Dear Cardinals,

 venerable brothers in the episcopate and the priesthood,

dear brothers and sisters!

"Expergiscere, homo: quia pro te Deus factus est homo ? Arise, man, because God has made himself man for you” (St Augustine, Discourses, 185). With this invitation of St Augustine to grasp the true meaning of the Christmas of Christ, I open my meeting with you, dear collaborators of the Roman Curia, as the Christmas festivities draw nearer. To each one of you, I extend an affectionate greeting, thanking you for the sentiments of devotion and affection, expressed efficiently by Cardinal Dean, to whom my grateful sentiments go. God became man for us: this is the message which each year spreads from the silent grotto of Bethlehem to the farthest ends of the earth. Christmas is a feast of light and of peace, it is a day of interior wonder and joy which spreads across the universe because “God made himself man”. From a humble grotto in Bethlehem, the eternal Son of God became a little Child, turning to each one of us: he calls upon us, invites us to be born again with him because, together with him, we can live eternally in communion with the Most Holy Trinity.

With hearts full of joy arising from this awareness, let us go back in our minds to the events of the year which is about to set. Great events which left a deep impact on the life of the Church lie just behind us.

The memory of John Paul II

I think first of all of the departure of our loved Holy Father John Paul II, preceded by a long journey of suffering and gradual loss of speech. No pope has left us a quantity of texts comparable to what he left us: no Pope was previously able to visit the world, as he did, and to talk directly to men of all the continents. But at the end, his was a journey of suffering and silence. Unforgettable images, which will stay with us forever, recall Palm Sunday when, with a palm branch in his hand and wracked by pain, he stayed at the window and gave us the blessing of the Lord, about to walk towards the Cross. Then the image in his private chapel, holding the Crucifix in his hand, participating in the Via Crucis in the Colosseum, where he had led the procession so many times, bearing the Cross himself. And finally, the mute blessing on Easter Sunday, when we saw through the pain, the promise of the resurrection, of eternal life, shining. The Holy Father, with his words and actions, gave us great things; but no less important was the lesson he gave us from the school of suffering and silence. In his last book, “Memoria e Identità (Memory and Identity)” (Rizzoli 2005), he left us an interpretation of suffering which is not a theological or a philosophical theory, but the long-matured fruit of his own personal journey of suffering, travelled with the help of faith in the Crucified Lord. This interpretation, which he elaborated in faith and which gave meaning to his suffering lived in communion with that of the Lord, spoke through his dumb pain, transforming it into a great message. Both at the beginning, and once again at the end of the above-mentioned book, the Pope showed himself to be deeply touched by the sight of the power of evil, which we experienced so dramatically in the century which has just come to a close. He says in the text: “It was not evil on a small scale… it was an evil of gigantic proportions, an evil which made use of state structures to undertake its ill-omened work, an evil set into the system” (page 198). Is evil perhaps invincible? Is it really the ultimate power in history? Precisely because of the experience of evil, the question of redemption became the essential and central question of Pope Wojtyla’s life and thoughts as a Christian. Is there a limit against which the power of evil is shattered? Yes, there is, answered the Pope in this book of his, as he did in his Encyclical on redemption. The power which limits evil is divine mercy. Divine mercy opposes violence and the posturing of evil ? as the “totally other” of God, as the power of God ? throughout history. We can say with the Apocalypse that the lamb is stronger than the dragon.

At the end of the book, looking back retrospectively at the attack on 13 May 1981 and even on the basis of the experience of his journey with God and with the world, John Paul II deepened his response further. That which poses limits on the power of evil, the power which ultimately wins over is ? this is what he tells us- the suffering of God, the suffering of the Son of God on the Cross: “The suffering of the crucified God is not only a form of suffering like the others… Christ, suffering for all of us, conferred a new meaning upon suffering, he introduced it in a new dimension, in a new order: that of love… The passion of Christ on the Cross gave a radically new meaning to suffering, he transformed it from within… it is a suffering which burns and consumes evil with the flame of love… Each human suffering, each pain, each infirmity encloses a promise of salvation… Christ is the Redeemer of the world: ‘By his bruises we are healed’ (Is 53, 5)”. (pag. 198 ss.). All this is not merely well-versed theology, but an expression of faith lived and matured in suffering. Certainly, we need to do all we can to alleviate suffering and to impede the injustice which provokes suffering of the innocents. All the same, we must also do our all so that all men may be able to discover the meaning of suffering, to be thus able to accept their own suffering and to unite it to the suffering of Christ. In this way, it merges with the redeeming love and becomes, as a consequence, a force against the evil of the world. The answer the world had with the death of the Pope was an overwhelming manifestation of recognition of the fact that in his ministry, he had given himself totally to God for the world: a thank-you for the fact that he, in a world full of hate and violence, taught us once again about love and suffering in the service of others; he showed us, so to speak, the Redeemer and redemption live, and gave us the certainty that, in fact, evil does not have the last word in the world.

(to continue)