BENEDICT XVI

The Superabundant
Gift of Jesus’ Self
EXCERPT FROM THE HOMILY OF HIS HOLINESS
Pastoral Visit to Brescia and Concesio
Paul VI Square, Brescia, Italy. (November 8, 2009)

At the heart of the Liturgy of the Word this Sunday, the 32nd in Ordinary Time, we find the figure of the poor widow or, more precisely, we find her gesture when she dropped her last coins into the collection box of the Temple treasury. Thanks to Jesus’ attentive look, it has become the proverbial “widow’s mite” and indeed is synonymous with the generosity of those who give unsparingly the little they possess. However, I would like first of all to emphasize the importance of the atmosphere in which this Gospel episode takes place, that is, the Temple of Jerusalem, the religious center of the People of Israel and the heart of its whole life. The Temple was the place of public and solemn worship, but also of pilgrimage, of the traditional rites and of rabbinical disputations such as those recorded in the Gospel between Jesus and the rabbis of that time in which, however, Jesus teaches with unique authority as the Son of God. He judges the scribes severely, as we have heard, because of their hypocrisy: while they display great piety they are exploiting the poor, imposing obligations that they themselves do not observe. Indeed, Jesus shows His affection for the Temple as a house of prayer but for this very reason wishes to cleanse it from improper practices; actually, He wants to reveal its deepest meaning, which is linked to the fulfillment of His own Mystery, the Mystery of His Death and Resurrection, in which He Himself becomes the new and definitive Temple, the place where God and man, the Creator and His creature, meet.
The episode of the widow’s mite fits into this context and leads us, through Jesus’ gaze itself, to focus our attention on a transient but crucial detail: the action of the widow, who is very poor and yet puts two coins into the collection box of the Temple treasury. Jesus is saying to us, too, just as He said to His disciples that day: Pay attention! Take note of what this widow has done, because her act contains a great teaching; in fact, it expresses the fundamental characteristic of those who are the “living stones” of this new Temple, namely, the total gift of themselves to the Lord and to their neighbor; the widow of the Gospel, and likewise the widow in the Old Testament, gives everything, gives herself, putting herself in God’s hands for others. This is the everlasting meaning of the poor widow’s offering which Jesus praises; for she has given more than the rich, who offer part of what is superfluous to them, whereas she gave all that she had to live on (cf. Mk 12: 44)–hence, she gave herself.
Dear friends, starting with this Gospel icon, I would like to meditate briefly on the mystery of the Church, the living Temple of God, and thereby pay homage to the memory of the great Pope Paul VI who dedicated his entire life to the Church. The Church is a real spiritual organism that prolongs in space and time the sacrifice of the Son of God, an apparently insignificant sacrifice in comparison with the dimensions of the world and of history but in God’s eyes crucial. As the Letter to the Hebrews says, and also the text we have just heard, Jesus’ sacrifice offered “once” sufficed for God to save the whole world (cf. Heb 9:26, 28), because all the Love of the Son of God made Man is condensed in that single oblation, just as all the widow’s love for God and for her brethren is concentrated in this woman’s action; nothing is lacking and there is nothing to add.

The Church, which is ceaselessly born from the Eucharist, from Jesus’ gift of self, is the continuation of this gift, this superabundance which is expressed in poverty, in the all that is offered in the fragment. It is Christ’s Body that is given entirely, a body broken and shared in constant adherence to the will of its Head.
I am glad that, guided by your Bishop’s Pastoral Letter, you are examining in depth the Eucharistic nature of the Church, this Church which the Servant of God, Paul VI, loved passionately and sought with all his might to make understood and loved. Let us reread his Pensiero alla morte, the part where, in the last section, he speaks of the Church. “I could say,” he writes, “that I have always loved her... and that it seems to me I have lived for her and for nothing else; but I would like the Church to know it.” These are the accents of a palpitating heart and he continues: “Lastly, I would like to understand her fully, in her history, in her divine plan, in her final destiny, in her complex, total, and unitary composition, in her human and imperfect consistence, in her adversities and her sufferings, in her weakness and in the wretchedness of so many of her children, in her less sympathetic aspects and in her eternal aspiration to fidelity, love, perfection, and charity. The Mystical Body of Christ.” “I would like,” the Pope continues, “to embrace, greet her, and love her in every being of whom she is made up, in every bishop and priest who serves and guides her, in every soul who lives and illustrates her; I would like to bless her.” Moreover, his last words were to her, as to the bride of his whole life: “And what shall I say to the Church, to whom I owe everything and whom was mine? May God’s Blessings be upon you; may you be aware of your nature and your mission; may you have a sense of humanity’s true and profound needs; and walk in poverty, in other words free, strong, and in love with Christ.”

What can be added to such lofty and intense words? I would just like to underline this last vision of the Church “poor and free” which evokes the Gospel figure of the widow. If it is to succeed in speaking to contemporary humanity, the ecclesial community must be like this. Giovanni Battista Montini had particularly at heart the Church’s encounter and dialogue with the humanity of our time in all the seasons of his life, from the early years of his priesthood until the Pontificate. He dedicated all his energy to serving a Church which would conform as closely as possible to his Lord Jesus Christ so that, in encountering her, contemporary men and women might encounter Him, Christ, because their need for Him is absolute. This was the basic desire of the Second Vatican Council with which Paul VI’s reflection on the Church corresponds.  He wanted to expound programmatically on some of her salient points in his first encyclical, Ecclesiam Suam of August 6, 1964, at a time when the Conciliar constitutions Lumen gentium and Gaudium et spes had not yet been written. With that first encyclical, the Pontiff sought to explain to all the Church’s importance for humanity’s salvation and, at the same time, the need to establish a relationship based on mutual knowledge and love between the ecclesial community and society (cf. Enchiridion Vaticanum, 2, p. 199, no. 164). “Conscience,” “renewal,” “dialogue”–these were the three words that Paul VI chose to express his principal “policies,” as he himself describes them at the beginning of his Petrine ministry, and all three concern the Church. First of all comes the need for her to increase her self-awareness: of her origins, nature, mission, and final destiny; second comes her need to renew herself, to cleanse herself by looking at her model, Christ. Last, there is the problem of establishing relations with the modern world (cf. ibid., pp. 203–205, nos. 166–168). Dear friends, and I am addressing in a special way my Brothers in the Episcopate and in the Priesthood, how can we fail to see, concerning the Church, the need for her in the plan of salvation and her relationship with the world that is still absolutely central today? And, indeed, that the developments of secularization and globalization have made it even more essential, in the confrontation on the one hand with the disregard for God and on the other with the non-Christian religions? Pope Montini’s reflection on the Church is more timely than ever; and even more valuable is his exemplary love for her, inseparable from his love for Christ. “The mystery of the Church,” we read once again in the encyclical Ecclesiam suam, “is not to be confined to the realms of speculative theology. It must be lived, so that the faithful may have a kind of intuitive experience of it, even before they come to understand it clearly” (ibid., no. 37). This presupposes a robust inner life which, the Pope continues, is thus “the richest source of the Church’s spiritual strength. It is the means, peculiarly its own, whereby the Church receives the sunlight of Christ’s Spirit. It is the Church’s natural and necessary way of expressing her religious and social activity, her surest defense and the cause of her constant renewal of strength amid the difficulties of the secular world” (cf. ibid., no. 38). It is precisely the Christian who is open, the Church open to the world, that need a robust inner life.