{"id":2855,"date":"2007-02-20T12:03:01","date_gmt":"2007-02-20T12:03:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/lenten-messages.html"},"modified":"2007-02-20T12:03:01","modified_gmt":"2007-02-20T12:03:01","slug":"lenten-messages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/lenten-messages.html","title":{"rendered":"Lenten messages"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sandro Magister posts the text of Pope Benedict’s Lenten message, in case you missed it. He adds, in regard to the Curial Lenten retreat:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

On the afternoon of the first Sunday of Lent, February 25, Benedict XVI and his collaborators in the Roman curia will begin their spiritual exercises, which will continue until the morning of Saturday, March 3. <\/p>\n

So for one week, the ordinary activities of the pope and the curia will be suspended. Even the Wednesday audience will be cancelled. <\/p>\n

The preacher that the pope has chosen for these exercises is cardinal Giacomo Biffi, 79, archbishop of Bologna from 1984 to 2003. He will preach three times each day, on the general topic: \u201cSeek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God: think about the things above, not about earthly things\u201d (Colossians 3:1-2). <\/p>\n

But on the afternoon of Tuesday, February 27, cardinal Biffi will speak to his audience on a topic that is off the main subject but very dear to him: \u201cThe prophetic admonition of Valdimir S. Soloviev.\u201d <\/p>\n

According to Biffi, in fact, this great Russian thinker, in the book \u201cTale of the Antichrist\u201d which he wrote shortly before his death in 1900, \u201cforetold with clairvoyant lucidity the great crisis that struck Christianity in the last decades of the twentieth century.\u201d <\/p>\n

Biffi exposes Soloviev\u2019s vision and his own in an essay from which www.chiesa published an extract, in this article from two years ago: <\/p>\n

> Antichrist Alert! Cardinal Biffi Rouses the Church<\/strong> (3.6.2005) <\/p>\n

In brief, the crisis that Soloviev foretold is the replacement of faith in Jesus Christ crucified and risen with \u201ca series of values that are easily peddled in worldly marketplaces.\u201d <\/p>\n

What Biffi will tell the pope and the curia is easy to guess at, because he has already written about it: <\/p>\n

\u201cSoloviev\u2019s teaching was both prophetic and widely ignored. But we want to propose it again, in the hope that Christianity will finally feel itself called upon and will pay it a bit of attention.\u201d
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sandro Magister posts the text of Pope Benedict’s Lenten message, in case you missed it. He adds, in regard to the Curial Lenten retreat: On the afternoon of the first Sunday of Lent, February 25, Benedict XVI and his collaborators in the Roman curia will begin their spiritual exercises, which will continue until the morning…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nLenten messages - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/lenten-messages.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Lenten messages - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Sandro Magister posts the text of Pope Benedict’s Lenten message, in case you missed it. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2855\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}