Fr. Roger J. Landry
The Anchor
Editorial
October 28, 2011
In recent years, the popes have been trying to focus the attention of Catholics throughout the world on certain aspects of the Christian life that on occasion can be taken for granted. Prior to the Jubilee Year of the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Christ, Blessed Pope John Paul II declared a Year of Christ (1997), a Year of the Holy Spirit (1998), and a Year of God the Father (1999), all geared to help us ground our life of faith anew in the Incarnation and in the love and truth of the Blessed Trinity. In 2002-2003, John Paul II called for a Year of the Holy Rosary, designed to get us to ponder this “Gospel on a string” that helps us to enter Mary’s school and contemplate with her the blessed Fruit of her womb.
Two years later, John Paul II had the Church focus on the Holy Eucharist, the source and summit, root and center of the Christian life that “makes the Church.” In 2008-2009, Pope Benedict convened a Year of St. Paul, celebrating the 2,000th anniversary of the great Apostle’s birth and giving us all the occasion to study his writings and witness in order to imitate him as he imitated Christ (1 Cor 11:1). The following year Pope Benedict summoned a Year For Priests, called to mark the 150th anniversary of the death of the patron saint of parish priests, St. John Vianney, to help the whole Church grow anew in gratitude to God for the gift of the priesthood through which Christ continues to teach, sanctify and shepherd us. In addition to these declared years, 2006 was essentially a “year of charity” dedicated to assimilating Pope Benedict’s beautiful encyclical on God’s love and ours and 2007-2008 was a “year of hope,” given to appropriating and living Benedict’s encyclical on Christian hope. Including the Jubilee Year, this means that 10 of the last 14 years have been consecrated to focusing the attention of clergy, religious and all the faithful on understanding and living these fundamental aspects of the Christian life, in order to lead us, our families, parishes, dioceses and the Church as a whole, to a thorough renewal.
On October 17, Pope Benedict announced that, beginning a year from now, there will be another ecclesial year devoted to what, in some ways, is the most fundamental theme of all: faith. He gave us a year’s notice precisely so that we could make appropriate practical preparations to help the year bear the greatest fruit. The Year of Faith, he said, would begin on Oct. 11, 2012, the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Second Vatican Council and the 20th anniversary of the publication of the great summary of the faith, the “Catechism of the Catholic Church.” The Year of Faith will begin during the three-week Synod of Bishops from around the world dedicated to “The New Evangelization for the Transmission of the Catholic Faith.” It’s pretty clear why a Year of Faith would be foundational for the New Evangelization: since we can only give what we have, in order to pass on the faith effectively, we need to know and live the faith. And since the New Evangelization is meant to be carried out not by specialists — missionaries, clergy, religious, catechists — but by all Catholics in our ordinary milieux, it’s therefore imperative that all Catholics dedicate themselves to this renewal and growth in faith.
There’s also clearly another reason why Pope Benedict wanted to convene a Year of Faith at this time. As successor of St. Peter he is called to strengthen his brothers and sisters in the faith (Lk 22:32), and he recognizes that many aspects of our culture now undermine rather than support the faith. As he indicated in his letter announcing the upcoming year, Porta Fidei (The gate of faith), aggressive secularists have begun to question and attack the “unitary cultural matrix” growing from the Christian faith that gave rise to and sustained Western culture, and this has led to a “profound crisis of faith that has affected many people.” Modern empiricism, which “limits the field of rational certainties to that of scientific and technological discoveries,” as well as relativism, which denies that there is any objective truth outside of technical facts, have not only become part of the cultural drinking water but are now often imposed on believers through law, politics and educational structures. The Year of Faith and the New Evangelization are efforts on the Church’s part to reverse these troubling trends.
The Year of Faith, Pope Benedict wrote, is a “summons to an authentic and renewed conversion to the Lord.” It’s an opportunity to “usher the whole Church into a time of particular reflection and rediscovery of the faith” that is meant to lead to an “exact knowledge of the faith, so as to reinvigorate it, purify it, confirm it and confess it.” This will bring about a rediscovery of the “joy of believing and the enthusiasm for communicating the faith,” that he hopes will help believers pray, profess, celebrate and give witness to the faith.
With characteristic theological clarity, Pope Benedict described in his letter the essence of the Christian faith in order to give us coordinates to prepare for the year. There are two aspects of faith: “the act by which we believe” and “the content to which we give our assent.” The first, he says, is the choice we make to “entrust ourselves fully to God, in complete freedom.” It’s on the basis of this trust in God that we then believe what He reveals to us. The second aspect of faith, knowledge of the truths of the faith, is “essential for giving one’s own assent … for adhering fully with the intellect and will” to what God proposed to us through the Church. To grow in faith, therefore, requires greater trust and greater knowledge, each of which impacts the other.
Once the act of faith resonates in our “heart” and in our “head” respectively, it must lead to confessing it with our “lips” in public testimony, Pope Benedict said, quoting St. Paul in his letter to the Romans (10:10). “A Christian may never think of belief as a private act,” the pope stressed. There are many secularists who want Christians to keep their faith closeted in their homes and churches, never to be mentioned in public and certainly never to have a social or political impact. But such a faith would not really be faith at all. Rather, Pope Benedict underlined, faith “is choosing to stand with the Lord so as to live with the Lord.” It’s profoundly “personal,” but it is also “communitarian” and “demands social responsibility.” It leads inexorably to the “witness of charity” (see Gal 5:6), since “faith without works is dead” (Gal 5:6; James 2:17). And the greatest work of faith, the greatest expression of love of neighbor is to seek to pass on, by witness and words, the faith that leads to salvation, to freedom, to happiness, to full human flourishing.
The beauty of a faith that is prayed, professed, celebrated and lived is seen, Pope Benedict highlighted, in the lives of the saints. In what could be justly called a fitting sequel to the great hymn of faith in the 11th chapter of the letter to the Hebrews, where the sacred author illustrates faith by demonstrating how it was shown in the life of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph the Patriarch, Moses, the Israelites, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, the prophets, and so many women and men, Pope Benedict exemplified the continuing splendor of faith by describing the faith of Mary, the Apostles, the first disciples, the martyrs, the men and women who have consecrated their lives to Christ, and all those across the centuries who bore witness to the fact that they were Christian in the family, workplace, public life and in Church ministries. The litany of the “great cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1), however, is not meant to be a thing of the past. “By faith, we too live,” Pope Benedict emphasized, while calling us, like them, to become a credible “living sign of the presence of the Risen Lord in the world.” That’s what the Year of Faith is meant to catalyze. That’s what the New Evangelization needs. That’s what Pope Benedict is asking us to prepare for.