This is Holy Family School of Faith.

Welcome to our Rosary meditation for Holy Saturday.

Let's begin in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Let's call to mind all those we've promised to pray for. This is a meditation on Holy Saturday, the day in which Jesus laid in the tomb.

This meditation comes from Cardinal Ratzinger who became Bob Benedict the 16th.

It's from his book Introduction to Christianity from the section Jesus descended to hell.

Cardinal Ratzinger writes, In his last prayer, Jesus cries out,

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

What appears as the innermost heart of his suffering is not any physical pain, but radical

loneliness, complete abandonment.

In the last analysis, what comes to light here is simply the abyss of loneliness of man in general, of man who is alone in his innermost being.

This loneliness, which is usually thickly overlaid but is nevertheless the true situation of man is at the same time

in fundamental contradiction with the nature of man who cannot exist alone. He needs company. That is

why loneliness is the region of fear which is rooted in the exposure of a being that must exist but is pushed

out into a situation which he cannot endure.

A concrete example may help to make this clear.

When a child has to walk through the woods in the dark, He feels frightened. However, convincingly, he has been

shown that there is no reason at all to be frightened. As soon as he is alone in

the darkness and thus has the experience of utter loneliness, fear arises.

The fear peculiar to man, which is not fear of anything in particular, but simply fear in itself.

Here we come up against something much deeper, namely, the fact that where man falls into extreme loneliness he is not afraid of anything

definite that could be explained away. On the contrary he experiences the fear of loneliness, the uneasiness and vulnerability of

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