VATICAN CITY (CNS): Cradle Catholics haven’t done enough to show people that God exists and can bring true fulfilment to everyone, Pope Benedict XVI told a group of his former students.
“We, who have been able to know (Christ) since our youth, may we ask forgiveness because we bring so little of the light of his face to people; so little certainty comes from us that he exists, he’s present and he is the greatness that everyone is waiting for,” the Pope said.
The Pope presided at a Mass on August 28 in Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, during his annual meeting with students who did their doctorates with him when he was a professor in Germany.
Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna, a regular participant in the Ratzinger Schulerkreis (Ratzinger student circle), gave the homily at the Mass, but the Pope made remarks at the beginning of the liturgy.
Pope Benedict highlighted the day’s reading in Psalm 63 in which the soul thirsts for God “in a land parched, lifeless and without water”.
He asked God to show himself to today’s world, which is marked by God’s absence and where “the land of souls is arid and dry, and people still don’t know where the living water comes from”.
May God let people who were searching for water elsewhere know that the only thing that would quench their thirst was God himself and that he would never let “people’s lives, their thirst for that which is great, for fulfilment, drown and suffocate in the ephemeral”, the Pope told his former students.
However, it also is up to Christians to make God known to the world, the Pope said, and older generations may not have done their best.
“We want to ask (God) to forgive us, that he renew us with the living water of his spirit and that he helps us to celebrate properly the sacred mysteries,” he said.
The formal discussions of the “schulerkreis” this year focused on the new evangelisation.
The closed-door seminar was held from August 25-28 in the papal residence of Castel Gandolfo and was attended by 40 people, reported the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.
The Pope chose two speakers to give lectures: Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, a female German theologian and professor, and Otto Neubauer, director of the Emmanuel Community’s academy for evangelisation in Vienna.
The lectures were followed by discussion among the participants, including the Pope.
Summarising the discussions for L’Osservatore Romano, Cardinal Schonborn said participants felt recent World Youth Day events in Madrid represented a fresh “boost of renewed hope” for the Church.
He said older generations have suffered by first living their faith at a time when Church life was thriving, and today they were watching parishes lose so many parishioners.
But, today’s young Catholics seem to realise they were a minority in a secular, relativistic world and have shown their “undaunted willingness to give witness to their peers in such an environment”, he said.
Seminar participants saw the so-called “John Paul II and Benedict XVI generations” as a whole new phase for the Church.
No one thought young Catholics would be so open to being in “the courtyard of the Gentiles” to evangelise, the cardinal said.
He said the meeting also reflected on how to spread the Gospel in a secular world that nonetheless “shows that it is waiting to receive anew the Gospel message”.
