Pope Chooses Cardinal Ravasi To Lead Annual Lenten Retreat

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI has asked Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, to lead his Lenten retreat Feb. 17-23.

The Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, reported Jan. 18 that the cardinal will focus on "Ars orandi, ars credendi" (the art of praying, the art of believing), looking particularly at "the face of God and the face of man in the Psalm prayers."

Pope Benedict and top officials from the Roman Curia suspend their normal schedules from the afternoon of the first Sunday of Lent until the following Saturday morning. Instead, they gather each morning and afternoon in the Redemptoris Mater Chapel for common prayer, eucharistic adoration and 17 meditations offered by a different guest preacher each year.

Cardinal Ravasi, 70, told L'Osservatore that he would begin by reflecting on the verbs associated with prayer: to breathe, to think, to struggle, to love.

In an interview with Vatican Radio, the cardinal said Pope Benedict asked him in late December, saying, "I'm curious to see how you handle a very long series, one that is made up of 17 parts."

The cardinal told Vatican Radio, "This spiritual, human and cultural curiosity is very moving in one way, but also suggests a certain intimacy."

Cardinal Ravasi said that, in developing his topic, he thought of the German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoffer, "the martyr under Nazisim," who wrote about the Psalms being human prayers to God, but, at the same time, the word of God.

The Psalms, the cardinal said, "demonstrate that the revelation of God is not a solitary soliloquy recited by God," but is "a dialogue, and for dialogue there must be a response."

Cardinal Ravasi said he expected to cite many examples of people's experiences of prayer and not all of them would be from Christians. "There is a very beautiful expression by an eighth-century Muslim mystic -- Rabia -- who, standing under the starry skies of Basra, her city in Iraq, said: 'O my Lord, the stars glitter in the sky ... Each lover is alone with his love, and I am here, alone with you, O Lord.'"