A Time for Spiritual Renewal for All Americans
by Fr. Roger J. Landry - April 18, 2008
At the end of his Regina Caeli address on Sunday, Pope Benedict summarized the purpose of his trip to the United States which is now underway. "This Tuesday," he said, "I leave Rome for my visit to the United Nations Organization and the United States of America. With the various groups I shall meet, my intention is to share our Lord's word of life. In Christ is our hope! Christ is the foundation of our hope for peace, for justice, and for the freedom that flows from God's law fulfilled in his commandment to love one another. … I ask you all to pray for the success of my visit, so that it may be a time of spiritual renewal for all Americans."
His goal is to lead us all to a "spiritual renewal" and his means is by "sharing our Lord's word of life" that "in Christ is our hope." This is the prism by which accurately to interpret all of the stops on his pilgrimage.
In his most recent encyclical, dedicated to Christian hope called Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict focused on the difference between those with and without hope. Borrowing a phrase from St. Paul's letter to the Ephesians, he said that so many were "without hope" because they were "without God in the world" (Eph 2:12). Those with hope, correlatively, are those who live "with God in the world." Pope Benedict's aim this week is to inspire us to live with Christ in the midst of all our daily activities, to allow him who is the "word of life" to accompany us continually. This is the path of hope. This is the way of genuine spiritual renewal.
Each of his homilies and discourses this week is meant to be a variant on this same theme, and even more so, his very presence is meant to be a reminder of it.
At his meetings with President Bush on Tuesday and Wednesday and with the representatives of the United Nations today, the Holy Father has stressed how God's "word of life" is the "foundation of our hope for peace, for justice and for the freedom that flows from God's law fulfilled in the commandment to love one another." He has chosen to focus in particular on the life-giving word Jesus enunciated in the Sermon on the Plain, "Do to others as you would have them do to you" (Lk 6:31), popularly known as the Golden Rule. The path to peace, to justice and to freedom is not by a strategy of "mutually assured destruction," or by clever diplomatic deals, but by beginning to treat each other in accordance with human dignity. In war torn areas of the world, to treat each other as you would want to be treated is a way to cut through the lack of forgiveness for past evils that continue to fuel present animosities. The Golden Rule is a means by which to acknowledge past wounds, while focusing on building a present and a future based on interacting with others not according to a negative criterion of what we think they "deserve" because of past infractions, but according to the positive criterion of how we thinks we would like to be treated in return. This is how it is possible to put into effect Christ's life-giving words to "love your neighbor as yourself" (Mt 19:19); by treating neighbors according to the standard of the love one has for oneself and wishes to receive from others, one cuts through accumulated pain to a means forward. Were people and nations to adopt practically the standard of the Golden Rule — which is a conceptually simple, but obviously practically challenging task — it is obvious the progress that could be made.
In his address with Bishops at the National Shrine and later with priests, seminarians and religious in New York, Pope Benedict had the occasion to stress how the leaders of the Church need to be agents of hope by being icons of Christ's presence in the midst of the world. Some of the darkest moments in recent Church history have come specifically from a failure to keep Christ present where he should have been present. The scandals would never have occurred had clergy been conscious of what the Lord was asking of them at the moment, if they treated young people and families with the love with which they wanted to be treated. The more Church leaders and the faithful they guide distinguish themselves by this Christ-like love, the faster the Church's renewal will take place, and the faster the "spiritual renewal for all Americans."
In his meeting with Catholic educators, Benedict had the opportunity to apply these same truths to the overall formation of young men and women. In recent decades, there has been an attempt at many Catholic educational establishments to distance themselves from Christ and the Church he founded, as if fidelity to Christ and to his teachings were opposed to academic freedom, rather than being its true foundation. Many scholars have tried to "prescind from faith" in their scholarship, even in Biblical or theological scholarship. But the real hope of Catholic educational institutions is not to prescind from Christ but to "be with him in the midst of their academic world." Christ is the truth that sets people free (Jn 8:32), and his truth keeps academia free.
Convening with interreligious leaders at the John Paul II cultural center, Pope Benedict had the chance to show how the religions together need to teach humanity how to be with God in the world. As he stressed in his famous Regensburg lecture in 2006, religions have the duty to show both God's love and God's reason and give an increasingly secularized northern hemisphere the witness that faith in God illumines reason and inspires acts of love, rather than undermines them. His focus on "reciprocity" with Muslim nations is simply an application of the Golden Rule, asking Muslim countries to extend to non-Muslim religions the same religious freedom they have grateful received in the countries of the west.
In his meeting tomorrow with young people tomorrow, Benedict will be able to show to the young, who are always the natural embodiment of hope for the future, that they will be able to renew society to the extent that they are able to bring Christ's word of life to the world.
Finally at the Masses at Nationals Park in Washington and at Yankee Stadium in New York on Sunday, Pope Benedict will have the chance to call all Americans back, respectively, to the hope contained in the foundation of the United States and in the history of Catholicism in our country. One of the reason why Pope Benedict is so positive about our country is precisely because our country from its inception has embodied a hope that comes from a culture infused with judaeo-Christian values that respects genuine freedom of religion and a properly understood separation between Church and state He wishes to help us to appreciate the real treasure of these characteristics, solidify them, and export them.
With regard to American Church history, he will celebrate on Sunday the bicentennial of the first four dioceses to be formed from mother Church of Baltimore. Against so many struggles and odds, the Church grew to be the largest single religious denomination in the country, and a model for education, health care, and charitable service for the Church throughout the world. Despite the challenges we face today, Benedict will doubtless remind us that we are in a much better position now to launch the re-evangelization of our society than the Catholics two hundred years ago were in to launch the very successful first, and he will encourage us to begin anew. He will also certainly remind us that the same hope that inspired and assisted our Catholic ancestors will do the same for us: Jesus Christ, who is our hope, yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
