Legion of Mary Blog

VATICAN CITY, OCT 7, 2007 (VIS) - Shortly before midday today, Benedict XVI appeared at the window of his study to pray the Angelus with pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square. Prior to the Marian prayer, the Pope spoke of today’s Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, and of missions to which this month of October is dedicated.

“The Rosary,” said the Holy Father, “is a means granted by the Virgin to contemplate Jesus and, by meditating upon His life, to love Him and follow Him ever more faithfully.” He also recalled how Mary in her various apparitions, and especially in that of Fatima, had “insistently recommended the daily recitation of the Rosary in order to obtain an end to war.

“We too,” he added, “wish to accept the Virgin’s maternal request, committing ourselves to the faithful recitation of the Rosary for peace in families, nations and the entire world. Yet we know that true peace is established where people and institutions open themselves to the Gospel, and the month of October helps us to recall this fundamental truth through [its] particular concern for maintaining the missionary spirit alive in all communities, and for supporting the efforts of those people … who work on the frontiers of the Church’s mission.”

The Pope recalled how the theme of this year’s World Mission Day - to be celebrated on October 21 - is “all the Churches for all the world.” He also highlighted the fact that “announcing the Gospel remains the Church’s principal service to humanity, so as to offer the salvation of Christ to the men and women of our time, who suffer so many forms of humiliation and oppression, and to give a Christian orientation to the cultural, social and ethical changes that are taking place in the world.

“This year,” he added, “there is another reason that encourages us to renewed missionary commitment: the 50th anniversary of Servant of God Pius XII’s Encyclical ‘Fidei donum’ which promoted and encouraged cooperation between Churches for the ‘ad gentes’ mission.” Pope Benedict also recalled the 150th anniversary of the arrival in Sudan with five priests and a layman of St. Daniel Comboni, “the future bishop of Central Africa, and patron saint of those people.”

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VATICAN CITY, SEP 19, 2007 (VIS) - In his general audience, held this morning in St. Peter’s Square, the Pope continued with his series of catecheses on the subject of the Fathers of the Church, focussing today on St. John Chrysostom.

The Pope began by recalling the fact that this year marks the 16th centenary of the death of St. John Chrysostom, who was born in Antioch, in modern-day Turkey, in the year 349. “Called Chrysostom, meaning ‘golden-mouthed,’ for his eloquence, it could be said that he is still alive today through his works,” the Holy Father observed.

“Ordained a deacon in 381 and a priest in 386, he became a famous preacher in the churches of his city; … 387 was John’s ‘heroic year’,” said Benedict XVI, the year of “the so-called ‘revolt of the statues’ when people destroyed the imperial statues as a sign of protest against the rise in taxes.”

The Holy Father then went on to observe how this saint “was one of the most prolific of the Fathers, of him we have 17 treatises, more than 700 authentic homilies, his commentaries on Matthew and Paul, and 241 letters. He was not a speculative theologian. He transmitted the traditional and certain doctrine of the Church at a time of theological controversies, caused above all by Arianism, in other words the negation of Christ’s divinity.”

“His is an explicitly pastoral theology,” the Pope continued, “in which he shows a constant concern for coherence between thought expressed in words and real existence, This, in particular, is the common thread of the magnificent catecheses with which he prepared catechumens to receive Baptism.”

Benedict XVI indicated how “St. John Chrysostom was concerned that his writings should accompany the integral - physical, intellectual and religious - development of the person.”

In his works, the saint highlighted the importance of childhood because it is then “that inclinations to vice and virtue appear. For this reason the law of God must, from the beginning, be impressed upon the soul ‘as upon a wax tablet’.”

Childhood, said the Pope referring to the saint’s writings, “is followed by the sea of adolescence in which the gales blow violently as concupiscence grows within us.” Then comes courtship and marriage, about which the saint points out “that a well prepared husband and wife close the way to divorce: everything takes place joyfully and children can be educated to virtue. When the first child is born, he or she is like a bridge: the three become a single flesh because the child brings the two parts together and all together they constitute a family, a little Church.”

Finally, the Pope recalled how the saint used to address his writings to the lay faithful who, “through Baptism, take on the priestly office, royal and prophetic. … This lesson of Chrysostom on the authentically Christian presence of the lay faithful in the family and in society is today more important than ever.”

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