COMMENT "Where God is, there is a future"

Sanctuary 'flickr' 

Dear William,

Thank for following the trail of Benedict XVI in Germany.

The State Visit and the Pilgrimage of the Church has been the experience of the beauty of encounter as of the travelling of the disciples on the road with Jesus. (Lk. 9:57).

Some photos are missed, as for example pictures of the Pope celebrating Benediction at the Marian Shrine.  
The Media has proved to be at service of the people.

Yours   ...Donald  

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: William J  ...
To: Donald ...
Sent: Tuesday, 27 September 2011, 19:52
Subject: [Blog] Choice words, Pope Benedict

Dear Father Donald,

 

Pope Benedict XVI breathes the life of the Spirit into the world as he travels across the continents. I am quite in awe of his spirituality, as one listening to St. Paul:

 

"Where God is, there is a future. Indeed – when we allow God’s love to influence the whole of our lives, then heaven stands open. Then it is possible so to shape the present that it corresponds more and more to the Good News of our Lord Jesus Christ. Then the little things of everyday life acquire meaning, and great problems find solutions."

 

If I had been a young man by the name of Eutychus (Acts 20) listening from a high windowsill, I too would have fallen... from so deep a trance.

 

Thank you for collating all of Benedict XVI's addresses on your Blog, truly a feast! 

 

... in Our Lord,

William 

The talk which Benedict XVI gave at Freiburg to those engaged in work for and with the Church.

Dear Fr. Edward,
Thank you.
I will be happy and follow up
on your suggestion for the special selection from the Germany Addresses.
Yours.
Donald
PS. Received the beautiful music.
http://player.rv.va/vaticanplayer.asp?language=it&tic=VA_IL2P1NGD


----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Fr. Edward . . .
To: Donald . . .
Sent: Monday, 26 September 2011, 22:24
Subject: A suggestion.
Dear Father Donald,

May I make a suggestion - after you have examined the material - that
you also publish the talk which Benedict XVI gave at Freiburg to those
engaged in work for and with the Church.

One reason is the beautiful music played by a wind ensemble at three
points during the meeting.

You can add the  English translation. You will get it all together
from the whole programme of texts and videos which you can find
through the medallion "Germany 2011" at the top left of the first page
(after the division into languages) of the Vatican web-site.
Blessings in Domino,
fr Edward O.P..
Iceland.

+ + +

ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI  Concert Hall, Freiburg im Breisgau Sunday, 25 September 2011 (Video) Mr President of the Federal Republic, Mr Minister President, Mr Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Brother Bishops and Priests, I am glad to be here today to meet all of you who work in so many ways for the Church and for society. This gives me a welcome opportunity personally to thank you most sincerely for your commitment and your witness as “powerful heralds of the faith in things to be hoped for” (Lumen Gentium, 35 – validi praecones fidei sperandarum rerum); this is how the Second Vatican Council describes people like you who do dedicated work for the present and the future from a faith perspective. In your fields of activity you readily stand up for your faith and for the Church, something that, as we know, is not at all easy at the present time. For some decades now we have been experiencing a decline in religious practice and we have been seeing substantial numbers of the baptized drifting away from church life. This prompts the question: should the Church not change? Must she not adapt her offices and structures to the present day, in order to reach the searching and doubting people of today? Blessed Mother Teresa was once asked what in her opinion was the first thing that would have to change in the Church. Her answer was: you and I. Two things are clear from this brief story. On the one hand Mother Teresa wants to tell her interviewer: the Church is not just other people, not just the hierarchy, the Pope and the bishops: we are all the Church, we the baptized. And on the other hand her starting-point is this: yes, there are grounds for change. There is a need for change. Every Christian and the whole community of the faithful are called to constant change. What should this change look like in practice? Are we talking about the kind of renewal that a householder might carry out when reordering or repainting his home? Or are we talking about a corrective, designed to bring us back on course and help us to make our way more swiftly and more directly? Certainly these and other elements play a part and we cannot go into all these matters here. But the fundamental motive for change is the apostolic mission of the disciples and the Church herself. The Church, in other words, must constantly rededicate herself to her mission. The three Synoptic Gospels highlight various aspects of the missionary task. The mission is built first of all upon personal experience: “You are witnesses” (Lk 24:48); it finds expression in relationships: “Make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:19); and it spreads a universal message: “Preach the Gospel to the whole creation” (Mk 16:15). Through the demands and constraints of the world, however, this witness is constantly obscured, the relationships are alienated and the message is relativized. If the Church, in Pope Paul VI’s words, is now struggling “to model itself on Christ's ideal”, this “can only result in its acting and thinking quite differently from the world around it, which it is nevertheless striving to influence” (Ecclesiam Suam, 58). In order to accomplish her mission, she will need again and again to set herself apart from her surroundings, to become in a certain sense “unworldly”. The Church’s mission has its origins in the mystery of the triune God, in the mystery of his creative love. And love is not just somehow within God, it isGod, he himself is love by nature. And divine love does not want to exist only for itself, by nature it wants to pour itself out. It has come down to humanity, to us, in a particular way through the incarnation and self-offering of God’s Son: by virtue of the fact that Christ, the Son of God, as it were stepped outside the framework of his divinity, took flesh and became man, not merely to confirm the world in its worldliness and to be its companion, leaving it to carry on just as it is, but in order to change it. The Christ event includes the inconceivable fact of what the Church Fathers call a sacrum commercium, an exchange between God and man. The Fathers explain it in this way: we have nothing to give God, we have only our sin to place before him. And this he receives and makes his own, while in return he gives us himself and his glory: a truly unequal exchange, which is brought to completion in the life and passion of Christ. He becomes, as it were, a “sinner”, he takes sin upon himself, takes what is ours and gives us what is his. But as the Church continued to reflect upon and live the faith, it became clear that we not only give him our sin, but that he has empowered us, from deep within he gives us the power, to offer him something positive as well: our love – to offer him humanity in the positive sense. Clearly, it is only through God’s generosity that man, the beggar, who receives a wealth of divine gifts, is yet able to offer something to God as well; that God makes it possible for us to accept his gift, by making us capable of becoming givers ourselves in his regard. The Church owes her whole being to this unequal exchange. She has nothing of her own to offer to him who founded her, such that she might say: here is something wonderful that we did! Her raison d’être consists in being a tool of redemption, in letting herself be saturated by God’s word and in bringing the world into loving unity with God. The Church is immersed in the Redeemer’s outreach to men. When she is truly herself, she is always on the move, she constantly has to place herself at the service of the mission that she has received from the Lord. And therefore she must always open up afresh to the cares of the world, to which she herself belongs, and give herself over to them, in order to make present and continue the holy exchange that began with the Incarnation. In the concrete history of the Church, however, a contrary tendency is also manifested, namely that the Church becomes self-satisfied, settles down in this world, becomes self-sufficient and adapts herself to the standards of the world. Not infrequently, she gives greater weight to organization and institutionalization than to her vocation to openness towards God, her vocation to opening up the world towards the other. In order to accomplish her true task adequately, the Church must constantly renew the effort to detach herself from her tendency towards worldliness and once again to become open towards God. In this she follows the words of Jesus: “They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world” (Jn17:16), and in precisely this way he gives himself to the world. One could almost say that history comes to the aid of the Church here through the various periods of secularization, which have contributed significantly to her purification and inner reform. Secularizing trends – whether by expropriation of Church goods, or elimination of privileges or the like – have always meant a profound liberation of the Church from forms of worldliness, for in the process she as it were sets aside her worldly wealth and once again completely embraces her worldly poverty. In this she shares the destiny of the tribe of Levi, which according to the Old Testament account was the only tribe in Israel with no ancestral land of its own, taking as its portion only God himself, his word and his signs. At those moments in history, the Church shared with that tribe the demands of a poverty that was open to the world, in order to be released from her material ties: and in this way her missionary activity regained credibility. History has shown that, when the Church becomes less worldly, her missionary witness shines more brightly. Once liberated from material and political burdens and privileges, the Church can reach out more effectively and in a truly Christian way to the whole world, she can be truly open to the world. She can live more freely her vocation to the ministry of divine worship and service of neighbour. The missionary task, which is linked to Christian worship and should determine its structure, becomes more clearly visible. The Church opens herself to the world not in order to win men for an institution with its own claims to power, but in order to lead them to themselves by leading them to him of whom each person can say with Saint Augustine: he is closer to me than I am to myself (cf. Confessions, III,6,11). He who is infinitely above me is yet so deeply within me that he is my true interiority. This form of openness to the world on the Church’s part also serves to indicate how the individual Christian can be open to the world in effective and appropriate ways. It is not a question here of finding a new strategy to relaunch the Church. Rather, it is a question of setting aside mere strategy and seeking total transparency, not bracketing or ignoring anything from the truth of our present situation, but living the faith fully here and now in the utterly sober light of day, appropriating it completely, and stripping away from it anything that only seems to belong to faith, but in truth is mere convention or habit. To put it another way: for people of every era, and not just our own, the Christian faith is a scandal. That the eternal God should know us and care about us, that the intangible should at a particular moment have become tangible, that he who is immortal should have suffered and died on the Cross, that we who are mortal should be given the promise of resurrection and eternal life – for people of any era, to believe all this is a bold claim. This scandal, which cannot be eliminated unless one were to eliminate Christianity itself, has unfortunately been overshadowed in recent times by other painful scandals on the part of the preachers of the faith. A dangerous situation arises when these scandals take the place of the primary skandalonof the Cross and in so doing they put it beyond reach, concealing the true demands of the Christian Gospel behind the unworthiness of those who proclaim it. All the more, then, it is time once again to discover the right form of detachment from the world, to move resolutely away from the Church’s worldliness. This does not, of course, mean withdrawing from the world: quite the contrary. A Church relieved of the burden of worldliness is in a position, not least through her charitable activities, to mediate the life-giving strength of the Christian faith to those in need, to sufferers and to their carers. “For the Church, charity is not a kind of welfare activity which could equally well be left to others, but is a part of her nature, an indispensable expression of her very being” (Deus Caritas Est, 25). At the same time, though, the Church’s charitable activity also needs to be constantly exposed to the demands of due detachment from worldliness, if it is not to wither away at the roots in the face of increasing erosion of its ecclesial character. Only a profound relationship with God makes it possible to reach out fully towards others, just as a lack of outreach towards neighbour impoverishes one’s relationship with God. Openness to the concerns of the world means, then, for the Church that is detached from worldliness, bearing witness to the primacy of God’s love according to the Gospel through word and deed, here and now, a task which at the same time points beyond the present world because this present life is also bound up with eternal life. As individuals and as the community of the Church, let us live the simplicity of a great love, which is both the simplest and hardest thing on earth, because it demands no more and no less than the gift of oneself. Dear friends, it remains for me to invoke God’s blessing and the strength of the Holy Spirit upon us all, that we may continually recognize anew and bear fresh witness to God’s love and mercy in our respective fields of activity. Thank you for your attention. © Copyright 2011 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana

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LATEST NEWS 

Full text: Pope’s speech to lay Catholics in Freiburg

By POPE BENEDICT XVI on Saturday, 24 September 2011

Pope Benedict XVI in Freiburg, 

on his third day of a four-day-visit to Germany (AP Photo)

Dear Brothers and Sisters,
I am grateful for this opportunity to come together, here in Freiburg, with you, the Council Members of the Central Committee for German Catholics (ZdK). I gladly express to you my appreciation for your work in publicly representing the concerns of Catholics and in giving impetus to the apostolate of the Church and of Catholics in society. I also thank the President of the ZdK, Herr Alois Glück, for his kind greeting.

Dear friends, for some years now, development aid has included what are known as “exposure programmes”. Leaders from the fields of politics, economics and religion live among the poor in Africa, Asia, or Latin America for a certain period and share the day-to-day reality of their lives. They are exposed to the circumstances in which these people live, in order to see the world through their eyes and hence to learn how to practise solidarity.  

Pope at Marian sanctuary of Etzelsbach in Germany Sept. 23

Pope visits Etzelsbach shrine: "Life should be an answer to God's love"

Holy Father address at Vespers, Etzelsbach Germany
Etzelsbach-Marian-Shrine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlajXJSbQ5U
Address: Scottish Catholic Observer

http://www.sconews.co.uk/news/12547/holy-father-address-at-vespers-etzelsbach-marian-shrine-germany/

Sept 23 2011

Holy Father: address at Vespers, Etzelsbach, Germany

Pope Benedict XVI lead a congregation of hundreds in the celebration Vespers at the Wallfahrtskapelle, or Pilgrimage Chapel of the Shrine, located in the small hamlet of Etzelsbach, outside the city of Erfurt, on Friday evening. Addess and video link below.

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Now I am able to fulfil my wish to visit Eichsfeld, and here in Etzelsbach to thank Mary in company with you. “Here in the beloved quiet vale”, as the pilgrims’ hymn says, “under the old lime trees”, Mary gives us security and new strength. During two godless dictatorships, which sought to deprive the people of their ancestral faith, the inhabitants of Eichsfeld were in no doubt that here in this shrine at Etzelsbach an open door and a place of inner peace was to be found. The special friendship with Mary that grew from all this, is what we seek to cultivate further, not least through this evening’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

When Christians of all times and places turn to Mary, they are acting on the spontaneous conviction that Jesus cannot refuse his mother what she asks; and they are relying on the unshakable trust that Mary is also our mother – a mother who has experienced the greatest of all sorrows, who feels all our griefs with us and ponders in a maternal way how to overcome them. How many people down the centuries have made pilgrimages to Mary, in order to find comfort and strength before the image of the Mother of Sorrows, as here at Etzelsbach!

Let us look upon her likeness: a woman of middle age, her eyelids heavy with much weeping, gazing pensively into the distance, as if meditating in her heart upon everything that had happened. On her knees rests the lifeless body of her son, she holds him gently and lovingly, like a precious gift. We see the marks of the crucifixion on his bare flesh. The left arm of the corpse is pointing straight down. Perhaps this sculpture of the Pietà, like so many others, was originally placed above an altar. The crucified Jesus would then be pointing with his outstretched arm to what was taking place on the altar, where the holy sacrifice that he had accomplished is made present in the Eucharist.

A particular feature of the holy image of Etzelsbach is the position of Our Lord’s body. In most representations of the Pietà, the dead Jesus is lying with his head facing left, so that the observer can see the wounded side of the Crucified Lord. Here in Etzelsbach, however, the wounded side is concealed, because the body is facing the other way. It seems to me that a deep meaning lies hidden in this representation, that only becomes apparent through silent contemplation: in the Etzelsbach image, the hearts of Jesus and his mother are turned to one another; they come close to each other. They exchange their love. We know that the heart is also the seat of the most tender affection as well as the most intimate compassion. In Mary’s heart there is room for the love that her divine Son wants to bestow upon the world.

Marian devotion focuses on contemplation of the relationship between the Mother and her divine Son. The faithful constantly discover new dimensions and qualities which this mystery can help to disclose for us, for example when the image of the Immaculate Heart of Mary is seen as a symbol of her deep and unreserved loving unity with Christ. It is not self-fulfilment that truly enables people to flourish, according to the model that modern life so often proposes to us, which can easily turn into a sophisticated form of selfishness. Rather it is an attitude of self-giving directed towards the heart of Mary and hence also towards the heart of the Redeemer.

“We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom 8:28), as we have just heard in the Scripture reading. With Mary, God has worked for good in everything, and he does not cease, through Mary, to cause good to spread further in the world. Looking down from the Cross, from the throne of grace and salvation, Jesus gave us his mother Mary to be our mother. At the moment of his self-offering for mankind, he makes Mary as it were the channel of the rivers of grace that flow from the Cross. At the foot of the Cross, Mary becomes our fellow traveller and protector on life’s journey. “By her motherly love she cares for her son’s sisters and brothers who still journey on earth surrounded by dangers and difficulties, until they are led into their blessed home” (Lumen Gentium, 62). Yes indeed, in life we pass through high-points and low-points, but Mary intercedes for us with her Son and conveys to us the strength of divine love.

Our trust in the powerful intercession of the Mother of God and our gratitude for the help we have repeatedly experienced impel us, as it were, to think beyond the needs of the moment. What does Mary actually want to say to us, when she rescues us from our plight? She wants to help us grasp the breadth and depth of our Christian vocation. With a mother’s tenderness, she wants to make us understand that our whole life should be a response to the love of our God, who is so rich in mercy. “Understand,” she seems to say to us, “that God, who is the source of all that is good and who never desires anything other than your true happiness, has the right to demand of you a life that yields unreservedly and joyfully to his will, striving at the same time that others may do likewise.” Where God is, there is a future. Indeed – when we allow God’s love to influence the whole of our lives, then heaven stands open. Then it is possible so to shape the present that it corresponds more and more to the Good News of our Lord Jesus Christ. Then the little things of everyday life acquire meaning, and great problems find solutions. Amen.

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 Pic: Pope Benedict gives a blessing after leading a prayer service at the Marian sanctuary of Etzelsbach in Germany Sept. 23

Video: 

http://player.rv.va/vaticanplayer.asp?language=it&tic=VA_28IYAZT5

+ +  +

Pope Benedict XVI prays shrine of the Virgin Mary at the pilgrimage chapel in Etzelsbach, eastern Germany

Marian sanctuary of Etzelsbach

Dear Fr. Edward,   
Thank for your Email and its sermon for  the Saturday Our Lady.
I am happy with the peroration which fills up the News of the Marian Shrine at Etzelsback and the illustrating , illuminating the German pictures.
Yours,
Donald

Etzelsbach Shrine of Our Lady, East Germany

----- Forwarded Message -----

From: edward booth . . .
To: Donald . . .
Sent: Sunday, 25 September 2011, 22:24
Subject: Benedict XVI in Germany

Dear Father Donald,
I have checked that the whole sermon with photographs for the Sisters
has been attached, and I hope that it arrives safely.
The TV transmission from Etzelsbach was beautiful ! I think that if
you hit the "Germany" Medallion on the first page of the Vatican
web-site you will find a connection. If not try the document as
provided by the the Bulletin of today of the Press Office.

Blessings in Domino,

fr Edward O:P.

 +++

Saturday of Our Lady 24 September

By Fr. Edward Booth OP

          It is possible to bring together the gospel of today with some very pertinent thoughts about Our Lady. We can approach the matter like this. Those prophesies about the coming passion of Our Lord: were they known to Mary? Had they been discussed together by her and the apostles, especially after the death of Jesus, because they did not share the same privileges. Those of Mary were very great.... 

Wallfahrtskapelle Etzelsbach

. . ..

          This is why it is so difficult to portray Mary's sufferings. One feels that Michelangelo had reflected on this question and how she would have reacted when the dead torso of Jesus was placed, with all of its still flowing blood on her lap. Michelangelo shows her face as virginal but without pain. I was watching the visit of the Holy Father yesterday afternoon to a Marian place of Pilgrimage at Etzelsbach just outside Erfurt. The Pope gave a beautiful and most perceptive meditation based on the pietá which was there. This was published by the Vatican Press Office in the course of today. It is of carved wood, not stone like the marble of Michelangelo's statue. The body of Christ with the Crucifixion wounds lies on her lap stiffly.  Her face is that of a middle-aged woman. The eyes are clear and still, but are not touched searing pain because she sees more deeply than that. All credit to the artist (probably local) who had not solved the problem by making her virginal, but pure, wise and experienced and communicating deeply in the sufferings of her Son.

Etzelsbach had already found its way before the day's end into Google images, and I found an image of the statue which proved difficult to reproduce. Also pictures of the chapel itself and of the Pope arriving SCV1 from the nearby landing site with an impressive group of German army helicopters: the Pietá had been transferred from the chapel to a specially raised altar in a large field, and a very large photograph of it was also displayed next to it.

On Saturday morning, together with more photos of the Pope's visit, I had found a better photograph of the statue in itself and a photograph of Benedict XVI with the statue.  

Pope Benedict XVI prayes at a shrine of the Virgin Mary during a vesper service at the pilgrimage chapel in Etzelsbach, eastern Germany on September 23, 2011, the second day of the Pontiff's first state visit to his native Germany. The 84-year old pope,...

Holy Father address at Vespers, Etzelsbach Germany 

Etzelsbach-Marian-Shrine

Pope represent and reciprocate, prayer of souls.

Fr. Edward, OP Iceland,

http://www.simnet.is/e.booth/Discourses%20State%20Visit%20Germany%20Benedict%20XVI.htm 

Reption: Mr President of the Federal Republic,
Mr President of the Bundestag,

 

Many thanks for FORWARDING the Links.

We Prayed at our Sunday community Mass with our thoughts for the
POPE at the climax in Germany

Thank you for the pictures and for the Addresses for the State Visit, for the Coumcil of the Evangelical Chuch, for Jewish Community, the Muslim Community, the Catholic Church.

It is a communion of reciprocate and representing of the prayer of souls.

The Church is seen everywhere.

In your isolated Parish in Iceland, Fr. Edward, (Dominican), you sent us the News as in this Email.

                        Our Intercession: Lord hear us  . . .

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Discourses, etc., of the

State Visit of the Holy Father to Germany

22-25 September 2011

Madam Chancellor,
Madam President of the Bundesrat 

Thursday 22 September:

Address to a Joint Session of the German Reichstag:

Address to a Joint Session of the German Reichstag

^{Mr President of the Federal Republic,
Mr President of the Bundestag,
Madam Chancellor,
Madam President of the Bundesrat,
Ladies and Gentlemen Members of the House,
It is an honour and a joy for me to speak before this distinguished house, before the Parliament of my native Germany, that meets here as a democratically elected representation of the people, in order to work for the good of the Federal Republic of Germany. I should like to thank the President of theBundestag both for his invitation to deliver this address and for the kind words of greeting and appreciation with which he has welcomed me. At this moment I turn to you, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, not least as your fellow-countryman who for all his life has been conscious of close links to his origins, and has followed the affairs of his native Germany with keen interest. But the invitation to give this address was extended to me as Pope, as the Bishop of Rome, who bears the highest responsibility for Catholic Christianity. In issuing this invitation you are acknowledging the role that the Holy See plays as a partner within the community of peoples and states. Setting out from this international responsibility that I hold, I should like to propose to you some thoughts on the foundations of a free state of law.
Allow me to begin my reflections on the foundations of law [Recht] with a brief story from sacred Scripture. In the First Book of the Kings, it is recounted that God invited the young King Solomon, on his accession to the throne, to make a request. What will the young ruler ask for at this important moment? Success – wealth – long life – destruction of his enemies? He chooses none of these things. Instead, he asks for a listening heart so that he may govern God’s people, and discern between good and evil (cf. 1 Kg 3:9). Through this story, the Bible wants to tell us what should ultimately matter for a politician. His fundamental criterion and the motivation for his work as a politician must not be success, and certainly not material gain. Politics must be a striving for justice, and hence it has to establish the fundamental preconditions for peace. Naturally a politician will seek success, without which he would have no opportunity for effective political action at all. Yet success is subordinated to the criterion of justice, to the will to do what is right, and to the understanding of what is right. Success can also be seductive and thus can open up the path towards the falsification of what is right, towards the destruction of justice. "Without justice – what else is the State but a great band of robbers?", as Saint Augustine once said.1 We Germans know from our own experience that these words are no empty spectre. We have seen how power became divorced from right, how power opposed right and crushed it, so that the State became an instrument for destroying right – a highly organized band of robbers, capable of threatening the whole world and driving it to the edge of the abyss. To serve right and to fight against the dominion of wrong is and remains the fundamental task of the politician. At a moment in history when man has acquired previously inconceivable power, this task takes on a particular urgency. Man can destroy the world. He can manipulate himself. He can, so to speak, make human beings and he can deny them their humanity. How do we recognize what is right? How can we discern between good and evil, between what is truly right and what may appear right? Even now, Solomon’s request remains the decisive issue facing politicians and politics today.
For most of the matters that need to be regulated by law, the support of the majority can serve as a sufficient criterion. Yet it is evident that for the fundamental issues of law, in which the dignity of man and of humanity is at stake, the majority principle is not enough: everyone in a position of responsibility must personally seek out the criteria to be followed when framing laws. In the third century, the great theologian Origen provided the following explanation for the resistance of Christians to certain legal systems: "Suppose that a man were living among the Scythians, whose laws are contrary to the divine law, and was compelled to live among them ... such a man for the sake of the true law, though illegal among the Scythians, would rightly form associations with like-minded people contrary to the laws of the Scythians." 2}This conviction was what motivated resistance movements to act against the Nazi regime and other totalitarian regimes, thereby doing a great service to justice and to humanity as a whole. For these people, it was indisputably evident that the law in force was actually unlawful. Yet when it comes to the decisions of a democratic politician, the question of what now corresponds to the law of truth, what is actually right and may be enacted as law, is less obvious. In terms of the underlying anthropological issues, what is right and may be given the force of law is in no way simply self-evident today. The question of how to recognize what is truly right and thus to serve justice when framing laws has never been simple, and today in view of the vast extent of our knowledge and our capacity, it has become still harder.
How do we recognize what is right? In history, systems of law have almost always been based on religion: decisions regarding what was to be lawful among men were taken with reference to the divinity. Unlike other great religions, Christianity has never proposed a revealed law to the State and to society, that is to say a juridical order derived from revelation. Instead, it has pointed to nature and reason as the true sources of law – and to the harmony of objective and subjective reason, which naturally presupposes that both spheres are rooted in the creative reason of God. Christian theologians thereby aligned themselves with a philosophical and juridical movement that began to take shape in the second century B.C. In the first half of that century, the social natural law developed by the Stoic philosophers came into contact with leading teachers of Roman Law.³ Through this encounter, the juridical culture of the West was born, which was and is of key significance for the juridical culture of mankind. This pre-Christian marriage between law and philosophy opened up the path that led via the Christian Middle Ages and the juridical developments of the Age of Enlightenment all the way to the Declaration of Human Rights and to our German Basic Law of 1949, with which our nation committed itself to "inviolable and inalienable human rights as the foundation of every human community, and of peace and justice in the world". For the development of law and for the development of humanity, it was highly significant that Christian theologians aligned themselves against the religious law associated with polytheism and on the side of philosophy, and that they acknowledged reason and nature in their interrelation as the universally valid source of law. This step had already been taken by Saint Paul in the Letter to the Romans, when he said: "When Gentiles who have not the Law [the Torah of Israel] do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves ... they show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness ..." (Rom 2:14f.). Here we see the two fundamental concepts of nature and conscience, where conscience is nothing other than Solomon’s listening heart, reason that is open to the language of being. If this seemed to offer a clear explanation of the foundations of legislation up to the time of the Enlightenment, up to the time of the Declaration on Human Rights after the Second World War and the framing of our Basic Law, there has been a dramatic shift in the situation in the last half-century. The idea of natural law is today viewed as a specifically Catholic doctrine, not worth bringing into the discussion in a non-Catholic environment, so that one feels almost ashamed even to mention the term. Let me outline briefly how this situation arose. Fundamentally it is because of the idea that an unbridgeable gulf exists between "is" and "ought". An "ought" can never follow from an "is", because the two are situated on completely different planes. The reason for this is that in the meantime, the positivist understanding of nature has come to be almost universally accepted. If nature – in the words of Hans Kelsen – is viewed as "an aggregate of objective data linked together in terms of cause and effect", then indeed no ethical indication of any kind can be derived from it.⁴ A positivist conception of nature as purely functional, as the natural sciences consider it to be, is incapable of producing any bridge to ethics and law, but once again yields only functional answers. The same also applies to reason, according to the positivist understanding that is widely held to be the only genuinely scientific one. Anything that is not verifiable or falsifiable, according to this understanding, does not belong to the realm of reason strictly understood. Hence ethics and religion must be assigned to the subjective field, and they remain extraneous to the realm of reason in the strict sense of the word. Where positivist reason dominates the field to the exclusion of all else – and that is broadly the case in our public mindset – then the classical sources of knowledge for ethics and law are excluded. This is a dramatic situation which affects everyone, and on which a public debate is necessary. Indeed, an essential goal of this address is to issue an urgent invitation to launch one.
The positivist approach to nature and reason, the positivist world view in general, is a most important dimension of human knowledge and capacity that we may in no way dispense with. But in and of itself it is not a sufficient culture corresponding to the full breadth of the human condition. Where positivist reason considers itself the only sufficient culture and banishes all other cultural realities to the status of subcultures, it diminishes man, indeed it threatens his humanity. I say this with Europe specifically in mind, where there are concerted efforts to recognize only positivism as a common culture and a common basis for law-making, reducing all the other insights and values of our culture to the level of subculture, with the result that Europe vis-à-vis other world cultures is left in a state of culturelessness and at the same time extremist and radical movements emerge to fill the vacuum. In its self-proclaimed exclusivity, the positivist reason which recognizes nothing beyond mere functionality resembles a concrete bunker with no windows, in which we ourselves provide lighting and atmospheric conditions, being no longer willing to obtain either from God’s wide world. And yet we cannot hide from ourselves the fact that even in this artificial world, we are still covertly drawing upon God’s raw materials, which we refashion into our own products. The windows must be flung open again, we must see the wide world, the sky and the earth once more and learn to make proper use of all this.But how are we to do this? How do we find our way out into the wide world, into the big picture? How can reason rediscover its true greatness, without being sidetracked into irrationality? How can nature reassert itself in its true depth, with all its demands, with all its directives? I would like to recall one of the developments in recent political history, hoping that I will neither be misunderstood, nor provoke too many one-sided polemics. I would say that the emergence of the ecological movement in German politics since the 1970s, while it has not exactly flung open the windows, nevertheless was and continues to be a cry for fresh air which must not be ignored or pushed aside, just because too much of it is seen to be irrational. Young people had come to realize that something is wrong in our relationship with nature, that matter is not just raw material for us to shape at will, but that the earth has a dignity of its own and that we must follow its directives. In saying this, I am clearly not promoting any particular political party – nothing could be further from my mind. If something is wrong in our relationship with reality, then we must all reflect seriously on the whole situation and we are all prompted to question the very foundations of our culture. Allow me to dwell a little longer on this point. The importance of ecology is no longer disputed. We must listen to the language of nature and we must answer accordingly. Yet I would like to underline a point that seems to me to be neglected, today as in the past: there is also an ecology of man. Man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will. Man is not merely self-creating freedom. Man does not create himself. He is intellect and will, but he is also nature, and his will is rightly ordered if he respects his nature, listens to it and accepts himself for who he is, as one who did not create himself. In this way, and in no other, is true human freedom fulfilled.
Let us come back to the fundamental concepts of nature and reason, from which we set out. The great proponent of legal positivism, Kelsen, at the age of 84 – in 1965 – abandoned the dualism of "is" and "ought". (I find it comforting that rational thought is evidently still possible at the age of 84!) Previously he had said that norms can only come from the will. Nature therefore could only contain norms, he adds, if a will had put them there. But this, he says, would presuppose a Creator God, whose will had entered into nature. "Any attempt to discuss the truth of this belief is utterly futile", he observed.⁵ Is it really? – I find myself asking. Is it really pointless to wonder whether the objective reason that manifests itself in nature does not presuppose a creative reason, a Creator Spiritus?
At this point Europe’s cultural heritage ought to come to our assistance. The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and to rob it of its completeness. The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome – from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law. This three-way encounter has shaped the inner identity of Europe. In the awareness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgment of the inviolable dignity of every single human person, it has established criteria of law: it is these criteria that we are called to defend at this moment in our history.
As he assumed the mantle of office, the young King Solomon was invited to make a request. How would it be if we, the law-makers of today, were invited to make a request? What would we ask for? I think that, even today, there is ultimately nothing else we could wish for but a listening heart – the capacity to discern between good and evil, and thus to establish true law, to serve justice and peace. I thank you for your attention!
_______________________^{1 De Civitate Dei, IV, 4, 1.
2 Contra Celsum, Book 1, Chapter 1. Cf. A. Fürst, "Monotheismus und Monarchie. Zum Zusammenhang von Heil und Herrschaft in der Antike",Theol.Phil. 81 (2006), pp. 321-338, quoted on p. 336; cf. also J. Ratzinger, Die Einheit der Nationen. Eine Vision der Kirchenväter (Salzburg and Munich, 1971), p. 60.
3 Cf. W. Waldstein, Ins Herz geschrieben. Das Naturrecht als Fundament einer menschlichen Gesellschaft (Augsburg, 2010), pp. 11ff., 31-61.
4 Cf. Waldstein, op. cit., pp. 15-21.
5 Cf. Waldstein, op. cit., p. 19.}

Meeting with Representatives of the Jewish Community:

Meeting with Representatives of the Jewish Community

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Friends,
I am truly glad to be taking part in this meeting with you here in Berlin. I warmly thank President Dr Dieter Graumann for his kind and thoughtful words. They make it very clear to me how much trust has grown between the Jewish people and the Catholic Church, who hold in common a not insignificant part of their essential traditions, as you emphasized. At the same time it is clear to us all that a loving relationship of mutual understanding between Israel and the Church, each respecting the essence of the other, still has further to grow and needs to be built into the heart of our proclamation of the faith.
On my visit to the Synagogue in Cologne six years ago, Rabbi Teitelbaum spoke of remembrance as one of the supporting pillars that are needed if a future of peace is to be built. And today I find myself in a central place of remembrance, the appalling remembrance that it was from here that the Shoah, the annihilation of our Jewish fellow citizens in Europe, was planned and organized. Before the Nazi terror, there were about half a million Jews living in Germany, and they formed a stable component of German society. After the Second World War, Germany was considered the "Land of the Shoah" where, for a Jew, it had become virtually impossible to live. Initially there were hardly any efforts to re-establish the old Jewish communities, even though Jewish individuals and families were constantly arriving from the East. Many of them wanted to emigrate and build a new life, especially in the United States or Israel.
In this place, remembrance must also be made of the Kristallnacht that took place from 9 to 10 November 1938. Only a few could see the full extent of this act of contempt for humanity, like the Berlin Cathedral Provost, Bernhard Lichtenberg, who cried out from the pulpit of Saint Hedwig’s Cathedral: "Outside, the Temple is burning – that too is the house of God". The Nazi reign of terror was based on a racist myth, part of which was the rejection of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ and of all who believe in him. The supposedly "almighty" Adolf Hitler was a pagan idol, who wanted to take the place of the biblical God, the Creator and Father of all men. Refusal to heed this one God always makes people heedless of human dignity as well. What man is capable of when he rejects God, and what the face of a people can look like when it denies this God, the terrible images from the concentration camps at the end of the war showed.
In the light of this remembrance, it is to be acknowledged with thankfulness that a new development has been seen in recent decades, which makes it possible to speak of a real blossoming of Jewish life in Germany. It should be stressed that the Jewish community during this time has made particularly laudable efforts to integrate the Eastern European immigrants.
I would also like to express my gratitude for the deepening dialogue between the Catholic Church and Judaism. The Church feels a great closeness to the Jewish people. With the Declaration Nostra Aetate of the Second Vatican Council, an "irrevocable commitment to pursue the path of dialogue, fraternity and friendship" was made (cf. Address in the Synagogue in Rome, 17 January 2010). This is true of the Catholic Church as a whole, in which Blessed John Paul II committed himself to this new path with particular zeal. Naturally it is also true of the Catholic Church in Germany, which is conscious of its particular responsibility in this regard. In the public domain, special mention should be made of the "Week of Fraternity", organized each year during the first week of March by local Societies for Christian-Jewish Partnership.
On the Catholic side there are also annual meetings between bishops and rabbis as well as structured conversations with the Central Council of Jews. Back in the 1970s, the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK) took the initiative of establishing a "Jews and Christians" forum, which over the years has issued many well-written and helpful documents. Nor should I omit to mention the historic meeting for Jewish-Christian dialogue that took place in March 2006 with the participation of Cardinal Walter Kasper. That cooperation is proving fruitful.
Alongside these important initiatives, it seems to me that we Christians must also become increasingly aware of our own inner affinity with Judaism, to which you made reference. For Christians, there can be no rupture in salvation history. Salvation comes from the Jews (cf. Jn 4:22). When Jesus’ conflict with the Judaism of his time is superficially interpreted as a breach with the Old Covenant, it tends to be reduced to the idea of a liberation that mistakenly views the Torah merely as a slavish enactment of rituals and outward observances. Yet in actual fact, the Sermon on the Mount does not abolish the Mosaic Law, but reveals its hidden possibilities and allows more radical demands to emerge. It points us towards the deepest source of human action, the heart, where choices are made between what is pure and what is impure, where faith, hope and love blossom forth.
The message of hope contained in the books of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament has been appropriated and continued in different ways by Jews and Christians. "After centuries of antagonism, we now see it as our task to bring these two ways of rereading the biblical texts – the Christian way and the Jewish way – into dialogue with one another, if we are to understand God’s will and his word aright" (Jesus of Nazareth. Part Two: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, pp. 33f.). This dialogue should serve to strengthen our common hope in God in the midst of an increasingly secularized society. Without this hope, society loses its humanity.
All in all, we may conclude that the exchanges between the Catholic Church and Judaism in Germany have already borne promising fruits. Enduring relations of trust have been forged. Jews and Christians certainly have a shared responsibility for the development of society, which always includes a religious dimension. May all those taking part in this journey move forward together. To this end, may the One and Almighty, Ha Kadosch Baruch Hu, grant his blessing. I thank you.
This was followed by the Mass in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin:  the Pope's Homily is given on the front, main page. 

Mass in the Olympic Stadium

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23rd September Began with a meeting with representatives of the Muslim Community in Berlin.

MEETING WITH MUSLIM COMMUNITIES

ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI 
Reception room of the Apostolic Nunciature, Berlin
Friday, 23 September 2011

   

Dear Muslim Friends,
I am glad to be able to welcome you here, as the representatives of different Muslim communities in Germany.  I thank Professor Mouhanad Khorchide most sincerely for his kind greetings and for the profound reflections that he shared with us.  His words illustrate what a climate of respect and trust has grown up between the Catholic Church and the Muslim communities in Germany and how the convictions we share are becoming visible.
Berlin is a good place for a meeting like this, not only because the oldest mosque in Germany is located here, but also because Berlin has the largest Muslim population of all the cities in Germany.
From the 1970s onwards, the presence of numerous Muslim families has increasingly become a distinguishing mark of this country.  Constant effort is needed in order to foster better mutual acquaintance and understanding.  Not only is this important for peaceful coexistence, but also for the contribution that each can make towards building up the common good in this society.
Many Muslims attribute great importance to the religious dimension of life.  At times this is thought provocative in a society that tends to marginalize religion or at most to assign it a place among the individual’s private choices.
The Catholic Church firmly advocates that due recognition be given to the public dimension of religious adherence. In an overwhelmingly pluralist society, this demand is not unimportant.  In the process, care must be taken to guarantee that the other is always treated with respect.  This mutual respect grows only on the basis of agreement on certain inalienable values that are proper to human nature, in particular the inviolable dignity of every single person as created by God.  Such agreement does not limit the expression of individual religions; on the contrary, it allows each person to bear witness explicitly to what he believes, not avoiding comparison with others.
In Germany – as in many other countries, not only Western ones – this common frame of reference is articulated by the Constitution, whose juridical content is binding on every citizen, whether he belong to a faith community or not.
Naturally, discussion over the best formulation of principles like freedom of public worship is vast and open-ended, yet it is significant that the German Basic Law expresses them in a way that is still valid today at a distance of over sixty years (cf. Art. 4:2).  In this law we find above all the common ethos that lies at the heart of human coexistence and that also in a certain way pervades the apparently formal rules of operation of the institutions of democratic life.
We could ask ourselves how such a text – drawn up in a radically different historical epoch, that is to say in an almost uniformly Christian cultural situation – is also suited to present-day Germany, situated as it is within a globalized world and marked as it is by a remarkable degree of pluralism in the area of religious belief.
The reason for this seems to me to lie in the fact that the fathers of the Basic Law at that important moment were fully conscious of the need to find truly solid ground with which all citizens would be able to identify and which could serve as the supporting foundation for everyone, irrespective of their differences.  In seeking this, mindful of human dignity and responsibility before God, they did not prescind from their own religious beliefs; indeed for many of them, the real source of inspiration was the Christian vision of man.  But they knew that everyone has to engage with the followers of other religions and none: common ground for all was found in the recognition of some inalienable rights that are proper to human nature and precede every positive formulation.
In this way, a society which at that time was essentially homogenous laid the foundations that we today may consider valid for a markedly pluralistic era, foundations that actually point out the evident limits of pluralism: it is inconceivable, in fact, that a society could survive in the long term without consensus on fundamental ethical values.
Dear friends, on the basis of what I have outlined here, it seems to me that there can be fruitful collaboration between Christians and Muslims.  In the process, we help to build a society that differs in many respects from what we brought with us from the past.  As believers, setting out from our respective convictions, we can offer an important witness in many key areas of life in society.  I am thinking, for example, of the protection of the family based on marriage, respect for life in every phase of its natural course or the promotion of greater social justice.
This is another reason why I think it important to hold a day of reflection, dialogue and prayer for peace and justice in the world, which as you know we plan to do on 27 October next in Assisi, twenty-five years after the historic meeting there led by my predecessor, Blessed Pope John Paul II.  Through this gathering, we wish to express, with simplicity, that we believers have a special contribution to make towards building a better world, while acknowledging that if our actions are to be effective, we need to grow in dialogue and mutual esteem.
With these sentiments I renew my sincere greetings and I thank you for this meeting, which for me has been a great enrichment of my visit to my homeland.  Thank you for your attention!

After which the Holy Father went to Erfurt, seat of a Catholic Bishopric, but with many links with Luther and the beginning of the Reformation.    

At the heart of the old city of Erfurt is a complex of Gothic Churches: the Catholic Cathedral is on the left; the former Augustinian Convent in which Luther stayed is on the right:

COUNCIL OF THE EVANGELICAL CHURCH

MEETING WITH THE COUNCIL

OF THE EVANGELICAL CHURCH IN GERMANY

ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI
Chapter Hall of the Former Augustinian Convent, ErfurtFriday, 23 September 2011

Dear Brothers and Sisters,
As I begin to speak, I would like first of all to say how deeply grateful I am that we are able to come together.  I am particularly grateful to you, my dear brother, Pastor Schneider, for receiving me and for the words with which you have welcomed me here among you.  You have opened your heart and openly expressed a truly shared faith, a longing for unity.  And we are also glad, for I believe that this session, our meetings here, are also being celebrated as the feast of our shared faith.   Moreover, I would like to express my thanks to all of you for your gift in making it possible for us to speak with one another as Christians here, in this historic place.
As the Bishop of Rome, it is deeply moving for me to be meeting you here in the ancient Augustinian convent in Erfurt.  As we have just heard, this is where Luther studied theology.  This is where he was ordained a priest.  Against his father’s wishes, he did not continue the study of Law, but instead he studied theology and set off on the path towards priesthood in the Order of Saint Augustine.  And on this path, he was not simply concerned with this or that.  What constantly exercised him was the question of God, the deep passion and driving force of his whole life’s journey.  “How do I receive the grace of God?”: this question struck him in the heart and lay at the foundation of all his theological searching and inner struggle.  For Luther theology was no mere academic pursuit, but the struggle for oneself, which in turn was a struggle for and with God.
“How do I receive the grace of God?”  The fact that this question was the driving force of his whole life never ceases to make a deep impression on me.  For who is actually concerned about this today – even among Christians?  What does the question of God mean in our lives?  In our preaching?  Most people today, even Christians, set out from the presupposition that God is not fundamentally interested in our sins and virtues.  He knows that we are all mere flesh.  And insofar as people believe in an afterlife and a divine judgement at all, nearly everyone presumes for all practical purposes that God is bound to be magnanimous and that ultimately he mercifully overlooks our small failings.  The question no longer troubles us.  But are they really so small, our failings?  Is not the world laid waste through the corruption of the great, but also of the small, who think only of their own advantage?  Is it not laid waste through the power of drugs, which thrives on the one hand on greed and avarice, and on the other hand on the craving for pleasure of those who become addicted?  Is the world not threatened by the growing readiness to use violence, frequently masking itself with claims to religious motivation?  Could hunger and poverty so devastate parts of the world if love for God and godly love of neighbour – of his creatures, of men and women – were more alive in us?  I could go on.  No, evil is no small matter.  Were we truly to place God at the centre of our lives, it could not be so powerful.  The question: what is God’s position towards me, where do I stand before God? – Luther’s burning question must once more, doubtless in a new form, become our question too, not an academic question, but a real one.  In my view, this is the first summons we should attend to in our encounter with Martin Luther.
Another important point: God, the one God, creator of heaven and earth, is no mere philosophical hypothesis regarding the origins of the universe.  This God has a face, and he has spoken to us.  He became one of us in the man Jesus Christ – who is both true God and true man.  Luther’s thinking, his whole spirituality, was thoroughly Christocentric: “What promotes Christ’s cause” was for Luther the decisive hermeneutical criterion for the exegesis of sacred Scripture.  This presupposes, however, that Christ is at the heart of our spirituality and that love for him, living in communion with him, is what guides our life.
Now perhaps one might say: all well and good, but what has this to do with our ecumenical situation?  Could this just be an attempt to talk our way past the urgent problems that are still waiting for practical progress, for concrete results?  I would respond by saying that the first and most important thing for ecumenism is that we keep in view just how much we have in common, not losing sight of it amid the pressure towards secularization – everything that makes us Christian in the first place and continues to be our gift and our task.  It was the error of the Reformation period that for the most part we could only see what divided us and we failed to grasp existentially what we have in common in terms of the great deposit of sacred Scripture and the early Christian creeds.  For me, the great ecumenical step forward of recent decades is that we have become aware of all this common ground, that we acknowledge it as we pray and sing together, as we make our joint commitment to the Christian ethos in our dealings with the world, as we bear common witness to the God of Jesus Christ in this world as our inalienable, shared foundation.
To be sure, the risk of losing it is not unreal.  I would like to make two brief points here.  The geography of Christianity has changed dramatically in recent times, and is in the process of changing further.  Faced with a new form of Christianity, which is spreading with overpowering missionary dynamism, sometimes in frightening ways, the mainstream Christian denominations often seem at a loss.  This is a form of Christianity with little institutional depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content, and with little stability.  This worldwide phenomenon – that bishops from all over the world are constantly telling me about –  poses a question to us all: what is this new form of Christianity saying to us, for better and for worse?  In any event, it raises afresh the question about what has enduring validity and what can or must be changed – the question of our fundamental faith choice.
The second challenge to worldwide Christianity of which I wish to speak is more profound and in our country more controversial: the secularized context of the world in which we Christians today have to live and bear witness to our faith.  God is increasingly being driven out of our society, and the history of revelation that Scripture recounts to us seems locked into an ever more remote past.  Are we to yield to the pressure of secularization, and become modern by watering down the faith?  Naturally faith today has to be thought out afresh, and above all lived afresh, so that it is suited to the present day.  Yet it is not by watering the faith down, but by living it today in its fullness that we achieve this.  This is a key ecumenical task in which we have to help one another: developing a deeper and livelier faith.  It is not strategy that saves us and saves Christianity, but faith – thought out and lived afresh; through such faith, Christ enters this world of ours, and with him, the living God.  As the martyrs of the Nazi era brought us together and prompted that great initial ecumenical opening, so today, faith that is lived from deep within amid a secularized world is the most powerful ecumenical force that brings us together, guiding us towards unity in the one Lord.  And we pray to him, asking that we may learn to live the faith anew, and that in this way we may then become one.

After that, Benedict XVI realised a desire to go to the place of Marian Pilgrimage over the centuries at Etzelsbach. It was impossible to contain the crowd in the Chapel so a place was created on a nearby field. The weather kept fine and the Marian Vespers, at which he delivered the homily, came to an end just after the sun had dipped below the horizon:

   Mass in the Olympic Stadium

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VESPERS OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY

ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI

Chapel of the Shrine, Etzelsbach
Friday, 23 September 2011

Dear Sisters and Brothers,
I would like to greet all of you most warmly, all who have come here to Etzelsbach for this time of prayer.  Ever since my youth I have heard so much about Eichsfeld that I thought at some point I must see it for myself and pray together with you.  I offer sincere thanks to Bishop Wanke, who pointed out to me this strip of land from the aircraft, and I thank your speakers and representatives who have brought me gifts symbolic of this region, thereby giving me at least an indication of the variety that is found here.
So I am very glad that my wish to visit Eichsfeld has been fulfilled, and that here in Etzelsbach I can now thank Mary in company with you.  “Here in the beloved quiet vale”, as the pilgrims’ hymn says, “under the old lime trees”, Mary gives us security and new strength.  During two godless dictatorships, which sought to deprive the people of their ancestral faith, the inhabitants of Eichsfeld were in no doubt that here in this shrine at Etzelsbach an open door and a place of inner peace was to be found.  The special friendship with Mary that grew from all this, is what we seek to cultivate further, not least through today’s celebration of Vespers of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
When Christians of all times and places turn to Mary, they are acting on the spontaneous conviction that Jesus cannot refuse his mother what she asks; and they are relying on the unshakable trust that Mary is also our mother – a mother who has experienced the greatest of all sorrows, who feels all our griefs with us and ponders in a maternal way how to overcome them.  How many people down the centuries have made pilgrimages to Mary, in order to find comfort and strength before the image of the Mother of Sorrows, as here at Etzelsbach!
Let us look upon her likeness: a woman of middle age, her eyelids heavy with much weeping, gazing pensively into the distance, as if meditating in her heart upon everything that had happened.  On her knees rests the lifeless body of her son, she holds him gently and lovingly, like a precious gift.  We see the marks of the crucifixion on his bare flesh.  The left arm of the corpse is pointing straight down.  Perhaps this sculpture of the Pietà, like so many others, was originally placed above an altar.  The crucified Jesus would then be pointing with his outstretched arm to what was taking place on the altar, where the holy sacrifice that he had accomplished becomes present in the Eucharist.
A particular feature of the holy image of Etzelsbach is the position of Our Lord’s body.  In most representations of the Pietà, the dead Jesus is lying with his head facing left, so that the observer can see the wounded side of the Crucified Lord.  Here in Etzelsbach, however, the wounded side is concealed, because the body is facing the other way.  It seems to me that a deep meaning lies hidden in this representation, that only becomes apparent through silent contemplation: in the Etzelsbach image, the hearts of Jesus and his mother are turned to one another; the hearts come close to each other.  They exchange their love.  We know that the heart is also the seat of the deepest affection and the most intimate compassion.  In Mary’s heart there is room for the love that her divine Son wants to bestow upon the world.
Marian devotion focuses on contemplation of the relationship between the Mother and her divine Son.  In their prayers and sufferings, in their thanksgiving and joy, the faithful have constantly discovered new dimensions and qualities which this mystery can help to disclose for us, for example when the image of the Immaculate Heart of Mary is seen as a symbol of her deep and unreserved loving unity with Christ.  It is not self-realization, the desire for self-possession and self-formation, that truly enables people to flourish, according to the model that modern life so often proposes to us, which easily turns into a sophisticated form of selfishness.  Rather it is an attitude of self-giving, self-emptying, directed towards the heart of Mary and hence towards the heart of Christ and towards our neighbour: this is what enables us to find ourselves.
“We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom 8:28), as we have just heard in the reading from the Letter to the Romans.  With Mary, God has worked for good in everything, and he does not cease, through Mary, to cause good to spread further in the world.  Looking down from the Cross, from the throne of grace and salvation, Jesus gave us his mother Mary to be our mother.  At the moment of his self-offering for mankind, he makes Mary as it were the channel of the rivers of grace that flow from the Cross.  At the foot of the Cross, Mary becomes our fellow traveller and protector on life’s journey.  “By her motherly love she cares for her son’s sisters and brothers who still journey on earth surrounded by dangers and difficulties, until they are led into their blessed home,” as the Second Vatican Council expressed it (Lumen Gentium, 62).  Yes indeed, in life we pass through high-points and low-points, but Mary intercedes for us with her Son and helps us to discover the power of his divine love, and to open ourselves to that love.
Our trust in the powerful intercession of the Mother of God and our gratitude for the help we have repeatedly experienced impel us, as it were, to think beyond the needs of the moment.  What does Mary actually want to say to us, when she rescues us from some trial?  She wants to help us grasp the breadth and depth of our Christian vocation.  With a mother’s tenderness, she wants to make us understand that our whole life should be a response to the love of our God, who is so rich in mercy.  “Understand,” she seems to say to us, “that God, who is the source of all that is good and who never desires anything other than your true happiness, has the right to demand of you a life that yields wholly and joyfully to his will, striving at the same time that others may do likewise.”  Where God is, there is a future.  Indeed – when we allow God’s love to pervade and to shape the whole of our lives, then heaven stands open.  Then it is possible so to shape the present that it corresponds more and more to the Good News of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Then the little things of everyday life acquire meaning, and great problems find solutions.
Confident of this, we pray to Mary; confident of this, we put our faith in Jesus Christ, our Lord and God.  Amen.