Scottish Catholic Observer

Pope Benedict XVI has begun the Year of Faith by calling on the rich to embrace charity and all Christians to ‘journey towards unity.’

The Holy Father officially opened the Year of Faith with a huge open-air Mass at the Vatican last Thursday, when he told Catholics to regard the next 12 months as a pilgrimage through the secular ‘desert’ of the modern world.

Faith call

Since then, he has continued to call on Catholics to live all aspects of their Faith including rejecting materialism and moving towards Christian unity.

Last Sunday, the Pope said that wealth and riches were meaningless without Christ’s love.

“God can win the heart of a person who has many goods,” the Holy Father said during his mid-day Angelus from his window overlooking a sunny St Peter’s Square filled with a crowd of thousands, packed with Church leaders and pilgrims who have been in Rome since last week’s start of the Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelisation.

The Pope also noted Christ’s warning: ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.’

This statement shocked Christ’s disciples, the Pope noted, reminding the assembly in St Peter’s Square of Christ’s follow-up: ‘This is impossible for men but not for God; everything is possible with God.’

The Church is ‘filled with examples of rich people who have used their assets in an evangelical way and reached holiness,’ the Holy Father added but warned ‘the rich should not neglect their salvation as if they were convicted, nor should they jettison wealth nor condemn it as insidious and hostile to life, but they must learn how to use wealth and obtain the life.’

Christian unity

Then on Monday, the Pope said at a lunch with Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople and Archbishop Rowan Williams from the Anglican Communion that the importance of moving towards Christian unity was undiminished.

“We are on the journey towards unity and we are progressing in our hearts; the Lord will help us to progress externally too,” the Pope said. “This joy, I believe, also gives us strength in the mandate to evangelise. We pray to the Lord to enlighten us, to inflame our hearts that they might see, to illuminate our minds. And we pray that, at dinner, at Eucharistic communion, we may truly be opened and see Him, and thus inflame our world with His light.”

Year of Faith

This message of spreading the Word of God chimed with his call at the opening of the Year of Faith in St Peter’s Square last Thursday.

The Holy Father said that those present, and Catholics across the world, should approach the Year of Faith in the same way that ancient pilgrims undertook holy journeys.

“This is how we can picture the Year of Faith: a pilgrimage in the deserts of today’s world, taking with us only what is necessary: neither staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money, but the Gospel and the Faith of the Church, of which the council documents are a luminous expression, as is the Catechism of the Catholic Church, published 20 years ago,” he said.

The Pope said the Year of Faith should also be regarded as a celebration of the Church’s history over the last 50 years, from the Second Vatican Council onwards.

“The Year of Faith which we launch today is linked harmoniously with the Church’s whole path over the last 50 years: from the council, through the Magisterium of the Servant of God, Pope Paul VI, who proclaimed a Year of Faith in 1967, up to the Great Jubilee of the year 2000, with which Blessed John Paul II re-proposed to all humanity Jesus Christ as the one Saviour, yesterday, today and forever,” he said. “Between these two Popes, Paul VI and John Paul II, there was a deep and profound convergence, precisely upon Christ as the centre of the cosmos and of history, and upon the apostolic eagerness to announce Him to the world. Jesus is the centre of the Christian Faith.”

However, he advised the Faithful not to think of the Year of Faith as the celebration of an anniversary but rather as a living, breathing call to Faith.

“If today the Church proposes a new Year of Faith and a New Evangelisation, it is not to honour an anniversary, but because there is more need of it, even more than there was 50 years ago!” he said. “And the reply to be given to this need is the one desired by the Popes, by the Council Fathers and contained in its documents. Living faith opens the heart to the grace of God which frees us from pessimism. Today, more than ever, evangelising means witnessing to the new life, transformed by God, and thus showing the path.”

—[email protected]