The True Impoverishment of Man: On Benedict XVI and Bishops

The True Impoverishment of Man: On Benedict XVI and Bishops | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | March 17, 2011 | Ignatius Insight

"This is the labor for the harvest in the field of God, in the field of human history: to bring to men and women the light of truth, to set them free from the lack of truth, which is the true sorrow, the true impoverishment of man."
— Pope Benedict XVI, "In God's Field", February 5, 2011 (Episcopal Ordination Mass in St. Peter's)

I.

On the occasion of five curial officials being raised to the arch-episcopacy, Pope Benedict XVI's sermon was about the need of truth and the centrality of making it known through the Church. He spoke of the Lord sending laborers into the harvest and, drawing from Isaiah, of the Lord's anointing to bring good tidings to the afflicted and to sooth the brokenhearted. The Pope reminded the bishops to stand as living witnesses, as it says in the first letter of John, to those who saw and touched the Lord. From the beginning, the Church has seen itself as sent to all the nations, however difficult it often is to be received in many of them. The office of Peter exists to assure the unity of witness to what is handed down.

The field of God is spread throughout human history to all the nations. We need to be set free from "a lack of truth." This lack is rightly called a "sorrow" and an "impoverishment." Contrasted to this sorrow are the "glad tidings," which, as the Pope carefully says, are not just words but include "an event." What is this event? Here Benedict echoes the core of his book, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week. The unique event is this: "God himself has come among us." This coming is the central truth that the followers of Christ are called upon to make known among the nations.

The Pope is aware of those who reject this truth. "Large parts of the modern world, large numbers of our contemporaries, turn their backs on God and consider faith something of the past." But when we look at what they implicitly want to put in the place of faith, we still find that "a yearning that justice, love and peace will be established at last, that poverty and suffering will be surmounted and that human beings will find joy." So the rejection of faith does not necessarily mean that what the faith promises is rejected or that the fulfillment of this yearning is simply some this-worldly political kingdom.

"The longing for all these things is present in the contemporary world, the longing for what is great and what is good. It is yearning for the Redeemer, for God himself, even when he is denied." Such is the great paradox. Even the denial of God is associated with a divinely established longing in our souls. The modern world is filled with all sorts of schemes to achieve these things. But it is careful not to consider or admit the truth of the Christian understanding of our longing. It is precisely a yearning for "a Redeemer," as the Pope puts it, not just for a sort of perfect order that exists somewhere down the eons in the future beyond any of us.

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