Cardinal Sodano has expressed the feelings not only of the College of Cardinals at the news of Pope Benedict’s resignation but also the feelings of many Catholics around the world. His eminence captures the momentous nature now assumed by Thursday the 28th February:
“Holy Father, before 28 February, the day that, as you have said, you wish to place the word ‘end’ to your pontifical service, conducted with so much love and so humbly, before 28 February, we will be able to better express our feelings. So too will the many pastors and faithful throughout the world, so too all those of good will together with the authorities of many countries. … Also, still this month, we will have the joy of listening to your voice as pastor: Ash Wednesday, Thursday with the clergy of Rome, in the Sunday Angelus, and the Wednesday general audiences, we will still have many occasions to hear your paternal voice. … Your mission, however, will continue. You have said that you will always be near us with your witness and your prayer. Of course, the stars always continue to shine and so will the star of your pontificate always shine among us. We are near to you, Holy Father, and we ask you to bless us.”
Cardinal Sodano began his message to the Holy Father as follows:
“We have heard you,” he said, “with a sense of loss and almost disbelief. In your words we see the great affection that you have always had for God’s Holy Church, for this Church that you have loved so much. Now, let me say, on behalf of this apostolic cenacle―the College of Cardinals―on behalf of your beloved collaborators, allow me to say that we are closer than ever to you, as we have been during these almost eight luminous years of your pontificate. On 19 April 2005, if I remember correctly, at the end of the conclave I asked … ‘Do you accept your canonical election as Supreme Pontiff?’ And you did not hesitate, although moved with emotion, to answer that you accepted, trusting in the Lord’s grace and the maternal intercession of Mary, Mother of the Church. Like Mary on that day she gave her ‘yes’, and your luminous pontificate began, following in the wake of continuity, in that continuity with your 265 predecessors in the Chair of Peter, over two thousand years of history from the Apostle Peter, the humble Galilean fisherman, to the great popes of the last century from St. Pius X to Blessed John Paul II.”
Protect the Pope comment: Early Christian art shows St Peter and St Paul together, as the two greatest Apostles and evangelisers who shed their blood for the Church of Rome. In the future, God willing, Christian art will show Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI as two great saints of the 21st century. Peter and Paul, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, great apostles how laid the groundwork for the re-birth of the Church in the 21st century. It will take generations for Catholics to understand and appropriate the teachings of these great popes.
http://www.news.va/en/news/cardinal-sodano-expresses-college-of-cardinals-nea
Absolutely right. History will look back and Blessed Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI will be two great saints of the 20/ 21 century who laid the groundwork for a return of man to God.
I find it hard to believe at this period of Time in History,when The Sanctity of Human Life, and The Sanctity of Marriage and The Family is under attack from rogue catholics seeking to undermine The Deposit of Faith, that Pope Benedict will end his pontifical service with the wolves still in place. Something is not right at the Vatican.
Nancy, maybe with all these threats to the Faith the Holy Father believes that we need a physically stronger successor to St Peter. Deacon Nick
I think you are right Nick. Benedict has done a fantastic job but has only really laid the foundations of the Church resurgence. Different people bring different skills to the papacy. No one person has all the skills required and I see this coming change as a great opportunity for a new man to build on Pope Benedict’s solid foundations.
I’m coming up to 72 and wonder how the Pope, now 85, has kept going so far!!
Dear Deacon Nick, I like your description of Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI as being two great saints of the 21st century. Let’s hope and pray that they will be recognised as such in time. Both have exercised a tremendously prophetic voice in the last 30+ years – Blessed Pope John Paul II’s dire predictions about the culture of death that has intoxicated the world and Pope Benedict’s stark warnings about the dictatorship of relativism, strangling culture. The Catholic Church is now more conspicuously than ever the brightest beacon of hope we have for preserving what is left of human dignity in this world.
I joined the Catholic Church in 2006, and so Pope Benedict is in that sense “my” Pope, and what a privilege it has been to have accompanied him on his spiritual journey as St. Peter’s successor. I have marvelled constantly at his wisdom, keen intellectual insights and leadership. His decision to resign is gut-wrenching, and yet at the same time it is a decision full of humility and wisdom; Blessed Pope John Paul II’s years of mental fragility seem all too recent, and I think Pope Benedict (even though he is physically and not mentally ailing) would wish to spare us a repetition of that, especially in this time of political, moral and spiritual crisis. We know that, if he is to dedicate the remainder of his life to active prayer, we are still in most worthy and capable hands. God bless him, and let’s pray for his successor.
With all these threats to the Faith one has to wonder why The Pope has not been able to do anything about the wolves. The question is, who is actually controlling the Vatican?
Yesterday the only journalist in the world who was listening to the “Concistoro” was Italian news agency ANSA’s vaticanist Giovanna Chirri.
As she is proficient in latin, the language in which the announcment was given, she straight away sent a message to ANSA, which sent the news around the world.Mrs Giovanna Chirri told SkyTg24 this morning that the first thing she did,without thinking, was giving the news,” because she is a journalist after all” but, being herself a Catholic, she broke down in tears just after that.Only after basically breaking this schocking news to the world,did she grasp the meaning of it , and she herself was schocked.
Today’s headline of Catholic daily Avvenire is : THE HUMILITY OF PETER whereas the headline of the online edition of the same paper is THE HUMILITY OF POPE BENEDICT WHICH SHAKES THE WORLD. I think this does sum it up.
The Avvenire editor M.Tarquinio writes in an editorial that “Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict have been two different yet complementary faces of the Gospel humility,an extraordinary sequence of two Popes which have introduced us and our faith in the third Millenium”.Mr Tarquinio then thanks Pope Benedict for “having once again showed us who Peter is and how he serves the Lord”
Amen. Such brilliant men. Truly wonderful, with works that will continue to bear fruit for a very long time to come.
Yes Nick I agree with you to a certain extent but it is the capacity to endure, to see through all things, to bear all things, to lay hold on life. I do not agree that a physically stronger
successor to Benedict would necessarily give the Church its capacity to endure all things, in my view we need (not want as the liberals do, after their own image)a Pope who has an intuitive
grasp of where the idols and ideologies that litter ‘the powers that be’ (Walter Wink)are heading and who has the strength of mind and body to keep the Church from itself from idolatry.
We are utterly dependent on God both for our creation and for our passage through death into true life, faith is literally what keeps us in one piece through all the contemporary threats
of self-destruction, it is the same for the Church.
The Modern and post-modern periods of Civilisation have had the luxury and tragic misfortune to doubt what all previous Civilisations trusted and believed. There can be little doubt that
this doubt and denial has well nigh destroyed mankind and natural Creation.