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Saturday, June 10, 2006

His Eminence Christoph Cardinal Schönborn Speaks
Father Richard John Neuhaus offers some quotes from an interview with the Austrian prelate in the latest edition of On the Square.

First, His Excellency speaks on the primacy of petitionary prayer, an idea quite at odds with the Lutheran teachings Fr. Neuhaus and I grew up with:
    Saint Thomas explains this in his long quaestio on prayer. There are things that we can do because it is in our power to do them. There are things that, although not in our power to do, can still be done by us when we ask that they be done by someone who can do them. Petitionary prayer, therefore, is for Thomas the primary form of prayer. It shows that we are in need, that we depend upon God. It is also the recognition that God really can achieve what we can only request. That is why petitionary prayer always has an element of adoration, of praise and thanksgiving.
Here is the cardinal's explanation of the Church's lack of both nationalism and false internationalism:
    The Church can never identify herself with any one nation. She is not a national Church. And yet the unmistakable features of the Church can be discerned within the different nations. This is never more luminously expressed than in the saints. Who could be more French than Therese, more English than Thomas More, more Spanish than Ignatius, more Italian than Catherine and Francis? And yet none of them is just a national saint, and any attempt to misuse the saints in the cause of nationalism (as has happened, for example, in the case of Saint Joan of Arc) totally misses the point of their lives.
[link via The Catholic Report]