That’s the message at the heart of a letter sent by Pope Benedict XVI to the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew 1st of Constantinoplel to mark Wednesday’s feast of St Andrew, patron saint of the Orthodox world. The letter, written in French, was presented to the Patriarch in the Turkish capital by a delegation from the Pontifical council for Christian Unity, headed by Cardinal Kurt Koch.
After greeting all the Orthodox clergy and faithful, the Pope recalles his recent meeting with Patriarch Bartholomew in Assisi during the day of reflection for peace and justice in the world.
Noting that the Patriarch is celebrating the 20th anniversary of his ministry as spiritual leader of the Orthodox world, Pope Benedict stresses that the future of evangelisation depends on the united witness and the quality of love shown by the one Church which Christ himself willed for all his followers. He says it is a great source of comfort to see that the Patriarch also has at the heart of his ministry that same search for holiness and united witness which today’s secular societies so urgently need.
LECTURES ON THE POPE'S BOOK ABOUT JESUS OF NAZARETH
VIS REPORTS: VATICAN CITY, 29 NOV 2011 (VIS) - The Vatican Publishing House is organising a series of lectures to promote Benedict XVI's book: "Jesus of Nazareth. From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection". One of these took place yesterday in the Italian University of Messina where the main address was given by Bishop Enrico Dal Covolo S.D.B., rector of the Pontifical Lateran University.
Bishop Dal Covolo explained that, while the Pope's first book on Jesus of Nazareth covered His public life beginning with His Baptism in the Jordan, the second is dedicated to the last few days of His earthly existence, until the resurrection.
"This disproportion", said the Bishop, "helps us to understand immediately that the passion, death and resurrection are not simply the epilogue of Jesus' life. They are what gives meaning to all the rest. It is from the crucified and risen Christ that the entire narrative of His life is illuminated". Likewise "the accounts of His passion and death, though they come last in the Gospels, are the oldest and most detailed of the oral and written traditions".
The book starts from the premise that "if scholarly exegesis is not to exhaust itself in constantly new hypotheses, becoming theologically irrelevant, it must take a methodological step forward and see itself once again as a theological discipline, without abandoning its historical character".
"The road along which the Pope takes us", said Bishop Dal Covolo, "leads us to meditate upon the 'hour' of Jesus, His 'lifting up'; in other words, upon the inseparable moment of death-resurrection".
The book "is the work of a lifetime, in which both the method used and the contents ... draw nourishment from a deep-rooted and mature love for Christ. In the final analysis, the leitmotif of the work is intimate friendship with Jesus, a theme which the Pope himself personifies as both witness and theologian. Indeed, true knowledge of Jesus - for Pope Benedict just as for the Beloved Disciple - comes from resting on His heart".
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HUMANITAS MAGAZINE TO HAVE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION
VATICAN CITY, 29 NOV 2011 (VIS) - At 6.30 p.m. today in the offices of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, a conference will be held to present the English edition of Humanitas, a magazine of Christian anthropology and culture produced by the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.
Participating in this evening's event will be Guzman Carriquiry, secretary of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America; Ignacio Sanchez, rector of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, and Jaime Antunez, editor in chief of Humanitas.
The magazine was founded in Santiago de Chile in 1995 and comprises a council of some of the most outstanding intellectual figures of the Catholic world. Since its inception, the magazine has described its mission as that of "being a vehicle for thought and study which seeks to reflect the concerns and teachings of pontifical Magisterium", as a premise for fruitful dialogue with modern society and culture.
The first English edition of the magazine has 252 pages and incorporates a large number of articles from the sixty-third Spanish edition (July-September 2011), which was dedicated to "Blessed John Paul II, gift of Divine Mercy" and focused entirely on the person and work of the late Pontiff. The English edition also includes essays written by Cardinals Angelo Scola, Angelo Amato S.D.B., Avery Robert Dulles S.J. (who died in 2008), Stanislaw Dziwisz and Mauro Piacenza, and by a number of academics including Livio Melina, Stanislav Grygiel, Pedro Morande and Carl Anderson.
The English edition of Humanitas will appear twice a year, both on paper and in a digital version which may be consulted at the website: www.humanitas.cl.
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