Weekly MESSAGE for February 18, 2007: The Pope Changes His Approach for Lent

February 18, 2007

Dear Friend,

In preparation for Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, I was looking over Pope Benedict’s Lenten message for this year. In it he seeks to show how our faith can lead to charity’s deepest dimensions. The message is centered around the mystery of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.

Worldwide entrepreneurs like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet establish social foundations. Film stars and politicians invite folks to charity dinners. Governments create friends for themselves in public opinion thanks to international cooperation. And great fund-raising endeavors – especially at times of catastrophes – reach considerable quantities. As Christians we can observe, not without some satisfaction, that in social life the biblical commandment of “Love Thy Neighbor” seems universally accepted.

The Pope’s message for Lent is considerably different than previous ones, either written by him or by Pope John Paul II. Previous messages have focused on works of charity in the sense of Christians’ social commitment. This time, the Pontiff forcefully places God the Father of Jesus Christ at the center. Therefore, the focus is not “anthropocentric” but “theocentric.” It appears that the Holy Father is less concerned with the horizontal dimension (people to people), in order to bring into clearer light the vertical dimension (God above; we below) of Christian living. This change of thought can be observed in general in Benedict XVI’s preaching. In the Pope’s encyclical or in other writings, the central theme is always the love of the Father in heaven becoming one of us in the Son, Jesus Christ.

Why has the Pope changed the focus of the Lenten message? One commentator believes that for the Holy Father the absence of God is worse than material poverty, because it kills every firm hope and leaves us alone with only our pain and lament. In the Lenten message, the commentator says, “The Pope is bound to the pain that weighs on our lives because of our own or others’ faults, and invites us to look up from down here toward the heights.” That is why the Pope chose the theme: “They Shall Look upon Him Whom They Have Pierced.”

The Vatican official, Archbishop Cordes, clarified that Benedict XVI does not forget to invite the faithful to concrete works of charity. According to Archbishop, the Holy Father says that the pierced side of Christ, “Will impel us, in particular, to combat every form of contempt of life or of exploitation of the person and to alleviate the tragedies of loneliness and abandonment of so many people.”

My thought is that our Lenten acts might begin with a healthy dose of charity toward others based on these thoughts.

Fondly,
Father Nick Amato