle attributed to the late Pontiff.
Pope Benedict XVI announced last month that he was declaring John Paul II Venerable and had previously waived a rule requiring that a canonization process cannot being until five years after a prospective saint's death.
donderdag 28 januari 2010
New book on John Paul II gives details on self-mortification, kidnap plot
Gospel must be shared with technology and personal witness, says Archbishop Chaput
Rome, Italy, Jan 27, 2010 / (CNA).-
The Emmanuel Community hosted a symposium in Rome this week with the theme "Priests and Laity in the Mission," for which Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver gave the keynote address on Wednesday. Following his talk, CNA spoke with the archbishop about how culture is affected by modern technology, a theme that was recently touched on by Pope Benedict XVI.
In his talk, the archbishop analyzed the roots and direction of contemporary culture including the effects that mass media and a "knowledge economy" have on the way we perceive the world.
On Saturday, through his message for the World Day for Social Communications, the Pope called for priests to have more of a presence online while, more importantly, remaining grounded in the faith.
In response to a question from CNA on his views about the use modern technologies as tools for evangelization, Archbishop Chaput said, "You have to be very prudent in your use of new media and new communications," explaining that he remembers the first time he heard a confession in which "people confessed sins that were the result of their access to media."
"We should use it to promote the Gospel, but we also need to guard ourselves from its dangers," he stated.
The archbishop also elaborated on a statement he made in his talk about addressing the "implications both for the Word of God and for the Church" that result from the effects of mass media and modern technology on culture, including its way of isolating people and attacking community.
The danger of spreading the Gospel through technological means rather than face-to-face, Archbishop Chaput said, is that "the Gospel becomes intellectual rather than interpersonal."
Sharing the experience of Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior with someone else is "not just a declaration of 'some' information," he said, adding, "and I don't know that the experience of the Lord Jesus can be shared electronically. I think it has to be shared personally.”
"We have great opportunities of entry into peoples' lives with the media, but we have to understand that it's not enough. There has to be, also, the personal relationship because the Gospel is essentially Trinitarian and, because of that, communitarian."
Summing up his thoughts, the archbishop said, "so I think that we've got to make good use of them but never presume that because we have an active presence in the technologies that it's ever enough.
"The old technology of personal witness and personal encounter and sharing faith is essential to the Gospel."
The archbishop added that using technology to extend an invitation to a community or describe it is useful, "but it can't be an experience of community in itself." Personal contact, he concluded, is "absolutely essential."
Pope encourages pontifical academies to address cultural problems
Vatican City, Jan 28, 2010 / (CNA).-
Pope Benedict XVI met with members of the Pontifical Academies in the Clementine Hall on Thursday morning, following their 14th annual public session a day earlier. Reminding them of the importance of keeping up to date with the contemporary culture and maintaining a degree of "originality" in their research, he called for them to look to the figure of St. Thomas Aquinas for inspiration.
Addressing the 300 members present from seven academies, the Holy Father congratulated them on their "glorious past" and then pointed out that at the present time "contemporary culture, and even more so believers themselves, continually petition the Church to concentrate her reflections and actions in those fields in which new problems emerge.”
Members of the academies, the Pope reminded, "are called to offer a qualified, competent and passionate contribution, so that all the Church... can offer occasions, language and of adequate means to dialogue with contemporary culture and respond effectively to the question and to the challenges that face her in the different areas of knowledge and human experience."
Pontifical academies approach questions concerning everything from philosophical and theological research to reflection on the figure of Mary, the heritage of the Christian witness and artistic creativity.
"As I have said before," continued Pope Benedict, "today's culture is strongly influenced by a vision dominated by relativism and subjectivism and by methods and attitudes that are sometimes superficial and even banal." These, he said, "damage the seriousness of study and reflection and, consequently, also dialogue, exchange and interpersonal communications."
Reflecting on the current situation, the Pope insisted, it is "urgent and necessary to recreate the essential conditions of a real capacity for deeper study and research, so as to dialogue reasonably and effectively confront various problems, with the view of a common growth and a formation the promotes man in his entirety and completeness."
Benedict XVI added that "social harmony and, above all, the formation of young generations" suffer from the lack of points of reference for ideals and morals, and that they should be introduced to "an ideal and practical offer of values and truth, of strong reasons for life and hope."
The need to form young people is "particularly urgent" in forming seminarians, he underscored.
The Holy Father pointed out a model for their work in Saint Thomas Aquinas, whom he said is an "always current model" that can "inspire action and dialogue of the Pontifical Academies with diverse cultures."
Citing the saint's ability to produce "an extraordinary theological synthesis" from Arabic, Jewish and Greek traditions, the Pope called for members of the academies to take a lesson from his "extraordinary and pervasive pedagogic originality."
The "thought and witness of St. Thomas Aquinas prompt us to study emerging problems with great attention, in order to offer adequate and creative responses," he added.
Acting as the saint, with trust in 'human reason' and its possibilities, concluded the Pope, "we must ... always draw from the richness of the Tradition in the constant search for the 'truth of things.'"
Archbishop Chaput addresses the reality of Satan
Rome, Italy, Jan 28, 2010 / CNA).-
On Wednesday, the Emmanuel Community's annual symposium in Rome was addressed by Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, who spoke on the task of evangelizing the modern culture and what he called religious leaders' embarrassment to discuss the existence of Satan.
The American archbishop spoke for half an hour at the Pontifical Lateran University to an audience ranging from college students to people in their 70s. His speech, entitled, “The Prince of this World and the Evangelization of Culture,” was part of a symposium that lasted from Jan. 25-27 and was dedicated to looking at "Priests and Laity in the Mission."
Archbishop Chaput began his talk by reflecting on the human desire for beauty and transcendence.
“We are creatures made for heaven; but we are born of this earth. We love the beauty of this world; but we sense there is something more behind that beauty. Our longing for that 'something' pulls us outside of ourselves,” he said.
Examining what God enabled man to do when He created him, the Denver archbishop observed that “God licenses us to know, love and ennoble the world through the work of human genius. Our creativity as creatures is an echo of God's own creative glory.”
But “we live in a time when, despite all of our achievements, the brutality and indifference of the world have never been greater,” the archbishop underscored as he surveyed the modern culture that Christians are called to evangelize.
In his estimation, “God has never been more absent from the Western mind than he is today. We live in an age when almost every scientific advance seems to be matched by some increase of cruelty in our entertainment, cynicism in our politics, ignorance of the past, consumer greed, little genocides posing as 'rights' like the cult of abortion, and a basic confusion about what – if anything at all – it means to be 'human.'”
Archbishop Chaput then warned of the dangers of creative genius, saying that our human accomplishments can lure us into a “will to power” within politics and science and an “impulse to pride” within art and high culture.
“Genius breeds vanity. And vanity breeds suffering and conflict.”
The roots of this vanity, explained the archbishop, can be traced back to the very first “non serviam” that Satan uttered.
Reflecting on the hesitancy of religious leaders to speak about Satan, Archbishop Chaput said, “It is very odd that in the wake of the bloodiest century in history – a century when tens of millions of human beings were shot, starved, gassed and incinerated with superhuman ingenuity – even many religious leaders are embarrassed to talk about the devil.”
“In fact,” he observed, “it is more than odd. It is revealing.”
“Mass murder and exquisitely organized cruelty are not just really big 'mental health' problems,” he continued. “They are sins that cry out to heaven for justice, and they carry the fingerprints of an Intelligence who is personal, gifted, calculating and powerful.”
The archbishop recalled that in the late 1920s, as “the great totalitarian murder-regimes began to rise up in Europe,” Raissa Maritain wrote an essay, “The Prince of This World,” in which she described Satan's works: “
“Lucifer has cast the strong though invisible net of illusion upon us. He makes one love the passing moment above eternity, uncertainty above truth. He persuades us that we can only love creatures by making Gods of them. He lulls us to sleep (and he interprets our dreams); he makes us work. Then does the spirit of man brood over stagnant waters. Not the least of the devil's victories is to have convinced artists and poets that he is their necessary, inevitable collaborator and the guardian of their greatness. Grant him that, and soon you will grant him that Christianity is unpracticable. Thus does he reign in this world.”
The archbishop added: “If we do not believe in the devil, sooner or later we will not believe in God.” The devil is “the first author of pride and rebellion, and the great seducer of man. Without him the Incarnation and Redemption do not make sense, and the cross is meaningless.”
“Satan is real. There is no way around this simple truth.”
Archbishop Chaput then praised Pope Benedict XVI for his commitment throughout the years to speak often and forcefully against the “culture of relativism” and called on the Catholic faithful to fulfill what he believes is their primary vocation.
“We have an obligation as Catholics to study and understand the world around us,” the archbishop said. “We have a duty not just to penetrate and engage it, but to convert it to Jesus Christ. That work belongs to all of us equally: clergy, laity and religious.”
“We are missionaries,” he continued. “That is our primary vocation; it is hardwired into our identity as Christians. God calls each of us to different forms of service in his Church. But we are all equal in baptism. And we all share the same mission of bringing the Gospel to the world, and bringing the world to the Gospel.”
Archbishop Chaput concluded his address by encouraging the faithful to have no fear in approaching what some may view as a daunting task.“We should not be afraid to believe and to love; it took even a great saint like Augustine half a lifetime to be able to admit, that 'late have I loved thee, Beauty so old and so new; late have I loved thee.'”
“God calls us to leave here today and make disciples of all nations,” exhorted the prelate. “But he calls us first to love him. If we do that, and do it zealously, with all our hearts – the rest will follow.”
