He said “it is also important that our institutions not be too heavy,” but, instead, apostolic initiatives should stem from “the community and the person.”
As for the form of worship, the Pope said that while a “participative liturgy is important,” it should also be “one that’s not sentimental.”
“Worship must not be simply an expression of sentiments, but raise up the presence and the mystery of God into which he enter and by which we allow ourselves to be formed.”
As for the notion of “inculturation”—the marrying of Christianity with elements of local culture—the Pope warned that the Church “mustn’t lose this grand thing that is Catholicity,” which recognizes that “in all parts of the world we are brothers and sisters, we are one family, where we know each other and collaborate in a spirit of fraternity.”
More in Middle East - Africa
Pope Benedict was then asked about the responsibility that lies with the political class in Africa to help reverse the fortunes of the continent.
The Pope recognized that there has often been a mismatch between “the words, the desires and good intentions” of African leaders and “what’s been accomplished,” by them.
Hinting at a history of corruption among African elites, he explained that the “human person, after original sin, wants to possess himself—to have life, not to give life. I want to keep whatever I have.”
With this mentality, however, “things don’t work,” as “it’s only with love, and the awareness of a God who loves us and gives to us, that we can arrive at a capacity to give ourselves away.”
Pope Benedict was next asked about his reference at the 2009 Synod of African Bishops in Rome to Africa being a “great spiritual lung for a humanity experiencing a crisis of faith and hope.”
In response he noted that while African society had faced “great problems and difficulties,” over the past 50 to 60 years there was still “a freshness, a ‘yes’ to life, in Africa, a youthfulness that’s full of enthusiasm and hope.”
“There’s a sense of humor, a joy,” he said, that “shows a freshness, too, in the religious sense.” African society, he said, still has “a metaphysical perception of reality, meaning reality in its totality with God,” which gives it a “fresh humanism,” in its “young soul,” despite its problems.
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He compared this African mentality to that of the more prosperous West which is often gripped, he said, by “a rigid positivism, that restricts our life and makes it a little arid, and also turns off hope.”
“If I think about my youth, it was a completely different world than that of today, so much so that I sometimes think I’m living on a different planet from when I was a young man!”
Finally, Pope Benedict was asked to reflect further upon his friendship with the late Cardinal Bernardin Gantin.
He explained that he first saw Cardinal Gantin at his installation as Archbishop of Munich in 1976. “On that important day of my episcopal ordination, it was beautiful for me to meet this young African bishop full of faith, full of joy and courage.”
During their years together in Rome, the Pope said he always marveled at Cardinal Gantin’s “deep and practical intelligence, his sense of discernment, to not trip over beautiful ideological phrases but to grasp what’s essential and what doesn’t make sense,” as well as his “beautiful” sense of humor and life of “deep faith and prayer.”
“All this made Cardinal Gantin not just a friend, but an example. He was a great African Catholic bishop, and I’m truly happy now that I’m able to pray at his tomb and to feel his closeness, his great faith, which will always make him an example for me and a friend.”