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Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) – During the First General Congregation of the Special Assembly for the Middle East of the Synod of Bishops, on Monday, October 11, the Holy Father Benedict XVI gave the meditation following the brief reading of the Hour of Terce. The Pope recalled how on that same day. “October 11, 1962, 48 years ago, Pope John XXIII inaugurated Vatican Council II. At the time, on October 11, the feast day of the Divine Motherhood of Mary was celebrated and, with this gesture, with this date, Pope John wished to entrust the whole Council into the motherly hands and maternal heart of the Madonna.” Initiated with the icon of the Theotokos, at its the end the Council recognized the same Madonna with the title of Mater Ecclesiae. The Pope continued: “And these two icons, which begin and end the Council, are intrinsically linked, and are, in the end, one single icon. Because Christ was not born like any other individual. He was born to create a body for Himself: He was born - as John says in Chapter 12 of his Gospel - to attract all to Him and in Him...The Mother of Theos, the Mother of God, is the Mother of the Church, because she is the Mother of He who came to unite all in His resurrected Body.” Between the birth of Jesus and the birth of the Church “lie truly the Cross and the Resurrection. And only through the Cross comes the path towards the totality of Christ, towards His resurrected Body, towards the universalization of His being in the unity of the Church.”
In Chapter 12 of Revelation, we see this synthesis between the Theotokos and Mater Ecclesiae: the woman clothed with the sun gives birth with great suffering. “Here the Marian mystery is the mystery of Bethlehem extended to the cosmic mystery,” the Pope explained. “Christ is always reborn in all generations and thus takes on, gathers humanity within Himself. And this cosmic birth is achieved in the cry of the Cross, in the suffering of the Passion. And the blood of martyrs belongs to this cry of the Cross.”
Focusing on the second Psalm of the Midday Prayer, Psalm 81, Benedict XVI said that “we can see the power taken from the gods. Those who seemed to be gods are not gods and lose their divine characteristics, and fall to earth...This process that is achieved along the path of faith of Israel, and which here is summarized in one vision, is the true process of the history of religion: the fall of the gods. And thus the transformation of the world, the knowledge of the true God, the loss of power by the forces that dominate the world, is a process of suffering.” In the story of Israel, this liberation from polytheism, came about amidst great sufferings, the Pope said. “And this process of loss of power continues throughout history...And is achieved truly, right at the time of the rising Church, where we can see how the blood of the martyrs takes the power away from the divinities, starting with the divine emperor, from all these divinities. It is the blood of the martyrs, the suffering, the cry of the Mother Church that makes them fall and thus transforms the world.”
This process of transformation of the world thus “costs blood, costs the suffering of the witnesses of Christ,” and if we look closely, “we can see that this process never ends. It is achieved in various periods of history in ever new ways.” The Pope continued: “Let us remember all the great powers of today’s history, let us remember the anonymous capital that enslaves man...It is a destructive power, that threatens the world. And then the power of the terroristic ideologies. Violent acts are apparently made in the name of God, but this is not God: they are false divinities that must be unmasked; they are not God. And then drugs, this power that, like a voracious beast, extends its claws to all parts of the world and destroys it: it is a divinity, but it is a false divinity that must fall. Or even the way of living proclaimed by public opinion: today we must do things like this, marriage no longer counts, chastity is no longer a virtue, and so on. These ideologies that dominate, that impose themselves forcefully, are divinities. And in the pain of the Saints, in the suffering of believers, of the Mother Church which we are a part of, these divinities must fall.” In Revelation, there is also the image of a fleeing woman who has a large river placed before her by the dragon, to overcome her, but the soil absorbs the river. The river represents “the currents that dominate all and wish to make faith in the Church disappear,” the Pontiff explained, “the Church that does not have a place anymore in front of the force of these currents that impose themselves as the only rationality, as the only way to live. And the earth that absorbs these currents is the faith of the simple at heart, that does not allow itself to be overcome by these rivers and saves the Mother and saves the Son...This true wisdom of simple faith, that does not allow itself to be swamped by the waters, is the force of the Church.” Lastly, Benedict XVI recalled Psalm 81 once more, where it says “the foundations of earth are shaken” (Ps. 81:5). “We see this today, with the climatic problems, how the foundations of the earth are shaken, how they are threatened by our behavior. The external foundations are shaken because the internal foundations are shaken, the moral and religious foundations, the faith that follows the right way of living. And we know that faith is the foundation, and, undoubtedly, the foundations of the earth cannot be shaken if they remain close to the faith, to true wisdom.” (SL) (Agenzia Fides 12/10/2010)
