“On the pathway to God, the church has made mistakes”

07/ 3/2013



FRANCIS THE MESS IN SANCTA MARTHA
During the morning Mass at Santa Marta, the Pope spoke about the Gospel for the Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle

VATICAN INSIDER STAFF
VATICAN CITY


Saint Thomas was “stubborn” but it was for all his stubbornness that he was the first to know and recognize in the risen Jesus the divinity and knew to call him by name “God”. On his feast day, the Pope Francesco wanted to remember how the apostle not content to merely see but wanted to actually touch with his own hands the wounds of the crucifixion, those same cuts that today the Christian must cherish and care for in the poor and the humble of our time.


According to tradition, Thomas travelled to Asia in the decades after Jesus’ mission and having arrived in India he founded the ancient Christian communities that Portuguese travelers discovered when they disembarked on the sub continents coast at the end of the fifteenth century. Perhaps because India is the multi-religious country par excellence, this morning at the Mass celebrated by Pope Francis in the chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae there were the priests and the staff of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, led by Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, chairman of the department.


Thomas, the pontiff said, as reported by Vatican Radio, was "stubborn" with his stubbornness he wanted to put his fingers in the wounds left by the crucifixion of Jesus, "But the Lord - said Pope Bergoglio – wanted a really stubborn person to make us understand something bigger. Thomas saw the Lord, and was invited to put his finger into the wound caused by the nails; to put his hand on his side and did not say: “It’s true: The Lord has risen!”. No! He went even further. He said: “God!”. The first disciple that confessed the divinity of Christ, after the resurrection. And he worshipped.


This is why Jesus wanted Thomas to wait a week more than the other disciples before meeting with him: "Taking his disbelief to bring him not to the affirmation of the Resurrection, but the affirmation of his divinity." Because the "way to meet Jesus-God - said the pope - is through his wounds. There is no another."


The doing of “charitable deeds” for the Pope remain the only path to God, even if “in the history of the Church there have been many mistakes along the way” on the one hand the error of those who have relied on meditation to "go higher” – “How many lose themselves along the way and never arrive”, said Francesco; on the other hand there are those who believe that to arrive to God one must be “humble, austere”, choosing the path of “penitence” and “fasting” only. They are the pelagians, who believe that with their strength they will get there”.


Thomas instead meets Jesus through his wounds, those who today meet him by doing “charitable deeds”: “Giving the body – to the body – and also to the soul, but to the body – he underlined – of his wounded brother because the he is hungry, he is thirsty, he is naked, humiliated, a slave, because he is imprison, or in hospital. Those are the wounds of Jesus today. And Jesus asks us to do acts of faith, for him, but through these wounds”, to meet and touch directly, not through a benevolent “foundation” .


Hence the conclusive invitation that revives a classic motif of Argentina's pontificate: to touch the living God you do not need to "do a refresher course" but to enter into the wounds of Jesus, and for this "just go out onto the street." "We call on St. Thomas - he concluded – to give us the grace to have the courage to enter into the wounds of Jesus with our tenderness and we will certainly have the grace to worship the living God.