XII ORDINARY GENERAL ASSEMBLY
Appropriately, the Master of the Order, Fr. Carlos, gave his intervention yesterday on the feast of the Holy Rosary. Following is the Vatican translation of his text:
The “primacy” of the Holy Scripture has its basis precisely in Trinitarian life.The great Medieval Doctors (Saint Albert the Great, Saint Bonaventure, Saint Thomas Aquinas) fully understood this; for them, the procession of people, within the unity of the divine essence is “the cause and the explicit reason of the procession of the same creatures.”
The Word, genitus creator, has from the Father the will to make itself flesh and to suffer for us ab aeterno.
God wished to reveal Himself to mankind in human form, through human culture, people and languages and through the very life of Jesus. While this form is for us a guarantee of the value of our nature , of history and of human cultures - with their different languages - it also poses complex problems of interpretation.
As the reality of the creation is not rationally understandable without an adequate grounding in metaphysics - l’analogia entis - so knowledge of the Holy Scripture requires profound knowledge of the cultures and literary genres in which it was expressed; thus making possible a less inadequate perception of its literal sense and also the recognition of the analogical quality of the terms used.
All the Church, with its unflagging proclamation, continues with hope to entrust the Good News to all cultures, so that it may be more fully understood, lived and proclaimed in new voices, once again.
In the recent history of the Church, undergoing many difficulties, the need for this kind of “critical” interpretation has, not without difficulties, been demonstrated (Fr Marie-Joseph Lagrange O.P. 1855-1938) emphasizing its historical foundations and its richness: the fact that it is - exactly - a song for several voices.
Christian faith, for all the fact that it is “religion”, must first of all be considered as “religion of the Spirit”, because the New Testament is principally the same Holy Spirit which in us produces charity and only secondarily, being “letter” may be considered “religion of the Book”.This process of revelation and of salvation is also the unveiling of the veritas iustitiae of our life, of the justice of God which is the foundation of the truth of our being and which is, for us, above all “justifying justice” that is to say based on its mercy which is the permanent precondition of divine justice, because it is the first root and also its crowning.