love?“Caritas Christi urget nos”? they are profoundly open to
loving their neighbour in concrete ways. This attitude arises primarily from
the consciousness of being loved, forgiven, and even served by the Lord, who
bends down to wash th
e
feet of the Apostles and offers himself on the Cross to draw humanity into
God’s love.
“Faith tells us that God has given his Son for our sakes and gives us
the victorious certainty that it is really true: God is love! … Faith,
which sees the love of God revealed in the pierced heart of Jesus on the
Cross, gives rise to
love. Love is the light?and in the end, the only light?that can always
illuminate a world grown dim and give us the
Subject: VISnews130201
From: Vatican Information Service - Eng - txt
courage needed to keep living and working”. All this helps us to
understand that the principal distinguishing mark of Christians is
precisely “love grounded in and shaped by faith”.
2. Charity as life in faith
The entire Christian life is a response to God’s love. The first
response is precisely faith as the acceptance, filled with wonder and
gratitude, of the unprecedented divine initiative that precedes us and summons
us. And the “yes”
of faith marks the beginning of a radiant story of friendship with the Lord,
which fills and gives full meaning to our whole life. But it is not enough for
God that we simply accept his gratuitous love. Not only does he love us, but
he wants to draw us
to himself, to transform us in such a profound way as to bring us to say with
Saint Paul: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in
me”.
When we make room for the love of God, then we become like him, sharing in
his own charity. If we open ourselves to his love, we allow him to live in us
and to bring us to love with him, in him and like him; only then does our
faith become truly
“active through love”; only then does he abide in us.
Faith is knowing the truth and adhering to it; charity is &ld
uo;walking” in the truth. Through faith we enter into friendship with
the Lord, through charity this friendship is lived and cultivated. Faith
causes us to embrace the commandment of
our Lord and Master; charity gives us the happiness of putting it into
practice. In faith we are begotten as children of God; charity causes us to
persevere concretely in our divine sonship, bearing the fruit of the Holy
Spirit. Faith enables us to
recognize the gifts that the good and generous God has entrusted to us;
charity makes them fruitful.
3. The indissoluble interrelation of faith and charity
In light of the above, it is clear that we can never separate, let alone
oppose, faith and charity. These two theological virtues are intimately
linked, and it is misleading to posit a contrast or “dialectic”
between them. On the one
hand, it would be too one-sided to place a strong emphasis on the priority and
decisiveness of faith and to undervalue and almost despise concrete works of
charity, reducing them to a vague humanitarianism. On the other hand, though,
it is equally
unhelpful to overstate the primacy of charity and the activity it generates,
as if works could take the place of faith. For a healthy spiritual life, it is
necessary to avoid both fideism and moral activism.
The Christian life consists in continuously scaling the mountain to meet
God and then coming back down, bearing the love and strength drawn from him,
so as to serve our brothers and sisters with God’s own love. In sacred
Scripture, we see how
the zeal of the Apostles to proclaim the Gospel and awaken people’s
faith is closely related to their charitable concern to be of service to the
poor. In the Church, contemplation and action, symbolized in some way by the
Gospel figures of Mary
and Martha, have to coexist and complement each other. The relationship with
God must always be the priority, and any true sharing of goods, in the spirit
of the Gospel, must be rooted in faith. Sometimes we tend, in fact, to reduce
the term
“charity” to solidarity or simply humanitarian aid. It is
important, however, to remember that the greatest work of charity is
evangelisation, which is the “ministry of the word”. There is no
action more beneficial
– and therefore more charitable – towards one’s neighbour
than to break the bread of the word of God, to share with him the Good News of
the Gospel, to introduce him to a relationship with God: evangelisation is the
highest and the
most integral promotion of the human person. As the Servant of God Pope Paul
VI wrote in the Encyclical "Populorum Progressio", the proclamation of Christ
is the first and principal contributor to development. It is the primordial
truth of the love of
God for us, lived and proclaimed, that opens our lives to receive this love
and makes possible the integral development of humanity and of every man.
Essentially, everything proceeds from Love and tends towards Love.
God’s gratuitous love is made known to us through the proclamation of
the Gospel. If we welcome it with faith, we receive the first and
indispensable contact with the Divine,
capable of making us “fall in love with Love”, and then we dwell
within this Love, we grow in it and we joyfully communicate it to others.
Concerning the relationship between faith and works of charity, there is a
passage in the Letter to the Ephesians which provides perhaps the best account
of the link between the two: “For by grace you have been saved through
faith; and this is
not your own doing; it is the gift of God; not because of works, lest anyone
should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good
works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them”. It
can be seen here that
the entire redemptive initiative comes from God, from his grace, from his
forgiveness received in faith; but this initiative, far from limiting our
freedom and our responsibility, is actually what makes them authentic and
directs them towards works of
charity. These are not primarily the result of human effort, in which to take
pride, but they are born of faith and they flow from the grace that God gives
in abundance. Faith without works is like a tree without fruit: the two
virtues imply one another. Lent invites us, through the traditional practices
of the Christian life, to nourish our faith by careful and extended listening
to the word of God and by receiving the sacraments, and at the same time to
grow in charity and
in love for God and neighbour, not least through the specific practices of
fasting, penance and almsgiving.
4. Priority of faith, primacy of charity
Like any gift of God, faith and charity have their origin in the action of
one and the same Holy Spirit, the Spirit within us that cries out “Abba,
Father”, and makes us say: “Jesus is Lord!” and
“Maranatha!”.
Faith, as gift and response, causes us to know the truth of Christ as Love
incarnate and crucified, as full and perfect obedience to the Father’s
will and infinite divine mercy towards neighbour; faith implants in hearts and
minds the firm
conviction that only this Love is able to conquer evil and death. Faith
invites us to look towards the future with the virtue of hope, in the
confident expectation that the victory of Christ’s love will come to its
fullness. For its part, charity
ushers us into the love of God manifested in Christ and joins us in a personal
and existential way to the total and unconditional self-giving of Jesus to the
Father and to his brothers and sisters. By filling our hearts with his love,
the Holy Spirit
makes us sharers in Jesus’ filial devotion to God and fraternal devotion
to every man.
The relationship between these two virtues resembles that between the two
fundamental sacraments of the Church: Baptism and Eucharist. Baptism
("sacramentum fidei") precedes the Eucharist ("sacramentum caritatis"), but is
ordered to it, the Eucharist
being the fullness of the Christian journey. In a similar way, faith precedes
charity, but faith is genuine only if crowned by charity. Everything begins
from the humble acceptance of faith (“knowing that one is loved by
God”), but has to
arrive at the truth of charity (“knowing how to love God and
neighbour”), which remains for ever, as the fulfilment of all the
virtues.
Dear brothers and sisters, in this season of Lent, as we prepare to
celebrate the event of the Cross and Resurrection?in which the love of God
redeemed the world and shone its light upon history?I express my wish that all
of you may spend this
precious time rekindling your faith in Jesus Christ, so as to enter with him
into the dynamic of love for the Father and for every brother and sister that
we encounter in our lives. For this intention, I raise my prayer to God, and I
invoke the
Lord’s blessing upon each individual and upon every community!
___________________________________________________________
CARDINAL SARAH: FAITH AND CHARITY ARE TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN
Vatican City, 1 February 2013 (VIS) – The Holy Father's Lenten
Message for 2013 was presented this morning in the Press Office of the Holy
See. It is entitled: Believing in Charity Calls Forth Charity ? "We have come
to know and to believe in
the love God has for us," (1Jn 4:16). Participating in the press conference
were: Cardinal Robert Sarah, president of the Pontifical Council "Cor Unum";
Msgr. Giampietro Dal Toso and Msgr. Segundo Tejado Munoz, respectively
secretary and undersecretary
of that dicastery; and Dr. Michael Thio, president general of the
International Confederation-Society of St. Vincent de Paul.
"This year," Cardinal Sarah said, "the theme of the message focuses on the
compelling relationship between faith and charity … between believing
in God, the God revealed by Jesus Christ, and the charity that is the fruit of
the Holy Spirit and
that leads us to the horizon of a deeper openness to God and neighbour.
… If we talk about the connection between faith and charity we are
referring to, at least, two dimensions. Firstly, there can be no true faith
without action: whoever
believes must learn to give of themselves to others. Secondly, charity calls
forth faith, which therefore makes it witness."
Introduced during this Year of Faith, the Lenten Message is "a valuable
opportunity to keep this bond between all the faithful alive. In this sense,
it is a propitious moment, since we are preparing for Easter, that is, to
celebrate the event that
Christians recognize as the source of charity: Christ who dies and is
resurrected out of love. … Lent is always an opportune time for opening
… our hearts to our brothers and sisters who are most in need, sharing
what we have with them. In
this particular historical moment, it is necessary to emphasize the importance
of an informed and documented charity that is attentive to the many areas of
poverty, misery, and suffering: from the increase in number and scale of
natural disasters, which
are not without human responsibility, ... to the escalation of violent
conflicts, often forgotten by the media; the worsening of living conditions
for many families, also a consequence of the economic and financial crisis that
affects so many countries in Europe and around the world; the increase in
unemployment, particularly among young adults; and the situations where jobs
exist, but the workers are exploited, underpaid and without the minimum
security that guarantees the
dignity of work itself and consequently, therefore, of the dignity of the
human person."
"The centre of this Lenten Message," the cardinal reiterated, "is certainly
the indissoluble interrelation of faith and charity. … 'We can never
separate, let alone oppose, faith and charity.' However, this separation or
opposition can take
different forms. … It is a misunderstanding to emphasize the faith, and
the liturgy as its privileged channel, so strongly as to forget that they are
intended for actual persons who have their own needs?human as they may
be?their own history,
their own relationships. This becomes so convenient for so many of us?inside
and outside of church, which is fragrant with candles, busy putting the
sacristy in order, concentrating on abstract theological discussions and
clerical disputes?to overlook
persons in their totality, the whole person to whom Christ calls."
"Another misconception is thinking that the Church is some kind of great
act of philanthropy or solidarity that is purely human, in which social
commitment is a priority, or that what is important is the promotion of a
humanity that has culture and
enough to eat." Such a misunderstanding extends to thinking that "the Church's
main task is to build a just and equitable society, forgetting our need for
God that lies at the heart of our very being."
"A further misconception is to divide the Church into a 'good Church'?the
one of charitable action?and a 'bad Church'?the one that insists on the truth,
that defends and protects human live and the universal moral values." Such a
misunderstanding
proposes that "the Church is fine when taking care of the sick, but it does
less well when exercising the duty of raising awareness."
"Faith and charity go together, which is why the Gospel and action go
together. What holds as true in personal experience also applies to the Church
as a community. … On the one hand, a life based solely on faith runs
the risk of sinking into
a banal sentimentality that reduces our relationship with God to mere
consolation. On the other hand, a charity that kneels in adoration of God
without taking into account the source from which it springs and to which
every good deed must be directed,
is likely to be reduced to mere philanthropy, to mere 'moral activism'. In our
lives, therefore, we are called to keep the 'knowing' of truth and the
'walking' in truth united."
"This is why I believe this Message is so timely," Cardinal Sarah
concluded. "Not only because it falls during the Year of Faith and therefore
in this context we do well to remember that faith and charity are the two
faces of the same coin, that is,
our belonging to Christ. But is timely because in this phase of history, when
humanity struggles to recognize itself and to find a path to the future, the
Pope's words present a unified proposal, a way of life in which accepting God
engenders acceptance
of others in all their dimensions, expressions, and needs. The Church can thus
be the beacon of a renewed humanity and contribute to the coming of the
'Civilization of Love'."
___________________________________________________________
AUDIENCES
Vatican City, 1 February 2013 (VIS) – Today, the Holy Father received
in separate audiences:
Archbishop Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, S.J., titular of Thibica and
secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and
eight prelates from the Campania region of the Italian Episcopal Conference
on their "ad limina" visit:
- Archbishop Luigi Moretti of Salerno-Campagna-Acerno,
- Archbishop Orazio Soricelli of Amalfi-Cava de’ Tirreni,
- Archbishop Tommaso Caputo, of the territorial prelature of Pompei o
Beatissima Vergine Maria del Santissimo Rosario and pontifical delegate to the
sanctuary,
- Bishop Antonio Napoletano, C.SS.R., of Sessa Aurunca,
- Bishop Arturo Aiello of Teano-Calvi,
- Bishop Giuseppe Giudice of Nocera Inferiore-Sarno,
- Msgr. Pietro Piccirillo, diocesan administrator of Capua, and
- Fr. Giordano Rota, O.S.B., apostolic administrator of Santissima Trinita
di Cava de’ Tirreni
___________________________________________________________
OTHER PONTIFICAL ACTS
Vatican City, 1 February 2013 (VIS) – The Holy Father has granted the
"Ecclesiastica Communio" requested of him in accordance with canon 76 para. 2
of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches by His Beatitude Louis Raphael I
Sako, canonically
elected as Patriarch of Babylon of the Chaldeans by the Synod of Bishops of
that Church, meeting in Rome on 28 January.
The Synod of Bishops of the Chaldean Church, convoked by the Holy Father
under the presidency of Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, prefect of the Congregation
for the Oriental Churches, canonically elected the Archbishop Louis Sako as
Patriarch of Babylon of
the Chaldeans. The new Patriarch, previously archbishop of Kirkuk of the
Chaldeans, Iraq, has chosen the name of Louis Raphael I Sako. He succeeds His
Eminence Cardinal Emmanuel III Delly.
___________________________________________________________
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