“I have come as a pilgrim.” This is how Pope Benedict described himself at the start of his two-day visit to Spain. Or perhaps I should say Cataluña, given the deep-rooted differences between this region and the rest of the country.
A pilgrim is not one who just visits a place to admire its treasures of nature, art or history. The pilgrim recognises the call of a loving God and strives to encounter the Divine in a place where His grace and splendour have shone with particular radiance. Thus strengthened, the pilgrim tries to pass on this radiance to others.
The Pope’s pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela had both aims. He wanted to flavour the intimacy he has with God and help us move up the path to this intimacy. Benedict’s agenda is very clear: to present God to the world – God who is the lover of humanity and who wants humanity to be his lover in return.
The Pope’s repeated message is that when the love of, and for God is translated into concrete actions, the quality of life of humans on earth is enhanced. The more time humans have for God the more time humans will have for other humans.
The Pope manifested this concretely by visiting two great ‘monuments’ of the Church. The same Church which built the wonderful theological hymn called the Sagrada Familia also built close by a haven of love and care for people with disability. These two initiatives are, in the words of the Pontiff himself, “two symbols of the fruitfulness of faith”.
The secularism that is so strong today in Europe has its roots in the tragic conviction, which grew in the 19th century, that God is somehow man’s antagonist and an enemy of his freedom. Its twin sibling is the other equally erroneous belief that religion should be an exclusively private concern. “How can what is most decisive in life be confined to the purely private sphere or banished to the shadows?” Benedict asked.
The Pope repeated his wake up call to the people of Europe: “Europe must open itself to God, must come to meet Him without fear, and work with His grace for that human dignity which was discerned by her best traditions: not only the biblical, at the basis of this order, but also the classical, the medieval and the modern, the matrix from which the great philosophical, literary, cultural and social masterpieces of Europe were born.”
Pope Benedict argued that the building of a better society is enhanced by Christian heritage and belief: “Allow me here to point out the glory of man, and to indicate the threats to his dignity resulting from the privation of his essential values and richness, and the marginalisation and death visited upon the weakest and the poorest.
“One cannot worship God without taking care of His sons and daughters; and man cannot be served without asking who his Father is and answering the question about Him.
“The Europe of science and technology, the Europe of civilisation and culture, must be at the same time a Europe open to transcendence and fraternity with other continents, and open to the living and true God, starting with the living and true man. This is what the Church wishes to contribute to Europe: to be watchful for God and for man, based on the understanding of both which is offered to us in Jesus Christ.”
It is only within this framework that one can really appreciate and understand the Pope’s pro-life and pro-family agenda which he put forward in Spain as he continually does “in season and out of season”.
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt