Pope summarizes 2009 in meeting with Curia
December 21, 2009
Pope Benedict XVI surveyed the most memorable events of the year 2009 as he met on December 21 with the leaders of the Roman Curia. In his summary of his own activities, the Pope emphasized the Church in Africa, his travels to that continent and to the Holy Land, his encyclical Caritas in Veritate, and the start of the Year for Priests.
“The year now drawing to a close passed largely under the sign of Africa,” the Holy Father told the Vatican officials who gathered in the Clementine Hall for a traditional pre-Christmas meeting. He recalled his trip to Cameroon and Angola and the Eucharistic liturgies he celebrated there, which were “authentic feasts of faith.”
That trip, the Pope continued, served as prelude to the meeting of the Synod of Bishops, dedicated to the Church in Africa. That Synod discussion was devoted to “the Church in Africa at the service of reconciliation, justice and peace." It was, Pope Benedict said, "a theological and, above all, a pastoral theme of vital relevance. Yet", he said, "it could also be misunderstood as a political theme. The task of the bishops was to transform theology into pastoral activity.”
In meeting out that challenge, the Pope said, African Church leaders must find ways to encourage “a positive secularism” in public life. The Pontiff remarked that this was also the goal of his encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, which continued and develop the tradition of Catholic social teaching.
The theme of “reconciliation” is important not only to Africa but to all Christianity, Pope Benedict continued. "We must learn the ability to do penance, to allow ourselves to be transformed,” he said. He noticed with concern that Catholics are going to Confession less frequently; he saw this trend as “a symptom of a loss of veracity towards ourselves and towards God.”
Recalling his trip to the Holy Land, the Pope thanked his hosts in Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories for their “great cordiality.” The trip, he said, had helped him to “perceive the suffering and the hopes present in their territory.” At the Yad Vashem memorial to Holocaust victims, he added, he experiences “a disturbing encounter with human cruelty, with the hatred of a blind ideology which, with no justification, consigned millions of human beings to death and which, in the final analysis, also sought to drive God from the world: the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and the God of Jesus Christ.”
A later trip to the Czech Republic in September had a different impact, the Pope related. Pointing out that unbelievers now constitute a majority in that country, he underlined the importance of the “new evangelization” to reach them. “We must take care that man does not shelve the question of God: the essential question of his existence,” he said.
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