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Christmas 2008
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Communion and Liberation
He has revealed Himself. He personally. And now the way to Him is open. The novelty of the Christian announcement does not consist in a thought, but in a fact: God has revealed Himself. Yet this is no blind fact, it is a fact that is, itself, Logos – the presence of eternal reason in our flesh. Verbum caro factum est (Jn 1:14)… It is a rational fact. Naturally, the humility of reason is always needed in order to accept it. It takes man’s humility to respond to God’s humility.
Benedict XVI
The event of Christ becomes present now in a phenomenon of a different humanity: a man runs up against you and discovers in you a new presentiment of life, something that increases his chance of certainty, of positivity, of hope, and of usefulness in living, and moves him to follow. Jesus Christ, that man of two thousand years ago, is imminent, becomes present, under the veil, under the aspect of a different humanity. The encounter, the impact, is with a different humanity that strikes us because it corresponds to the structural needs of the heart more than any other modality of our thought or imagination—we never expected it, we never would’ve dreamed of it, it was impossible, it cannot be found elsewhere.
L. Giussani
Christmas and Hope
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
by Julián Carrón
La Repubblica, December 23, 2008
Dear Sir,
I was struck by the readings that the Ambrosian Liturgy proposes for Monday if the third week of Advent. How must the members of the ancient people of Israel been disconcerted at the words of the prophet Jeremiah: “It will devour your harvests and your bread; it will devour your sons and daughters; it will devour your flocks and herds; it will devour the fortified cities in which you placed your trust” (Jer 5:17). He was telling them that another nation was going to conquer the kingdom in which they had put their trust. “Then, if they say: ‘Why has the Lord our God done these things?’, you will answer: ‘Just as you have abandoned the Lord and served foreign gods in your country, so will you serve foreigners in a country that is not yours’” (Jer 5:19).
continue reading... en françaisThe Freedom To Educate: For a True Pluralism
Friday, November 27, 2008
The Ethics and Religious Culture program recently launched by the Ministère de l’Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport, surreptitiously promotes a project of homogenization in the guise of pluralism. The ERC, which operates from the earliest elementary grades to the end of high school, introduces children to religious cultures. It loosely ties a cultural approach to training in ethics. Students are taught to “dialogue” and develop ethical judgments on their own without interference from teachers. The aim is to have children grow up with a way of relating to each other, a model of “harmonization” taught by the State.
After the Synod
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Letter to the Movement by Fr. Julián Carrón
Dear friends,
Taking part in the Synod of Bishops, which, as you well know, had as its theme “The Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church” gave me a keener grasp of our responsibility in the Church and in the world. First of all, through what emerged during the work of the Synod: that the word of God is an “event”–Jesus Christ–who goes on being present in history through the Church’s life. Therefore the relationship with the living tradition of the Church assimilates us with the novelty witnessed by the Biblical text and makes us share the same experience as those who met Jesus himself. So, as the Pope said at the beginning of the Synod, all our fellow men can discover “the present in the past, the Holy Spirit who speaks to us today in the words of the past.” The Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation will point the way for our faith and as such we are all waiting for it.
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Pope Benedict XVI Speech to the New Canadian Ambassador
Wednesday, October 30, 2008
Freedom Doesn't Justify Everything, Says Pope
Here is the full text of the speech in French of Benedict XVI to Ms. Anne Leahy, Canada's new ambassador to the Holy See, who presented her credentials on October 30, 2008.
Here is a summary of the speech in English
Canada - 2008 Elections
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
What We Hold Most Dear
Elections are a unique educational opportunity for all of us. We do not expect salvation from politics or politicians. Nevertheless, politics plays a critical role in our lives.
Father Giussani taught us that when we face the real problems and challenges of life, the ambiguity at the roots of our actions rise to the surface and we affirm what it is we hold most dear. Thus, in the exercise of voting we will see “whether faith is really in the foreground, whether faith truly comes first, whether we really expect everything from the fact of Christ or whether we expect what we decide to expect from the fact of Christ.”
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Luigi Giussani, the Church, and Youth in the 1950s
Monday, March 17, 2008
A Judgment Born of an Experience
On February 24, 2005, the then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, personally represented the ailing Pope John Paul II at the funeral Mass for Monsignor Luigi Giussani; his homily would be discussed for months to come in the international press. Speaking for over fifteen minutes without as much as glancing at a text, he called attention to how “Fr. Giussani always kept the eyes of his life and of his heart fixed on Christ. In this way, he understood that Christianity is not an intellectual system, a packet of dogmas, a moralism; Christianity is rather an encounter, a love story; it is an event.” The future Pope Benedict XVI asserted that this “love affair with Christ” was far from every superficial enthusiasm, from every vague romanticism. Really seeing Christ, he knew that to encounter Christ means to follow Christ. This encounter is a road, a journey, a journey that passes also . . . through the “valley of darkness.” In the Gospel, we heard of the last darkness of Christ’s suffering, of the apparent absence of God, when the world’s Sun was eclipsed. He knew that to follow is to pass through a “valley of darkness,” to take the way of the cross, and to live all the same in true joy.
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This article originally appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of Logos: A Journal Of Catholic Thought & Culture.
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