Dear brothers and sisters, after the great Pope John Paul II, the cardinals have elected me – a simple, humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord.
The humility to recognize the truth that makes demands on me and that I do not choose for myself.
After the evil spirit of a narrow Scholastic orthodoxy has been driven out, in the end seven much more wicked spirits return in its place.
The Creed, which is a sort of Gospel synthesis, helps us understand what it means and how we should read the Gospel itself.
Mary had said: “Your father and I have been looking for you anxiously.” Jesus corrects her: I am with my father. My father is not Joseph, but another – God himself. It is to him that I belong, and here I am with him. Could Jesus’ divine sonship be presented any more clearly?
As a spiritual being, the human creature is defined through interpersonal relations. The more authentically he or she lives these relations, the more his or her own personal identity matures. It is not by isolation that man establishes his worth, but by placing himself in relation with others and with God.
Morality is not man’s prison but rather the divine element in him.
We have come to believe in God’s love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.
Iconographic tradition has theologically interpreted the manger and the swaddling cloths in terms of the theology of the Fathers. The child stiffly wrapped in bandages is seen as prefiguring the hour of his death: from the outset, he is the sacrificial victim, as we shall see more closely when we examine the reference to the first-born. The manger, then, was seen as a kind of altar.
So the manger has in some sense become the Ark of the Covenant, in which God is mysteriously hidden among men, and before which the time has come for “ox and ass” – humanity made up of Jews and Gentiles – to acknowledge God.
The two chapters of Matthew’s Gospel devoted to the infancy narratives are not a meditation presented under the guise of stories, but the converse: Matthew is recounting real history, theologically thought through and interpreted, and thus he helps us to understand the mystery of Jesus more deeply.
The highest truths cannot be forced into the type of empirical evidence that only applies to material reality.
Science can serve humanity, but it can also become an instrument of evil. Indeed, it is science that has the potential to make evil truly terrible. It is only when scientific work is sustained by ethical responsibility that it is able to be what it is meant to be.
A culture and a nation that cuts itself off from the great ethical and religious forces of its own history commits suicide.
It is not the task of the state to create mankind’s happiness, nor is it the task of the state to create new men. It is not the task of the state to change the world into a paradise – nor can it do so. If it tries, it abandons its own boundaries and posits itself as something absolute. It behaves as if it were God, and, as the Revelation of John shows, this makes it the beast from the abyss, the power of the Antichrist.
From the moment of his birth, he belongs outside the realm of what is important and powerful in worldly terms. Yet it is this unimportant and powerless child that proves to be the truly powerful one, the one on whom ultimately everything depends.
God is so great that he can become small. God is so powerful that he can make himself vulnerable and come to us as a defenseless child, so that we can love him.
When conscience falls silent and we do nothing to resist it, the consequence is the dehumanization of the world and a deadly danger.
Well, perhaps the path appears straight when we look back at it. On the way, we often feel lost.
Only by suffering himself and by becoming free of the tyranny of egotism through suffering does man find himself, his truth, his joy, his happiness.
Beauty is the radiance of truth, Thomas Aquinas once said, and one might add that the distortion of the beautiful is the self-irony of lost truth.