PASCHA NOSTRUM, IMMOLATUS EST CHRISTUS
*
*
*For a younger generation which, as recent investigations show, is fascinated by comfort, money, security, investment, cars, television, refrigerators, and washing machines, for these young people, who admittedly believe neither in love nor in politics (they barely believe in pleasure, certainly not in passion), who still take an idolatrous attitude toward science and for the most part accept indifference in matters of religion as good as mental hygiene and economy of the heart, for such young people what can the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ still represent?
*
*
Never in the whole history of Christianity has there been a more appropriate time to meditate on the burial of our Lord Jesus Christ. We have seen God die, we have seen Him placed in the ground, we have seen the great stone rolled against His tomb, we have seen the supercilious legalists place seals on the sepulcher. And is it in This tormented Body, now heaped with aromatics, that we are asked to keep our faith?
*
*Why deny it, why not see things as they are? We have against us the appearances, prejudices, myths, propagandas, concupiscences of this world, time seems to be working against us, and the festivals that are openly celebrated are no longer ours. One after another we have retired all our banners. Laws and customs are no longer Christian. Art and architecture are no longer Christian. The exceptions prove the rule, and very often we have to blush at the sight of what officially bears the name of Christian. The architecture of our modern churches is the ugliest in the world. To us belong mourning, solitude, scorn, shame, prayer, faith, and love offered up, through the rock, to the wounded Body of the Fairest of the children of men.
*
*...The Passion of Jesus Christ has reconciled the universe, and within the universe man, to God, in the way a mirror is reconciled to the light by opening wide the windows and cleansing the mirror of all impurity. This is what redeption from sin is, this is the restoration, the recreation of the universe in the Blood of Jesus. Thanks to This purifying Blood, the universe again finds in itself traces of the divine, and man, looking at himself, recognizes his profoundest sonship.
†
STAT CRUX, DUM VOLVITUR ORBIS
*
~ Fr. Bruckberger, The History of Jesus Christ
