{"id":425,"date":"2008-02-06T11:19:38","date_gmt":"2008-02-06T11:19:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/02\/todays-ga-text-translated-by.html"},"modified":"2008-02-06T11:19:38","modified_gmt":"2008-02-06T11:19:38","slug":"todays-ga-text-translated-by","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/02\/todays-ga-text-translated-by.html","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s GA text, translated by Teresa Benedetta<\/a><\/p>\n

In placing ashes on the head of the faithful, the celebrant says: “Remember that you are dust and, to dust you will return” (cfr Gen 3,19), or repeats Jesus’s exhortation: “Repent and believe in the Gospel” (cfr Mk 1,15).
\nBoth formulas are reminders of the truth of human existence: we are creatures with limitations, sinners who always need penance and conversion.
\nHow important it is to listen and welcome this reminder in our time! when contemporary man proclaims his autonomy from God, he becomes a slave of himself and often finds himself in a state of disconsolate solitude.
\nThe invitation to penitence is therefore a stimulus to return to the arms of God, kind and merciful Father, to trust in him, to entrust ourselves to him as adoptive children, regenerated by his love.
\nWith wise teaching, the Church repeats that penitence is above all a grace, a gift which opens the heart to the infinite goodness of God. He himself, through this grace, anticipates our desire for penitence and accompanies our efforts towards full adherence to his saving will. To repent means to allow oneself to be conquered by Jesus (cfr Phil 3,12), and with him, to ‘return’ to the Father.
\nPenitence therefore entails placing oneself humbly in the school of jesus, and walk obediently in his footsteps. In this respect, the words which he himself indicated as the conditions for being his true disciples are indeed illuminating: “He who wishes to save his own life will lose it; but he who loses his life for my sake and that of the Gospel, will save it” (Mk 8,35-36).
\nDo the conquest of success, the yearning for prestige and the search for comfort – when these totally absorb life to the point of excluding God from the horizon – truly lead to happiness? Can there be authentic happiness in doing without God?
\nExperience shows that one is not made happy only because expectations and material demands are satisfied. In reality, the only joy which can fill the human heart is that which comes from God: and indeed, we need this infinite joy. Neither daily concerns nor the difficulties of life can extinguish the joy that comes from friendship with God.
\nJesus’s invitation to take up our own Cross and follow him may seem initially severe and contrary to what we wish, mortifying to our desire for personal fulfillment. But looking at it more closely, we see that is not so: the testimony of the saints shows that in the Cross of Christ, in the love he gives us, renouncing our self-possession, we find that profound serenity which is the spring for generous dedication to our brothers, especially to the poor and the needy. This makes us joyous ourselves.
\nThe Lenten journey of penitence, which we undertake with the whole Church today, is therefore the propitious occasion, ‘the favorable moment’ (cfr 2Cor 6,2) to renew our filial abandonment into the hands of God and to put into practice what Jesus continues to remind us: “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me” (Mk 8,34), going forward on the road of love and true happiness.
\nIn the Lenten season, the Church, echoing the Gospel, proposes some specific tasks for the faithful during this itinerary of interior renewal: prayer, fasting and almsgiving.
\nIn my Lenten Message for this year, published recently, I dwelt on “the practice of almsgiving, which represents a concrete way of coming to the aid of the needy and is, at the same time, an ascetic exercise to free oneself from attachment to earthly goods” (No. 1). Unfortunately, we know that the temptation of material wealth profoundly pervades modern society.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Click on the image below for the Vatican Lent page. Not on the individual links from here – they won’t work. Just on the image itself.)
\n<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s GA text, translated by Teresa Benedetta In placing ashes on the head of the faithful, the celebrant says: “Remember that you are dust and, to dust you will return” (cfr Gen 3,19), or repeats Jesus’s exhortation: “Repent and believe in the Gospel” (cfr Mk 1,15). Both formulas are reminders of the truth of human…<\/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-425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n- 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\/2008\/02\/todays-ga-text-translated-by.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"- Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Today’s GA text, translated by Teresa Benedetta In placing ashes on the head of the faithful, the celebrant says: “Remember that you are dust and, to dust you will return” (cfr Gen 3,19), or repeats Jesus’s exhortation: “Repent and believe in the Gospel” (cfr Mk 1,15). 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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\/425","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=425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}