After the death of Pope John Paul II, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, as Dean of the College of Cardinals, celebrated a Mass for the election of the new Roman Pontiff with all of the other Cardinals, just hours before they would enter into conclave. Little did Cardinal Ratzinger know that the next day he would be elected the new Pope of the Roman Catholic Church.
The readings of that Mass were the very same we’ve proclaimed today (Eph 4:11-16, Ps 89, John 15:9-17). And in his homily, Cardinal Ratzinger expounded upon that image from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, that unless we seek to attain full Christian maturity, we will remain infants in the faith and be tossed about by the waves and winds of falsehoods and errors and deceit and trickery of the world.
I think we know all too well how the temptations of the world can blow us in a direction which is contrary to the faith. And Cardinal Ratzinger was saying if we are not rooted in the knowledge of our faith, if we are not committed to prayer, if we’re not grounded in the commandments, we are going to be tossed about and swept away.
Cardinal Ratzinger then warned against “building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires.” If you do not acknowledge something to be true other than your own feelings, again, you will be tossed back and forth and swept away. We need the Faith, or we will drown.
Yet, when we are rooted in rock-solid faith, we, as the Lord says, will bear fruit, fruit that will last.
When the Cardinals of the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, elected Cardinal Ratzinger as the 265th Pope, they chose a man who is rock solid in faith, and history will show the lasting fruits of his teaching and guidance and humility and courage and his immense love for the Church.
Today’s Gospel takes us back to the Last Supper when the Lord said to his Apostles: “This is my commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you” This love that urges us to offer our own lives in service of our brothers and sisters. Surely this is the attitude that we pray our next Pope will manifest on behalf of the whole Church.
So, we pray today, in this special Mass, that the Church will be blessed, once again with a Pope who will be a Pastor according to Jesus’ own heart, a Pastor who will guide us to knowledge of Christ, who will help us to be rock-solid in our faith amidst all of the waves and winds of error and falsehood and evil in the world today for the glory of God and salvation of souls.
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