Benedict Will Enter a Monastery

Pope Benedict will enter a monastery shortly after his resignation in order to pray for the Church and the world.  Excerpts:

Saying he would soon be “hidden to the world,” Pope Benedict XVI took his leave of parish priests and clergy members of the Diocese of Rome on Thursday as he offered personal, and incisive, recollections of the Second Vatican Council, the gathering of bishops 50 years ago that set the Roman Catholic Church’s course for the future...

“Though I am now retiring to a life of prayer, I will always be close to all of you, and I am sure all of you will be close to me, even though I remain hidden to the world,” Benedict, 85, and increasingly frail, told the assembly of hundreds of priests, who had greeted him with a long standing ovation and some tears...

Once retired, Benedict will live in a convent in Vatican City, and will be tended to by the nuns who look after him now. Father Lombardi said Benedict’s longtime personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, who was also named prefect of the papal household two months ago, would continue to work for him.

I think a lot of people have been so focused on his resignation, they haven't quite noticed how this next step is a logical working out of the Pope's own choice of name. "Benedict will enter a monastery." When you put it that way, matters become a lot clearer. Benedict will enter a monastery--of course! Whatever else would he do? He will retire to pray for the Church and the world--of course! He's named Benedict!

Founder of western monasticism, born at Nursia, c. 480; died at Monte Cassino, 543....

The Pope has offered his own evaluation of the life and work of St. Benedict. Might this not clue us in as to his own intentions by resigning to retire to a monastery?  Excerpts:

...According to Gregory the Great, Benedict's exodus from the remote Valley of the Anio to Monte Cassio - a plateau dominating the vast surrounding plain which can be seen from afar - has a symbolic character: a hidden monastic life has its own raison d'être but a monastery also has its public purpose in the life of the Church and of society, and it must give visibility to the faith as a force of life...

Throughout the second book of his Dialogues, Gregory shows us how St Benedict's life was steeped in an atmosphere of prayer, the foundation of his existence. Without prayer there is no experience of God. Yet Benedict's spirituality was not an interiority removed from reality. In the anxiety and confusion of his day, he lived under God's gaze and in this very way never lost sight of the duties of daily life and of man with his practical needs. Seeing God, he understood the reality of man and his mission...

The Abbot must be at the same time a tender father and a strict teacher (cf. 2, 24), a true educator. Inflexible against vices, he is nevertheless called above all to imitate the tenderness of the Good Shepherd (27, 8), to "serve rather than to rule" (64, 8) in order "to show them all what is good and holy by his deeds more than by his words" and "illustrate the divine precepts by his example" (2, 12). To be able to decide responsibly, the Abbot must also be a person who listens to "the brethren's views" (3, 2), because "the Lord often reveals to the youngest what is best" (3, 3). This provision makes a Rule written almost 15 centuries ago surprisingly modern! A man with public responsibility even in small circles must always be a man who can listen and learn from what he hears...

By proclaiming St Benedict Patron of Europe on 24 October 1964, Paul VI intended to recognize the marvellous work the Saint achieved with his Rule for the formation of the civilization and culture of Europe. Having recently emerged from a century that was deeply wounded by two World Wars and the collapse of the great ideologies, now revealed as tragic utopias, Europe today is in search of its own identity. Of course, in order to create new and lasting unity, political, economic and juridical instruments are important, but it is also necessary to awaken an ethical and spiritual renewal which draws on the Christian roots of the Continent, otherwise a new Europe cannot be built. Without this vital sap, man is exposed to the danger of succumbing to the ancient temptation of seeking to redeem himself by himself - a utopia which in different ways, in 20th-century Europe, as Pope John Paul II pointed out, has caused "a regression without precedent in the tormented history of humanity" (Address to the Pontifical Council for Culture, 12 January 1990). Today, in seeking true progress, let us also listen to the Rule of St Benedict as a guiding light on our journey. The great monk is still a true master at whose school we can learn to become proficient in true humanism...

It would seem that the Pope is acting according to a vocational call, discerned at the time of his own election--the call to be, in a certain sense, a son of St. Benedict.

...If you know Benedict XVI at all, you know that he is firmly convinced that his resignation reflects the prompting of the Holy Spirit—that in an important sense it is God’s decision, not his own. It is no accident that in his public audiences during the past few weeks, especially on Ash Wednesday, the Pope has exhorted the faithful to surrender themselves completely to God’s will...

And that surrender has been the story of the life of Joseph Ratzinger, as the Anchoress points out.  Excerpts:

...Because we know Benedict is an introvert, and we see his tiredness, it is easy to believe that the man simply wishes, as some have suggested, to spend his last days unburdened, “reading and writing’ in an fragrant castle garden.

I don’t think so; During his entire priesthood, the man has not shaken off duties and burdens, but consented to carry more and more. This is who he is.

Increasingly, I believe Benedict’s resignation, rather than releasing himself from a heavy weight, is necessary so he may take on something much more cumbersome.

Last November, in a beautiful, intimate talk to a small gathering of elderly people, Benedict urged, “. . .never feel down at heart: you are a wealth for society, even in suffering and sickness..."

As he has done from his first moments as pontiff, Benedict yesterday asked pardon for his “defects” and then said, “With regard to myself, I wish to also devotedly serve the Holy Church of God in the future through a life dedicated to prayer.” It’s not about him. It’s about the church he serves, as always.

He’s retiring to a monastery within the Vatican. One does not “retire” into monasticism; a monastery is not an idyllic place of retreat, but a full-thrust into spiritual depths. It is where one goes to pray, do penance and — if one is particularly holy and willing — to engage in supernatural battle with things seen and unseen.

This is grave stuff, indeed; a heavy task. My suspicion is that Benedict is not taking his leave of the papacy in order to play his piano and read his books. In the midst of the temporal Lent of 2013, he’s going to be immersing himself in the Long Lent that began for us in 2002, and is with us still.

I suspect he will be doing penance for the church, and for the world — for those of us who cannot or will not do it, ourselves.

He is going into deep prayer, and that is no easy thing. It is, in fact, his last and perhaps greatest act of self-abnegation in a life that has been full of them. He never wanted the papacy, but was obedient to where he was being led. Given that his whole life has been lived in obedience to the Holy Spirit’s lead, we should believe he is being led, yet again, and is meekly — but with paradoxical boldness — going where he would rather not go.

As did Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa, Benedict meant it when he offered himself to God in the full rush of love, and said “use me.” As with those two saints, he is being used up to his last ember. It is only my conjecture, of course, but in my gut, I think it is so.

We won’t get to witness the last flames and embers of the 80+-year holocaust that has been Joseph Ratzinger because, as penitents have taken themselves into the desert since the earliest church, to do their separate battle and offer their weary praise, this is between Benedict — carrying the weight of all of our church-wide sins on his back — and the God who has called him.

Pray for Pope Benedict XVI as he becomes again Ratzinger, and — for the sake of the rest of us — willingly takes on a burden he will not shrug off. If he is, in fact, headed into battle for our sake, it is the most heroic thing we will never know about, in a whole life of quiet heroism...

In The Details

I was presenting Fr. Barron's Catholicism series at the local parish in the weeks leading up to Lent.  One of the questions which arose was about his discussion of the saints.  How could saints think that they were such sinners?  Isn't it unhealthy to have such a negative self-image?  His explanation--that saints are oriented toward the light of God, and so their flaws are clearly illuminated just as the flaws and dirt on a windshield of a car are illuminated when it faces the sun--made a lot of sense to some people.  But some seemed to still struggle with the idea that small sins could be such a big deal.

We're a culture that's been taught, "Don't sweat the small stuff."  And really, quite often, that's good advice.  Who needs absolute precision all throughout their day?  Who really needs to worry about every last little detail in most things in life?  We can live without absolute accuracy, with a bit of dust in the corners and the dirty clothes stuffed in a corner on the floor--right?

Only if we know what the small stuff really is.  There's a difference between "small stuff" and "significant details," between "small enough not to count" and "apparently small, but the key to the whole thing."  The saints knew the difference between a messy house and a messy soul, between the dust of the earth and the dust of a deadened heart.  They were experts, you see, and so they knew what small stuff to sweat.

It's the same with experts across the board.  Their discussions with each other often seem consumed with minutiae, technical beyond bearing to the innocent layman caught between them or the student embarking on a course in their field.  Why does it matter whether I get the answers to the math problems all right or not?  Why does it matter whether I'm subtly sharp or flat?  Why does it matter whether or not I meet every demanding little specification of my teacher?  And we often have no idea why it matters until we're designing the bridge, or performing the solo, or having to do the thing we'd studied all those years.  It matters when the little details are the difference between success and failure, between life and death, between heaven and hell.

So we have Lent, now, beginning on this Ash Wednesday, in order to learn which details we're overlooking in our lives and our hearts, which sins we've thought venial for too long, and which sins have long since deadened the voice of our soul.  We apprentice ourselves to Mother Church and listen to her expertise once more.  We test ourselves against her standard, discover what's wanting (we're all wanting), and open ourselves to the graces unleashed in the first Holy Week to be made right again.

The Essence of Social Justice

Dang, the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church is well done.  Get a copy and read it in this Year of Faith.  They begin with the roots of human dignity in the beginning and the Trinity, then descend from there to the issues of social justice today and forever.  Really, really good stuff.  This is probably the first of a bunch of excerpts:

...The inner transformation of the human person, in his being progressively conformed to Christ, is the necessary prerequisite for a real transformation of his relationships with others. “It is necessary, then, to appeal to the spiritual and moral capacities of the human person and to the permanent need for his inner conversion, so as to obtain social changes that will really serve him. The acknowledged priority of the conversion of heart in no way eliminates but on the contrary imposes the obligation of bringing the appropriate remedies to institutions and living conditions when they are an inducement to sin, so that they conform to the norms of justice and advance the good rather than hinder it”[43].

It is not possible to love one's neighbour as oneself and to persevere in this conduct without the firm and constant determination to work for the good of all people and of each person, because we are all really responsible for everyone[44]. According to the Council's teaching, “they also have a claim on our respect and charity that think and act differently from us in social, political and religious matters. In fact the more deeply we come to understand their ways of thinking through kindness and love, the more easily will we be able to enter into dialogue with them”[45]. This path requires grace, which God offers to man in order to help him to overcome failings, to snatch him from the spiral of lies and violence, to sustain him and prompt him to restore with an ever new and ready spirit the network of authentic and honest relationships with his fellow men[46]...(articles 42-43)

The Meaning of History, the Universe, and Everything

According to the Pope. Excerpts:

If, meanwhile, we look at the world in faith, we know that there is another, second breakthrough point within it: the moment at which God became man, the moment at which was achieved, not just the breakthrough from nature to mind, but the breakthrough from Creator to creature. That is the moment when, in one place, the world and God became one. The significance of all the history that followed after can only be that of including the entire world within this union and, on that basis, giving it the fulfilled meaning of being at one with its Creator. "God became man, in order that men might become gods," is what Saint Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, said. We can say, as a matter of fact, that the actual meaning of history is being announced to us here. In the breakthrough from the world to God, everything that went before and everything that followed afterward is given its proper significance as the great movement of the cosmos is drawn into the process of deification, into a return to the state from which it originated.--Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), What It Means to Be a Christian, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), pg. 53