Sanctity through prayer (John Paul II) and Love through contemplation (Benededict XVI)

John Paul II: Sanctity through a training in prayer

John Paul II: Sanctity through a training in prayer is the most important priority of the Church.

At the beginning of the new millennium, John Paul II placed sanctity as the most important pastoral priority of the Catholic Church in his Apostolic Exhortation Novo Millennio Ineunte. And for this he emphasized the need for a training in the "art of prayer". He said that Catholic communities should become schools of prayer.

A key paragraph is:

There is a temptation which perennially besets every spiritual journey and pastoral work: that of thinking that the results depend on our ability to act and to plan. God of course asks us really to cooperate with his grace, and therefore invites us to invest all our resources of intelligence and energy in serving the cause of the Kingdom. But it is fatal to forget that "without Christ we can do nothing" (cf. Jn 15:5). It is prayer which roots us in this truth. It constantly reminds us of the primacy of Christ and, in union with him, the primacy of the interior life and of holiness.

Benedict XVI: Love by receiving love through contemplation

Benedict XVI also took up the theme in his first encyclical, being the first of his papacy, it is considered emblematic.

In Deus Caritas Est, the Pope-theologian explained the exact theological meaning of what John Paul II preached. The essence of sanctity is love, and we become love by experiencing love, especially through contemplative prayer.

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 Jn 4:16). These words from the First Letter of John express with remarkable clarity the heart of the Christian faith.

He would later say "I am convinced" that humanity truly needs the "essential message" that God is love. Thus, he says with echoes of John Paul's pastoral planning for the entire church: "Everything must start from here and everything must lead to here, every pastoral action, every theological treatise. As St Paul said, "If I ... have not love I gain nothing" (cf. I Cor 13:3)."

Benedict explained that God is love, and that man is made in God's image and is therefore made for love. This love grows to the extent that man receives God's love: "we have to receive for us to give". Thus he stressed the "importance of prayer in the face of the activism and the growing secularism of many Christians engaged in charitable work."

Benedict XVI: Prayer, as a means of drawing ever new strength from Christ, is concretely and urgently needed.

He used the word urgent only once and in reference to the need for prayer: "Prayer, as a means of drawing ever new strength from Christ, is concretely and urgently needed."

He even mentioned Blessed Mother Teresa three times to stress that the roots of effective Christian service and charity is in prayer:

In the example of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta we have a clear illustration of the fact that time devoted to God in prayer not only does not detract from effective and loving service to our neighbour but is in fact the inexhaustible source of that service

On explaining one of the main themes, realization of true love via the union of agape and eros, he stresses that man "cannot always give, he must also receive."

Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift... Yet to become such a source, one must constantly drink anew from the original source, which is Jesus Christ, from whose pierced heart flows the love of God... Only in the way of contemplation will he be able to take upon himself the needs of others and make them his own.

To further stress this way of contemplation, his Lenten message for 2007 was titled "They shall look on him whom they have pierced" (Jn 19:37). There he invited everyone:

Dear brothers and sisters, let us look at Christ pierced on the Cross! He is the unsurpassing revelation of God's love.. On the Cross, it is God himself who begs the love of his creature: He is thirsty for the love of every one of us... One could rightly say that the revelation of God's eros toward man is, in reality, the supreme expression of his agape.

He thus emphasizes that God's way of giving himself to us (agape) is by showing us that he wants us for himself (eros).

Benedict's point on the importance of "receiving love as a gift" is in line with his teaching in Introduction to Christianity on the primacy of receptivity or acceptance. The Christian's role is to "allow God to work" in us and through us, since God is "the only one who can make the world both good and happy." We allow God to work, he says, when we "speak to God as a friend speaks to a friend."

Taken from my article at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interior_life_%28Catholic_theology%29

First Day of May, First Day of Mary´s Month

It´s May 1.

I am now in Madrid and it´s great to be breathing the air of the birthplace of Opus Dei and of many great things Catholic.

If Mary is the short cut to Jesus, what is the short cut to Mary? I suppose that would be St. Joseph, whose feast we celebrate today, May 1, the first day of Mary´s month.

And how do we deal with Mary? St. Josemaria recommended that we utter piropos, i.e. compliments uttered by gentlemen towards beautiful ladies. You can just imagine the piropos St. Joseph whispered to make her happy!

Alleluia: What does it mean?

"Beginning with the Easter Triduum as its source of light, the new age of the Resurrection fills the whole liturgical year with its brilliance... Therefore, Easter is not simply one feast among others, but the Feast of feasts... Easter is the Great Sunday. The mystery of the Resurrection, in which Christ crushed death, permeates with its powerful energy our old time, until all is subjected to him." CCC 1168-9

Since Sunday, we have been congratulating Our Lady, as advised by St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Church itself has recommended to us how to do so-- the Regina Coeli.

Queen of heaven, rejoice! Alleluia!

For he whom you did merit to bear. Allelulia!

Has risen as he said. Alleluia!

What a great prayer! Especially, with the addition of the Alleluia, the prayer becomes a prayer of joy and exultation.

But, what does "alleluia" mean? especially now that we repeat it so often, even at the end of Mass?

Alleluia is from "Hallelu-jah". And hallelu is from hallel and hillel which means "praise be to you." And jah or yah refers to Yahweh.

So Alleluia means Praise to you, O God! or Praise the Lord!!! It's the ancient Catholic way of saying what Protestants love to say: Praise the Lord!!!

God's eros is supreme agape!

In Benedict's Lenten message he says:

Dear brothers and sisters, let us look at Christ pierced in the Cross! He is the unsurpassing revelation of God's love...

On the Cross, it is God Himself who begs the love of His creature: He is thirsty for the love of every one of us.

The Apostle Thomas recognized Jesus as "Lord and God" when he put his hand into the wound of His side.

Not surprisingly, many of the saints found in the Heart of Jesus the deepest expression of this mystery of love. One could rightly say that the revelation of God's eros toward man is, in reality, the supreme expression of His agape.

Wow! That last statement which I just italicized is perhaps one of those great words of wisdom which everyone should know of.

This brilliant Pope is telling us the deepest secrets of God! And the deepest secret of how we are to live!

This means that one of the best things to do is to see God's love in the dying Christ. Why? because the revelation of God's eros toward man is, in reality, the supreme expression of His agape.

The greatest gift that God gives us (agape is about giving) is to tell us that he passionately wants us for himself (eros is about wanting to be together).

Isn't that wonderful? It's such wonderful news that the Pope exclaims next: only the love that unites the free gift of oneself with the impassioned desire for reciprocity instills a joy, which eases the heaviest of burdens.

St. Josemaria expressed God's eros this way:

Look how gently the Lord invites us. His words have human warmth; they are the words of a person in love: "I have called you by your name. You are mine." God, who is beauty and greatness and wisdom, declares that we are his, that we have been chosen as the object of his infinite love.