WELCOME TO THE VICARIATE APOSTOLIC OF KUWAIT
17 April 2007, Holy Family Cathedral, Kuwait City
Homily of H.L. Bishop Camillo Ballin, MCCI, at the Solemn Eucharistic Celebration
on the Occasion of H.H. Benedict XVI's 2nd Anniversary as Pope.
Your Excellency Archbishop Mounjed al-Hashem, Apostolic Nuncio to Kuwait,
Your Excellency Bishop Romulo de la Cruz, Bishop of Antique (Philippines),
Dear Brothers in the Priesthood,
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
It is with joy that I welcome you this evening to pray together in this Cathedral for our Pope Benedict XVI and to thank God for the great gift He has given to the Catholic Church and to the world in choosing him as Pastor of the Universal Church.
During these days, we celebrate two anniversaries connected with the Holy Father: Yesterday, the 16th of April, we celebrated His Holiness' birthday and the day after tomorrow, the 19th of April, we shall commemorate the anniversary of his election as Pope of the Catholic Church. Let us ask God to bless him and to keep him always under His divine Guidance.
The Holy Father Benedict XVI has now completed two years of his pontifical ministry. I would like to present these two years through five words which are the key to understanding the teaching and the choices of Pope Benedict. His teaching is fruit of a faith which discovers in Jesus Christ the answer to the needs of the human heart, even in these times of confusion and new intolerances against the Catholic Church.
First word: The HEART
It was on the occasion of his Christmas message (25 December 2006) that Pope Benedict XVI stressed the importance of the biblical concept of “heart”, which is: to be near to humanity in its concrete problems. The Pope said that the Church proclaims Jesus Christ as the Savior of the world, but he asked himself if the men and women of today feel the necessity of a Savior. He wrote in his encyclical, "God is Love":
The Church cannot and must not take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible. She cannot and must not replace the State. Yet at the same time she cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice… A just society must be the achievement of politics, not of the Church. Yet the promotion of justice through efforts to bring about openness of mind and will to the demands of the common good is something which concerns the Church deeply (no. 28).
The Church has a loving heart for humanity if she brings to the world openness of mind and will to the demands of the common good.
The Pope said in the quoted Christmas message that in spite of the many forms of progress, the human being remained the one as always: a freedom strained between the good and the evil, between life and death. It is just there, in his heart of hearts that man needs always to be saved. And he said to the young men in Poland (27 May 2006): God the Creator, who inspires the young heart with the huge desire of happiness, He doesn’t abandon him after that in the tiring construction of that house which is called life. So, from the heart of God to the heart of the Church to the heart of the mankind.
Second word: REASONEducation and reason are often recalled by Pope Benedict XVI. If education is a journey towards a more adequate meeting with reality, we must educate first of all the reason so that she be able to enlighten the scientific research and the life of the persons. The Pope said in Regensburg (12 September 2006):
While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons.
We have to educate our reason which is our specific characteristic and makes us image of God. It is our educated reason that makes us familiar with the Logos (Word of God) who embraces everything and whose traces we can find in all creation. The Pope affirmed in the quoted lecture in Regensburg:
It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures.
Reason is necessary for a dialogue but she must be educated to discover the presence of The One Who is present everywhere and is superior to her because He is her Creator. If we separate reason from faith, we destroy the world. In fact, if we maintain only reason in the name of a so-called personal freedom, we deny our divine origin, we become only animals. If we maintain only faith, without reason, we become terrorists.
Third Word: EDUCATION
The great challenge of education, as the Pope said recently, starts already in the infancy and cannot be born or develop except in the heart of the family based on marriage where the father and the mother, through their different and complementary psychologies, confront themselves with the needs required by the formation of their children. Education, in the family then in the school, is possible only in the context of a dialogue which recognizes the dignity, the freedom and the responsibilities of the other. It is not possible to educate if the human and spiritual resources, present in every person, are not opened to the discovery of the first Educator, God.
The Pope said at the end of the General Audience of 7 February 2007:
You are called to communicate faith to the new generations promoting the meeting of many children and young men with Christ. Do not get fed up with remembering them that only the Gospel can fully satisfy the expectations of the human heart and create a true humanism.
Fourth Word: LOVE
The Holy Father dedicated his first encyclical "God is Love" to this subject. He distinguished between Eros and Agape. The first is “desire” of the other, the second is “donation” to the other. God is both, Eros and Agape because He desired to communicate with humanity, not in order to possess us, but only to help us. That’s why He gave us even His Son to redeem us. For us Jesus emptied himself and died on a cross (cfr. Ph 2:8). God loved us first and not because we deserved His love but only for a pure and disinterested love. St. John writes: Love consists in this: it is not we who loved God, but God loved us and sent his Son to expiate our sins (1 John 4:10). St. Paul says: So it is proof of God’s own love for us, that Christ died for us while we were still sinners (Rom 5:8). It is this love of God which is the source of our love of God and of one another. Pope Benedict XVI stresses very often these two faces of love: to desire the other and to donate ourselves to the other, see also his post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation "The Sacrament of Charity" (22 February 2007) and his message for Lent 2007.
He wrote in his first encyclical “God is Love”:
God’s passionate love for his people – for humanity – is at the same time a forgiving love. It is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice. Here Christians can see a dim prefiguration of the mystery of the Cross: so great is God’s love for man that by becoming man he follows him even into death, and so reconciles justice and love.
Fifth Word: DIALOGUE
All the persons of good will are grateful to Pope Benedict XVI for the religious inspiration, the intellectual lucidity and the human courage with which he précised, in the historical lecture at the University of Regensburg on 12 September 2006, the bases of the correct relation between dialogue and peace under the banner of the indissoluble bond between faith and reason. He clarified, from the greatness of his spiritual mission, that the true premise of the dialogue is the consideration of the reality as it is. It is the photo he made of the reality that irritated many people over all the world. Only if we look at the reality with a concrete form we can know what we must do for the good of humanity. Pope Benedict XVI wanted to put the dialogue between religions on the true basis. A Moslem, friend of mine, told me in Arabic:
Translated: In Regensburg, Pope Benedict put an end to hypocrisy between religions and started true dialogue.
The Holy Father said in Turkey on 28 November 2006:
I am happy to be today a guest of Turkey, where I arrived as friend and as apostle of dialogue and peace. (…) True peace needs justice, to correct the economical disparity and the political disorders that are always cause of tensions and menaces in all the society. The development of terrorism and of some regional conflicts pointed out the necessity that the decisions of the International Institutions must be respected and supported. (…) The truth of peace calls everybody to cultivate creative and sincere relations, it stimulates to look for and to follow the roads of forgiveness and reconciliation, to be transparent in the treaties and faithful to the given word.
In his address on 8 January 2007 to the Diplomatic Corps accredited by the Holy See, he specified that dialogue must have as purpose the interest for man. He said:
The future can be serene if we work together for man.
We hope that this wish of the Pope becomes a reality and that we can work together for the good of every person in Kuwait and every person we meet wherever in the world.
God accompany the Holy Father in his difficult mission. In our churches we pray every Sunday for him. May the Lord, through the intercession of Our Lady of Arabia, the Patroness of our Vicariate, give him long life and peace.
+ Camillo Ballin
Vicar Apostolic of Kuwait
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