Catholicaware

a. association for
w. worship and
a. adoration,
r. renewal and
e. evangelization
 Catholicaware
Awareness in the writings of Pope John Paul II

“In my first encyclical, in which I set forth the

program of my pontificate, I said that "the church's
fundamental function in every age, and particularly in ours,
is to direct man's gaze, to point the awareness and
experience of the whole of humanity toward the mystery of
Christ."

“Every initiative serves true renewal in the Church and

helps to bring the authentic light that is Christ insofar as the
initiative is based on adequate awareness of the individual
Christian's vocation and of responsibility for this singular,
unique and unrepeatable grace by which each Christian in
the community of the People of God builds up the Body of
Christ.
This principle, the key rule for the whole of Christian
practice-apostolic and pastoral practice, practice of interior
and of social life-must with due proportion be applied to
the whole of humanity and to each human being.” (Pope
John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, 21)

Awareness in the writings of Pope Benedict XVI

The awareness of being saved by the love of Christ,

which every Mass nourishes in the faithful and especially
in priests, cannot but arouse within them a trusting self-
abandonment to Christ who gave his life for us. To believe
in the Lord and to accept his gift, therefore, leads us to
entrust ourselves to Him with thankful hearts, adhering to
his plan of salvation. When this does happen, the one who
is “called” voluntarily leaves everything and submits
himself to the teaching of the divine Master; hence a
fruitful dialogue between God and man begins, a
mysterious encounter between the love of the Lord who
calls and the freedom of man who responds in love, hearing
the words of Jesus echoing in his soul, “You did not choose
me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go
and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide” (Jn 15:16).

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

“Christ, our Paschal lamb, has been sacrificed!” (1 Cor
5:7). On this day, Saint Paul’s triumphant words ring forth,
words that we have just heard in the second reading, taken
from his First Letter to the Corinthians. It is a text which
originated barely twenty years after the death and
resurrection of Jesus, and yet – like many Pauline passages
– it already contains, in an impressive synthesis, a full
awareness of the newness of life in Christ.

Vatican Instruction “On Certain Questions Regarding the

Participation of the Lay Faithful in the Life and Ministry of
the Priest” (15 August 1997, 9.) “The priority task of the
New Evangelization, which involves all the People of God,
requires that, today in particular… there be [also]a full
recovery of the awareness of the secular nature of the
mission of the laity . . . it is necessary that all who are in
any way involved in this collaboration, exercise particular
care to safeguard the nature and mission of sacred
ministry and the vocation and secular character of the lay
faithful

What do we mean by awareness?

While reason can approach God and thus is a kind of
awareness, this stops short of the awareness indicated by
the latest Popes. This awareness begins in a kind of
perception called faith, and leads to a kind of knowing. As
St. Augustine has it “the Son is sent, whenever he is known
and perceived by anyone. Now perception implies a certain
experimental knowledge; and this is properly called
wisdom (Sapientia), as it were a sweet knowledge (sapida
scientia).” This knowing of Jesus is not a metaphor, it is a
reality. God is not bound by time and all that Jesus did is
made present to the person who, prompted by the Holy
Spirit, appropriates what Jesus did by faith. As an
unknown preacher, 4th or 5th called Pseudo- Chrysostom
writes, “as far as we are concerned, Christ’s immolation on
our behalf takes place when we become aware of this grace
and we understand the life conferred on us by this
sacrifice.” (Homily on Easter 1.7 Sources Chretiennes 36,
61).

So begins the process of awareness, in faith. The

Church preaches grace and faith before rules. Symeon the
New Theologian (1022) said this once when he was
instructing that canonical penances should only being
imposed only after announcement of the faith,
enlightenment, “for it is senseless to bind and scorch, that
is, to lay a penance according to the canons upon one who
is unable to feel, just as it is senseless to give treatment to a
dead person.”

Then he describes the “path to God.” It is a great good to

believe in Christ, because without faith in Christ it is
impossible for anyone to be saved; but on must also be
instructed in the word of truth and understand it. It is a
good thing to be instructed in the word of truth, and to
understand it is essential; but one must also receive
Baptism in the name of the Holy And Life-giving Trinity,
for the bringing to life of the soul. It is a good thing to
receive Baptism and through it a new spiritual life; but it is
necessary that this mystical life, or this mental
enlightenment in the spirit, also should be consciously felt.
It is a good thing to receive to receive with feeling the
mental enlightenment in the spirit; but one must manifest
the works of light. It is a good thing to do the works of
light; but one must also be clothed in the humility and
meekness of Christ for a perfect likeness to Christ.1

1
Simeon the New Theologian, The First-Created Man, Seven Homilies, translated by Fr. Seraphim Rose
(Plantina, California: St. Herman Press, 1979, 2001),
 Catholicaware
Association:
An association is not a club, a church, or a family. It presumes that there is
life outside of the association, but it exists to gather together people who are
called to a deeper communion in the particular graces that form and inform
our experience of God. In particular, this association, aware, draws together
those who have awakened to the power of Christian worship as “more than a
song” but an entrance into God’s presence and abandonment to the action of
the Holy Spirit. This association is for those who thirst to see their own
lives and the entire church “led by the Spirit,” especially attentive to the re-
awakening of charisms and all gifts of the Spirit. Catholic A.W.A.R.E. is
for those who believe that God is right now renewing the Church by a New
Pentecost for a New Evangelization. We exist to encourage each other to
receive God’s love for ourselves and to live our lives in the awareness that
people have the right to hear about God’s loving plan, enfleshed in Jesus
Christ: that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, and that it is
an act of love to invite all people to faith in Jesus.

Worship:
First of all, Worship is a lifestyle (notice what it does!):
CCC 2031: “The moral life is spiritual worship. We "present [our] bodies as
a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God," within the Body of Christ
that we form and in communion with the offering of his Eucharist. In the
liturgy and the celebration of the sacraments, prayer and teaching are
conjoined with the grace of Christ to enlighten and nourish Christian
activity. As does the whole of the Christian life, the moral life finds its
source and summit in the Eucharistic sacrifice.”

CCC 2097: “To adore God is to praise and exalt him and to humble
oneself, as Mary did in the Magnificat, confessing with gratitude that he has
done great things and holy is his name. The worship of the one God sets
man free from turning in on himself, from the slavery of sin and the idolatry
of the world.”

Second, worship is expressed in a form of prayer:

CCC 2639 “Praise is the form of prayer which recognizes most immediately
that God is God. It lauds God for his own sake and gives him glory, quite
beyond what he does, but simply because HE IS. It shares in the blessed
happiness of the pure of heart who love God in faith before seeing him in
glory. By praise, the Spirit is joined to our spirits to bear witness that we are
children of God, testifying to the only Son in whom we are adopted and by
whom we glorify the Father. Praise embraces the other forms of prayer and
carries them toward him who is its source and goal: the "one God, the
Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist."

There is an important connection between the worship that is the moral

life and the worship offered in praise.

Fr. Cantalamessa: “Side by side with suffering, the other powerful means of
destroying “the sinful body” is praise. Praise is par excellence, anti-sin. If,
as the Apostle explained, the mother-sin is impiety, that is, a refusal to
glorify and thank God, then the exact opposite of sin is not virtue but praise!
The opposite of impiety is piety. We must learn to overcome sin with big
means and not small ones, with positive ones and not negative ones, and the
greatest and most positive of all means is God himself… What do praise
and thanksgiving immolate and destroy? It immolates and destroys man’s
pride! Whoever offers praise sacrifices to God the most acceptable victim
that could exist and that is his own glory. That is what the extraordinary
purifying power of praise consists of. Humility is concealed in praise. (Life
in Christ, 260).

Adoration:
CCC 2096: Adoration is the first act of the virtue of religion. To adore God
is to acknowledge him as God, as the Creator and Savior, the Lord and
Master of everything that exists, as infinite and merciful Love. "You shall
worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve," says Jesus, citing
Deuteronomy.

Renewal:
“What is renewal? Renewal is an act of the Holy Spirit in the church by
which the Church re-appropriates the life given to it by the death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ. (Fr. Francis Martin).

There is a renewal, an act of the Holy Spirit, happening in the Church today.
Hear Pope Benedict XVI on this:

“What is emerging here is a new generation of the Church which I am

watching with great hope. I find it marvelous that the Spirit is once more
stronger that our programs and brings himself to play in an altogether
different way that we had imagined. In this sense the renewal, in a
subdued but effective way, is afoot. Naturally, it does not have its full
voice in the great debate of dominant ideas. It Grows in silence. Our
task- the task of the the office-holders in the Church and of theologians – is
to keep the door open to them, to prepare room for them.” (Ratzinger
Report pp, 43-44).

"The period following the Council scarcely seemed to live up to the hopes of
John XXIII, who looked for a 'new Pentecost'. But his prayer did not go
unheard. In the heart of a world desiccated by rationalistic skepticism a new
experience of the Holy Spirit has come about, amounting to a worldwide
renewal movement. What the New Testament describes, with reference to
the charisms, as visible signs of the coming of the Spirit is no longer merely
ancient, past history - this history is becoming a burning reality today."
(Ratzinger Report p.151).

Renewal is about being baptized in the Holy Spirit. Pope Benedict

expressed this reality as a recovery of awareness when he wrote:
In my Message for the next World Youth Day 2008, I have proposed to the
young people that they rediscover the Holy Spirit's presence in their lives
and thus the importance of these Sacraments. Today I would like to extend
the invitation to all: let us rediscover, dear brothers and sisters, the beauty of
being baptized in the Holy Spirit; let us recover awareness of our Baptism
and our Confirmation, ever timely sources of grace.

“What we learn in the New Testament on charisms, which appeared as

visible signs of the coming of the Holy Spirit, is not a historical event of the
past, but a reality ever alive. It is the same divine Spirit, soul of the Church,
that acts in every age and those mysterious and effective interventions of the
Spirit are manifest in our time in a providential way. The Movements and
New Communities are like an outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the Church
and in contemporary society. We can, therefore, rightly say that one of the
positive elements and aspects of the Community of the Catholic Charismatic
Renewal is precisely their emphasis on the charisms or gifts of the Holy
Spirit and their merit lies in having recalled their topicality in the Church.

Evangelization:
“God is opening before the Church the horizons of a humanity more fully
prepared for the sowing of the Gospel. I sense that the moment has come
to commit all of the Church's energies to a new evangelization and to the
mission ad gentes. No believer in Christ, no institution of the Church can
avoid this supreme duty: to proclaim Christ to all peoples.”

To nourish ourselves with the word in order to be "servants of the word" in

the work of evangelization: this is surely a priority for the Church at the
dawn of the new millennium. Even in countries evangelized many centuries
ago, the reality of a "Christian society" which, amid all the frailties which
have always marked human life, measured itself explicitly on Gospel values,
is now gone. Today we must courageously face a situation which is
becoming increasingly diversified and demanding, in the context of
"globalization" and of the consequent new and uncertain mingling of
peoples and cultures. Over the years, I have often repeated the summons to
the new evangelization. I do so again now, especially in order to insist that
we must rekindle in ourselves the impetus of the beginnings and allow
ourselves to be filled with the ardour of the apostolic preaching which
followed Pentecost. We must revive in ourselves the burning conviction of
Paul, who cried out: "Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel" (1 Cor 9:16).
. . . This passion will not fail to stir in the Church a new sense of mission,
which cannot be left to a group of "specialists" but must involve the
responsibility of all the members of the People of God. Those who have
come into genuine contact with Christ cannot keep him for themselves, they
must proclaim him. A new apostolic outreach is needed, which will be lived
as the everyday commitment of Christian communities and groups. This
should be done however with the respect due to the different paths of
different people and with sensitivity to the diversity of cultures in which the
Christian message must be planted, in such a way that the particular values
of each people will not be rejected but purified and brought to their fullness
(John Paul II, Novo Millennio Ineunte 40).