Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - In his homily during the Mass for the ordination of priests for his diocese of Rome, in St Peter's Basilica on Good Shepherd Sunday, 3 May 2009, the Holy Father, Benedict XVI, among other reflections, affirmed: “Careful attention must be given to a reality: that the ‘world’, in Gospel sense of the word, is a threat to the Church, it infects her members and even her ordained ministers and underneath the word, world, St John indicates and explains a mentality, a way of thinking and of living which can pollute also the Church, and in fact does pollute her, and therefore demands continual vigilance and purification”.
It is therefore necessary and urgent, to be vigilant because not everything which the world says, suggests, states and, sometimes, imposes, is good, quite the contrary! A certain way of thinking which considers good whatever comes from the world indistinctly, since it is simply "the work of man", and man is the "work of God", reveals today all its inadequacy: with regard to the truth of faith of Original sin (unless one wishes to deny it!), and with regard to concrete confrontation with every day reality which continues to demonstrate how the progress of the world never coincides with the moral progress or the true happiness of the human person.
Christians, especially priests and missionaries, are well aware that the world needs evangelising; the world is called to conversion, to heed Christ's call: “Convert your hearts and believe in the Gospel!”. Only the dynamics of conversion open and illuminate the eyes of the mind to understand that the world must convert to God, not God to the world. This awareness, nourished with prayer and penance, produces “continual vigilance and purification” from worldly pollution in the Church.
This pollution is real, not theoretical, and must be fought continually, with conviction and with fidelity. This pollution is highly insidious because it becomes a way of thinking and, amply propagandised by the media, impacts every reality, not excluding even consecrated persons and priests.
The world pollutes the Church every time subjective opinions or personal tastes are put before common doctrine and doctrine authoritatively taught, regularly or exceptionally, by the Magisterium; every time the words of the apostles and their collaborators, rather than the “yes, yes and no!” of the Gospel, are instead an exasperating search for human mediation, at times bordering on compromise, we risk demonstrating too little confidence in supernatural grace and excessive confidence in human activity; what is more, the world pollutes the Church every time the liturgy is celebrated as a spectacle and not in keeping with liturgical norms and the Spirit of the Liturgy and above all, not in keeping with the Holy Father's desires, expressed in various ways, for the whole Church.
Definitively, what allows the world to pollute the Church, and above all her members, is a lack of humility, also caused by an anthropological revolution. If it is true that the world pollutes the Church, let us pray for the grace to be guided by reality, and be continually vigilant. (Agenzia Fides 8/5/2009; righe 37, parole 522)
