Letter #12 2021, Friday, April 2: Good Friday

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Letter #12 2021, Friday, April 2: Good Friday

[2021-04-02]

[Engleză]

Letter #12 2021, Friday, April 2: Good Friday

 I send this Letter on Good Friday, when we recall the passion and death of Jesus on the cross.

 I just received a letter from a reader and old friend: "Keep writing! Keep challenging us! You are a voice crying out in the wilderness, 'Make straight the way of the Lord!' Thank you to you and your team! Blessings to you this Easter!"

 So on this Good Friday, 2021, my thoughts go out to all who walk in the wilderness, to all who seek consolation and all who offer consolation in these difficult times. A blessed Triduum to all, and a coming blessed Easter.

 ***

 Today is also the 16th anniversary of the death of Pope St. John Paul II. He died in 2005 at the age of 85.

 I was able to meet St. John Paul on a number of occasions.

 Once at an evening prayer (a Friday evening rosary) in 1991, he took up my young son, Christopher, then just two years old, for a moment in his arms, like kindly uncle, later sending to me a signed photograph of the moment with his signature and blessing. Not long after, he kindly encouraged me with great friendliness to begin the magazine Inside the Vatican in 1993. So I remember John Paul, and feel a personal affection for him.

 The subtitle of the journalistic initiative called Inside the Vatican was to accompany and report on the life of the Church "from the heart of the Church."

 Of course the heart of the Church is... Christ.

 The Church, the Vatican, is always, or should be, Christocentric — centered on Christ.

 It is for this reason that hearing about Christ, learning about Him, studying His life and words and acts, coming to know Him, is "the way of the Church," and "the way" of any writing and reflection and reporting about the Church.

 The "voice in the wilderness," whether John the Baptist, or any other herald of the coming of God's reign, speaks finally only about one thing: the coming of Christ, the encounter with Christ...

 Pope John Paul II placed Christ at the center of his teaching and ministry, and John Paul's own suffering in the his years, months and days of his life were a testimony to the whole world of his love for Christ.

 In this sense, John Paul was like Simon of Cyrene: he helped Jesus carry the cross that had become too heavy for him, beaten and wounded as He was.

 John Paul helped to carry the cross of Christ for 27 years as Pope, and in this way, showed us the path all Christians — in our inevitably stumbling ways — ought to walk.

 The way of the cross is the way of all Christians, the way of the Church, as it was on the first Good Friday, as it was for Pope John Paul, as it is for us today, and as it will be in time to come... —RM

 Here below, John Paul II, who died on this day in 2005, 16 years ago (photo by Grzegorz Galazka)

 Easter Appeal: On this Good Friday, just before Easter, 2021, we ask you to consider making an Easter contribution to support our journalistic work in Inside the Vatican magazine, these Letters, and also our initiatives to "build bridges" between Eastern and Western Christians in the hope of beginning to heal the "Great Schism" of 1054 A.D., and in this way to help bring about the long-desired reunion, or closer union, of the divided Catholic and Orthodox Churches. To make a contribution, click below:
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 "His most holy Passion must also be fulfilled in His mystical body"

 A Good Friday 2021 Reflection by Archbishop Viganň

 Introduction

 "With this warning the Savior reminds us that His most holy Passion must also be fulfilled in his Mystical Body — If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you — both in individuals over the course of the centuries as well as in the Church as an institution at the end of time." —Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganň, in a reflection on Good Friday published this morning, April 2, 2021

 The essential point of a new reflection for this year's Good Friday composed by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganň is contained in the sentence cited above: that individual Christians, and the Church Herself as an institution at the end of time, will face intense persecution.

 Here below is the full text of the archbishop's reflection, followed by an interview that the archbishop recently gave to Italian journalist Aldo Maria Valli.

 Below, Archbishop Viganň

 "Let us ask ourselves if in this sacred re-presentation we will have the courage to wipe the bloody Face of Christ in the devastated image of the Church, if like the Cyrenian we will know how to help the Church carry her Cross, if like Joseph of Arimathea we will offer a worthy place in which to lay her until she is resurrected." — Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganň in his April 2, 2021 reflection on Good Friday

 Simon of Cyrene assists Jesus in carrying his cross. The lithograph, done more than 200 years ago by the Italian artist Benedetto Eredi (1750-1812), is today in the church of Santo Stefano in Reggio Emilia in north-central Italy

 The Passion of the Church

 Here below, a meditation by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganň for Good Friday, April 2, 2021.

PASSIO ECCLESIĆ

A Meditation on the Passion and Death of the Lord

"This is your hour; it is the reign of darkness." —Luke 22:53

 By Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganň

 The texts of the liturgy of the Sacred Triduum strike us, like the lash of a whip, for the crude brutality of the torments to which the Lord was subjected by the will of the Sanhedrin, at the order of the Roman procurator.

 The crowd, instigated by the high priests, invokes the innocent blood of the Son of God upon themselves and their children, denying in the space of just a few days the triumph which had been attributed to Him at His entrance into Jerusalem.

 The praises and cries of Hosanna turn into shouts of Crucify him, and the palm branches become whips and clubs.

 How much crowds can disappoint: they are capable of giving honor with the same conviction with which shortly afterwards they decree the death sentence.

 Who are the protagonists and those responsible for this condemnation?

 Judas, one of the Twelve Apostles, a thief and a traitor, who for thirty pieces of silver hands the Master over to the ecclesiastical authority to have him arrested.

 The Sanhedrin, that is, the religious authority of the Old Law, which is still in force at the moment of the Passion.

 The false witnesses, who are either paid or else seek notoriety, who accuse Our Lord, contradicting one another.

 The people, or better the crowd that is ready for demonstrations in the square and lets itself be led by a few skilled manipulators.

 The Procurator Pontius Pilate, the representative of the Emperor in Palestine, who issues an unjust sentence but with official authority.

 And the whole jumble of nameless subordinates who rage with unprecedented cruelty against an innocent man, for the sole reason that this is expected of them: the Temple guards, the soldiers of the Sanhedrin, the Roman soldiers, the violent mob.

 Our Lord is condemned to death despite the fact that his innocence has been recognized by the legitimate Magistrate: Accipite eum vos et crucifigite; ego enim non invenio in eo causam — "Take him yourselves and crucify him; I find no case against him."

 Pilate does not want to antagonize the high priests, nor have the crowd against him, which the priests can manipulate by leveraging hatred of the Romans, who militarily occupy Palestine.

 Pilate knows the contempt that the Levites and elders of the people harbor against him, considering him a pagan from whom they must keep their distance, to the point of not wanting to contaminate themselves by entering the Praetorium: they remain outside even as they ensure that the temporal power which oppresses them will become their accomplice in condemning their Messiah for blasphemy, that is, for a religious crime.

 Or rather: in order to send an innocent man to death without a conviction. Innocens ego sum a sanguine iusti huius, says Pilate: "I am innocent of the death of this just man."

 Thus the civil authority, out of fearfulness in the face of arrogance and the blackmail of a riot, abandons the exercise of justice; just as the spiritual authority, in order not to lose the power which it has monopolized, hides the prophecies, insisting on not recognizing the promised Messiah despite the continuous confirmations of His divinity, and conspires to kill Jesus Christ because, speaking the truth, He has proclaimed that He is God.

 The princes of the priests threaten Pilate: Si hunc dimittis, non es amicus Cćsaris — "If you release him, you are no friend of Caesar" — and they go so far as to submit themselves to the imperial power in order to put their King to death: Non habemus regem, nisi Cćsarem — "We have no king but Caesar."

 But was it not Herod, the king of Judea?

 Even on the Cross, where the Lord intones the antiphon of his own Sacrifice with the words of the Psalmist: Deus meus, Deus meus: ut quid me dereliquisti? — "My God, my God: why have you abandoned me?" — those who have memorized the Sacred Scriptures pretend not to recognize in that solemn cry the last warning to the Synagogue, presaging the abolition of the Levitical priesthood and the imminent destruction of the Temple, forty years later, at the hand of Titus.

 In Psalm 21, David foretells what the Jews had before their eyes, what they were no longer able to understand because of their blindness, and we hear that warning repeated today in the Reproaches of the liturgy of Good Friday, incredulous at the infidelity of the Chosen People and broken-hearted at the no less appalling repetition of the infidelity of the new Israel, of her pontiffs, of her ministers.

 There is not a single word, in the liturgy of the Paschal Triduum, that does not sound like a pained and suffering accusation: the accusation of the Lord that sees fulfilled in his betrayal by Judas and his own people the action by which the religious and civil power unite against the Lord and His Christ: Astiterunt reges terrae, et principes convenerunt in unum, adversus Dominum, et adversus Christum ejus — "The kings of the earth rise up, and princes conspire together against the Lord and his Anointed."

 Our Lord says: If the world hates you, know that it hated me before you. If you were of the world, the world would love what is its own; but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, for this reason the world hates you. Remember the word that I have spoken to you: A servant is not greater than his master. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.

 With this warning the Savior reminds us that His most holy Passion must also be fulfilled in his Mystical Body — If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you — both in individuals over the course of the centuries as well as in the Church as an institution at the end of time.

 And the correspondence between the Passion of Christ and the Passion of the Church is significant.

 This correspondence seems to me to be even more evident in this hour of darkness, in which the power of the new unfaithful and corrupt Sanhedrin is allied with the temporal power in persecuting Our Lord and those who are faithful to Him.

 Today also the princes of the priests, thirsty for power and eager to please the empire that keeps them subjugated, have recourse to Pilate to have Catholics condemned, accusing them of blasphemy for not wanting to accept the betrayal of their leaders.

 The Apostles and martyrs of yesterday live once more in the apostles and martyrs of today, who for now are denied the privilege of a bloody martyrdom but are not denied persecution, ostracism and derision.

 Once again we find Judas, who sells good shepherds to the Sanhedrin; once again we find false witnesses, villains, those who instigate the crowd, the temple guards and the soldiers of the Praetorium; once again we find Caiaphas who tears his garments, Peter who denies the Lord, and the Apostles who run away and hide; once again we find those who crown the Church with thorns, who slap her face and mock her, who scourge her and expose her to ridicule; who throw upon her the Cross of the scandals of her ministers, the sins of her faithful; once again today there are those who dip the sponge in vinegar and pierce the side of the Church with a spear; once again today there is a seamless garment and those who cast lots for it.

 But just as on Good Friday, so also today the Mother of the Church and an Apostle will remain at the foot of the Cross, witnesses of the passio Ecclesić ["the passion of the Church"] just as they were once witnesses of the passio Christi ["the passion of Christ"].

 May each of us, in these hours of silence and recollection, examine himself.

 Let us ask ourselves if we want to be, in the liturgical action of the end times, among those who, even if only for the sake of conforming, looked away, shook their heads, and spat on the Lord on His journey to Calvary.

 Let us ask ourselves if, in this sacred re-presentation, we will have the courage to wipe the bloody Face of Christ in the devastated image of the Church, if like the Cyrenian we will know how to help the Church carry her Cross, if like Joseph of Arimathea we will offer a worthy place in which to lay her until she is resurrected.

 Let us ask ourselves how many times we have slapped Christ, taking the part of the Sanhedrin and the high priests, how many times we have placed human respect ahead of our Faith, how many times we have accepted thirty pieces of silver to betray and hand over the Savior, in His good ministers, to the princes of the priests and the elders of the people.

 When the Church will cry out her Consummatum est ["It is finished"] under a black sky, while the earth will shake and the veil of the temple will be torn from top to bottom, what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ (Col 1:24) will be accomplished in the Mystical Body.

 We will await the deposition from the Cross, the laying in the sepulchre, the absorbed and mute silence of nature, the descent into Hell.

 There will be, also in this instance, temple guards to keep watch and ensure that the pusillus grex ["little flock"] does not rise again, and there will be those who will say that His followers have come to steal it.

 Holy Saturday will also come for the Holy Church; the Exultet and the Alleluia will also come after the sorrow, death, and darkness of the tomb. Scimus Christum surrexisse a mortuis vere ["We known that Christ is truly risen from the dead"]: we know that His Mystical Body will also rise with Him, just at the moment when his ministers will think that all is lost.

 And they will recognize the Church, as they have recognized the Lord, in fractione panis ["in the breaking of the bread"].

 This is my wish, from the bottom of my heart, for this Holy Easter and for the times that await us.

 + Carlo Maria Viganň, Archbishop

April 2, 2021

Feria VI in Parasceve

Interview of Aldo Maria Valli with Mons. Carlo Maria Viganň

Holy Thursday, April 1, 2021

(link)

 Your Excellency, through your repeated interventions and the activity of various blogs you are denouncing in every way the apostasy that is spreading in the Church just like the tyranny imposed by the ideology of the New World Order, to which the Hierarchy of the Church seems to be in total submission. With respect to these themes, a division is noted, that is ever more accentuated, within families and also between friends. With respect to the affairs of the world and the Church there is a radically divided judgment, with a polarization that seems to admit no mutual understanding. It is as if two different cultures have emerged, two different anthropologies, even two different faiths. Thus, how should we behave in this situation if we wish to safeguard love for the truth?

 Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganň: You are right: the establishment of the New Order, begun under the pretext of the so-called pandemic, makes the loss of inner peace and serenity perceptible to many; it makes us perceive an evil that overwhelms us and before which we feel powerless; it sharpens divisions and disputes between family members, relatives, and friends.

 Very often we are saddened to see how the lie succeeds in convincing people close to us whom we had believed to be mature and capable of discerning good from evil.

 It seems incredible to us that our friends have allowed themselves to be deceived, indeed I would almost say to be hypnotized, by the drumbeat of the mainstream media: doctors whom we considered conscientious seem to have cancelled their own scientific knowledge by abdicating rationality in the name of a sort of crazy superstition; acquaintances who up until yesterday condemned the horrors of Nazism and Communism do not realize how much the horrors of those dictatorships are being re-proposed in an even more inhuman and ruthless form, replicating on a wider scale the experimentation of the concentration camps and the violation of the natural rights of the world population.

 We cannot understand how it can be that our parish priest speaks to us about Covid as if it were a plague, that the mayor behaves like a hierarch, that a neighbor calls the police because a family organizes a barbecue on the terrace.

 Elderly people who once fought valiantly and risked their lives are now literally terrorized by a treatable flu.

 Fathers of families with solid moral principles tolerate their children being indoctrinated into vice and perversion, as if what has been passed on to them and what they believe in no longer has any value.

 Speaking about love of one’s country, the defense of national borders, and national sovereignty is now considered fascist.

 And we ask ourselves: where is the Italy that we have loved? Where is the Church that instructed us in the Faith and made us grow in the Grace of God? Is it possible that all of this has been cancelled in just a few years?

 It is obvious that what is now happening has been planned for decades, both in the civil sphere as well as the religious.

 And many people, very many, have been deceived: first by convincing them to grant rights to those who share neither our Faith nor our values, then by making them feel almost guilty for the fact of being Catholic, for their ideas, for their past.

 Today we have reached the point of being barely tolerated as retrogrades and fanatics, while there are those would like to make it a crime to do what has constituted the basis of civilized life for millennia and declare every behavior against God, against nature, and against our identity not only licit but obligatory.

 In the face of this upheaval that involves our entire society, the division that emerges between the children of light and children of darkness appears increasingly clear: this is a grace that is granted to us by God in order to make a courageous and decisive choice.

 Let us recall the words of Our Lord: “Do not believe that I have come to bring peace upon the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword” (Mt 10:34).

Sursa: www.InsideTheVatican.com

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