35.5 F
Saint Paul
Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Pope Benedict leaves valuable witness for seniors

Sister Contance Veit

As Ash Wednesday approached, I was thinking that this was going to be a Lent like most others. And then came the news on Feb. 11. Even as I pondered what a papal resignation signified, my thoughts drifted back to another season of high emotion — Lent 2005. A proud member of the John Paul II generation, I will never forget the images of him publicly living out his last days like a long and deliberate way of the cross. Benedict XVI’s final papal Lent has an entirely different tenor.

We Little Sisters of the Poor would simply like to offer profound thanks to God for the gift of Pope Benedict at a very challenging time in the life of the Church. We would like to thank him for the canonization of our mother foundress, Saint Jeanne Jugan, in 2009, and for imparting a message of hope to our sisters and elderly residents during a visit to our home in London in 2010.

We would also like to reflect on Pope Benedict’s example from the perspective of women religious dedicated to the elderly. In visiting our residents in London, the pope readily admitted that he came among them as a brother who knows both the joys and struggles of advanced age. During a visit to an old age home in Rome in late 2012, he identified himself as “an old man visiting his peers,” even exclaiming that “it is beautiful to be old!” Rare is the public figure who so readily admits his own frailty.

At the beginning of his pontificate, Benedict said that “Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.” It is worth pondering at any age, but especially as one feels his or her strength and abilities diminishing under the weight of old age.

In his first encyclical, Benedict wrote about humility and service. Now he is showing us the way: “We are only instruments in the Lord’s hands; and this knowledge frees us from the presumption of thinking that we alone are personally responsible for building a better world. . . . . To do all we can with what strength we have, however, is the task which keeps the good servant of Jesus Christ always at work: ‘The love of Christ urges us on’ (2 Corinthians 5:14)” (“Deus Caritas Est,” n. 35).

- Advertisement -

There can be no doubt that the love of Christ – and love for the Church – are urging Benedict XVI on as he pursues a life of prayer, hidden from the world.

Like so many seniors whose daily Masses, rosaries and petitions serve as a hidden fulcrum lifting up the Church, Benedict will express with his life an insight shared by his predecessor in his “Letter to the Elderly” — “At the very time when their physical energies and their level of activity are decreasing, these brothers and sisters of ours become all the more precious in the mysterious plan of Providence.”

Sister Constance is director of communications for the Little Sisters of the Poor in the United States.

 


Related Articles

SIGN UP FOR OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
- Advertisement -
- Advertisement -

Trending

- Advertisement -
- Advertisement -
12,743FansLike
1,478FollowersFollow
6,479FollowersFollow
35,922FollowersFollow
583SubscribersSubscribe
- Advertisement -