Friday, July 11 : Saint John-Paul II

Saint Benedict knew how to interpret the signs of the time during his period in a clear-sighted and certain way when he wrote his rule, in which the union of prayer and work became, for those who accepted it, the principle of their aspiration towards eternity. “Ora et labora, pray and work.”… In reading the signs of the time, Benedict saw that it was necessary to implement the radical program of evangelical holiness… in an ordinary way, in the things that make up the daily life of every person. It was necessary to make “the heroic” normal, daily, and to make what was normal and daily life heroic. In that way, the father of monks, the legislator of monastic life in the West also became the pioneer of a new civilization. Everywhere, where human work conditioned the development of culture, of economy, of social life, he added the Benedictine program of evangelization, which united work to prayer and prayer to work… In our time, Saint Benedict is the patron of Europe. This is not only because of his particular merits as regards this continent, its history and civilization. It is also because of his person’s new timeliness as regards contemporary Europe. It is possible to detach work from prayer and to make it the only component of human existence. Our present-day period carries within it this tendency… One has the impression that the economy occupies first place, before a moral sense, that what is material has first place before what is spiritual. On the one hand, the almost exclusive orientation towards consumerism in material goods takes away the deepest meaning from human life. On the other hand, in many cases, work has become a force that alienates human beings … and almost in spite of himself, the person detaches himself from prayer, thus removing the transcendent dimension from human life… It is not possible to live for the future without understanding that the meaning of life is greater than what is just material and passing, that the meaning of life goes beyond this world. If society and the people of our continent have lost interest in that meaning, they must find it again… If my predecessor Paul VI named Benedict of Nursia as patron of Europe, it was because this saint can help the Church and the nations of Europe with this.
Roman Catholic Ordinary Calendar – rosary,team