Marco Tosatti
May God give his Flock a faithful and wise Shepherd, one with a firm hand.
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ear; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do outlives them; the good is often buried with their bones; and so be it with Caesar”.
The mass media have rightly noted the gestures and attitudes of kindness and openness of heart towards people in existential difficulty, of whatever kind they were, of the recently deceased pontiff.
I hope and pray that the new pope who will emerge from the upcoming Conclave, will live generosity in his heart. Catholics call the successor of Peter the Holy Father, and not without reason. And a very beautiful prayer, addressed to the Lord, says: “At the end of the day, O supreme Creator, watch over us in our rest with the love of a Father.”
But the situation of the Church today also needs something else, a love that also corrects those tendencies that deviate from what has been the Catholic faith for centuries and centuries.
And unfortunately the pontificate that has just ended has opened some of these cracks, which the wisdom of the next pontiff will be called to heal.
A few days ago the German Episcopal Conference entrusted priests with a text of instructions for the blessing of irregular couples; people who are not married in the Church, and couples formed by people of the same sex.
Obviously in it they cited Fiducia Supplicans. Which speaks of a “Pastoral blessing” and not a liturgical one. But every priest is part of the Church; and if a priest blesses a couple, whatever sort of couple it may be, he also blesses them as a couple, that is, the situation in which the couple lives. So in the person of the priest, it is the Church that acts…
The initiative of the German bishops is a step further. And this means that the Church, which should be universal, in Germany blesses behaviors, acts, and situations that have always been condemned by the Church over the centuries, and that are rejected and condemned by the Church of an entire continent, the African continent.
And the problem, evidently, is not the African prelates.
The examples could continue; starting with Amoris Laetitia, which allows divorced and remarried people – therefore bigamists, in the eyes of the Church, because the first marriage is still valid – to receive the Body of Christ. We know what Saint Paul would say about it…
And then there is the tacit denial of the uniqueness of Christ as the way of salvation, with the document signed in Abu Dhabi with the Imam of al Azhar, which states that “Pluralism and diversity of religion, color, sex, race, and language are a wise part of the divine will, with which God created human beings.”
In the Gospel it seems to me that Jesus speaks of himself as the Way, the Truth and the Life, and states that only through him can one reach the Father. And in the Acts of the Apostles, in a context in which religious pluralism was very present, as today, it is written: “There is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven given among men, by which we must be saved”.
Is it a pure coincidence that since 2012, priestly and religious vocations have been in constant decline? John Paul II with the overwhelming force of his faith – which does not mean being free from errors, mind you… – drew countless young people in his wake. And the meek, too meek, Benedict continued in that wake. The gift of oneself, for anyone, is born and nurtured by the example of a faith that is even crazy, even excessive, not in doubt or in a sort of calculation of “this is worth that”…
And it is born and nurtured – for a priest, a religious, and a lay person – in a context of certainties shared over the centuries by the one, holy, catholic Church. That is also apostolic.
May God give his Flock a faithful and wise Shepherd, one with a firm hand.
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