Enthronization of John X, Patriarch of Antioch

The Lord will not be satisfied in seeing us attached to the letter, rigid, without a breath of life. The Church lives in the Holy Spirit and can speak to all in all generations. Church tradition is not something sclerotic and rigid, repeated unconsciously; tradition is an instrument of salvation and of understanding the mystery of God. We live in an era that often rejects every tradition, and this has a negative influence on our young people. Our Church walks in time, because Christ wanted it to be his witness in every epoch. To walk in a world such as ours requires first of all that the dust which with the passage of time has covered our tradition be removed; it requires serious work so as to return to what stands at the root. Modernity is a grace that invites us to revive the origins of our liturgy and of our teaching and to distinguish between Sacred Tradition and the traditions to which we become attached because to pay attention only to the exterior and forget the life contained within. The witness of the Church in today’s world requires a discernment of modernity’s content, which has so many advantages … Our Church ought not to fear to make use of the instruments that render it capable of bringing its practices up to date and building bridges towards its people with words and ways understood by all … Finally, renewal is not realized solely in updating texts and making them readable in today’s language, but in renewing the human soul and its thoughts and in making this soul turn towards the face of Christ, who always looks at the last ones. In this way humanistic updating is united with man’s heart, giving birth to the salvation of what is human.

Monasticism has a great role in enlivening spiritual life and church renewal through spiritual oases, that is, the monasteries that God as permitted us to see revive in their dignity in the last fifty years, in this blessed Church that has known the birth of monasticism in the Church’s first centuries. We have need of monasteries in which is lived a fraternal life of communion in prayer, in asceticism, and in work, of monasteries capable of interceding in prayer. We are certain, in fact, that their prayer protects the world and what is in the world and strengthens the work in the Church’s vineyard …