The Magi represent all men in search of God. Saint Paul annotes that «The pagans now share the same inheritance» (Eph 3,6). «Jesus Christ is not only relevant to Christians, or only to believers, but to all men and women. Christ, who is the centre of faith is also the foundation of hope. And every human being is constantly in need of hope» (Benedict XVI, Angelus 29th November 2009).
This is the source where Christians draw their passion to meet all men in every part of the earth and to share their life.
1. “The people who walked in darkness … upon those who dwelt in the land of deep shadow …” (Is 9: 1). These words of the prophet Isaiah concern us. Proceeding – or maybe living – in the darkness is hard and we are tired. Wearied and devastated is the world states with an acute realism Chesterton. More or less aware, this is the reason why we have gathered here on this Holy Night: here we search light because: “of the world the desire this is” Chesterton continues.
The light is this “child born for us” (Is 9: 5). In the stable of Bethlehem, as here now, in our resplendent basilica, the light shines. In the stable of Bethlehem as in every church in the world, thousands of years after creation rises the first dawn of the world. With the birth of Jesus the virtue of hope in its infancy grows anew for every man. Christmas is the inexhaustible source of revival – and God knows how much this word is precious today for each one of us -. Read the rest
“Crises in teaching are not crises of teaching: they reveal a crisis of life and they are crises of life themselves.” Once again it is the genius of a poet like Péguy which, blowing away an array of cliches and superficial analyses, knows how to get to the heart of what at this point is recognived by everybody as the educational emergency. A question that has been chosen as a theme, studied and proposed as an educational challenge by the Cultural Project of the Italian Conference of Bishops, which has devoted to it its first Report-proposal (published as a book under the title The educational challenge, Laterza).
Péguy hits the target: where there is no adequate life nothing can be communicated, it is not possible to educate. The Report-proposal has been built and written based on the well-documented conviction that “the current crisis of education does not concern only single problems, but rather the idea we have of man and of his future. Read the rest
On the 16 of December cardinal Scola has took part to the annual Christmas wish-party of Reyer Venezia Basketball Society.
In the fully crowed stadium, among the young players, the official teams and team’s managers, and the relatives of the player, he said: “you will achieve more goals if you know where you are going in your life, staing closed to Jesus”.
On the 19th of October 2009 cardinal Scola took part to the Sixth International Conference on the Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena, and read the Holy Father’s message to the partecipants, who celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of the first astronomical use of Galileo’s telescope.
Here you can read the Cardinal Scola’s declaration.
“Mr President of the Venetian Institute of Sciences, Arts and Letters, Directors of the Department of Astronomy of the University of Padua; of INAF, the Astronomy Observatory of Padua; of INSAP, the International Executive Committee; of the Vatican Observatory, honoured Conference participants, it is an honour for me to address you on the occasion of the Sixth International Conference on the Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena, at which you intend to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of the first astronomical use of Galileo’s telescope.
Your important gathering has prompted the Holy Father to send you a message through the Patriarch of Venice, which I now have the pleasure of reading to you. Read the rest
As president of the French delegation to the second international conference of UNESCO (held in 1947), Jacques Maritain supported a thesis that retains a strong validity and one which, if rigorously formulated, can constitute the basis by which to identify a new way of thinking about secularity in a plural society. Maritain said that the political domain has as its objective a practical good that is recognised by everyone as a value in itself, independently of the fact that there may be a failure to agree on its speculative or doctrinal foundation which necessarily refers to different and often contradictory visions of the world. What could this be? Living together in society and the reciprocal communication to which subjects that live in contemporary plural society and are often in conflict are called, reveal as a social practical good the very fact of living together. Read the rest
The School of Advanced Studies Society Economy Theology (ASSET), created within the Studium Generale Marcianum of the Patriachate of Venice, is the object of an article by the italian Vaticanist Sandro Magister.
On September 5, Cardinal Scola opened in Venice an international conference entitled “The pluralist society,” with lectures by Italian and foreign scholars from different disciplines, Catholics and non-Catholics, from Massimo Cacciari to David Novak, from Ottfried Höffe to Cesare Mirabelli, from Ignazio Musu to Steve Schneck.
The conference marked the opening in Venice of a new study center called the “Alta Scuola Società Economia Teologia,” ASSET, which has the purpose of promoting interaction among the various disciplines, including theology, in confronting the crucial questions of a culturally “pluralist” world. Read the rest
The School of Advanced Studies Society Economy Theology (ASSET), created within the Studium Generale Marcianum of the Patriachate of Venice, aims to be an asset for the comprehension of the plural society. ASSET is an academic and cultural proposal responding to a twofold urgency: on one side the necessity for the social sciences to take account, in a complex post-modern society, of all the dimensions of human experience and human need, avoiding any a priori exclusion of interpretative hypotheses, even those deriving from the religious traditions; on the other side the need for both theology and the social doctrine of the Church to become part of the public debate and to contribute to the common good, confronting topics, paradigms and methodologies typical of diverse disciplines.
From the 2009 Redeemer Address by Patriarch Card. A. Scola
1. Personally, I was provoked to choose pain and suffering as the topic for the Redeemer Address during the Pastoral Visitation, as I met in their homes people who were seriously sick or very ill. This issue has become more urgent to me, I would say unpostponable, because of the faces, the looks and the few but radical words that were addressed to me by them and by their loved ones. In the history of the human family, it seems that the aggression of pain and suffering never stops. Like all elementary realities that are part of universal human experience (knowledge, love and so on), also pain and suffering are difficult to explain. Here, we just want to reflect a little on the immense travail of pain and suffering that mankind as a whole — but always in the flesh of individuals — has to bear. If –- as St. Augustine said – every man is, as such, a great question, at the heart of the man-question lies the question on pain and suffering. Read the rest
Today’s pluralistic society, in which democracies are founded on procedures agreed upon, urges us to reflect carefully on the ethical, juridical and economic praxis common to all humanity.
It is by now a commonly shared idea that it is necessary to translate the concepts deriving from one’s various religious and cultural traditions into public argumentation. In other words, it is vital that the foundations, which cannot be relinquished in any substantiated view, be translated into a series of axioms. Similarly to mathematical logic, they must be understood as a formal system of properties that implicitly define their expression (which is, in this case, a vision of the world), quite apart from a priori recognition or negation of their absoluteness by everyone concerned. On this basis the subjects living in a pluralistic society are called to work at continuous dialogue, and to tell others tirelessly of their own identity within a spirit of reciprocal recognition, allowing orientations and directions in the interest of the common good to emerge. On this subject, as Benedict XVI wrote in his lecture for the university “La Sapienza” (Rome 17th January, 2008), the very experience of democracy shows that numerical majorities and their relations of strength are not enough to guarantee and maintain it; democracy needs to be characterized also by «a process of argumentation that is sensitive to the truth». Read the rest
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