Silence and Word: Pope Announces Theme of World Communications Day 2012

Prayer is an ongoing dialogue of intimate communion with God. Prayer is about falling in love with God

Pope Benedict XVI has carried forward the mission of the "New Evangelization" announced by his predecessor, Blessed John Paul II. He knows that for the Church to rise to this challenge she must be filled with the Lord and thus able to give Him to others. This kind of deep conversion will only come through prayer. He is leading us to our knees - or for our brethren from the East - to a profound bow. He reminds us that we can all be contemplatives, no matter our state in life or Christian vocation

P>VATICAN CITY (Catholic Online) - From the moment Pope Benedict XVI stepped onto the balcony of St Peters in April of 2005 our hearts were calmed by his deferential manner, his "littleness", his humility and his holiness. Those who knew him before his election to the Chair of peter confirmed he was a towering intellect and a theologian of the highest order. His writings were highly respected and his intellectual prowess and clarity of thought formed the framework for much of the truly good theology of our age.

However, what has become clear is that he is a man of deep faith; the kind that gets into the marrow of the bones of a man who truly walks with God, making him strong, steady and unafraid of any adversary. This is precisely because he is a man of deep prayer, a contemplative. This contemplation is the symbol of his service and reveals the heart of the Church to modern world. He calls all of us to the kind of genuine conversion that comes only through prayer.

Pope Benedict focuses us upon the Eucharist, which reveals the heart of the Church and opens us to communion. The Church, the Body of Christ, is called to be a living tabernacle, making the Lord of the Eucharist "incarnate" in an age that has lost its way and is again searching for God. In his bearing - and in his example of authentic piety and intimate, interiority and prayer - Pope Benedict is helping restore the "mystery" of the Christian faith lived experientially among the faithful.

Only a Church of holiness, mystery, mission and true majesty can accomplish the huge task that lies ahead of us. The Church that was born from the wounded side of Jesus Christ, who stretched His arms out on the tree of our redemption to embrace the world, is desperately in need of deep and profound conversion.

Pope Benedict XVI has carried forward the mission of the "New Evangelization" announced by his predecessor, Blessed John Paul II. He knows that for the Church to rise to this challenge she must be filled with the Lord and thus able to give Him to others. This kind of deep conversion will only come through prayer. He is leading us to our knees - or for our brethren from the East - to a profound bow. He reminds us that we can all be contemplatives, no matter our state in life or Christian vocation. Prayer must inform our lives and our mission. 

During the Nativity of the Lord in his first year, Pope Benedict VI, Joseph Ratzinger, wrote of his namesake, St. Joseph:  "His is a silence permeated by contemplation of the mystery of God, in an attitude of total availability to his divine wishes...Let us allow ourselves to be "infected" by the silence of St Joseph! We have much need of it in a world which is often too noisy, which does not encourage reflection and listening to the voice of God." ( December 18, 2005) His approach to prayer certainly reflects that of his namesake.

World Communications Day is the only worldwide celebration called for by the Second Vatican Council. It is celebrated on the Sunday before Pentecost. In 2012 that will fall on May 20. Traditionally, the Holy Father's complete message for this global celebration of the Catholic Church is published on January 24, the Feast of the Patron of writers and communicators, the Memorial of St. Francis de Sales. On Thursday, September 29, 201 the Pontifical Council for Social Communications announced the theme of the event for 2012: Silence and Word: Path of Evangelization"

"The extraordinarily varied nature of the contribution of modern communications to society highlights the need for a value which, on first consideration, might seem to stand in contradistinction to it. Silence, in fact, is the central theme for the next World Communications Day Message: 'Silence and Word: path of evangelization'.

"In the thought of Pope Benedict XVI, silence is not presented simply as an antidote to the constant and unstoppable flow of information that characterizes society today but rather as a factor that is necessary for its integration. Silence, precisely because it favors habits of discernment and reflection, can in fact be seen primarily as a means of welcoming the word.

"We ought not to think in terms of a dualism, but of the complementary nature of two elements which when they are held in balance serve to enrich the value of communication and which make it a key factor that can serve the new evangelization. It is clearly the desire of the Holy Father to associate the theme of the next World Communications Day with the celebration of the forthcoming Synod of Bishops which will have as its own theme: 'The New Evangelization for the Transmission of the Christian Faith'."

Prayer is an ongoing dialogue of intimate communion with God. Prayer is about falling in love with God. Isaac of Ninevah was an early eighth century monk, Bishop and theologian. For centuries he was mostly revered in the Eastern Christian Church for his writings on prayer. In the last century the beauty of his insights on prayer are being embraced once again by both lungs, East and West, of the Church. He wrote these words in one of his many treatises on Prayer:

"When the Spirit dwells in a person, from the moment in which that person has become prayer, he never leaves him. For the Spirit himself never ceases to pray in him. Whether the person is asleep or awake, prayer never from then on departs from his soul. Whether he is eating or drinking or sleeping or whatever else he is doing, even in deepest sleep, the fragrance of prayer rises without effort in his heart. Prayer never again deserts him.

"At every moment of his life, even when it appears to stop, it is secretly at work in him continuously, one of the Fathers, the bearers of Christ, says that prayer is the silence of the pure. For their thoughts are divine motions. The movements of the heart and the intellect that have been purified are the voices full of sweetness with which such people never cease to sing in secret to the hidden God."

Through His Incarnation, Saving Life, Death, and Resurrection, Jesus opens the way to full communion with God for all men and women. He leads us out of the emptiness and despair that is the rotted fruit of narcissism, nihilism and materialism. When we enter into the dialogue of prayer, we can experience a progressive, dynamic and intimate relationship with God. He transforms us from within. We, as Isaac said, can "become prayer" as we empty ourselves in order to be filled with Him.

Through prayer, daily life takes on new meaning. It becomes a classroom of communion. In that classroom we learn the truth about who we are - and who we are becoming - in Jesus. Through prayer we receive new glasses through which we see the true landscape of life. Through prayer darkness is dispelled and the path of progress is illuminated.

Through prayer we begin to understand why this communion seems so elusive at times; as we struggle with our own disordered appetites, and live in a manner at odds with the beauty and order of the creation within which we dwell only to find a new beginning whenever we confess our sin and return to our first love. Prayer opens us up to Revelation, expands our capacity to comprehend truth and equips us to change.

Through prayer we are drawn by Love into a deepening relationship with Jesus whose loving embrace on the hill of Golgotha bridged heaven with earth; His relationship with His Father is opened now to us; the same Spirit that raised Him from the dead begins to give us new life as we are converted, transfigured and made new.

Through prayer, heavenly wisdom is planted in the field of our hearts and we experience a deepening communion with the Trinitarian God. We become, in the words of the Apostle Peter "partakers of the divine nature." (2 Peter 1:4) That participation will only be fully complete when we are with Him in the fullness of His embrace, in Resurrected Bodies in a New Heaven and a New earth, but it begins now, in the grace of this present moment.

The beloved disciple John became prayer. He writes in the letter he penned in his later years: "See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know Him. Beloved, we are God's children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope based on him makes himself pure, as he is pure. Everyone who commits sin commits lawlessness, for sin is lawlessness" (1John 3:1-4)

As we "become prayer" our daily life becomes the field of choice and we are capacitated to choose the "more excellent way" of love of which the great Apostle Paul wrote. (1 Cor. 13) Pondering the implications of the exercise of our human freedom becomes a regular part of our life, as we learn to "examine our conscience", repent of our sin and become joyful penitents. Prayer provides the environment for such recollection as it exposes the darkness and helps us surrender it to the light of Love, the Living God dwelling within us.

"Becoming prayer" is possible for all Christians, no matter their state in life or vocation, because God holds nothing back from those whom He loves. This relationship of communion is initiated by Him. Our part is to respond. That response should flow from a heart that beats in surrendered love, in the process of being freed from the entanglements that weigh us down. The God who is Love hungers for the communion of sons and daughters - and we hunger for communion with Him - because He made us this way. Nothing else will satisfy. The early Church Father Origen once wrote: "Every spiritual being is, by nature, a temple of God, created to receive into itself the glory of God."

Let us follow the example of Pope Benedict XVI and learn to pray. Mother Teresa once wrote: "God is the friend of silence, in that silence he will listen to us; there he will speak to our soul, and there we will hear his voice. The fruit of silence is faith. The fruit of faith is prayer, the fruit of prayer is love, the fruit of love is service and the fruit of service is silence.

"In the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Silence gives us a new way of looking at everything. We need this silence in order to touch souls. God is the friend of silence. His language is silence. 'Be still and know that I am God'."

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