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MASS FOR THE INAUGURATION OF THE PONTIFICATE OF
POPE BENEDICT XVI
HOMILY OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI
St. Peter's Square
Sunday, 24 April 2005
Your Eminences, My dear Brother Bishops and Priests, Distinguished Authorities and Members of the Diplomatic Corps, Dear Brothers and
Sisters,
During these days of great intensity, we have chanted the litany of the saints
on three different occasions: at the funeral of our Holy Father John Paul II; as
the Cardinals entered the Conclave; and again today, when we sang it with the
response: Tu illum adiuva – sustain the new Successor of Saint Peter. On
each occasion, in a particular way, I found great consolation in listening to
this prayerful chant. How alone we all felt after the passing of John Paul
II – the Pope who for over twenty-six years had been our shepherd and guide on
our journey through life! He crossed the threshold of the next life,
entering into the mystery of God. But he did not take this step alone. Those
who believe are never alone – neither in life nor in death. At that
moment, we could call upon the Saints from every age – his friends, his
brothers and sisters in the faith – knowing that they would form a living
procession to accompany him into the next world, into the glory of God. We
knew that his arrival was awaited. Now we know that he is among his own and
is truly at home. We were also consoled as we made our solemn entrance into
Conclave, to elect the one whom the Lord had chosen. How would we be able
to discern his name? How could 115 Bishops, from every culture and every
country, discover the one on whom the Lord wished to confer the mission of
binding and loosing? Once again, we knew that we were not alone, we knew
that we were surrounded, led and guided by the friends of God. And now, at
this moment, weak servant of God that I am, I must assume this enormous task,
which truly exceeds all human capacity. How can I do this? How will I
be able to do it? All of you, my dear friends, have just invoked the entire
host of Saints, represented by some of the great names in the history of God’s
dealings with mankind. In this way, I too can say with renewed conviction:
I am not alone. I do not have to carry alone what in truth I could never
carry alone. All the Saints of God are there to protect me, to sustain me
and to carry me. And your prayers, my dear friends, your indulgence, your
love, your faith and your hope accompany me. Indeed, the communion of
Saints consists not only of the great men and women who went before us and whose
names we know. All of us belong to the communion of Saints, we who have
been baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
we who draw life from the gift of Christ’s Body and Blood, through which he
transforms us and makes us like himself. Yes, the Church is alive – this
is the wonderful experience of these days. During those sad days of the
Pope’s illness and death, it became wonderfully evident to us that the Church
is alive. And the Church is young. She holds within herself the future
of the world and therefore shows each of us the way towards the future. The
Church is alive and we are seeing it: we are experiencing the joy that the Risen
Lord promised his followers. The Church is alive – she is alive because
Christ is alive, because he is truly risen. In the suffering that we saw on
the Holy Father’s face in those days of Easter, we contemplated the mystery of
Christ’s Passion and we touched his wounds. But throughout these days we
have also been able, in a profound sense, to touch the Risen One. We have
been able to experience the joy that he promised, after a brief period of
darkness, as the fruit of his resurrection.
The Church is alive – with these words, I greet with great joy and gratitude
all of you gathered here, my venerable brother Cardinals and Bishops, my dear
priests, deacons, Church workers, catechists. I greet you, men and women
Religious, witnesses of the transfiguring presence of God. I greet you,
members of the lay faithful, immersed in the great task of building up the
Kingdom of God which spreads throughout the world, in every area of life. With
great affection I also greet all those who have been reborn in the sacrament of
Baptism but are not yet in full communion with us; and you, my brothers and
sisters of the Jewish people, to whom we are joined by a great shared spiritual
heritage, one rooted in God’s irrevocable promises. Finally, like a wave
gathering force, my thoughts go out to all men and women of today, to believers
and non-believers alike.
Dear friends! At this moment there is no need for me to present a programme
of governance. I was able to give an indication of what I see as my task in
my Message of Wednesday 20 April, and there will be other opportunities to do
so. My real programme of governance is not to do my own will, not to pursue
my own ideas, but to listen, together with the whole Church, to the word and the
will of the Lord, to be guided by Him, so that He himself will lead the Church
at this hour of our history. Instead of putting forward a programme, I
should simply like to comment on the two liturgical symbols which represent the
inauguration of the Petrine Ministry; both these symbols, moreover, reflect
clearly what we heard proclaimed in today’s readings.
The first symbol is the Pallium, woven in pure wool, which will be placed on my
shoulders. This ancient sign, which the Bishops of Rome have worn since the
fourth century, may be considered an image of the yoke of Christ, which the
Bishop of this City, the Servant of the Servants of God, takes upon his
shoulders. God’s yoke is God’s will, which we accept. And this
will does not weigh down on us, oppressing us and taking away our freedom. To
know what God wants, to know where the path of life is found – this was
Israel’s joy, this was her great privilege. It is also our joy: God’s
will does not alienate us, it purifies us – even if this can be painful –
and so it leads us to ourselves. In this way, we serve not only him, but
the salvation of the whole world, of all history. The symbolism of the
Pallium is even more concrete: the lamb’s wool is meant to represent the lost,
sick or weak sheep which the shepherd places on his shoulders and carries to the
waters of life. For the Fathers of the Church, the parable of the lost
sheep, which the shepherd seeks in the desert, was an image of the mystery of
Christ and the Church. The human race – every one of us – is the sheep
lost in the desert which no longer knows the way. The Son of God will not
let this happen; he cannot abandon humanity in so wretched a condition. He
leaps to his feet and abandons the glory of heaven, in order to go in search of
the sheep and pursue it, all the way to the Cross. He takes it upon his
shoulders and carries our humanity; he carries us all – he is the good
shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. What the Pallium indicates
first and foremost is that we are all carried by Christ. But at the same
time it invites us to carry one another. Hence the Pallium becomes a symbol
of the shepherd’s mission, of which the Second Reading and the Gospel speak. The
pastor must be inspired by Christ’s holy zeal: for him it is not a matter of
indifference that so many people are living in the desert. And there are so
many kinds of desert. There is the desert of poverty, the desert of hunger
and thirst, the desert of abandonment, of loneliness, of destroyed love. There
is the desert of God’s darkness, the emptiness of souls no longer aware of
their dignity or the goal of human life. The external deserts in the world
are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast. Therefore
the earth’s treasures no longer serve to build God’s garden for all to live
in, but they have been made to serve the powers of exploitation and destruction. The
Church as a whole and all her Pastors, like Christ, must set out to lead people
out of the desert, towards the place of life, towards friendship with the Son of
God, towards the One who gives us life, and life in abundance. The symbol
of the lamb also has a deeper meaning. In the Ancient Near East, it was
customary for kings to style themselves shepherds of their people. This was
an image of their power, a cynical image: to them their subjects were like
sheep, which the shepherd could dispose of as he wished. When the shepherd
of all humanity, the living God, himself became a lamb, he stood on the side of
the lambs, with those who are downtrodden and killed. This is how he
reveals himself to be the true shepherd: “I am the Good Shepherd . . . I
lay down my life for the sheep”, Jesus says of himself (Jn 10:14f). It
is not power, but love that redeems us! This is God’s sign: he himself is
love. How often we wish that God would make show himself stronger, that he
would strike decisively, defeating evil and creating a better world. All
ideologies of power justify themselves in exactly this way, they justify the
destruction of whatever would stand in the way of progress and the liberation of
humanity. We suffer on account of God’s patience. And yet, we need
his patience. God, who became a lamb, tells us that the world is saved by
the Crucified One, not by those who crucified him. The world is redeemed by
the patience of God. It is destroyed by the impatience of man.
One of the basic characteristics of a shepherd must be to love the people
entrusted to him, even as he loves Christ whom he serves. “Feed my
sheep”, says Christ to Peter, and now, at this moment, he says it to me as
well. Feeding means loving, and loving also means being ready to suffer. Loving
means giving the sheep what is truly good, the nourishment of God’s truth, of
God’s word, the nourishment of his presence, which he gives us in the Blessed
Sacrament. My dear friends – at this moment I can only say: pray for
me, that I may learn to love the Lord more and more. Pray for me, that I
may learn to love his flock more and more – in other words, you, the holy
Church, each one of you and all of you together. Pray for me, that I may
not flee for fear of the wolves. Let us pray for one another, that the Lord
will carry us and that we will learn to carry one another.
The second symbol used in today’s liturgy to express the inauguration of the
Petrine Ministry is the presentation of the fisherman’s ring. Peter’s
call to be a shepherd, which we heard in the Gospel, comes after the account of
a miraculous catch of fish: after a night in which the disciples had let down
their nets without success, they see the Risen Lord on the shore. He tells
them to let down their nets once more, and the nets become so full that they can
hardly pull them in; 153 large fish: “and although there were so many, the net
was not torn” (Jn 21:11). This account, coming at the end of
Jesus’s earthly journey with his disciples, corresponds to an account found at
the beginning: there too, the disciples had caught nothing the entire night;
there too, Jesus had invited Simon once more to put out into the deep. And
Simon, who was not yet called Peter, gave the wonderful reply: “Master, at
your word I will let down the nets.” And then came the conferral of his
mission: “Do not be afraid. Henceforth you will be catching men” (Lk
5:1-11). Today too the Church and the successors of the Apostles are told
to put out into the deep sea of history and to let down the nets, so as to win
men and women over to the Gospel – to God, to Christ, to true life. The
Fathers made a very significant commentary on this singular task. This is
what they say: for a fish, created for water, it is fatal to be taken out of the
sea, to be removed from its vital element to serve as human food. But in
the mission of a fisher of men, the reverse is true. We are living in
alienation, in the salt waters of suffering and death; in a sea of darkness
without light. The net of the Gospel pulls us out of the waters of death
and brings us into the splendour of God’s light, into true life. It is
really true: as we follow Christ in this mission to be fishers of men, we must
bring men and women out of the sea that is salted with so many forms of
alienation and onto the land of life, into the light of God. It is really
so: the purpose of our lives is to reveal God to men. And only where
God is seen does life truly begin. Only when we meet the living God in
Christ do we know what life is. We are not some casual and meaningless
product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each
of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. There is
nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with
Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to
others of our friendship with Him. The task of the shepherd, the task of
the fisher of men, can often seem wearisome. But it is beautiful and
wonderful, because it is truly a service to joy, to God’s joy which longs to
break into the world.
Here I want to add something: both the image of the shepherd and that of the
fisherman issue an explicit call to unity. “I have other sheep that are
not of this fold; I must lead them too, and they will heed my voice. So
there shall be one flock, one shepherd” (Jn 10:16); these are the words
of Jesus at the end of his discourse on the Good Shepherd. And the account
of the 153 large fish ends with the joyful statement: “although there were so
many, the net was not torn” (Jn 21:11). Alas, beloved Lord, with
sorrow we must now acknowledge that it has been torn! But no – we must
not be sad! Let us rejoice because of your promise, which does not
disappoint, and let us do all we can to pursue the path towards the unity you
have promised. Let us remember it in our prayer to the Lord, as we plead
with him: yes, Lord, remember your promise. Grant that we may be one flock
and one shepherd! Do not allow your net to be torn, help us to be servants
of unity!
At this point, my mind goes back to 22 October 1978, when Pope John Paul II
began his ministry here in Saint Peter’s Square. His words on that
occasion constantly echo in my ears: “Do not be afraid! Open wide
the doors for Christ!” The Pope was addressing the mighty, the powerful
of this world, who feared that Christ might take away something of their power
if they were to let him in, if they were to allow the faith to be free. Yes,
he would certainly have taken something away from them: the dominion of
corruption, the manipulation of law and the freedom to do as they pleased. But
he would not have taken away anything that pertains to human freedom or dignity,
or to the building of a just society. The Pope was also speaking to
everyone, especially the young. Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way? If
we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him,
are we not afraid that He might take something away from us? Are we not
perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something
that makes life so beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and
deprived of our freedom? And once again the Pope said: No! If we
let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what
makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are
the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great
potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we
experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and
great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to
you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away,
and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a
hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you
will find true life. Amen.
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