Day's Links - 2015-02-25

Wise words from the future Pope Benedict XVI on fasting, reflecting on a conversation he had previously had with an Orthodox patriarch:

 

Consider, also, how much more fruitful ecumenical dialogue would be if Roman Catholics valued fasting as much as Orthodox Christians.  In 1983, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger touched on this connection when he preached the Lenten retreat for the Pope and the Roman curia at the Vatican.  In one of his talks, the future Pope Benedict XVI relates how Cardinal Willebrands, the president at the time of the Pontifical Concil for Promoting Christian Unity, told him about a conversation he had had with the Patriarch of the Coptic Church in Egypt at the end of the latter’s visit to Rome.  “Yes,” he said, “I have understood that our faith in Jesus Christ, true God and true man, is identical.  But I have [also] found that the Church of Rome has abolished fasting and without fasting there is no church.”   Obviously, the Patriarch of the Coptic Church considered fasting to be of great importance.  Of course, in principle the Church of Rome has not abolished fasting.  But in practice, the Patriarch’s observation rings true as much today as it did in the early eighties.  Without a doubt, such a person would have a lot more respect for the Church of the West if he saw evidence that the Catholic hierarchy and faithful alike took fasting every bit as seriously as the Church of the East, and stopped making excuses for modern man on account of his needs and circumstances!

 

Actuallly, modern man stands in desperate need of fasting and abstinence. After relating the remarks of the Patriarch of the Coptic Church, Cardinal Ratzinger proceeded to speak of fasting in relation to conversion –– of putting God first in one’s life:  “The primacy of God is not really achieved if it does not also include man's corporality.  The truly central actions of man's biological life are eating and reproduction.  Therefore virginity and fasting have been from the beginning of the Christian tradition two indispensable expressions of the primacy of God, of faith in the reality of God.  Without being given corporeal expression also, the primacy of God with difficulty remains of decisive moment in man's life.  It is true that fasting is not all there is to Lent, but it is something indispensable for which there is no substitute.  Freedom in the actual application of fasting is good and corresponds to the different situations in which we find ourselves.  But a communal and public act of the Church seems to be no less necessary than in past times, as a public testimony to the primacy of God and of spiritual values, as much as solidarity with all who are starving.  Without fasting we shall in no way cast out the demon of our time.”[2]  And what is the demon of our time?  In our day, man is possessed with the idea that he himself holds the primacy in everything; that he, not God, is “the measure of all things.”