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“The first reading also makes clear, as we see from the imposition of hands on the first deacons, that the Church’s unity is "apostolic". It is a visible unity, grounded in the Apostles whom Christ chose and appointed as witnesses to his resurrection, and it is born of what the Scriptures call "the obedience of faith" (Rom 1:5; cf. Acts 6:7).(1) "Authority" … "obedience". To be frank, these are not easy words to speak nowadays. Words like these represent a "stumbling stone" for many of our contemporaries, especially in a society which rightly places a high value on personal freedom. Yet, in the light of our faith in Jesus Christ -- "the way and the truth and the life" -- we come to see the fullest meaning, value, and indeed beauty, of those words. The Gospel teaches us that true freedom, the freedom of the children of God, is found only in the self-surrender which is part of the mystery of love. Only by losing ourselves, the Lord tells us, do we truly find ourselves (cf. Lk 17:33). True freedom blossoms when we turn away from the burden of sin, which clouds our perceptions and weakens our resolve, and find the source of our ultimate happiness in him who is infinite love, infinite freedom, infinite life. "In his will is our peace".Real freedom, then, is God’s gracious gift, the fruit of conversion to his truth, the truth which makes us free (cf. Jn 8:32). And this freedom in truth brings in its wake a new and liberating way of seeing reality. When we put on "the mind of Christ" (cf. Phil 2:5), new horizons open before us! In the light of faith, within the communion of the Church, we also find the inspiration and strength to become a leaven of the Gospel in the world. We become the light of the world, the salt of the earth (cf. Mt 5:13-14), entrusted with the "apostolate" of making our own lives, and the world in which we live, conform ever more fully to God’s saving plan.This magnificent vision of a world being transformed by the liberating truth of the Gospel is reflected in the description of the Church found in today’s second reading. The Apostle tells us that Christ, risen from the dead, is the keystone of a great temple which is even now rising in the Spirit. And we, the members of his body, through Baptism have become "living stones" in that temple, sharing in the life of God by grace, blessed with the freedom of the sons of God, and empowered to offer spiritual sacrifices pleasing to him (cf. 1 Pet 2:5). And what is this offering which we are called to make, if not to direct our every thought, word and action to the truth of the Gospel and to harness all our energies in the service of God’s Kingdom? Only in this way can we build with God, on the one foundation which is Christ (cf. 1 Cor 3:11). Only in this way can we build something that will truly endure. Only in this way can our lives find ultimate meaning and bear lasting fruit.Today we recall the bicentennial of a watershed in the history of the Church in the United States: its first great chapter of growth. In these two hundred years, the face of the Catholic community in your country has changed greatly. We think of the successive waves of immigrants whose traditions have so enriched the Church in America. We think of the strong faith which built up the network of churches, educational, healthcare and social institutions which have long been the hallmark of the Church in this land. We think also of those countless fathers and mothers who passed on the faith to their children, the steady ministry of the many priests who devoted their lives to the care of souls, and the incalculable contribution made by so many men and women religious, who not only taught generations of children how to read and write, but also inspired in them a lifelong desire to know God, to love him and to serve him. How many "spiritual sacrifices pleasing to God" have been offered up in these two centuries! In this land of religious liberty, Catholics found freedom not only to practice their faith, but also to participate fully in civic life, bringing their deepest moral convictions to the public square and cooperating with their neighbors in shaping a vibrant, democratic society. Today’s celebration is more than an occasion of gratitude for graces received. It is also a summons to move forward with firm resolve to use wisely the blessings of freedom, in order to build a future of hope for coming generations."You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people he claims for his own, to proclaim his glorious works" (1 Pet 2:9). These words of the Apostle Peter do not simply remind us of the dignity which is ours by God’s grace; they also challenge us to an ever greater fidelity to the glorious inheritance which we have received in Christ (cf. Eph 1:18). They challenge us to examine our consciences, to purify our hearts, to renew our baptismal commitment to reject Satan and all his empty promises. They challenge us to be a people of joy, heralds of the unfailing hope (cf. Rom 5:5) born of faith in God’s word, and trust in his promises.Each day, throughout this land, you and so many of your neighbors pray to the Father in the Lord’s own words: "Thy Kingdom come". This prayer needs to shape the mind and heart of every Christian in this nation. It needs to bear fruit in the way you lead your lives and in the way you build up your families and your communities. It needs to create new "settings of hope" (cf. Spe Salvi, 32ff.) where God’s Kingdom becomes present in all its saving power.Praying fervently for the coming of the Kingdom also means being constantly alert for the signs of its presence, and working for its growth in every sector of society. It means facing the challenges of present and future with confidence in Christ’s victory and a commitment to extending his reign. It means not losing heart in the face of resistance, adversity and scandal. It means overcoming every separation between faith and life, and countering false gospels of freedom and happiness. It also means rejecting a false dichotomy between faith and political life, since, as the Second Vatican Council put it, "there is no human activity -- even in secular affairs -- which can be withdrawn from God’s dominion" (Lumen Gentium, 36). It means working to enrich American society and culture with the beauty and truth of the Gospel, and never losing sight of that great hope which gives meaning and value to all the other hopes which inspire our lives.And this, dear friends, is the particular challenge which the Successor of Saint Peter sets before you today. As "a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation", follow faithfully in the footsteps of those who have gone before you! Hasten the coming of God’s Kingdom in this land! Past generations have left you an impressive legacy. In our day too, the Catholic community in this nation has been outstanding in its prophetic witness in the defense of life, in the education of the young, in care for the poor, the sick and the stranger in your midst. On these solid foundations, the future of the Church in America must even now begin to rise!
Explanation of Terms and Concepts
(1) “Obedience of faith” (Rom 1, 5; cf. Acts 6, 7): Authority – obedience – freedom.
“The Gospel teaches us that true freedom, the freedom of the children of God, is found only in the self-surrender which is part of the mystery of love. Only by losing ourselves, the Lord tells us, do we truly find ourselves )cf. Lk. 17, 33). True freedom blossoms when we turn away from the burden of sin, which clouds our perceptions and weakens our resolve, and find the source of our ultimate happiness in him who is infinite love, infinite freedom, infinite life. ‘In his will is our peace.’
“Real freedom, then, is God’s gracious gift, the fruit of conversion to his truth, the truth which makes us free (cf. Jn. 8, 32).
“Real freedom, then, is God’s gracious gift, the fruit of conversion to his truth, the truth which makes us free (cf. Jn. 8, 32).
“Freedom”
True freedom is not primarily choice. It is “self-surrender.” This means that it takes place in a created and sinful being (of multiple parts of body and soul) only by the act of self-mastery that yields self-possession that in turn can now become self-gift. Freedom is not indetermination of the will but the state of being totally in relation to another like the divine Persons. And since God is Love, Love and freedom are synonymous.
“Freedom is not an opting out. It is an opting in – a participation in Being itself. Hence authentic freedom can never be attained by turning away from God. Such a choice would ultimate disregard the very truth we need in order to understand ourselves.”[1]
Freedom in God is “Being” totally for the Other. It is a relational act. The underlying metaphysic is not substance as thing-in-itself but a “constitutive” relationality that is given in the God revealed by Jesus Christ. This is not grasped through the senses but experienced by the self in the uniquely spousal act of self-gift.
Choice: is not the essence of freedom, but a derivative of prior self-mastery. If there is not self-mastery in accordance with the truth of self-giving, then choice is already vitiated with the tendency to act against the being of the person as image of the divine Persons, i.e., as relational self-gift.
“Only by loving ourselves… do we truly find ourselves” (Lk. 17, 33): This has become the text for Gaudium et Spes #24 and the central description of Christian anthropology that is fundamentally all anthropology because Jesus Christ is not a type of man, but the Prototype of all men (cf. Gaudium et Spes #22). It is the truth that grounds the entire social doctrine of the Church: “‘this human person is the primary route that t he Church must travel in fulfilling her mission… the way traced out by Christ himself, the way that leads invariably through the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption.’
“This, and this alone, is the principle which inspires the Church’s social doctrine.”[2]
Conversion:
Freedom is always an act of turning away from self toward the other: “The Greek word for converting means: to rethink – to question one’s own and common way of living; to allow God to enter into the criteria of one’s life: to not merely judge according to the current opinions. Thereby, to convert means: not to live as all the others live, not do what all do, not feel justified in dubious, ambiguous, evil actions just because others do the same; begin to see one’s life through the eyes of God; thereby looking for the good, even if uncomfortable; not aiming at the judgment of the majority of men, but on the justice of God – in other words: to look for a new style of life, a new life.
“All of this does not imply moralism: reducing Christianity to morality loses sight of the essence of Christ’s message: the gift of a new friendship, the gift of communion with Jesus and thereby with God. Whoever converts to Christ does not mean to create his own moral autarchy for himself, does not intend to build his own goodness through his own strengths.
“‘Conversion’ (metanoia) means exactly the opposite: to come out of self-sufficiency to discover and accept our indigence – the indigence of others and of the Other, his forgiveness, his friendship. Unconverted life is self-justification (I am not worse than the others); conversion is humility in entrusting oneself to the love of the Other, a love that becomes the measure and the criteria of my own life.”[3]
“All of this does not imply moralism: reducing Christianity to morality loses sight of the essence of Christ’s message: the gift of a new friendship, the gift of communion with Jesus and thereby with God. Whoever converts to Christ does not mean to create his own moral autarchy for himself, does not intend to build his own goodness through his own strengths.
“‘Conversion’ (metanoia) means exactly the opposite: to come out of self-sufficiency to discover and accept our indigence – the indigence of others and of the Other, his forgiveness, his friendship. Unconverted life is self-justification (I am not worse than the others); conversion is humility in entrusting oneself to the love of the Other, a love that becomes the measure and the criteria of my own life.”[3]
Faith:
In his habilitation thesis, Benedict offered the notion of revelation as the self-giving action of the Person of Christ matched by the action of self-giving in the believer whereby the “veil” in the believer is removed: re-vel-ation. In the believer, “Credo” “means that man does not regard seeing, hearing and touching as the totality of what concerns him, that he does not see the area of his world as marked of by what he can see and touch, but seeks a second mode of access to reality, a mode which he calls in fact belief, and in such a way that he finds in it the decisive enlargement of his whole view of the world….(I)t signifies not the observation of this or that fact but a fundamental mode of behavior towards being, towards existence, towards one’s own sector of reality and towards reality as a whole. It signifies that deliberate view that what cannot be seen, what can in no wise move onto the field of vision, is not unreal; that on the contrary what cannot be seen in fact represents true reality, the element that supports and makes possible all the rest of reality…. In other words, belief signifies the decision that at the very core of human existence there is a point which cannot be nourished and supported on the visible and tangible, which encounters and comes into contact with what cannot be seen and finds that it is a necessity for its own existence.
“Such an attitude is certainly to be attained only by what the language of the Bible calls ‘reversal,’ ‘conversion.’ Man’s natural centre of gravity draws him to the visible, to what he can take in his hand and hold as his own. He as to turn round inwardly in order to see how badly he is neglecting his ownb interests by letting himself be drawn along in this way by his natural center of gravity. He must turn round to recognize how blind he is if he trusts only what he sees with his eyes. Without this change of direction, without this resistance to the natural center of gravity, there can be no belief. Indeed belief is con-version in which man discovers that he is following an illusion if he devotes himself only to the tangible. This is at the same time the fundamental reason why belief is not demonstrable: it is an about-turn; only he who turns about is receptive to it; and because our center of gravity does not cease to incline us in another direction it remains a turn that is new every day; only in a life-long conversion can we become aware of what it means to say ‘I believe.’”
Comment: The phenomenology of this is the following: there is an experience of Christ as Person, only if we experience ourselves as determining self by self-mastery, self-possession and self-gift. What else could conversion be if not this triple exercise of the self over the self. Where else does the self really exercise itself as truly a self that has been made in the image and likeness of Persons Who reveal Self as “I AM” and who are constitutively self-transcendents? It is only in this act that there can be an experience of who I really am as a type of the Prototype Who is all for the Father?
And there is no other “I” that I can experience as “I” that is not myself. I must imitate the deeds of obedience of Christ in order to experience in my unique and irreducible subjectivity what the Logos experienced in Himself by subduing His human will and personally re-ordering it – laden with all sin (2Cor. 5, 21) – into obedience to the Father. That experience is the act of con-version that is faith in me.
So, when the pope is talking about “freedom,” “self-surrender,” “losing ourselves… finding ourselves,” “conversion to His truth, the truth which makes us free,” “putting on the mind of Christ,” “a new and liberating way of seeing reality,” “we become the light of the world, the salt of the earth,” – and if I may jump a little further forward in his homily to the “royal priesthood” of the American laity who “participate fully in civic life” and making “God’s Kingdom become present in all its saving power,” -- we are talking about no less than that each baptized Catholic Christian is “another Christ” and must live out that Christic life in the secular public square. And this is done by the continuous, ongoing conversion of this Christian anthropology that is an ongoing growth into becoming Christ Himself. And this is done by converting again and again to self-forgetfulness and service to the others in secular work and ordinary, normal family life.
A large part of the theological exegesis of Benedict is the identity of the Kingdom of God with the Person of the God-man. The Kingdom is a Person who is enfleshed and besouled divinity. It is not a “thing,” a “structure,” a “Christendom,” a “project,” an “ideology.” It is a person. And that Person as Kingdom of God or Heaven - without ceasing to be God and one with the Father - is not outside of time or space. He – “Jesus Christ, yesterday, today and forever,” is present among us – now, and grows insofar as each person goes through the conversion of self into becoming “another Christ.” He said: “‘Thy Kingdom come.’ This prayer needs to shape the mind and heart of every Christian in this nation. It needs to bear fruit in the way you lead oyour lives and in the way you build up your families and your communities. It needs to create new ‘settings of hope’ (cf. Spe Salvi, 32ff.) where God’s Kingdom becomes present in all its saving power.”
In sum, I become “another Christ” in the act of freedom that is self mastery and self gift. Anything else is to be run by cosmic causality which is other than my “I” and of a necessity that is of my doing. If I follow my whims, fancies, orgasmic lusts, tendencies from below, will to power, etc., I am escaping the primordial experience of the God-man. And this is “the particular challenge which the Successor of Saint Peter sets before you today. As ‘a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation,’ follow faithfully in the footsteps of those who have gone before you! Hasten the coming of God’s Kingdom in this land!”
“Such an attitude is certainly to be attained only by what the language of the Bible calls ‘reversal,’ ‘conversion.’ Man’s natural centre of gravity draws him to the visible, to what he can take in his hand and hold as his own. He as to turn round inwardly in order to see how badly he is neglecting his ownb interests by letting himself be drawn along in this way by his natural center of gravity. He must turn round to recognize how blind he is if he trusts only what he sees with his eyes. Without this change of direction, without this resistance to the natural center of gravity, there can be no belief. Indeed belief is con-version in which man discovers that he is following an illusion if he devotes himself only to the tangible. This is at the same time the fundamental reason why belief is not demonstrable: it is an about-turn; only he who turns about is receptive to it; and because our center of gravity does not cease to incline us in another direction it remains a turn that is new every day; only in a life-long conversion can we become aware of what it means to say ‘I believe.’”
Comment: The phenomenology of this is the following: there is an experience of Christ as Person, only if we experience ourselves as determining self by self-mastery, self-possession and self-gift. What else could conversion be if not this triple exercise of the self over the self. Where else does the self really exercise itself as truly a self that has been made in the image and likeness of Persons Who reveal Self as “I AM” and who are constitutively self-transcendents? It is only in this act that there can be an experience of who I really am as a type of the Prototype Who is all for the Father?
And there is no other “I” that I can experience as “I” that is not myself. I must imitate the deeds of obedience of Christ in order to experience in my unique and irreducible subjectivity what the Logos experienced in Himself by subduing His human will and personally re-ordering it – laden with all sin (2Cor. 5, 21) – into obedience to the Father. That experience is the act of con-version that is faith in me.
So, when the pope is talking about “freedom,” “self-surrender,” “losing ourselves… finding ourselves,” “conversion to His truth, the truth which makes us free,” “putting on the mind of Christ,” “a new and liberating way of seeing reality,” “we become the light of the world, the salt of the earth,” – and if I may jump a little further forward in his homily to the “royal priesthood” of the American laity who “participate fully in civic life” and making “God’s Kingdom become present in all its saving power,” -- we are talking about no less than that each baptized Catholic Christian is “another Christ” and must live out that Christic life in the secular public square. And this is done by the continuous, ongoing conversion of this Christian anthropology that is an ongoing growth into becoming Christ Himself. And this is done by converting again and again to self-forgetfulness and service to the others in secular work and ordinary, normal family life.
A large part of the theological exegesis of Benedict is the identity of the Kingdom of God with the Person of the God-man. The Kingdom is a Person who is enfleshed and besouled divinity. It is not a “thing,” a “structure,” a “Christendom,” a “project,” an “ideology.” It is a person. And that Person as Kingdom of God or Heaven - without ceasing to be God and one with the Father - is not outside of time or space. He – “Jesus Christ, yesterday, today and forever,” is present among us – now, and grows insofar as each person goes through the conversion of self into becoming “another Christ.” He said: “‘Thy Kingdom come.’ This prayer needs to shape the mind and heart of every Christian in this nation. It needs to bear fruit in the way you lead oyour lives and in the way you build up your families and your communities. It needs to create new ‘settings of hope’ (cf. Spe Salvi, 32ff.) where God’s Kingdom becomes present in all its saving power.”
In sum, I become “another Christ” in the act of freedom that is self mastery and self gift. Anything else is to be run by cosmic causality which is other than my “I” and of a necessity that is of my doing. If I follow my whims, fancies, orgasmic lusts, tendencies from below, will to power, etc., I am escaping the primordial experience of the God-man. And this is “the particular challenge which the Successor of Saint Peter sets before you today. As ‘a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation,’ follow faithfully in the footsteps of those who have gone before you! Hasten the coming of God’s Kingdom in this land!”
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