Holy reminder

Pope Benedict is a brilliant and eloquent teacher and he doesn’t need me or anyone else re-casting his messages in simpler terms for modern ears. But….let’s look at what he said today to the annual forum on penance, anyway.

To paraphrase, Benedict said we all need divine love to find true peace. And he said an inexhaustible supply of it is available because of the Cross. We face and fight evil and sin endlessly in this life, but can defeat them only with the interior energy that comes from that always-available love.

Ah…but the modern world separates itself from that spring by denying its importance. A great many people believe they don’t need God, thinking they’re self-sufficient and doing well. And yet…their lives are empty. Benedict points out the paradox that in this information age of mass communications, loneliness weighs on souls. “In a word, it seems today that we have lost a ‘sense of sin’…but have increased our ‘complex of guilt’.”

We’re seriously conflicted. But there’s a remedy, beyond expensive shrinks (okay, Benedict didn’t say that last part). He referred to the sacrament of confession (penance) and the release of forgiveness in it. And he urged priests to carry out that ministry with mercy and encouragement to penitents…”never compromising with evil”. Priests must be holy, or always striving to be, and faithful to the Church’s moral doctrine, aware that good and evil aren’t determined by situation ethics, “but by God.”

There is beauty of the art of nuance and clarity. Benedict is a master at both.