Dear Parishioners,

This week, we as a Church mourn the loss of our Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. I personally mourn him because this Holy Father made a huge impact on my own life and vocation. He is a man that was often wrongly characterized as a harsh pitbull for the faith. But, in reality, anyone who actually knows him, knows that he was more like a calm reserved cat. He did his duty, defended the faith and showed an incredibly deep understanding of scripture and the traditions of the Church. If you have never read his “Spirit of the Liturgy” or his “Jesus of Nazareth” series or his exhortation “Verbum Domini,” then you are in for an intellectual treat.

I will now let Pope Benedict summarize his own life work. It’s worth a read:

Stand firm in the faith! Do not let yourselves be confused! It often seems that science — the natural sciences on the one hand and historical research (especially exegesis of Sacred Scripture) on the other — are able to offer irrefutable results at odds with the Catholic faith. I have experienced the transformations of the natural sciences since long ago and have been able to see how, on the contrary, apparent certainties against the faith have vanished, proving to be not science, but philosophical interpretations only apparently pertaining to science; just as, on the other hand, it is in dialogue with the natural sciences that faith, too, has learned to understand better the limit of the scope of its claims, and thus its specificity. It is now sixty years that I have been accompanying the journey of Theology, particularly of the Biblical Sciences, and with the succession of different generations I have seen theses that seemed unshakable collapse, proving to be mere hypotheses: the liberal generation (Harnack, Jülicher etc.), the existentialist generation (Bultmann etc.), the Marxist generation. I saw and see how out of the tangle of assumptions the reasonableness of faith emerged and emerges again. Jesus Christ is truly the way, the truth and the life — and the Church, with all its insufficiencies, is truly His body.

(Source: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/253202/full-text-of-benedict-xvis-spiritualtestament)

God bless! Always stand firm with Christ!

Fr. Carter