[Emphases have been added and are not part of the original text.]
Dear brothers and sisters!
This evening we are here before Mary. We have prayed to her, to maternally take us more and more in union with her Son Jesus; we have brought her our joys and our sorrows, our hopes and our difficulties; we have invoked her with the lovely name “Salus Populi Romani” (“protectress of the Roman people”) asking for all of us, for Rome, for the world that she keep us in good health. Yes, because Mary gives us health, she is our saving grace.
With his Passion, Death and Resurrection, Jesus Christ brings us salvation, the grace and the joy of being God’s children and the possibility of calling him with the name of the Father. Mary is a mother, a mother who takes care above all of the health of her children and knows how to heal them with her great and tender love. The Madonna is the custodian of our health. What does this mean? My thoughts go, above all, to three aspects: she helps us in our growth, she helps us to face life, she teaches us to be free.
1. A mother helps her children to grow and it is her wish that they grow well; this is why she teaches them to not yield to laziness – which is something that derives also from certain well-being -, she teaches them not to adapt themselves to a life of ease that desires nothing beyond material possessions. A mother takes care that her children’s growth is not stunted, that they grow strong and capable of taking responsibilities upon themselves, that they take on commitments in life and lean towards great ideals. The Gospel of Luke says that in the family of Nazareth Jesus “grew and became strong in spirit, filled with wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him”(Luke 2,40). This is exactly what the Madonna does with us, she helps us to grow humanely and in faith, to be strong and not to yield to the temptation of being men and Christians in a superficial way, but to live with responsibility, reaching upwards all the time.
2. And then, a mother thinks of the health of her children, teaching them to face the difficulties of life. One does not educate, one does not look after someone’s health avoiding problems, as if life was a highway without obstacles. A mother helps her children to look to the problems in life with realism, not to lose oneself in them but to tackle them with courage, not to be weak, to know how to overcome them, in a healthy balance that a mother can “feel” is to be found in between the areas of safety and of risk. A life without challenges does not exist and a boy or a girl who does not know how to face challenges and put himself or herself on the line, has no backbone! Let us remember the parable of the Good Samaritan: Jesus does not commend the behavior of the priest or of the Levite, who avoid assisting the traveler who had been beaten, robbed and left half dead along the road, but that of the Samaritan who saw the situation of the man and tackled it in a concrete manner. Mary lived many difficult times in her life, from the birth of Jesus, when “there was no room for him in the inn” (Luke 2,7), up until the Calvary: (John 19,25). And like a good mother she is close to us so that we never lose courage before the adversities of life, before our own weaknesses, before our sins: she gives us strength, she points to the path of her Son. From the cross, indicating John, Jesus tells Mary: “Woman, here is your son,” and to John: “Here is your mother!” (John 19,26-27). We are all represented by that disciple: the Lord entrusts us to the loving hands and to the tenderness of the Mother, so that we can rely on her support when we face and overcome the difficulties of our human and Christian journey.
3. One last aspect: a good mother not only accompanies her children during their growth, not avoiding the problems and the challenges of life; a good mother also helps to take important decisions with freedom. But what does freedom mean? Certainly not doing all that one wants, letting oneself be dominated by passions, passing from one experience to the next without discernment, following the trends of the moment; freedom does not mean, so to say, throwing all that one does not like from the window. Freedom is given to us so that we make good choices in life! As a good mother, Mary teaches us to be, like she is, capable of making important decisions with the same full freedom with which she answered “yes” to God’s plan for her life (Luke 1,38).
Dear brothers and sisters, how difficult it is in our time to take important decisions! The ephemeral seduces us. We are victims of a tendency that pushes us towards the ephemeral… as if we wished to remain adolescents throughout our lives! We must not be afraid of definitive commitments, of commitments that involve and have an effect on our whole lives. In this way our lives will be fruitful!
The whole existence of Mary is a hymn to life, a hymn to love and to life: she generated Jesus the man and she accompanied the birth of the Church on Mount Calvary and in the Cenacle. The “Salus Populi Romani” is the mother that looks after our growth, she helps us face and overcome problems, she gives us freedom when we make important decisions; she is the mother who teaches us to be fruitful of good, joy, hope, to give life to others, both physical and spiritual life.
This is what we are asking of you this evening, Oh Mary, Salus Populi Romani, for the people of Rome, for all of us: give us the grace that only you can give, so that we may always be signs and tools of life.
教宗：瑪利亞，請助我們抵禦誘惑作出明確選擇
教宗方濟各返回聖母雪地大殿誦念玫瑰經。每一個「好媽媽」「幫助我們成長、面對生活、享受自由。」「沒有挑戰的人生不存在的，孩子不知道該如何面對挑戰」。自由「不是按自己的需要去做，讓個人的激情帶動，沒有辨別之下，從一個經驗傳遞到下一個。自由是給我們在生活中做出正確的選擇！」
羅馬（亞洲新聞） - 能夠作出明確的決定，以抗拒誘惑。教宗懇求瑪利亞，形容她的生命是一首「生命贊歌」，作為一位「好媽媽」，「幫助我們成長、面對生活、享受自由。」祈禱時常是生命的標記和工具，這是教宗方濟各今晚在羅馬聖母雪地大殿，向聖母誦念玫瑰經后的默想分享。
教宗抵達首間在西方奉獻給聖母的大殿。他在3月14日（圖）他當選翌日曾經到哪裡祈禱。在傍晚時，已有大批群眾在等候他。他在大門處吻了十字架，作為「接管」大殿的象征行動，然后入內在聖母畫像前祈禱，誦念玫瑰經的歡喜五端。
在聖母祈禱后，教宗方濟各向在場的信眾，談到瑪利亞作為一位母親，就像所有好媽媽一樣，「照顧她的孩子的健康，並知道她如何以偉大和溫良的愛如何來治療他們。聖母是我們健康的托管人。什麼意思？我想，這有三方面：她幫助我們成長；她幫助我們面對生活；她教導我們要自由。」
「一位母親幫助其孩子成長，她希望他們長大；這就是為什麼她教導子女不要屈服於懶惰。她教導他們不要不用隻渴望超越物質財富。一位母親照顧孩子，隻要他們的成長不是發育不良，他們成長強壯，能夠負起自己的責任，及承諾在生活的投身，以及傾向偉大的理想。聖母幫助我們以人性和在信德中成長，要堅強，而不要屈服於膚淺的誘惑，人和基督徒，要度有責任的生活，時常向上。」
「然后，母親挂心孩子的健康，教導他們面對生活的困難。人不是教育，不是看顧他們的健康以避免有問題，仿佛生命是一條沒有障礙的公路。一位母親幫助她的孩子面對現實生活中存在的問題，不要在他們中失去自己，但要有勇氣去解決這些問題，不是要軟弱，而是要知道如何克服這些問題，以一個健康的平衡方式，一位母親可以感受，可以在安全及有風險之間。」
「最后一方面：一位好母親不僅伴隨著她的孩子，他們的成長過程中，不回避問題和生活的挑戰；一位好母親，有助充滿自由去作出重大決策。但自由是什麼意思？當然不要讓自己的激情主導事情，要有明辨能力，把一個經驗傳遞到下一個。否則，就像把不喜歡的東西從窗口扔出去，這不是自由。自由要我們在生活中做出很好的選擇！作為一個好母親，瑪利亞教導我們，在重要的決定，一如她自己，以充分自由，對於天主對她的生活的計劃，回答『是』。」
「我們的時代要作出重要決定是何等困難！這短暫的事誘惑我們。我們是這種傾向的受害者，它催迫我們邁向短暫。一如我們希望我們的整個生活保持青少年心態！我們絕不能害怕明確承諾，該承諾要參與並影響我們的整個生命。這樣，我們的生活將是碩果累累！」
「瑪利亞的存在是一首生命贊歌，一首愛與生命的贊歌。她養育耶穌成人，她在加爾瓦略山上陪伴教會誕生，在晚餐廳亦然。聖母照顧我們的成長，她可以幫助我們面對和克服的問題，她給了我們自由去做重要決定；她是教我們富有善、喜悅、希望、給生命別人，包括身體和精神生活。這是我今天晚上，希望大家一起祈禱。噢，瑪利亞，為了羅馬人民，為我們所有人：求你給我們的恩寵，隻有你可以給我們，成為我們生命的標志和工具。」【妮】
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Mary "helps us in our growth, she helps us to face life, she teaches us to be free"
THE NEED FOR HUMAN MATURITY
Your years in the seminary should also be a time of growth towards human maturity. It is important for the priest, who is called to accompany others through the journey of life up to the threshold of death, to have the right balance of heart and mind, reason and feeling, body and soul, and to be humanly integrated. To the theological virtues the Christian tradition has always joined the cardinal virtues derived from human experience and philosophy, and, more generally, from the sound ethical tradition of humanity. Paul makes this point this very clearly to the Philippians: "Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things" (4:8). This also involves the integration of sexuality into the whole personality. Sexuality is a gift of the Creator yet it is also a task which relates to a person’s growth towards human maturity. When it is not integrated within the person, sexuality becomes banal and destructive. Today we can see many examples of this in our society. Recently we have seen with great dismay that some priests disfigured their ministry by sexually abusing children and young people. Instead of guiding people to greater human maturity and setting them an example, their abusive behaviour caused great damage for which we feel profound shame and regret. As a result of all this, many people, perhaps even some of you, might ask whether it is good to become a priest; whether the choice of celibacy makes any sense as a truly human way of life. Yet even the most reprehensible abuse cannot discredit the priestly mission, which remains great and pure. Thank God, all of us know exemplary priests, men shaped by their faith, who bear witness that one can attain to an authentic, pure and mature humanity in this state and specifically in the life of celibacy. Admittedly, what has happened should make us all the more watchful and attentive, precisely in order to examine ourselves earnestly, before God, as we make our way towards priesthood, so as to understand whether this is his will for me. It is the responsibility of your confessor and your superiors to accompany you and help you along this path of discernment. It is an essential part of your journey to practise the fundamental human virtues, with your gaze fixed on the God who has revealed himself in Christ, and to let yourselves be purified by him ever anew.
--Benedict XVI, Letter to Seminarians, 6, 18 October 2010
Becoming Christ: Renewal and Maturity
It is part of the structure of Paul's Letters always in reference to the particular place and situation that they first of all explain the mystery of Christ, they teach faith. The second part treats their application to our lives: what ensues from this faith? How does it shape our existence, day by day? In the Letter to the Romans, this second part begins in chapter 12, in which the Apostle briefly sums up the essential nucleus of Christian existence in the first two verses. What does St Paul say to us in that passage? First of all he affirms, as a fundamental thing, that a new way of venerating God began with Christ a new form of worship. It consists in the fact that the living person himself becomes adoration, "sacrifice", even in his own body. It is no longer things that are offered to God. It is our very existence that must become praise of God. But how does this happen? In the second verse we are given the answer: "Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God..." (12: 2). The two decisive words of this verse are "transformed" and "renewal". We must become new people, transformed into a new mode of existence. The world is always in search of novelty because, rightly, it is always dissatisfied with concrete reality. Paul tells us: the world cannot be renewed without new people. Only if there are new people will there also be a new world, a renewed and better world. In the beginning is the renewal of the human being. This subsequently applies to every individual. Only if we ourselves become new does the world become new. This also means that it is not enough to adapt to the current situation. The Apostle exhorts us to non-conformism. In our Letter he says: we should not submit to the logic of our time. We shall return to this point, reflecting on the second text on which I wish to meditate with you this evening. The Apostle's "no" is clear and also convincing for anyone who observes the "logic" of our world. But to become new how can this be done? Are we really capable of it? With his words on becoming new, Paul alludes to his own conversion: to his encounter with the Risen Christ, an encounter of which, in the Second Letter to the Corinthians he says: "if anyone is in Christ, he is in a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come" (5: 17). This encounter with Christ was so overwhelming for him that he said of it: "I... died..." (Gal 2: 19; cf. Rm 6). He became new, another, because he no longer lived for himself and by virtue of himself, but for Christ and in him. In the course of the years, however, he also saw that this process of renewal and transformation continues throughout life. We become new if we let ourselves be grasped and shaped by the new Man, Jesus Christ. He is the new Man par excellence. In him the new human existence became reality and we can truly become new if we deliver ourselves into his hands and let ourselves be moulded by him.
Paul makes this process of "recasting" even clearer by saying that we become new if we transform our way of thinking. What has been introduced here with "way of thinking" is the Greek term "nous". It is a complex word. It may be translated as "spirit", "sentiments", "reason", and precisely, also by "way of thinking". Thus our reason must become new. This surprises us. We might have expected instead that this would have concerned some attitude: what we should change in our behaviour. But no: renewal must go to the very core. Our way of looking at the world, of understanding reality all our thought must change from its foundations. The reasoning of the former person, the common way of thinking is usually directed to possession, well-being, influence, success, fame and so forth. Yet in this way its scope is too limited. Thus, in the final analysis, one's "self" remains the centre of the world. We must learn to think more profoundly. St Paul tells us what this means in the second part of the sentence: it is necessary to learn to understand God's will, so that it may shape our own will. This is in order that we ourselves may desire what God desires, because we recognize that what God wants is the beautiful and the good. It is therefore a question of a turning point in our fundamental spiritual orientation. God must enter into the horizon of our thought: what he wants and the way in which he conceived of the world and of me. We must learn to share in the thinking and the will of Jesus Christ. It is then that we will be new people in whom a new world emerges.
Paul illustrates the same idea of a necessary renewal of our way of being human in two passages of his Letter to the Ephesians; let us therefore reflect on them briefly. In the Letter's fourth chapter, the Apostle tells us that with Christ we must attain adulthood, a mature faith. We can no longer be "children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine..." (4: 14). Paul wants Christians to have a "responsible" and "adult faith". The words "adult faith" in recent decades have formed a widespread slogan. It is often meant in the sense of the attitude of those who no longer listen to the Church and her Pastors but autonomously choose what they want to believe and not to believe hence a do-it-yourself faith. And it is presented as a "courageous" form of self-expression against the Magisterium of the Church. In fact, however, no courage is needed for this because one may always be certain of public applause. Rather, courage is needed to adhere to the Church's faith, even if this contradicts the "logic" of the contemporary world. This is the non-conformism of faith which Paul calls an "adult faith". It is the faith that he desires. On the other hand, he describes chasing the winds and trends of the time as infantile. Thus, being committed to the inviolability of human life from its first instant, thereby radically opposing the principle of violence also precisely in the defence of the most defenceless human creatures is part of an adult faith. It is part of an adult faith to recognize marriage between a man and a woman for the whole of life as the Creator's ordering, newly re-established by Christ. Adult faith does not let itself be carried about here and there by any trend. It opposes the winds of fashion. It knows that these winds are not the breath of the Holy Spirit; it knows that the Spirit of God is expressed and manifested in communion with Jesus Christ. However, here too Paul does not stop at saying "no", but rather leads us to the great "yes". He describes the mature, truly adult faith positively with the words: "speaking the truth in love" (cf. Eph 4: 15). The new way of thinking, given to us by faith, is first and foremost a turning towards the truth. The power of evil is falsehood. The power of faith, the power of God, is the truth. The truth about the world and about ourselves becomes visible when we look to God. And God makes himself visible to us in the Face of Jesus Christ. In looking at Christ, we recognize something else: truth and love are inseparable. In God both are inseparably one; it is precisely this that is the essence of God. For Christians, therefore, truth and love go together. Love is the test of truth. We should always measure ourselves anew against this criterion, so that truth may become love and love may make us truthful.
Another important thought appears in this verse of St Paul. The Apostle tells us that by acting in accordance with truth in love, we help to ensure that all things (ta pánta) the universe may grow, striving for Christ. On the basis of his faith, Paul is not only concerned in our personal rectitude nor with the growth of the Church alone. He is interested in the universe: ta pánta. The ultimate purpose of Christ's work is the universe the transformation of the universe, of the whole human world, of all creation. Those who serve the truth in love together with Christ contribute to the true progress of the world. Yes, here it is quite clear that Paul is acquainted with the idea of progress. Christ his life, his suffering and his rising was the great leap ahead in the progress of humanity, of the world. Now, however, the universe must grow in accordance with him. Where the presence of Christ increases, therein lies the true progress of the world. There, mankind becomes new and thus the world is made new.
Paul makes the same thing clear from yet another different perspective. In chapter three of the Letter to the Ephesians he speaks to us of the need to be "strengthened... in the inner man" (3: 16). With this he takes up a subject that earlier, in a troubled situation, he had addressed in the Second Letter to the Corinthians. "Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day" (4: 16). The inner person must be strengthened this is a very appropriate imperative for our time, in which people all too often remain inwardly empty and must therefore cling to promises and drugs, which then result in a further growth of the sense of emptiness in their hearts. This interior void the weakness of the inner person is one of the great problems of our time. Interiority must be reinforced the perceptiveness of the heart; the capacity to see and to understand the world and the person from within, with one's heart. We are in need of reason illuminated by the heart in order to learn to act in accordance with truth in love. However, this is not realized without an intimate relationship with God, without the life of prayer. We need the encounter with God that is given to us in the sacraments. And we cannot speak to God in prayer unless we let him speak first, unless we listen to him in the words that he has given us. In this regard Paul says to us: "Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge" (Eph 3: 17ff.). With these words Paul tells us that love sees beyond simple reason. And he also tells us that only in communion with all the saints, that is, in the great community of all believers and not against or without it can we know the immensity of Christ's mystery. He circumscribes this immensity with words meant to express the dimensions of the cosmos: breadth, length and height and depth. The mystery of Christ has a cosmic vastness; he did not belong only to a specific group. The Crucified Christ embraces the entire universe in all its dimensions. He takes the world in his hands and lifts it up towards God. Starting with St Irenaeus of Lyons thus from the second century the Fathers have seen in these words on the breadth, length and height and depth of Christ's love an allusion to the Cross. In the Cross, Christ's love embraced the lowest depths the night of death as well as the supreme heights, the loftiness of God himself. And he took into his arms the breadth and the vastness of humanity and of the world in all their distances. He always embraces the universe all of us.
Let us pray the Lord to help us to recognize something of the immensity of his love. Let us pray him that his love and his truth may touch our hearts. Let us ask that Christ dwell in our hearts and make us new men and women who act according to truth in love. Amen!
--Pope Benedict XVI, 28 June 2009