The invaluable Teresa Benedetta has translated all the addresses and homilies Pope and Patriarch from this past weekend. Go here and scroll down.
Snippets:
From Vespers:

But he is not looking only to the past. ‘Teacher of the Gentiles’ – these words open up to the future, to all peoples and to all generations. Paul is not, for us, a figure of the past whom we remember with veneration. He is also our teacher – apostle and preacher of Jesus Christ, even for us.
We are therefore gathered here not to reflect on a story from a past that has irrevocably gone. Paul speaks to us – today. That is why I proclaimed this special Pauline Year – to listen to him and to learn from him, as our teacher, ‘faith and truth’, in which are rooted the reasons for unity among the disciples of Christ.

and

At this time, at the start of the Pauline Year that we are inaugurating, I wish to choose from the rich testimony of the New testament three texts in which we see his interior physiognomy, the specifics of his character.

Those texts are Galatians 2:20; Acts 9:4ff and 2 Timothy 1:8. On the last:

When, after his encounter with the Risen Christ, Paul found himself blind in his habitation in Damascus, Ananias received the order to go to the feared persecutor to lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight. To Ananias’s objection that this Saul was a dangerous persecutor of Christians, came the answer: This man should bring my name before peoples and kings. “I will show him how much he must suffer for my name” (Acts 9,15f).
The responsibility of proclaiming Christ and the call to suffering for Christ come together inseparably. The call to become the teacher of peoples is at the same time and intrinsically a call to suffering in communion with Christ, who has redeemed us through his Passion.
In a world where lies have power, the truth is paid for with suffering. Whoever wants to avoid suffering, to keep it away from himself, also holds life itself and its greatness away – and cannot be a servant of the truth and thus, a servant of the faith.
There is no love without suffering – without the suffering of self-renunciation, of transformation and purification of the I, for true freedom.
Where there is nothing worth suffering for, life itself loses its value. The Eucharist – center of our Christian being – is based on Jesus’s sacrifice for us, it is born from the suffering of love, which culminated on the Cross. From this love that was self-giving, we live. It gives us the courage and the strength to suffer with Christ and for him, in this world, knowing that by doing so, our life becomes great and mature and true.

From the Patriarch on Sunday:

And now, venerating the sufferings and the cross of Peter and embracing the chains and stigmata of Paul, honoring the confession, martyrdom and venerated death of both in the name of the Lord who truly brings us to Life, we glorify thrice-holy God and implore him, that through the intercession of his Apostle Proto-Coryphaei, he may give us and all the children anywhere in the world of the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, ‘the union of faith and the communion of the Holy Spirit’ in the ‘bond of peace’ down here, and life eternal and his great mercy in the beyond. Amen.

From Benedict’s Sunday homily, which centered on the question of Peter, Paul, and Rome. He begins with their martyrdom:

For their martyrdom, Peter and Paul became part of Rome. Through martyrdom, even Peter became a Roman citizen for always. Through their martyrdom, their faith and their love, the two Apostles show us where true hope lies, and are the founders of a new kind of city, which should always form itself anew among the old cities of man which continue to be threatened by the opposing forces of sin and man’s selfishness.

And then moves backward, in a sense, exploring the reasons why each came to Rome. He concludes:

The desire of Paul to go to Rome underscored, as we have pointed out, the word ‘catholic’ among the characteristics of the Church.
The journey of St. Peter towards Rome, representing the peoples of the world, has most to do with the word ‘one’ – his task was to create the unity of the catholic church, of the Church made up of Jews and pagans, the Church of all peoples.
And this is the permanent mission of Peter: to make it clear that the Church never identifies itself with any one nation, any one culture or any one State. That it may always be the Church of all. That it may unite mankind beyond frontiers and, amids the divisions of this world, make God’s peace present, the reconciling power of his love.

He then concludes the homily by turning to the Archbishops who have received the pallium. This is a fascinating section,  inviting us all to see a bigger picture – a liturgical picture:

Every time we put on the pallium of the Pastor of Christ’s flock, we should hear that question, “Do you love me?” and we must ask ourselves about that ‘something more’ of love that he expects from his Pastors.

Thus the pallium becomes a symbol of our love for the Shepherd Christ and our loving together with him – it becomes the symbol of the calling to love men as he does, together with him: those who are searching, those who have questions, those who are self-assured, the humble, the simple, the great. It becomes a symbol of the calling to love everyone with the strength of Christ and with the sight of Christ, so that they may find him, and in finding him, find themselves.
But the pallium which you will receive ‘from’ the tomb of Peter has yet another significance, inseparably connected with the first. To understand this, a sentence from the First Letter of Peter may help us. In his exhortation to priests to pasture their flock in the correct way, he calls himself a synpresbýteros – co-priest (5,1). This formulation implicitly contains the principle of apostolic succession: the Pastors who follow are Pastors like him; together with him, they belong to the common ministry of the pastors of the Church of Jesus Christ, a ministry that continues in them.
But the prefix ‘con-‘ has two other meanings. It also expresses the reality that we indicate today by the word ‘collegiality’ among bishops. We are all ‘con-presbiteri’. No one is a Pastor by himself. We are in the succession of the Apostles thanks only to being in communion with the college in which the College of Apostles finds its continuation. The communion – the ‘we’ – of Pastors is part of being a Pastor, because there is only one flock, the one Church of Christ.
Finally, this ‘con’ also refers to communion with Peter and his successor as a guarantee of unity. Thus, the pallium speaks to us of the catholicity of the Church, of the universal communion between the Pastor and his flock. And it refers us back to apostolicity: to communion with the faith of the Apostles on which the Church is founded.
It speaks to us of the one, holy, catholic, apostolic Church, and of course, in linking us to Christ, it also tells us that the Church is holy, and that our work is in the service of this holiness.
This brings me back, finally, to St. Paul and his mission. He expressed the essence of his mission, as well as the most profound reason for his desire to go to Rome, in Chapter 15 of the Letter to the Romans, in an extraordinarily beautiful statement.
He knows he has been called “to be a minister [leitourgos] of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in performing the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering up of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the holy Spirit” (15,16). In this passage, Paul uses the word ‘leiturgos’ – liturgist and ‘hierarchist’ administering as priest. He means the cosmic liturgy, in which the world of men itself becomes an adoration of God, an oblation to the Holy Spirit.
When all the world will have become a liturgy of God, when its reality will have become adoration, then it will have reached its goal, then it will be whole and saved. This is the ultimate objective of St. Paul’s apostolic mission and of ours.
Let us pray at this time that he may help us carry it out correctly in order that we may be true liturgists of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Far too much of our religious discussions – which still reflect contentious religious history – seems to be about setting up our “personal” faith in contrast to or even in competition with the shape that faith takes within broader, institutional forms.  We see it all the time, both in the culture at large: “I’m spiritual, not religious.”  We see it when people reflect that religious institutions function as an obstacle, rather than a help, in their personal faith relationships. We see it when religious institutions themselves emphasize the external at the expense of the internal.
One of the most important things Benedict is doing, I think – among many important things – is helping us re-knit the fabric. He constantly challenges those in ministry to focus. What is this about? Why are you doing what you are doing? Are you really about Christ or about something else?
Additionally, he is challenging the rest of us to see faith with greater broadness of vision – to understand that Jesus didn’t come into the world, say some nice things, die, and then leave us to figure it all out by ourselves, over and over again, reinventing the wheel with every generation, never sure that what we are affirming is the truth. To understand that even though it may get obscured by human sin and weakness, the Church is the Body of Christ and that in the totality of this Body – the teaching, the liturgy, the charity, the saints, the art, the simple, steadfast faith of Christians – we find Him whom we seek.
 
 

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