Benedict xvi, Teresa of Avila, and the New Evangelization

Sharing with you my piece in the current issue of the CBCP Monitor.  You may check out the column AND THAT'S THE TRUTH on Page 4 (Editorial Page), by clicking on this link:

 http://www.scribd.com/doc/129027442/CBCP-Monitor-Vol-17-No-5

By Teresa R. Tunay, OCDS      March 12, 2013 marks the 391^st anniversary of the canonization of St. Teresa of Avila, Doctor of the Church and founder of the Order of the Discalced Carmelites who had been hailed by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI as a model in the Church’s efforts to launch the New Evangelization. 

Flashback to February, 2011, exactly two years before announcing his resignation, the Holy Father initiated a new cycle of catecheses on the Doctors of the Church, saying he would “begin with a saint who represents one of the highest examples of Christian spirituality of all times, St. Teresa of Avila.”  He went on to say that St. Teresa “stressed how essential prayer is”, prayer for her being a “frequent and intimate conversation with a friend whom we know loves us very much.”

On July 16, 2012, memorial of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the Holy Father said, “Today, too, as in the sixteenth century, in the midst of rapid transformation, it is important that trusting prayer be the heart of the apostolate, so that the redeeming message of Jesus Christ may sound out clearly and dynamically.”

He then reminded the world that in espousing a “radical return” to a more ascetic life by the Carmelites, St. Teresa, reformer of the Carmelite Order, sought to “create a form of life which favored a personal encounter with the Lord. The ultimate goal of Teresa’s reform and the creation of new monasteries in a world lacking spiritual values was to protect apostolic work with prayer.”

He quoted the Spanish teacher of prayer who wrote (to her nuns) of post-Reformation Europe: “The world is on fire.  Men try to condemn Christ once again.  They would raze His Church to the ground.  No, my sisters, this is no time to treat with God for things of little importance.”  Then he asked, “Does this luminous and engaging call, written more than four centuries ago by the mystic saint, not sound familiar in our own times?”

Fast forward to February 2013: the Holy Father, in announcing his resignation, said that he would thereafter “live a life of prayer, hidden to the world.”  Non-believers judged it as an act of cowardice—“deserting his cross”—thinking he had been “shamed” by scandals in the Church.

But in ending his papacy, to my mind, the pope was just being pope, and in a very radical way—leading his people to God, not only by word, but by deed.  He was, and is, in effect, heeding a “luminous call” which should echo and reverberate in the heart of every one who believes in the timeliness and relevance of the call to the New Evangelization.

By the simple admission of his powerlessness, the light of a Greater Power shone through Benedict XVI.  By opting for a monastic—even heremitical—existence as an ordinary priest praying in one corner of the Vatican, he is showing us what matters most in his ministry; he is letting  “trusting prayer be the heart of the apostolate so that the redeeming message of Jesus Christ may sound out clearly and dynamically.”

In exalting the Spanish mystic—“who did not have an academic formation” but became a Doctor of the Church—Benedict XVI said that in the “exhilarating task” of the New Evangelization, St. Teresa’s example should inspire all Christians because “she evangelized unhesitatingly, showing tireless ardor, employing methods free from inertia and using expressions bathed in light.  This remains important in the current time when there is a pressing need for the baptized to renew their hearts through individual prayer in which, following the guidance of St. Teresa, they also focus on contemplation of Christ’s blessed humanity as the only way to reach the glory of God.”

Over 450 years ago, St. Teresa of Avila began the reform of a religious congregation; today, when we find ourselves in an environment not much different from hers when she wrote “The world is on fire.  Men try to condemn Christ once again.  They would raze His Church to the ground…” we are grateful for a pope giving up a “powerful” throne in order to lead us back to what is most essential in our faith: not preaching, not projects, but prayer.  And that’s the truth.

EDSA ek ek

The following is an article by Magdalena Torres that first saw print 27 years ago, shortly after the “EDSA revolution.”  After all these years of celebrating EDSA I, we ask ourselves: What has the Feb. 25 EDSA revolution really done for the Filiinos? 
 

It is interesting to note that in spite of the “miracle at EDSA” the people of this only Christian nation in Asia have remained loyal to anyone but Christ. Note the various factions we are thanking for the so called “bloodless revolution.” Believers in the US supremacy maintain that it is the American intervention in Philippine affairs that saved the Filipinos from a bloodbath. Fans of the Enrile-Ramos block insist that the “bloodless revolution” would not have happened without their heroes’ crucial change of heart. Marcos sympathizers assert that there surely would have been bloodshed had it not been for Marcos’ love for his people. A foreign correspondent writes that the television cameras (notably those which recorded for worldwide viewing the Marcos-Ver “debate”) are to be credited for actually having prevented carnage among our people. And advocates of “people’s power,” led by the involved clergy, of course, are just as quick in claiming it is “our rosaries” that brought about the “miracle.”

While each may be valid in its own right, all these claims, however, have one thing in common; they all attribute the almost bloodless revolution to human cause, thus further dividing this Christian nation into segments none of which seems to have absorbed the message of Christ from the “miracle.”

I recently bumped into a priest I had not seen for months. To my smiling “How are you?” he exclaimed, “We’ve won! We’ve won! It’s over! All efforts didn’t go to waste! Marcos is out!”

I must admit it struck me dumb, but only because I was asking inside, “Lord, where is this country headed to if all the evils our priests cared to fight are those outside of ourselves?” But I quickly rode along and asked him, “We’ve won? You mean, we’re now all on the side of God?”

The priest, unsmiling now, blurted out, “What do you mean we’re now on the side of God? We won because God has always been on our side, right from the start!”

I switched to another topic, but the brief encounter was to flash on and on in my mind, like a yellow traffic light that wouldn’t be turned off.

I view the “miracle at EDSA” as an act of Divine Mercy, a blanket absolution granted to an unrepentant nation of blind followers and blind leaders.

Imagine what would have happened had events pursued the logical conclusion our human actions were leading them to. We had sown so much hatred around us then that we deserved nothing less than a national tragedy to make us learn our lesson, yet God chose to send us His love instead, and like the proverbial rain that falls on both the just and the unjust, His forgiving hand came to preserve a whole nation bent on destroying itself. In that momentous event that nobody expected, Jesus Christ— with knuckles swollen from knocking on the door of our hearts—once more cried, “Let me in!” And He is still weeping, because our hearts have remained shut.

We are back in the rat race, and human folly may yet reduce the “miracle at EDSA” into just another tool for attracting tourists’ dollars to our shores. In the euphoria following this Christian nation’s miraculous escape from a bloody confrontation, Christ is all but forgotten. Our idolatry goes on. A lady president is deified as “a goddess in the Pantheon of democracy,” lionized as a “Joan of Arc in a yellow tunic.” We’re still groveling before our colonizers as the true guardian of our welfare. We’re still counting on men with guns to bring us peace. We continue to take the word of the media—especially foreign media—as gospel truth. In a mad play for power we threaten to draw the blood we claim our fallen idol refused to shed. And we are in greater danger than ever of clinging to our pagan ways to bring about Utopia. How thankless can we be, that even in “gratitude” we must grab the glory for ourselves?

“But we thanked God for the miracle, didn’t we?” Perhaps a million of us would cry thus, citing one impassioned celebration at the park where we flew balloons and shamelessly hailed Cory with much greater zeal than we’ve ever done for Mary. And we go on “thanking God,” here and abroad, all the while betraying our lack of consideration for Christ by discarding the season’s liturgical purple in favor of a political color. Feverish with false joys and unexamined victories we come to our houses of worship burning with politics instead of prayer. We call this thanksgiving?

How much longer must we remain deaf to Christ? How can God’s kingdom come when we do not want to dethrone ourselves in our hearts? The “miracle at EDSA” is not a reward for our efforts. It is part of a Divine Plan for this only Christian nation in Asia: God allowed the evil in us to drag us down to such depths so that we may finally see that only He can lift us up again. How can it be a reward when all our efforts were leading us to hatred and divisiveness?

Let us be humble and admit that we did not cause the miracle—it was God who willed to save us from ourselves in spite of the self-serving prayers we uttered when we found our necks stuck on the chopping block. How dare we say our actions, our prayers, prevented bloodshed? Who moved us to pray when blood threatened to rain on our picnic?

What a shame that the face of Christ continues to be spat upon in a Christian nation! We are not thanking God at all—we are merely using His gift to puff up our egos. Since the “miracle” we’ve been boasting: I was there. I’m proud to be a Filipino. Look at these pictures―that’s me in front of the tank. Galing, ano? Two days ago, at a movie house, I sat next to man wearing a yellow shirt with a picture of a tank that says “I WAS A HUMAN BARRICADE” in big bold red letters. I found it ironic that someone who could stop advancing tanks could not stop himself from littering his surroundings with butong-pakwan shells.

It is saddening to think that in spite of the miracle we have remained slaves of sin and habit―look around, the danger signs are everywhere. Did this Christian nation merely change her dress for the benefit of the foreign media? Thanking God for a miracle means acknowledging God as the only Power in our lives. This Power deserves more than just token gratitude. What is a miracle for if it comes into our eyes and our ears and goes out of our mouths without touching our hearts? Did God give us this gift only so we could slap His face with it? Or only so we could brag to the rest of the world that we are special children of God?

If we sincerely want to thank God we will make Him “Number One” in our hearts. We will make an honest effort towards change through individual conversion. The “miracle at EDSA” is Christ’s invitation for us to expand as Christians. Let us raise the quality of our worship, deepen our faith, heighten the levels of our prayer, and pray for a constant awareness of God’s presence, so that one day when each of us will have enthroned the Christ in our hearts, we may know what we mean when we say “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…”

The article ends there.

I can’t claim political savvy, but I think that as a blatantly Christian people we ought to examine our use of the word “revolution.” As it has come to be popularly linked to “EDSA 1”, writer Ambrose Bierce would be spot-on correct in saying “Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.”

Pity that we have to count on political icons, slogans and symbols to better our lives! The teachings of our Lord Jesus are as revolutionary today as they were when He walked the earth, but in overlooking their relevance we have failed to use them to revolutionize our hearts. So, dear countrymen, unless and until we take Jesus seriously, we can expect more of the same headlines in year 2036, the 50^th anniversary of the “bloodless revolution.” And that’s the truth.