The prompt devotion with which, beloved sons and daughters,
you have come here in great numbers from every part of Rome, our Episcopal
See, affords a living testimony to your willing response to the exhortation
which the Church addresses to all the faithful on Passion Sunday. Would
that you would hear His voice today (Psalm 94, 7). This voice of the
Lord, which the bells of your churches and the resonant chimes of this
patriarchal basilica bring to you even as a murmuring echo, has resounded
during the past weeks of Lent in your innermost hearts as, while gathered
around the pulpits of your churches, you have listened to the words
of zealous Lenten preachers in the course of the missions which we had
ordered.
These preachers, like their predecessors in past centuries,
have impressed upon you with a burning zeal, and sometimes also with
a loving severity, the duty of giving serious thought to and providing
for the "unum necessarium" (Luke, x, 42), the one thing necessary-namely,
your own personal spiritual salvation and sanctification.
In this blessed time, the Divine Sower has passed
amongst you and has abundantly sown the seed of His word in your souls,
which by constant prayer and penance, had been made ready to receive
it as upon good and fertile soil. And now, in the presence of the true
Cross, from which Christ with arms extended invites and awaits you,
we, His unworthy vicar, beseech you, beloved sons and daughters, "that,
denying ungodliness and worldly desires, we should live soberly, and
justly, and godly in this world, looking for the blessed hope and coming
of the glory of the great God and Savior Jesus Christ" (Titus,
ii, 12-13).
Henceforward, let none of you fail with each passing
day to raise his heart and hands to God in humble and confident prayer
of adoration, praise, impetration and thanksgiving. Keep holy Sunday,
the Lord's day, as the faithful of Rome, your fathers, have given example
from the time of the Apostles.
Let all of you assist faithfully at the sacrifice
of the mass, partake in large numbers of eucharistic banquet and conduct
yourselves in a manner that the God of Peace and Love may dwell amongst
you in your domestic and social life. Parents, remember always that
you are responsible before God, before the Church, before all of human
society, for the spiritual and temporal welfare of your children. And
you, sons and daughters, renew in yourselves that proper respect and
obedience toward those who have given you life and hold in your regard
the place of God.
You, O husbands and wives, be mindful of the moment
in which before the altar of God you solemnly promised to one another
inviolable fidelity. Keep it and guard it integrally without the slightest
stain or shadow, and it will be until the end for you and your family
a source of the most abundant blessings. For if, on the other hand,
the fatal canker of marital infidelity should spread and become general
in a people, malediction and misfortune would be called down upon them
for their great guilt. All of you, together in general competition,
strive in all things to reintegrate and restore the uprightness of moral
conduct.
In all things: In the education of offspring, in the
formation of youth, chaste, sound, sincere, holily proud and jealous
of its virtue. In all things: In the life of labor, in recreation, in
amusements, in athletic activity. Otherwise the Christian honor of the
people and human dignity itself will be no more, for "God hath
not called us unto uncleanness but unto sanctification" (I Thessalonians,
iv, 7).
Let none of you be numbered amongst those who, in
the midst of the terrible calamity in which the human family finds itself
at present, see in that tragedy only a propitious occasion to enrich
themselves through dishonest means, by taking advantage of the suffering
and need of their neighbor and raising prices without limit in order
to procure profits that are scandalous.
Look at their hands: They are besmirched with blood;
the blood of widows and orphans; the blood of children and youths, whose
physical development is impeded or retarded by malnutrition and hunger;
the blood of thousands and thousands of unfortunates of all classes
whom they have sacrificed at the altar of their despicable trade. This
blood, like that of Abel, cries to heaven against the new Cains. And
on their hands the smirch remains indelible, just as down deep in their
conscience their crimes must remain unforgivable until they shall have
recognized it and through tears and expiation made amends to the extent
to which reparation of so great a crime is possible.
Do not shut your hearts to the voice of the Divine
Master: "Blessed are the merciful," he said, "for they
shall obtain mercy" (Matthew v, 7). For the love of Christ, join
together in the spirit of brotherhood, lend a helping hand to one another,
you who enjoy still, or who recently acquired, a measure of the world's
goods, and you who have tragically lost everything, in order that through
mutual support you may overcome the economic crisis into which the country
has fallen and which would be ever so greatly relieved were all men
united by truly human solidarity and by a real divine Christian charity.
Listen today, then, to the voice of God, and do not
harden your hearts. That voice counsels: "Let the wicked forsake
his way and the unjust man his thoughts, and let him return to the Lord."
(Isaiah lv, 7). To those who would turn a deaf ear to this invitation
of the Almighty, to those who would not listen to the persuasive voice
of the shepherds of souls, even in the face of the clear and commanding
call of conscience, another voice, the savage and atrociously real voice
of the cruel events of our times, makes itself audible to announce and
warn that war is the fruit and the wages of sin.
The sinner well may try to bury his head in the sand,
the wicked man well may insist on following obstinately the ways of
evil, far removed from God: But that tragic voice will become ever louder,
ever more terrifying, will penetrate the innermost recesses of their
heart, even through the immediate cause and responsibilities of the
inhuman conflict and through the mist of external acts and words, to
seek out and expose the profound cause which has given rise to and nourished
the horrible conflagration, the spirit which has aroused and embittered
the strife, which is the spirit of pride of ambition and of greed.
It is the spirit of evil which wars against the spirit
of God and which would banish from the earth the kingdom of Christ and
deify material force, in order to drive out of the lives of peoples
and still more to abolish from international relations, every essential
distinction between good and evil and between what is just and what
is unjust.
To those who have allowed themselves to be seduced
by the advocates of violence and who, after having thoughtlessly followed
them, begin finally to reawaken from their deception, in consternation
at seeing to what their servile docility has led them, there remains
no other way to salvation than that of repudiating definitely the idolatry
of absolute nationalism, the pride of race and blood, the desire for
hegemony in the possession of worldly goods, and to turn resolutely
toward that spirit of sincere fraternity which is founded on the worship
of the Divine Father of all men and in which those ideas, for too long
a time opposed, of right and of duty, of advantage and of disadvantage,
are reconciled in justice and in charity.
But the reconciliation of peoples will only be able
to guarantee stability if it is carried out faithfully and with large-mindedness.
We cannot even suppose that after so many sorrowful events there is
anyone who might give in to the temptation of profiting by the present
situation of affairs to turn the organization of peace to his own advantage
against the dictates of justice. He, in fact, would be for the moment
in a position indeed to present himself as a benefactor of humanity,
but later history, which judges in the light of higher principles and
vaster experience, will classify him not among those who have contributed
to redeem the world from oppression and violence, but rather among the
deceivers who in a grave and decisive hour have betrayed the expectations
of peoples to whom indescribable suffering conferred a new title to
respect for their inviolable rights.
Let us not forget that before God (for whom every
heart is open and to whom every will speaks) votive mass of the Holy
Ghost (hearts hold no darkness, nor wills secrets). Teacher and Sovereign
Lord, He holds in His hands and can move at will the spirit of the men
who believe they have in theirs the destinies of the world. He can cause
the birth, the sprouting and the blossoming of thoughts and sentiments
that will inspire a peace corresponding to His designs and to the hopes
of men of good-will.
He can do it but He awaits our cooperation and desires
that we supplicate and pray to Him. And that is the reason why the whole
of Christianity, and why on this day the children of the Eternal City,
with a contrite and humble heart in repentance and expiation, in prayer
and penance, raise eyes and hands to Him Who alone can cause the serenity
and pacification of all peoples to follow Him from the horrors of discord
and hatred, the innumerable anxieties of peoples, especially in those
countries that are still fields of battle.
And that is why also, mindful that the Lord and Father
"manifests His omnipotence above all in mercy and forgiveness"
(Oration Mass of Tenth Sunday after Pentecost), we beg Him to put an
end to so mighty a scourge, to bring about the great and much desired
regeneration of deeply wounded humanity and to hasten the coming of
a true and lasting peace. The path that will have to lead from the conflict
to the suspension of hostilities, from the truce of arms to peace, is
still in each of its stages covered over with shadows that may perhaps
conceal surprises and dangers.
The more that man endeavors with his reflections and
calculations to foresee and prevent conflicts, so much the more he at
times perceives an evil spirit across his path to upset, at least momentarily,
his best thought-out plans. But at long last-and may it be soon-the
hour shall come, the hour determined by God and hastened by the merits
and prayers of the elect. May that hour find you ready, especially you
beloved children of our Rome, seeing you in this moment thronged at
the foot of the great obelisk which was witness to the passion of Peter.
Our thoughts go back to your ancestors whose grateful faith chiselled
on the granite pedestal of that obelisk the joyful acclamation "Christus
vincit" (Christ conquers). Your fathers, before chiseling in stone
the memory of this triumph of Christ, pledge of consolation and hope,
had exalted it with valor in battle and with generosity in suffering.
This, indeed, is the honor of Christian Rome, which
is now entrusted to you, an honor which is embodied not so much in the
stones of its basilicas and monuments as in the faith, in the love and
in the virtue of its children. Woe betide us if the children of Rome
should leave the care and conservation of that faith to the marble,
the canvasses, the memories of ancient glory.
Sons and daughters of Christian Rome be proud of the
heritage that your fathers have deeded to you, hold it aloft in honor,
in honor before a past that recalls and summons to heroism, in honor
before future generations for whom you must prepare in this anguished
present the way of orderly progress and of true and unephemeral greatness
for the achievement of earthly and eternal happiness.
Sources: ibiblio