Discern

This brief extract ties in to discussions of local interest on preaching and justice.

From Vienna, a Lesson on How to Sing the Mass
by Sandro Magister

In Loreto, Benedict XVI instead personally participated in the afternoon meeting with the young people, organized by the heads of the pastoral care of young people for the Italian bishops' conference. But here, too, he made a clear departure from the prepared script. On the one side, there were the young actors who took turns reading – with theatrical flair, but still in a contrived manner – the passages selected by the organizers, many of which were taken from the Bible. On the other side, there was the pope, who set aside the texts prepared for him by the offices of the curia and responded to questions from the young people with spontaneous, improvised words that were unmistakably his own, and therefore also capable of penetrating the heart. While he was speaking and saying profound, demanding, touching things, there was an impressive silence and attention among the three hundred thousand young people listening to him. In any case, Benedict XVI did not appear to be isolated. He had the full agreement of the young men and women who recounted their personal stories, some of them dramatic, and asked him questions. He had with him the missionary Giancarlo Bossi, recently freed from Islamic kidnappers in the Philippines. Father Bossi spoke simply and said little, but what he said made clear to everyone what it means to be a genuine missionary of the Gospel of Jesus, and not a humanitarian worker or an anti-globalization activist.

Resourcement. Amerio made an interesting observation that to claim a resourcement which eliminates all resourcements which went before, is to declare your own resourcement to be invalid from the get-go. And so goes the hermeneutic of rupture and discontinuity, which would take another 20+ years after Amerio's book to be "named" by pope Benedict XVI.