Pope Leo and the staff of the Vatican were on a Lenten Retreat this week given by Bishop Eric Varden who is a Trappist. This was the second meditation he gave on the retreat:
St. Bernard keeps us on our toes. He states: ‘I would have you warned: no one lives on earth without temptation; if one is relieved of one, let him surely expect another’. We must nurture the correct balance between assurance in God’s help and distrust of our frailty, dreading temptations while we accept their inevitability, remembering that God submits us to them because they are useful.
Useful in what sense?
As we resist arrows launched by the Father of Lies, our commitment to the truth will be strengthened. We shall be fit, having turned away from weakening falsehood, to strengthen our brethren…
He then goes on to encourage the clergy not to have ambition in their pastoral care of people. He follows with this reflection on truth:
‘What is truth?’ People of our time ask this question earnestly, often with remarkable goodwill, notwithstanding their confusion, fear, and the rush they are always in. We cannot let it go unanswered. We have no energy to waste on the silly temptations of fear, vainglory, and ambition. We need our best resources to uphold substantial, essential, freeing truth against more or less plausibly shining, more or less fiendish substitutes.
In our predicament, rich in opportunity, it is imperative to see and articulate the world in Christ’s light. Christ, who is truth, not only shields us; he renews us, impatient to reveal himself through us to a creation increasingly aware of being subject to futility.
It is tempting to think we must keep up with the world’s fashions. It is, I’d say, a dubious procedure. The Church, a slow-moving body, will always run the risk of looking and sounding last season. But if she speaks her own language well, that of the Scriptures and liturgy, of her past and present fathers, mothers, poets, and saints, she will be original and fresh, ready to express ancient truths in new ways, standing a chance, as she has done before, of orienting culture.
This work has an important intellectual dimension. It also has an existential dimension. As Cardinal Schuster said on his deathbed: It seems that people no longer let themselves be convinced by our preaching, but in the presence of holiness, they still believe, they still kneel and pray.’ Was not the universal call to holiness, the call, that is, to embody truth, the strongest note struck by the Second Vatican Council? It resounded splendidly like a gong throughout its deliberations. The Christian claim to truth becomes compelling when its splendor is made personally evident with sacrificial love in sanctity, cleansed of temptations to temporize.
Peace,
Fr. Damian
Pastor’s Letter 3.1.26
