Audiences 2005-2013 31012

Wednesday, 3 October 2012

31012

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

In last week’s Catechesis I began talking about one of the special sources of Christian prayer: the sacred liturgy which, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, is “a participation in Christ’s own prayer addressed to the Father in the Holy Spirit. In the liturgy, all Christian prayer finds its source and goal” (n. 1073). Today I would like us to ask ourselves: in my life, do I leave enough room for prayer and, above all, what place in my relationship with God does liturgical prayer, especially Holy Mass occupy, as participation in the common prayer of the Body of Christ which is the Church?

In answering this question we must remember first of all that prayer is the living relationship of the children of God with their Father who is good beyond measure, with his Son Jesus Christ and with the Holy Spirit (cf. ibid., 2565). Therefore the life of prayer consists in being habitually in God’s presence and being aware of it, in living in a relationship with God as we live our customary relationships in life, with our dearest relatives, with true friends; indeed the relationship with the Lord is the relationship that gives light to all our other relationships. This communion of life with the Triune God is possible because through Baptism we have been incorporated into Christ, we have begun to be one with him (cf.
Rm 6,5).

In fact, only through Christ can we converse with God the Father as children, otherwise it is not possible, but in communion with the Son we can also say, as he did, “Abba”. In communion with Christ we can know God as our true Father (cf. Mt 11,27). For this reason Christian prayer consists in looking constantly at Christ and in an ever new way, speaking to him, being with him in silence, listening to him, acting and suffering with him. The Christian rediscovers his true identity in Christ, “the first-born of all creation” in whom “all things hold together” (cf. Col 1,15ff.). In identifying with him, in being one with him, I rediscover my personal identity as a true son or daughter who looks to God as to a Father full of love.

But let us not forget: it is in the Church that we discover Christ, that we know him as a living Person. She is “his Body”. This corporeity can be understood on the basis of the biblical words about man and about woman: the two will be one flesh (cf. Gn 2,24 Ep 5,30ff.; 1Co 6,16f.). The indissoluble bond between Christ and the Church, through the unifying power of love, does not cancel the “you” and the “I” but on the contrary raises them to their highest unity. Finding one’s identity in Christ means reaching communion with him, that does not wipe me out but raises me to the loftiest dignity, that of a child of God in Christ: “The love-story between God and man consists in the very fact that this communion of will increases in a communion of thought and sentiment, and thus our will and God's will increasingly coincide” (Encyclical Deus Caritas Est ). Praying means raising oneself to God’s heights, through a necessary, gradual transformation of our being.

Thus, by participating in the liturgy we make our own the language of Mother Church, we learn to speak in her and for her. Of course, as I have already said, this happens gradually, little by little. I must immerse myself ever more deeply in the words of the Church with my prayer, with my life, with my suffering, with my joy, and with my thought. It is a process that transforms us.

I therefore think that these reflections enable us to answer the question we asked ourselves at the outset: how do I learn to pray, how do I develop in my prayer? Looking at the example which Jesus taught us, the Pater Noster [Our Father], we see that the first word [in Latin] is “Father” and the second is “our”. Thus the answer is clear, I learn to pray, I nourish my prayer by addressing God as Father and praying-with-others, praying with the Church, accepting the gift of his words which gradually become familiar to me and full of meaning. The dialogue that God establishes with each one of us, and we with him in prayer, always includes a “with”; it is impossible to pray to God in an individualistic manner. In liturgical prayer, especially the Eucharist and — formed by the liturgy — in every prayer, we do not only speak as individuals but on the contrary enter into the “we” of the Church that prays. And we must transform our “I”, entering into this “we”.

I would like to recall another important aspect. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church we read: “In the liturgy of the New Covenant every liturgical action, especially the celebration of the Eucharist and the sacraments, is an encounter between Christ and the Church” (CEC 1097). Therefore it is the “total Christ”, the whole Community, the Body of Christ united with her Head, that is celebrating. Thus the liturgy is not a sort of “self-manifestation” of a community; it means instead coming out of merely “being ourselves”, being closed in on ourselves, and having access to the great banquet, entering into the great living community in which God himself nourishes us. The liturgy implies universality and this universal character must enter ever anew into the awareness of all. The Christian liturgy is the worship of the universal temple which is the Risen Christ, whose arms are outstretched on the Cross to draw everyone into the embrace of God’s eternal love. It is the worship of a wide open heaven. It is never solely the event of a single community with its place in time and space. It is important that every Christian feel and be truly integrated into this universal “we” which provides the “I”, the basis and refuge of the “I”, in the Body of Christ which is the Church.

In this we must bear in mind and accept the logic of God’s Incarnation: he made himself close, present, entering into history and into human nature, making himself one of us. And this presence continues in the Church, his Body. So, the Liturgy is not the memory of past events, but is the living presence of the Paschal Mystery of Christ who transcends and unites times and places. If in the celebration the centrality of Christ did not emerge, we would not have Christian liturgy, totally dependent on the Lord and sustained by his creative presence. God acts through Christ and we can act only through and in him. The conviction must grow within us every day that the liturgy is not our or my “doing” but rather is an action of God in us and with us.

It is not, therefore, the individual — priest or member of the faithful — or the group celebrating the liturgy, but the liturgy is primarily God’s action through the Church which has her own history, her rich tradition and her creativity. This universality and fundamental openness, which is proper to the whole of the liturgy, is one of the reasons why it cannot be conceived of or modified by the individual community or by experts, but must be faithful to the forms of the universal Church.

The entire Church is always present even in the liturgy of the smallest community. For this reason there are no “strangers” in the liturgical community. In every liturgical celebration the whole Church takes part, heaven and earth, God and men. The Christian liturgy, even if it is celebrated in a place and in a concrete space and expresses the “yes” of a specific community, is by its nature catholic, it comes from all and leads to all, in unity with the Pope, with the Bishops and with believers of all epochs and all places. The more a celebration is enlivened by awareness of this, the more fruitfully will the authentic meaning of the liturgy be made present.

Dear friends, the Church becomes visible in many ways: in charitable action, in mission projects, in the personal apostolate that every Christian must carry out in his own walk of life. However the place in which she is fully experienced as Church is in the liturgy; it is the act in which we believe that God enters our reality and we can encounter him, we can touch him. It is the act in which we come into contact with God: he comes to us and we are illuminated by him. For this reason, when in reflections on the liturgy we focus our attention exclusively on how to make it attractive, interesting and beautiful, we risk forgetting the essential: the liturgy is celebrated for God and not for ourselves; it is his work; he is the subject; and we must open ourselves to him and let ourselves be guided by him and by his Body which is the Church.

Let us ask the Lord to learn every day to live the sacred liturgy, especially the Eucharistic Celebration, praying in the “we” of the Church, which directs her gaze not upon herself, but to God, and feeling part of the living Church of all places and of all epochs. Thank you.

To special groups:

I greet all the English-speaking pilgrims present, including the St Hallvard Boys' Choir from Oslo. I also welcome students from the Pontifical North American College, who are to be ordained deacon tomorrow. Dear Ordinands, always be faithful heralds of the Gospel and generous witnesses to the love of Christ! Upon you and your loved ones, and indeed upon all present, I invoke God’s abundant blessings. Thank you!

I am glad to welcome the priests and seminarians from various nations, students at the Pontifical Colleges of San Paolo Apostolo and Maria Mater Ecclesiae. In addressing to you my good wishes for your commitment to study, I assure you my special remembrance in prayer.

Lastly, my greetings go to the young people, the sick and the newlyweds.Dear young people, listen to Christ, the word of truth, and accept promptly his plan for your life. Dear sick people, may you feel Jesus beside you and witness with your hope to the life-giving power of his Cross. Dear newlyweds, with the grace of the sacrament, invigorate your love day by day and walk on the path of holiness.

Tomorrow I shall be going to the Shrine of Loreto on the 50th anniversary of the famous pilgrimage of Blessed Pope John XXIII to that Marian region, which he made a week before opening the Second Vatican Council.

I ask you to join in my prayers, commending to the Mother of God the principal ecclesial events for which we are preparing: the Year of Faith and the Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelization. May the Blessed Virgin accompany the Church on her mission to proclaim the Gospel to the men and women of our time.


Saint Peter's Square

Wednesday, 10 October 2012

10102

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

This is the eve of the day on which we shall be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council and the beginning of the Year of Faith.With this Catechesis I would like, with a few brief thoughts, to start reflecting on the important Church event which the Council was and which I witnessed directly. It lies before us like a great fresco, so to speak, painted with the great multiplicity and variety of its elements under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. And as if we were standing in front of a large picture, still today we continue to perceive the extraordinary wealth of that moment of grace, to discover in it particular scenes, fragments and pieces of the mosaic.

On the threshold of the third millennium Blessed John Paul II wrote: “I feel more than ever in duty bound to point to the Council as the great grace bestowed on the Church in the 20th century: there we find a sure compass by which to take our bearings in the century now beginning” (Apostolic Letter, Novo Millennio Ineunte, n. 57). I think this is an eloquent image. The Second Vatican Council Documents, to which we must return, freeing them from a mass of publications which instead of making them known have often concealed them, are a compass in our time too that permits the Barque of the Church to put out into the deep in the midst of storms or on calm and peaceful waves, to sail safely and to reach her destination.

I remember that period well: I was a young professor of fundamental theology at the University of Bonn and it was Cardinal Frings, Archbishop of Cologne — my human and priestly reference point — who took me with him to Rome as his theological consultant; I was then also appointed a Council peritus. It was a unique experience for me: after all the excitement and enthusiasm of the preparations, I could see a living Church — almost 3,000 Council Fathers under the leadership of the Successor of the Apostle Peter — which set herself to learn at the school of the Holy Spirit, the true driving force of the Council. Only rarely in history has it been possible, as it was then, almost “to touch”, to feel tangibly the universality of the Church at a moment of the great fulfilment of her mission to take the Gospel in every epoch to the ends of the earth. In these days, if you look at the pictures of the opening of this great assembly, on television or via the other means of communication, you too will be able to discern the joy, hope and encouragement that participation in this event of light, which shines to this day, gave to us all.

In the history of the Church, as I think you know, various Councils preceded Vatican II. These great ecclesial assemblies were usually convoked to define fundamental elements of faith, above all to correct errors which endangered it. Let us think of the Council of Nicea, held in 325 to oppose the Arian heresy and to reassert clearly the divinity of the Only-Begotten Son of God the Father; or of the Council of Ephesus, in 431, that defined Mary as the Mother of God; of the Council of Chalcedon, in 451, that affirmed the one Person of Christ in two natures, the divine nature and the human. To come a little closer to us, we must mention the Council of Trent in the 16th century that clarified essential points of Catholic doctrine in the face of the Protestant Reformation; or the First Vatican Council that began to reflect on various topics but — because it was interrupted by the occupation of Rome in September 1870 — only had time to produce two documents, one on knowledge of God, the revelation, faith and the relationship with reason, and the other on the primacy of the Pope and on his infallibility.

If we look at the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, we see that in that stretch of the Church’s journey there were no particular errors of faith to correct or condemn, nor were there any specific questions of doctrine or discipline to explain. It is thus possible to understand the surprise of the small group of cardinals in the Chapter Hall of the Benedictine monastery of St Paul Outside-the-Walls when, on 25 January 1959, Blessed John XXIII, announced the Diocesan Synod for Rome and the Council for the universal Church. The first question that arose in the preparation of this great event was, precisely, how to begin it and what specific task to attribute to it. Blessed John XXIII issued a general instruction, in his opening Discourse on 11 October 50 years ago: faith had to speak in a “renewed” and more incisive way — because the world was rapidly changing — but all the while keeping its perennial content intact, without concessions or compromises. The Pope wished the Church to reflect on her faith, on the truth that guides her. However, this serious, in-depth reflection on faith, was to delineate in a new way the relationship between the Church and the modern epoch, between Christianity and certain essential elements of modern thought, not in order to be conformed to it but to present to this world of ours, that is tending to drift away from God, the requirement of the Gospel in its full greatness and purity (cf. Discourse to the Roman Curia for the Exchange of Christmas Greetings, 22 December 2005).

The Servant of God Paul VI expressed this well in his homily at the end of the last Council session — on 7 December 1965 — using extraordinarily modern words, when he said that to appreciate this event properly: “it is necessary to remember the time in which it was realized”. In fact, the Pope said “it took place at a time which everyone admits is orientated toward the conquest of the kingdom of earth rather than of that of heaven; a time in which forgetfulness of God has become habitual, and seems, quite wrongly, to be prompted by the progress of science; a time in which the fundamental act of the human person, more conscious now of himself and of his freedom, tends to pronounce in favour of his own absolute autonomy, in emancipation from every transcendent law; a time in which secularism seems the legitimate consequence of modern thought and the highest wisdom in the temporal ordering of society.... It was at such a time as this that our Council was held to the honour of God, in the name of Christ and under the impulse of the Spirit”.

This is what Paul VI said. And he ended by identifying the key point of the Council, God, who “is — and more, he is real, he lives, a personal, provident God, infinitely good; and not only good in himself, but also immeasurably good to us. He is recognized as our Creator, our truth, our happiness; so much so that the effort to look on him, and to centre our heart in him which we call contemplation, is the highest, the most perfect act of the human spirit, the act which even today can and must be at the apex of all human activity from which human beings receive their dignity” (cf. AAS 58 [1966], 52-53).

We see that the era in which we live continues to be marked by forgetting and being deaf to God. I think, therefore, that we should learn the simplest and most fundamental lesson of the Council: namely, that Christianity in its essence consists of faith in God which is Trinitarian Love, and in a personal and community encounter with Christ who orients and gives meaning to life. Everything else flows from this. What is as important today as it was for the Council Fathers is that we see — once again, and clearly — that God is present, concerns us and responds to us. And when, instead, man lacks faith in God, the essential collapses because man loses his profound dignity and what makes his humanity great enough to withstand any form of reductionism. The Council reminds us that the Church in all her members, has the task, the mandate of transmitting God’s word of love which saves, so that we may hear and welcome the divine call which contains in itself our eternal beatitude.

Looking in this light at the riches contained in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, I would like to mention only the four Constitutions, as it were, the four cardinal points of the compass that can direct us. The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium points out to us that in the Church at the beginning there is worship, there is God, there is the centrality of the mystery of Christ’s presence. And the Church, the Body of Christ and the pilgrim people in time, has the glorification of God as her fundamental task, as the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium explains. The third document I want to mention is the Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum: the living Word of God convokes the Church and never fails to enliven her as she journeys on through history. And the way in which the Church brings to the whole world the light she has received from God so that he may be glorified is the basic theme of the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes.

The Second Vatican Council is a strong appeal to us to rediscover every day the beauty of our faith, to know it deeply for a more intense relationship with the Lord, in order to live our Christian vocation to the full. May the Virgin Mary, Mother of Christ and of the whole Church, help us to achieve and to bring to completion what the Council Fathers, motivated by the Holy Spirit, pondered in their hearts: the desire that all might know the Gospel and encounter the Lord Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Many thanks.

To special groups:

I greet all the English-speaking pilgrims, visitors and groups present today, including those from England, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Ghana, Australia, India, Japan, Malaysia, Canada and the United States. Upon all of you, I invoke God’s blessings of joy and peace!

I then greet with affection the young people, the sick and the newlyweds, inviting them to think of Mary, invoked in this month of October as Queen of the Holy Rosary. Look to her, dear young people, especially you, students at the Schools of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians of Campania and Basilicata, and be ready to renew your “yes” to the plan of love that God has for each one of you. Dear sick people, share your suffering with Mary, offering it to her as a gift of salvation for your brethren. Persevere in prayer with Mary, dear newlyweds, like the Apostles in the Upper Room, and your families will experience the consoling presence of the Holy Spirit.


Saint Peter's Square

Wednesday, 17 October 2012: The Year of Faith. Introduction

17102

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Today I would like to introduce the new series of Catecheses that will develop throughout the Year of Faith that has just begun and will interrupt — during this period — the series on the school of prayer. I announced this special Year in the Apostolic Letter Porta Fidei, precisely so that the Church might renew the enthusiasm of believing in Jesus Christ the one Saviour of the world, revive the joy of walking on the path he pointed out to us and bear a tangible witness to the transforming power of faith.

The 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council is an important opportunity to return to God, to deepen our faith and live it more courageously, and to strengthen our belonging to the Church, “teacher of humanity”. It is through the proclamation of the Word, the celebration of the sacraments and works of charity that she guides us to meeting and knowing Christ, true God and true man. This is not an encounter with an idea or with a project of life, but with a living Person who transforms our innermost selves, revealing to us our true identity as children of God.

The encounter with Christ renews our human relationships, directing them, from day to day, to greater solidarity and brotherhood in the logic of love. Having faith in the Lord is not something that solely involves our intelligence, the area of intellectual knowledge; rather, it is a change that involves our life, our whole self: feelings, heart, intelligence, will, corporeity, emotions and human relationships. With faith everything truly changes, in us and for us, and our future destiny is clearly revealed, the truth of our vocation in history, the meaning of life, the pleasure of being pilgrims bound for the heavenly Homeland.

However — let us ask ourselves — is faith truly the transforming force in our life, in my life? Or is it merely one of the elements that are part of existence, without being the crucial one that involves it totally? With the Catecheses of this Year of Faith let us make a journey to reinforce or rediscover the joy of faith, in the knowledge that it is not something extraneous, detached from daily life, but is its soul. Faith in a God who is love, who makes himself close to man by incarnating himself and by giving himself on the Cross, who saves us and opens the doors of Heaven to us once again, clearly indicates that man’s fullness consists solely in love.

This must be unequivocally reasserted today, when the cultural transformations under way frequently display so many forms of barbarity, passed off as “conquests of civilization”. Faith affirms that there is no true humanity except in the places, actions, times and forms in which the human being is motivated by the love that comes from God. It is expressed as a gift and reveals itself in relationships full of love, compassion, attention and disinterested service to others. Wherever there is domination, possession, exploitation and the taking advantage of the other for selfish reasons wherever there is the arrogance of the ego withdrawn into the self, the human being is impoverished, debased and disfigured. The Christian faith, active in charity and strong in hope, does not limit but rather humanizes life, indeed, makes it fully human.

Faith means taking this transforming message to heart in our life, receiving the revelation of God who makes us know that he exists, how he acts and what his plans for us are. Of course, the mystery of God always remains beyond our conception and reason, our rites and our prayers. Yet, through his revelation, God actually communicates himself to us, recounts himself and makes himself accessible. And we are enabled to listen to his Word and to receive his truth. This, then, is the wonder of faith: God, in his love, creates within us — through the action of the Holy Spirit — the appropriate conditions for us to recognize his Word. God himself, in his desire to show himself, to come into contact with us, to make himself present in our history, enables us to listen to and receive him. St Paul expresses it with joy and gratitude in these words: “And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers” (
1Th 2,13).

God has revealed himself with words and works throughout a long history of friendship with mankind which culminated in the Incarnation of the Son of God and in the Mystery of his death and Resurrection. God not only revealed himself in the history of a people, he not only spoke through the Prophets but he also crossed the threshold of his Heaven to enter our planet as a man, so that we might meet him and listen to him. And the proclamation of the Gospel of salvation spread from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. The Church, born from Christ’s side, became the messenger of a new and solid hope: Jesus of Nazareth Crucified and Risen, the Saviour of the world who is seated at the right hand of the Father and is the judge of the living and the dead. This is the kerygma the central, explosive proclamation of faith. However the problem of the “rule of faith” has been posed from the outset, in other words the problem of believers’ faithfulness to the truth of the Gospel, which to be firmly anchored, to the saving truth about God and man that must be preserved and passed down. St Paul wrote: “I preached to you the Gospel, which you received, in which you stand, by which you are saved, if you hold it fast — unless you believed in vain” (1Co 15,2).

But where can we find the essential formula of faith? Where can we find the truths that have been faithfully passed down to us and that constitute the light for our daily life? The answer is simple. In the Creed, in the Profession of Faith or Symbol of Faith, we are reconnected with the original event of the Person and history of Jesus of Nazareth; what the Apostle to the Gentiles said to the Christians of Corinth happens: “I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures; that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day, in accordance with the Scriptures” (1Co 15,3-5).

Today too the Creed needs to be better known, understood and prayed. It is important above all that the Creed be, so to speak, “recognized”. Indeed, knowing might be merely an intellectual operation, whereas “recognizing” means the need to discover the deep bond between the truth we profess in the Creed and our daily existence, so that these truths may truly and in practice be — as they have always been — light for our steps through life, water that irrigates the parched stretches on our path, life that gets the better of some arid areas of life today. The moral life of Christians is grafted on the Creed, on which it is founded and by which it is justified.

It is not by chance that Blessed John Paul II wanted the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a reliable norm for teaching the faith and a dependable source for a renewed catechesis, to be based on the Creed. It was a question of confirming and preserving this central core of the truths of the faith and of rendering it in a language that would be more comprehensible to the people of our time, to us. It is a duty of the Church to transmit the faith, to communicate the Gospel, so that the Christian truths may be a light in the new cultural transformations and that Christians may be able to account for the hope that is in them (cf. 1P 3,15). Today we are living in a society in constant movement, one that has changed radically, even in comparison with the recent past.

The processes of secularization and a widespread nihilistic mentality in which all is relative have deeply marked the common mindset. Thus life is often lived frivolously, with no clear ideals or well-founded hopes, and within fluid and temporary social ties. Above all the new generations are not taught the truth nor the profound meaning of existence that surmounts the contingent situation, nor permanent affections and trust. Relativism leads, on the contrary, to having no reference points, suspicion and volubility break up human relations, while life is lived in brief experiments without the assumption of responsibility.

If individualism and relativism seem to dominate the minds of many of our contemporaries, it cannot be said that believers are completely immune to these dangers, with which we are confronted in the transmission of the faith. The investigation promoted on all the continents through the celebration of the Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelization, has highlighted some of them: a faith lived passively and privately, the rejection of education in the faith, the gap between life and faith.

Christians often do not even know the central core of their own Catholic faith, the Creed, so that they leave room for a certain syncretism and religious relativism, blurring the truths to believe in as well as the salvific uniqueness of Christianity. The risk of fabricating, as it were, a “do-it-yourself” religion is not so far off today. Instead we must return to God, to the God of Jesus Christ, we must rediscover the Gospel message and make it enter our consciences and our daily life more deeply.

In the Catecheses of this Year of Faith I would like to offer some help for achieving this journey for taking up and deepening knowledge of the central truths of our faith, concerning God, man, the Church, about the whole social and cosmic reality, by meditating and reflecting on the affirmations of the Creed. And I would like it to be clear that this content or truth of faith (fides quae) bears directly our life; it asks for a conversion of life that gives life to a new way of believing in God (fides qua). Knowing God, meeting him, deepening our knowledge of the features of his face is vital for our life so that he may enter into the profound dynamics of the human being.

May the journey we shall be making this year enable us all to grow in faith, in love of Christ, so that in our daily decisions and actions we may learn to live the good and beautiful life of the Gospel. Many thanks.

To special groups:

I offer a warm welcome to the Muslim and Catholic study group from the Diocese of Broken Bay in Australia. I also greet the representatives of the Jewish Federation of North America and the participants in the European Conference of the American Bankruptcy Institute. I thank the Cathedral Choir from Oslo and the Hawaiian dancers for their performances. Upon all the English-speaking visitors present, including those from England, Scotland, Ireland, Jersey, Norway, Australia, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Canada and the United States, I invoke God’s abundant blessings.

Lastly, I address a special thought to the sick, the newlyweds and the young people, among whom I greet in particular the confirmands of the Diocese of Faenza-Modigliana, accompanied by Bishop Claudio Stagni. Thank you. Thank you for your enthusiasm! The liturgy today has us celebrate the Memorial of St Ignatius of Antioch, a Pastor on fire with love for Christ. May this feast help everyone to rediscover the joy of being Christian. I pray that the Lord’s goodness and mercy may comfort your hope, young people, that it may console your suffering, sick people and strengthen your mutual love, newlyweds.

My thanks to you all.


Saint Peter's Square

Wednesday, 24 October 2012: The Year of Faith: What is faith?


Audiences 2005-2013 31012