|
Pope
Benedict XVI - Homilies |
Homily
"Respect, Protect, Love and Serve Life, Every Human Life"
First Sunday of Advent - Vigil for Unborn Life
H.H. Benedict XVI
November 27, 2010
www.zenit.org
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
With this evening
celebration the Lord gives us the grace and joy of opening the new
Liturgical Year, starting with its first season: Advent, the period that
commemorates the coming of God among us. Every beginning brings a
special grace, because it is blessed by the Lord.
In this Advent Season we
shall be granted once again to experience the closeness of the One who
created the world, who guides history and who cared for us to the point
of deigning to become a man.
This great and fascinating
mystery of the God-with-us, indeed, of the God who becomes one of us, is
what we shall celebrate in the coming weeks journeying towards holy
Christmas. During the Season of Advent we shall feel the Church which
takes us by the hand and — in the image of Mary Most Holy, expresses her
motherhood, enabling us to experience the joyful expectation of the
coming of the Lord, who embraces us all in his love that saves and
consoles.
While our hearts look
forward to the annual celebration of Christ’s Birth, the Church’s
Liturgy directs our gaze to the final goal: our encounter with the Lord
who will come in the splendour of glory. For this reason in every
Eucharist we “announce his death, proclaim his Resurrection until he
comes again”, we watch in prayer.
The Liturgy does not cease
to encourage and support us, putting on our lips, in the days of Advent,
the cry with which the whole of Sacred Scripture ends, on the last page
of the Revelation to St John: “Come, Lord Jesus” (22:20).
Dear brothers and sisters,
our gathering this evening for the beginning of the journey through
Advent is enriched by another important reason: together with the whole
Church we wish to celebrate a solemn prayer vigil for unborn life. I
would like to express my gratitude to all those who have accepted this
invitation and to those who are specifically dedicated to welcoming and
safeguarding human life in its various situations of frailty, especially
when it is newly conceived and in its early stages.
Precisely, the beginning of
the Liturgical Year helps us live anew the expectation of God who took
flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary, God who makes himself little, who
becomes a child; it speaks to us of the coming of a God who is close,
who chose to experience human life from the very beginning in order to
save it totally, in its fullness. And so the mystery of Lord’s
Incarnation and the beginning of human life are closely and harmoniously
connected and in tune with each other in the one saving plan of God, the
Lord of the life of each and everyone.
The Incarnation reveals to us, with intense light and in a surprising
way, that every human life has a very lofty and incomparable dignity.
In comparison with all the
other living beings that populate the earth man has an unmistakable
originality. He is presented as the one unique being, endowed with
intelligence and free will, as well as consisting of material reality.
He lives simultaneously and inseparably in both the spiritual and the
corporal dimension.
This is also suggested in
the text of the First Letter to the Thessalonians that has just been
proclaimed: “May the God of peace himself”, St Paul writes, “sanctify
you wholly; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and
blameless for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:23).
We are therefore spirit,
soul and body. We are part of this world, tied to the possibilities and
limitations of our material condition, while at the same time we are
open to an infinite horizon, able to converse with God and to welcome
him within us. We are active in earthly realities and through them we
are able to perceive God’s presence and to reach out to him, Truth,
Goodness and absolute Beauty. We savour fragments of life and happiness
and yearn for complete fulfilment.
God loves us deeply, totally
and without making distinctions. He calls us to friendship with him, he
makes us part of a reality beyond every imagination and every thought
and word: his divine life itself.
With feeling and gratitude,
let us be aware of the value of every human person’s incomparable
dignity and of our great responsibility to all. “Christ, the final
Adam”, the Second Vatican Council states, “by the revelation of the
mystery of the Father and his love, fully reveals man to man himself and
makes his supreme calling clear… by his Incarnation, the Son of God has
in a certain way united himself with each man” (Gaudium et Spes, n. 22).
Believing in Jesus Christ
also means seeing man in a new way, with trust and hope. Moreover,
experience itself and right reason testify that the human being is
capable of understanding and of wanting, conscious of himself and free,
unrepeatable and irreplaceable, the summit of all earthly realities, and
who demands to be recognized as a value in himself and deserves always
to be accepted with respect and love. He is entitled not to be treated
as an object to be possessed or a thing to be manipulated at will, and
not to be exploited as a means for the benefit of others and their
interests.
The human person is a good
in himself and his integral development must always be sought. Love for
all, moreover, if it is sincere, tends spontaneously to become
preferential attention to the weakest and poorest. This explains the
Church’s concern for the unborn, the frailest, those most threatened by
the selfishness of adults and the clouding of consciences.
The Church continually reasserts what the Second Vatican Council
declared against abortion and against every violation of unborn life:
“from the moment of its conception life must be guarded with the
greatest care” (ibid., n. 51).
Cultural trends exist that
seek to anaesthetize consciences with spurious arguments. With regard to
the embryo in the mother's womb, science itself highlights its autonomy,
its capacity for interaction with the mother, the coordination of
biological processes, the continuity of development, the growing
complexity of the organism.
It is not an accumulation of biological material but rather of a new
living being, dynamic and marvelously ordered, a new individual of the
human species. This is what Jesus was in Mary’s womb; this is what we
all were in our mother’s womb. We may say with Tertullian, an ancient
Christian writer: “the one who will be a man is one already” (Apologeticum
IX, 8), there is no reason not to consider him a person from conception.
Unfortunately, even after
birth, the lives of children continue to be exposed to neglect, hunger,
poverty, disease, abuse, violence and exploitation. The many violations
of their rights sorrowfully wound the conscience of every person of good
will.
In the face of the sad view
of injustices committed against human life, before and after birth, I
make my own Pope John Paul II’s passionate appeal to the responsibility
of each and every individual: “respect, protect, love and serve life,
every human life! Only in this direction will you find justice,
development, true freedom, peace and happiness!” (Encyclical Evangelium
vitae, n. 5).
I urge politicians, leaders
of the economy and of social communications to do everything in their
power to promote a culture ever respectful of human life, to obtain
favourable conditions and support networks for the acceptance and
development of life.
Let us entrust our prayers
and our commitment to unborn life to the Virgin Mary, who welcomed the
Son of God made man with her faith, with her maternal womb, with her
attentive care, with her nurturing support, vibrant with love.
Let us do so in the Liturgy
— which is the place where we live the truth and where truth lives with
us — adoring the divine Eucharist in which we contemplate Christ’s Body,
that Body which took flesh from Mary through the action of the Holy
Spirit, and was born of her in Bethlehem for our salvation. Ave, verum
Corpus, natum de Maria Virgine!
© Copyright 2010 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana
Return to Homily Page...
Look
at the One they Pierced!
This page is the work of
the Servants of the Pierced Hearts of Jesus and Mary
