St. Paul As Our Model
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith on Wednesday, February 11, 2009 10:00 PM
You know the Holy Father loves cats, right?
He had a special visitor at his Wednesday audience on January 28—as part of a visiting circus troupe. On that day he dedicated his reflection to Paul’s letters to the early bishops.
The Pope especially draws our attention to the fact that as early as Paul’s letters, false doctrines have begun to appear, and he notes the parallel with our own time. “We see how modern this concern is, because today as well Scripture is sometimes read as an object of historical curiosity and not as the Word of the Holy Spirit, in which we can hear the very voice of the Lord and recognize his presence in history.”
The “take-home lesson” for us is the necessity of reading scripture regularly, but reading it “in dialogue with the Holy Spirit,” and in concert with the deposit of faith. This is how scripture is both living and open to any person of any culture, and anchored in the truth.
The following week he delivered the final lecture in this “St. Paul seminar” on Paul’s death and heritage. Pope Benedict starts with a survey of texts which tell us something about Paul’s martyrdom at the hands of Nero, and he relates some of the legends related to the event (the most famous probably being the notion that the “Tre Fontane” of Rome sprang from the spots where Paul’s head bounced).
His heritage, however, is much greater than legend. Very early on the Church recognized him with Peter as a co-founder of the Church of Rome and his letters came to be included in our Christian liturgy. The fathers of the church drew from his spirituality and theology. His greatness is such that even disparate figures such as Luther, Nietszche and proponents of the historical-critical method of scriptural exegesis take Paul as a touchstone—even when it is to use him as a scourge against the Church or to mock him.
Be that as it may, the Pope sees the increasing meeting of the minds between Catholic & Protestant theologians on disputed questions as fruit of a shared devotion to Paul’s teaching.
Benedict concludes his Pauline catechesis citing St. John Chrysostom, who compared Paul to Noah:
Paul “did not place together the shafts to build an ark, instead, in place of uniting tablets of wood, he composed letters, and thus dug out of the waters not two or three or five members of his own family, but the entire inhabited world that was about to perish”
Benedict adds these lines:
Precisely still and always the Apostle Paul can do this. To tend toward him, as much to his apostolic example as to his doctrine, would be therefore a stimulus, if not a guarantee, to consolidate the Christian identity of each one of us and for the renewal of the whole Church.
Previous Sessions:
Session 1
Session 2
Session 3
Session 4
Session 5
Session 6
Session 7
Session 8
Session 9
Session 10
Session 11
Session 12
Session 13
Session 14
Session 15
Session 16
Session 17
Session 18
Session 19
Session 20
Session 21
Print Blog
Email a FriendPost a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Faith And Family Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
