Pope Benedict used last night’s Ash Wednesday mass to deliver a withering and extraordinary blast at the warring factions in the Vatican’s upper-echelons, whose power struggles many believe influenced the Pontiff’s historic decision to stand down.
Earlier on Wednesday, during the general audience, the Pontiff had alluded to the need for church figures to avoid the temptations of power and privilege.
But yesterday evening his warning was clearer. “We must reflect on how the face of the Church is marred by sins against unity and division of the ecclesiastical body. We must overcome individualism and rivalry,” he told great and the good of the curia assembled in St Peter’s Basilica. “The true disciple does not serve himself or the public, but the Lord.
“Many are ready to get on their high horse over scandals and injustices – obviously committed by others – but few seem able to act according to the real wishes of their own hearts and consciences.”
Pundit Gerard O’Connell of the Vatican Insider said: “This was a very, very, clear and strongly worded speech. It was an appeal for an end to the personal rivalries and of people competing to put themselves in high profile positions. I think Benedict is passing messages to the cardinals and to those who will succeed him.”
Many have speculated that a raft of scandals within the Vatican lies, at least in part, behind his decision to quit, however.
Those scandals culminated last year with the conviction of Paolo Gabriele, the pope’s ex-butler, who was found guilty of leaking confidential papal memos suggesting corruption and intrigue within the Holy See to the Italian press.
But many Vatican watchers believe a confidential report into Vatileaks commissioned by Benedict may have revealed evidence of power struggles and a more far-reaching conspiracy to discredit his papacy and his deputy, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.
La Repubblica newspaper suggested that Benedict’s criticism yesterday may have been aimed at three of the Vatican’s most powerful figures: the secretary of state Cardinal Bertone, his predecessor, Angelo Sodano, the current dean of the College of Cardinals, and the head of the Bishops Conference, Angelo Bagnasco.
It claimed that Cardinal Bertone was already at loggerheads with his two rivals as senior figures jockeyed for power and influence in the run up to the Conclave in mid-March, which will elected Benedict’s successor.
Meanwhile, as one of last significant appointments under Benedict’s reign, a new head of the Vatican Bank, the IOR, in expected within the next few days. Pundits believe a foreigner is likely to be brought in to clean up bank’s reputation.
The IOR has been without a president since May 2012 when its Italian head Ettore Gotti Tedeschi resigned, following a no-confidence vote by the board of directors of the bank. This provoked a series of accusation and counter claims between Mr Tedeschi and the Holy See regarding the management of the scandal-hit financial institution.
February 12, 2012 (Romereports.com) The cardinals tasked with electing the new Pope know little of each other. A small group, the most distinguished among them, have the informal task of building consensus. They are few, but in their hands lies the outcome of the election. They can easily be considered the 16 pillars of the Church. Here are their names.
They will also take into consideration Gianfranco Ravasi, the cardinal that will lead the last spiritual exercises of Benedict XVI as Pope.
Pope spends final retreat exploring truth, beauty connection
.- Benedict XVI finished his final Lenten spiritual exercises as Pope by thanking his collaborators for support and help these last eight years and by reflecting on the relationship between truth and beauty.
“I would like to thank you all, not only for this week, but for the past eight years, in which you have borne with me, with great skill, affection, love, faith, the weight of the Petrine ministry,” Pope Benedict said Feb. 23 in his closing remarks for the week-long retreat.
“This gratitude remains within me and even if this visible exterior communion is now ending – as Cardinal Ravasi has said – the spiritual closeness, a deep communion in prayer, remains.
“In this certainty let us go forward,” the Pope stated, “confident in the victory of God, sure of the truth, of beauty, and of love.”
The Holy Father offered his words of thanks and his thoughts on the week of meditation at 9:00 this morning in the Redemptoris Mater chapel of the Apostolic Palace. He spoked to Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, who led the retreat, and the rest of the Curia who took part in the exercises.
He began by recalling the theme of the retreat – “The art of believing, the art of praying” – and said it reminded him that medieval theologians “translated the word ‘Logos’ not only as ‘Verbum’ (Word), but also as ‘ars’ (art, skill): ‘Verbum’ and ‘ars’ are interchangeable.”
Medieval theologians understood that the Word of God “is also love. The truth is beautiful and the true and beautiful go together: beauty is the seal of truth,” the Pope stated.
Cardinal Ravasi based his meditations on the Psalms, and in one section he pointed out how God’s Creation was made good but evil constantly attacks it.
“It’s almost as if wickedness wills permanently to spoil creation, to contradict God and make its truth and its beauty unrecognizable,” the Pope observed.
“In a world so marked even by evil, the ‘Logos,’ the eternal beauty and the eternal ‘art,’ must appear as a ‘caput cruentatum’(bloodied head). The incarnate Son, the incarnate ‘Logos’ is crowned with a crown of thorns and nevertheless is just that: in this suffering figure of the Son of God we begin to see the deepest beauty of our Creator and Redeemer; in the silence of the ‘dark night’ we can, nevertheless, hear the Word.
“And believing is nothing other than, in the darkness of the world, touching the hand of God, and in this way, in silence, hearing the Word, seeing love,” Pope Benedict said.
Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi
From wikipedia
Gianfranco Ravasi (born 18 October 1942) is an Italian prelate, a cardinal of the Catholic Church. He currently serves in the Roman Curia as President of the Pontifical Council for Culture. On 20 November 2010 Ravasi was created cardinal by Pope Benedict XVI.
Biography
Early life
The eldest of three children, Ravasi was born in Merate, Province of Lecco. His father was an anti-fascist tax official who served in Sicily during World War II, but later deserted the army; it took him 18 months to return to his family.[1] Ravasi would later say, "My search has always been for something permanent, for what is behind the transitory, the contingent. I’m fighting loss and death, which probably relates to the absence of my father in my first years."[1] His mother was a schoolteacher.
Ordination
Ravasi decided to join the priesthood instead of teaching Greek and Latin classics, as had been his original desire.[1] He attended the seminary of Milan, and was ordained by Cardinal Giovanni Colombo on 28 June 1966.[2] He then furthered his studies in Rome at the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Pontifical Biblical Institute. He spent summers in Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Turkey, working as an archaeologist with such figures as Kathleen Kenyon and Roland de Vaux.[1]
Professor
He later served as a professor of exegesis of the Old Testament at the Theological Faculty of Northern Italy in Milan. From 1989 to 2007, he was prefect of the Ambrosian Library. He also collaborated with Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, S.J., but was sometimes seen as more conservative than the Cardinal on matters of faith and morals.[3]
Candidate for bishop
In 2005, according to Sandro Magister, Ravasi was a leading candidate to become Bishop of Assisi but the Congregation for Bishops withdrew his candidacy after Ravasi wrote an article about Easter in the newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, in which his statement, "He was not raised; he arose," was seen as potentially heterodox.[4] Yet in 2007, at the invitation of Pope Benedict XVI, he composed the Good Friday meditations for the public procession of Stations of the Cross led by the Pope at the Colosseum.[4][5]
Roman Curia
On 3 September 2007, Ravasi was appointed President of the Pontifical Council for Culture and Titular Archbishop of Villamagna in Proconsulari. He was also named President of the Pontifical Commission for the Cultural Heritage of the Church and of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology. He received his episcopal consecration as an archbishop on the following 29 September from Benedict XVI himself, with Cardinals Tarcisio Bertone, S.D.B., and Marian Jaworski serving as co-consecrators, at St. Peter’s Basilica. On 20 November 2010, he was created and proclaimed Cardinal-Deacon of San Giorgio in Velabro.
| Styles of Gianfranco Ravasi |
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On 11 December 2010, Ravasi was named a member of the Congregation for Catholic Education for a five-year renewable term.[6] On 29 December 2010, he was appointed the first member of the new Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelisation and also a member of the Pontifical Council for Interreligous Dialogue.[7]
Court of the Gentiles
In February 2011 Cardinal Ravasi said that the dialogue between believers and nonbelievers should not limit itself to finding a least common denominator of agreement, but rather should seek to confront the fundamental questions of life. Cardinal Ravasi spoke of the need for more profound dialogue with nonbelievers which took place in an interview, which took place ahead of the presentation at the University of Bologna of the "Court of the Gentiles." The new Vatican structure – overseen by the culture council – was created to foster dialogue between believers and nonbelievers. The idea for this initiative was proposed in a 21 December 2009, address by Pope Benedict to the Roman Curia, in which he spoke about the "Court of the Gentiles," a space in the ancient Temple of Jerusalem that was not reserved for the Jews, but rather was open to any person independent of his culture or religion. Cardinal Ravasi, "wanted to reintroduce the ancient tradition of the ‘disputed questions’ – as they were called then – while at that time they had to do with different opinions and theses, in this case they will be between believers and nonbelievers." He added "I am trying to see to it that this danger is avoided,". He stated that "I want really fundamental questions to be asked – questions of anthropology, then good and evil, life and afterlife, love suffering, the meaning of evil – questions that are substantially at the basis of human existence."[8]
The programme visited Stockholm, Sweden from 13–14 September 2012. It will put Cardinal Ravasi and other Catholic thinkers into dialogue with a cross-section of Sweden’s leading intellectual lights on these questions: “Can one choose a ‘World without God?’ How far can the human person go in the field of creation? Are there limits, and if so, what are they?”[9]
Preaching
In November 2011 Cardinal Ravasi said preaching in churches had become formulaic and boring that it risked becoming "irrelevant". He said that "The advent of televised and computerised information requires us to be compelling and trenchant, to cut to the heart of the matter, resort to narratives and colour," He added that "We need to remember that communicating faith doesn’t just take place through sermons. It can be achieved through the 140 characters of a Twitter message."[10]
In February 2013 he preached the Lenten retreat Spiritual Exercises"Ars Orandi, Ars Credendi" to the Papal household during the final days of the pontificate of Benedict XVI
Views on evolution
In 2008, he said, "I want to affirm, as an a priori, the compatibility of the theory of evolution with the message of the Bible and the Church’s theology."[11] He also noted that neither Charles Darwin nor his work On the Origin of Species had ever been condemned by the Church.[11]
Other
Some commentators thought that Ravasi would be the next Archbishop of Milan, replacing Dionigi Tettamanzi, but Angelo Scola was instead appointed to that see. However, the same writers would consider him papabile in either position.[12] Cardinal Ravasi was admitted to the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George by Infante Carlos, Duke of Calabria in 2006 and promoted to Bailiff Grand Cross of Justice following his elevation to the College of Cardinals, in 2010.
2012 Earthquake
Serene faces preserved on the Madonnina of Pieve di Cento
Cardinal Ravasi visited the severly-damaged Emilia Romagna region a month after the May 2012 earthquake which killed more than twenty persons and left thousands more homeless. He drew attention to the significant damage inflicted on the cultural patrimony of the region, including many historical churches by tweeting[13] a striking image of the Madonnina of Pieve di Cento
