An excerpt from Light of the World: The Pope, The Church and The Signs Of The Times, Peter Seewald’s book-length interview with Pope Benedict XVI:
From Chapter 17, "The Return of Jesus Christ" pages 175-177:
Jesus does not merely bring a message, he is also the Savior, the healer, Christus medicus, as an old expression has it. Given this society of ours, which is so broken and unhealthy in so many ways, as we have often said in this interview, isn’t it an especially pressing task of the Church to take extra pains to highlight the offer of salvation contained in the Gospel? Jesus, at any rate, made his disciples strong enough, not just to preach, but also to expel demons and to heal.
Yes, that’s key. The Church is not here to place burdens on the shoulders of mankind, and she does not offer some sort of moral system. The really crucial thing is that the Church offers Him. That she opens wide the doors to God and so gives people what they are most waiting for and what can most help them. The Church does this mainly through the great miracle of love, which never stops happening afresh. When people—without earning any profit, without having to do it because it is their job—are motivated by Christ to stand by others and to help them. You are right that this therapeutic character of Christianity, as Eugen Biser put it, ought to be much more clearly in evidence than it is.
A major problem for Christians is that they stand unprotected in the middle of a world that is basically continually launching bombs against the alternative values of Christian culture. Wouldn’t you have to say that it is impossible to be entirely immune to this sort of worldwide propaganda in favor of negative behavior?
It is true that we need something like islands where faith in God and the interior simplicity of Christianity are alive and radiant; oases, Noah’s arks, to which man can always come back for refuge. Liturgical spaces offer such protective zones. But there are also various communities and movements, the parishes, celebrations of the sacraments, exercises of piety, pilgrimages, and so forth, in which the Church attempts to instill powers of resistance as well as to develop protective zones in which the beauty of the world, of the gift of being alive, also becomes visible in contrast to the rampant brokenness around us.
• Visit www.LightOfTheWorldBook.com for more information.
Comments