{"id":442,"date":"2008-02-24T13:37:37","date_gmt":"2008-02-24T13:37:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/02\/pastoral-visit.html"},"modified":"2008-02-24T13:37:37","modified_gmt":"2008-02-24T13:37:37","slug":"pastoral-visit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/02\/pastoral-visit.html","title":{"rendered":"Pastoral Visit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, the Third Sunday of Lent, Pope Benedict made a visit to Santa Maria Liberatrice parish in the Testaccio area of Rome.
\nTeresa Benedetta has interesting background on the parish (run by the Salesians) here. <\/a>
\nMany photos here. <\/a>
\nNo English translation of the homily yet<\/a>, of course, but AsiaNews has a summary of the Angelus, which perhaps echoes the homily.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

The pope was returning from a pastoral visit to the Roman parish of Santa Maria Liberatrice, in the neighbourhood of Testaccio, and was welcomed by tens of thousands of people waiting for him in Saint Peter’s Square.
\nThe account says that Jesus, “tired from his journey”, asks for a drink from a Samaritan woman who had come to draw water from the well.\u00a0 The woman is astonished because “it was . . . absolutely unusual for a Jew to speak to Samaritan woman, and moreover an unfamiliar woman”.\u00a0 Jesus then speaks to her of “a ‘ living water’ capable of quenching her thirst and becoming within her a ‘spring of water welling up to eternal life'”.
\n“All of this”, the pontiff explains, “begins from the real and tangible experience of thirst.\u00a0 The theme of thirst runs through the entire Gospel of John: from the encounter with the Samaritan woman to the great prophecy during the feast of Booths (John 7:37-38), to the Cross, when Jesus, before He dies, says in order to fulfil the Scriptures: ‘ I thirst’ (John 19:28).\u00a0 The thirst of Christ is a gate of entry to the mystery of God, who became thirsty in order to quench our thirst, just as He became poor in order to make us rich (cf. 2 Cor 8:9).\u00a0 Yes, God thirsts for our faith and our love.\u00a0 Like a good\u00a0 and merciful father, He desires for us all of the good possible, and this good is He Himself. The Samaritan woman, on the other hand, represents\u00a0 the existential dissatisfaction of those who have not found what they are looking for: she has had ‘ five husbands’ and now lives with another man; her coming and going to and from the well to draw water expresses a repetitive and resigned way of life.\u00a0 But everything changed for her on that day, thanks to her conversation with the Lord Jesus, who shook her up so much that she left her jar of water behind and ran to tell the people of the village: ‘Come see a man who told me everything I have done. Could he possibly be the Messiah?’<\/strong> (John 4:28-29)”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Vatican has translated the Pope’s recent Q & A with clergy – available in one piece here.<\/a>
\nTeresa Benedetta pulls an interesting encounter from this morning’s event: <\/a><\/p>\n

Giuliana Ferrara \u00a0(pictured above) editor of Il Foglio,<\/a> was among those greeted by the Holy Father
\nat Santa Maria Liberatrice today. Ferrara is leading an anti-abortion ticket in
\nItaly’s coming parliamentary elections in April, and is one of Italy’s leading
\n‘devout atheists’ who share the moral and ethical principles of the Catholic Church.<\/address>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, the Third Sunday of Lent, Pope Benedict made a visit to Santa Maria Liberatrice parish in the Testaccio area of Rome. Teresa Benedetta has interesting background on the parish (run by the Salesians) here. Many photos here. No English translation of the homily yet, of course, but AsiaNews has a summary of the Angelus,…<\/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-442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nPastoral Visit - 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\/pastoral-visit.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Pastoral Visit - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Today, the Third Sunday of Lent, Pope Benedict made a visit to Santa Maria Liberatrice parish in the Testaccio area of Rome. 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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\/442","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=442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}