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Pope Benedict's Inauguration Homily |
THE CATHOLIC DIOCESE OF RAPHOE |
Your Eminences,
My
dear Brother Bishops and Priests,
Distinguished
Authorities and Members of the Diplomatic Corps,
Dear
Brothers and Sisters,
During
these days of great intensity, we have chanted the litany of the saints on
three different occasions: at the funeral of our Holy Father John Paul II; as
the Cardinals entered the Conclave; and again today, when we sang it with the
response: Tu
illum adiuva
– sustain the new Successor of Saint Peter.
On each occasion, in a particular way, I found great consolation in
listening to this prayerful chant. How
alone we all felt after the passing of John Paul II – the Pope who for over
twenty-six years had been our shepherd and guide on our journey through life!
He crossed the threshold of the next life, entering into the mystery of
God. But he did not take this
step alone.
Those
who believe are never alone – neither in life nor in death.
At that moment, we could call upon the Saints from every age – his
friends, his brothers and sisters in the faith – knowing that they would
form a living procession to accompany him into the next world, into the glory
of God. We knew that his arrival
was awaited. Now we know that he
is among his own and is truly at home.
We
were also consoled as we made our solemn entrance into Conclave, to elect the
one whom the Lord had chosen. How
would we be able to discern his name? How
could 115 Bishops, from every culture and every country, discover the one on
whom the Lord wished to confer the mission of binding and loosing?
Once again, we knew that we were not alone,
we knew that we were surrounded, led and guided by the friends of God.
And now, at this moment, weak servant of God that I am, I must assume
this enormous task, which truly exceeds all human capacity.
How can I do this? How
will I be able to do it? All of
you, my dear friends, have just invoked the entire host of Saints, represented
by some of the great names in the history of God’s dealings with mankind.
In
this way, I too can say with renewed conviction: I am not alone.
I do not have to carry alone what in truth I could never carry alone.
All the Saints of God are there to protect me, to sustain me and to
carry me. And your prayers, my
dear friends, your indulgence, your love, your faith and your hope accompany
me. Indeed, the communion of
Saints consists not only of the great men and women who went before us and
whose names we know.
All
of us belong to the communion of Saints, we who have been baptized in the name
of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, we who draw life from
the gift of Christ’s Body and Blood, through which he transforms us and
makes us like himself.
Yes,
the Church is alive – this is the wonderful experience of these days.
During those sad days of the Pope’s illness and death, it became
wonderfully evident to us that the Church is alive.
And the Church is young. She
holds within herself the future of the world and therefore shows each of us
the way towards the future. The
Church is alive and we are seeing it: we are experiencing the joy that the
Risen Lord promised his followers.
The
Church is alive – she is alive because Christ is alive, because he is truly risen.
In the suffering that we saw on the Holy Father’s face in those days
of Easter, we contemplated the mystery of Christ’s Passion and we touched
his wounds. But throughout these
days we have also been able, in a profound sense, to touch the Risen One.
We have been able to experience the joy that he promised, after a brief
period of darkness, as the fruit of his resurrection.
The
Church is alive – with these words, I greet with great joy and gratitude all
of you gathered here, my venerable brother Cardinals and Bishops, my dear
priests, deacons, Church workers, catechists.
I greet you, men and women Religious, witnesses of the transfiguring
presence of God. I greet you,
members of the lay faithful, immersed in the great task of building up the
Dear
friends! At this moment there is
no need for me to present a programme of governance.
I was able to give an indication of what I see as my task in my Message
of Wednesday 20 April, and there will be other opportunities to do so.
My real programme of governance is not to do my own will, not to pursue
my own ideas, but to listen, together with the whole Church, to the word and
the will of the Lord, to be guided by Him, so that He himself will lead the
Church at this hour of our history. Instead
of putting forward a programme, I should simply like to comment on the two
liturgical symbols which represent the inauguration of the Petrine
Ministry; both these symbols, moreover, reflect clearly what we heard
proclaimed in today’s readings.
The
first symbol is the Pallium, woven in pure wool,
which will be placed on my shoulders. This
ancient sign, which the Bishops of Rome have worn since the fourth century,
may be considered an image of the yoke of Christ, which the Bishop of this
City, the Servant of the Servants of God, takes upon his shoulders.
God’s yoke is God’s will, which we accept.
And this will does not weigh down on us, oppressing us and taking away
our freedom. To know what God
wants, to know where the path of life is found – this was
The
symbolism of the Pallium is even more concrete:
the lamb’s wool is meant to represent the lost, sick or weak sheep which the
shepherd places on his shoulders and carries to the waters of life.
For the Fathers of the Church, the parable of the lost sheep, which the
shepherd seeks in the desert, was an image of the mystery of Christ and the
Church. The human race – every
one of us – is the sheep lost in the desert which no longer knows the way.
The Son of God will not let this happen; he cannot abandon humanity in
so wretched a condition. He leaps
to his feet and abandons the glory of heaven, in order to go in search of the
sheep and pursue it, all the way to the Cross.
He takes it upon his shoulders and carries our humanity; he carries us
all – he is the good shepherd who lays down his
life for the sheep.
What
the Pallium indicates first and foremost is that
we are all carried by Christ. But
at the same time it invites us to carry one another.
Hence the Pallium becomes a symbol of the
shepherd’s mission, of which the Second Reading and the Gospel speak.
The pastor must be inspired by Christ’s holy zeal: for him it is not
a matter of indifference that so many people are living in the desert.
And there are so many kinds of desert.
There is the desert of poverty, the desert of hunger and thirst, the
desert of abandonment, of loneliness, of destroyed love.
There is the
In
the Ancient Near East, it was customary for kings to style themselves
shepherds of their people. This
was an image of their power, a cynical image: to them their subjects were like
sheep, which the shepherd could dispose of as he wished.
When the shepherd of all humanity, the living God, himself became a
lamb, he stood on the side of the lambs, with those who are downtrodden and
killed. This is how he reveals
himself to be the true shepherd: “I
am the Good Shepherd . . . I lay down my life for the sheep”, Jesus says of
himself (Jn
10:14f). It is not power, but
love that redeems us! This is
God’s sign: he himself is love. How
often we wish that God would make show himself stronger, that he would strike
decisively, defeating evil and creating a better world.
All
ideologies of power justify themselves in exactly this way, they justify the
destruction of whatever would stand in the way of progress and the liberation
of humanity. We suffer on account
of God’s patience. And yet, we
need his patience. God, who
became a lamb, tells us that the world is saved by the Crucified One, not by
those who crucified him. The
world is redeemed by the patience of God.
It is destroyed by the impatience of man.
One
of the basic characteristics of a shepherd must be to love the people
entrusted to him, even as he loves Christ whom he serves.
“Feed my sheep”, says Christ to Peter, and now, at this moment, he
says it to me as well. Feeding
means loving, and loving also means being ready to suffer.
Loving means giving the sheep what is truly good,
the nourishment of God’s truth, of God’s word, the nourishment of his
presence, which he gives us in the Blessed Sacrament.
My
dear friends – at this moment I can only say:
pray for me, that I may learn to love the Lord more and more.
Pray for me, that I may learn to love his flock more and more – in
other words, you, the holy Church, each one of you and all of you together.
Pray for me, that I may not flee for fear of the wolves.
Let us pray for one another, that the Lord will carry us and that we
will learn to carry one another.
The
second symbol used in today’s liturgy to express the inauguration of the Petrine
Ministry is the presentation of the fisherman’s ring.
Peter’s call to be a shepherd, which we
heard in the Gospel, comes after the account of a miraculous catch of fish:
after a night in which the disciples had let down their nets without success,
they see the Risen Lord on the shore. He
tells them to let down their nets once more, and the nets become so full that
they can hardly pull them in; 153 large fish: “and although there were so
many, the net was not torn” (Jn
This
account, coming at the end of Jesus’s earthly
journey with his disciples, corresponds to an account found at the beginning:
there too, the disciples had caught nothing the entire night; there too, Jesus
had invited Simon once more to put out into the deep.
And Simon, who was not yet called Peter, gave the wonderful reply:
“Master, at your word I will let down the nets.”
And then came the conferral of his mission:
“Do not be afraid. Henceforth
you will be catching men” (Lk
5:1-11).
Today
too the Church and the successors of the Apostles are told to put out into the
deep sea of history and to let down the nets, so as to win men and women over
to the Gospel – to God, to Christ, to true life.
The Fathers made a very significant commentary on this singular task.
This is what they say: for a fish, created for water, it is fatal to be
taken out of the sea, to be removed from its vital element to serve as human
food. But in the mission of a
fisher of men, the reverse is true.
We
are living in alienation, in the salt waters of suffering and death; in a sea
of darkness without light. The
net of the Gospel pulls us out of the waters of death and brings us into the
splendour of God’s light, into true life.
It is really true: as we follow Christ in this mission to be fishers of
men, we must bring men and women out of the sea that is salted with so many
forms of alienation and onto the land of life, into the light of God.
It is really so: the
purpose of our lives is to reveal God to men.
And only where God is seen does life truly begin.
Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is.
We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution.
Each of us is the result of a thought of God.
Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.
There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by
the encounter with Christ. There
is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our
friendship with Him. The task of
the shepherd, the task of the fisher of men, can often seem wearisome.
But it is beautiful and wonderful, because it is truly a service to
joy, to God’s joy which longs to break into the world.
Here
I want to add something: both the image of the shepherd and that of the
fisherman issue an explicit call to unity.
“I have other sheep that are not of this fold; I must lead them too,
and they will heed my voice. So
there shall be one flock, one shepherd” (Jn
At
this point, my mind goes back to
The
Pope was addressing the mighty, the powerful of this world, who feared that
Christ might take away something of their power if they were to let him in, if
they were to allow the faith to be free.
Yes, he would certainly have taken something away from them: the
dominion of corruption, the manipulation of law and the freedom to do as they
pleased. But he would not have
taken away anything that pertains to human freedom or dignity, or to the
building of a just society.
The
Pope was also speaking to everyone, especially the young.
Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way?
If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves
totally to him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us?
Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something
unique, something that makes life so beautiful?
Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom?
And once again the Pope said: No!
If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely
nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great.
No! Only in this
friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only
in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed.
Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation.
And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life. Amen.