"Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give" (Mt 10,8): this is the invitation that Christ repeats to his holy ministers, called upon to generously offer the world the mystery and the gift of their priestly lives, which in Christ becomes the source of sanctity and a call to sanctification.

In the papers presented by the Theologians who have spoken, we have been able to contemplate in priests the fulfilment of the Holy Spirit’s work, announced by the Prophet Ezekiel: "I prove my holiness through you. For I will take you away from among the nations, gather you from all the foreign lands…; I will give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you" (Ez 36, 23-25).

"What distinguishes the Church from other religious communities", wrote the Holy Father in his pastoral exhortation Ecclesia in Asia (November 6^th 1999), "is her faith in Jesus Christ; and she cannot keep this precious light of faith under a bushel (cf. Mt 5:15), for her mission is to share that light with everyone" (no. 10).

In the long winter of anthropology without Christ and a spiritualist humanism, celebrated by esoteric or pantheistic religiosity, the Church cannot remain idle and indifferent: with the loyalty of her priests she wishes to light up the darkness of a Godless culture and be the guide towards the dawn of a springtime of sanctity for humankind. "It was Friday. And Saturday’s first stars were already shining" remembered Father de Lubac, quoting Like’s Gospel to indicate that the hope for a victory of God’s sanctity is stronger than death (Henri de Lubac, Le drame de l’humanisme athée, Spes, 1944).

It is especially by showing humankind the sacramental path of redemption that the priest makes manifest that the Christian God is not the Deus otiosus of neo-gnostic sects and syncretistic religions. He is instead The One and Only God, made manifest in Christ as the communion of charity, the koinonía of the three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity.

In the papers presented we understood that the priest of the New Alliance points out the wisdom of the Man-God, making Himself known as the efficient cause and final cause of humankind’s happiness to the homo faber, to the homo economicus, to the homo ludens of the third millennium, on the path to sanctity. Every man can repeat the Old Testament’s affirmation : "Wisdom knows and understands all things" (Sap 9,11), because called upon to trust reason enlightened by faith, made capable to access the heights of God’s transcendent sanctity through Christ’s humanity, encountered and contemplated in the priest.

Christoph Schönbron showed in a profound manner how controversies between religions reflect discussions concerning man’s capability to imitate God, hence his capability of sanctity and his vocation to sanctity. Christ’s humanity is "the visible figure of the Father’s love, the human translation of eternal filiation…In Christ human nature became capable of being similar to God’s love. Love is the icon of God" (see C. Schönbron, Die Christus-Ikone, Scaffhausen 1984, pages 97,134). Christ Crucified is the supreme image of the invisible God’s love, and it is to his school of prayer that the priest travels, approaching the Cross of Christ that is the real and only chair at which one learns life’s sanctity.

Within this context, Christ’s words in John’s Gospel are extremely important: "Who has seen me, has seen the Father" (John 14,9): because sanctity is not a synonym for inhuman radicalism, for disembodied spiritualism or ascetic fanaticism, but for redeemed humankind, for joyful "normality" capable of accessing God’s sanctity through the receiving of grace, participation in divine Trinitarian life that the Church is the guardian for and that she bestows.

This is the foundation for Christian optimism and hope: the future of the world belongs to Christ, Lord of the cosmos and of history, of which He is the "Alfa and the Omega" (Ap 1,8; 21,6), "The Beginning and the End" (Ap 21,6) and it depends on the sanctity of His holy ministers.

In this sense, it becomes easy for me to introduce the subject of our next videoconference: "The God of history".

History is of crucial importance in Christianity, because it is in history that the mystery of God’s freedom and humankind’s freedom is fulfilled. The world is created within the temporal dimension, and this history of redemption is fulfilled within time, culminating in the "fullness of time" of the Incarnation and with its goal in the joyful return of the Son of God at the end of time.

"Time is indeed fulfilled by the very fact that God, in the Incarnation, came down into human history. Eternity entered into time" writes the Holy Father in his Apostolic Letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente (no. 9). For Christians, mankind’s history is also divine history.

This is what we shall discuss next Saturday December 18^th, at 12. A.M. Rome time, hoping you will all experience the abundant grace that the Mother of God will bestow upon us in the imminent Solemnity of the one hundredth and fiftieth anniversary of the dogmatic proclamation of her Immaculate Conception.

I wish to once again thank the eminent prelates, theologians and professors who have spoken today.

From the Holy See, November 23^rd 2004