Audience: Dwelling in the Church’s living Tradition
(Vatican Radio) “In a world where individualism seems to regulate relationships between
people, rendering them increasingly fragile, faith calls us to be people of God, to
be Church, and bearers of God’s love and communion for all mankind", said Pope Benedict
XVI Wednesday as he continued his general audience catechesis on the ‘Act of Faith’,
more familiarly known as the ‘Creed’. Emer McCarthy reports:
Despite foreboding
skies and sharp temperatures, the audience was held in St Peter’s square. In off
the cuff comments to the thousands who withstood the drizzle huddled under umbrellas
to hear the Pope’s words, Benedict XVI noted ‘it could be worse’.
Last week
the Pope had spoken of how we have seen that faith is something intensely personal:
a gift of God which transforms and enriches our life. But, he asked this Wednesday:
“If faith is of a purely personal, individual character? Does it only affect me personally?
Do I live my faith alone?”
In comments in Italian Benedict XVI said : “The
answer is found in Baptism, when the priest asks the person to be baptized if he believes
in God the Father, Jesus His only Son and the Holy Spirit. The "I do" with which we
answer "is not the result of my solitary reflection, it is not the product of my own
thoughts, but it is the result of a relationship, a dialogue in which there is a listening,
and receiving and response; it is communicating with Jesus that takes me out of the
"I" that is enclosed in on myself to open up to the love of God the Father. It is
like a rebirth in which I find myself united not only Jesus, but also all those who
have walked and walk on the same path; and this new birth, which begins with Baptism,
continues throughout the course of my existence. I can not build my personal faith
in a private dialogue with Jesus, because faith is given to me by God through a community
of believers, the Church, and I a become part of the multitude of believers in a community
that is not only sociological, but rooted in the eternal love of God. " When we
recite the Creed during the Mass "we express ourselves in the first person, but as
a community we confess the one faith of the Church. That "I" individually pronounced
is united to that of an immense choir in time and space, in which everyone contributes,
so to speak, for a harmonious polyphony of faith". In fact since Pentecost, "when
the journey of the Church began," the Church has been a "community" that brings the
announcement of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ “to the ends of the world".
The Church “is the People of God based on new covenant thanks to the blood of Christ,
whose members do not belong to a particular social or ethnic group, but are men and
women from every nation and culture. It is a ' Catholic' people, that is, one which
speaks new languages, universally open to welcome all, beyond all boundaries, breaking
down all barriers". Thus there is "an unbroken chain of life of the Church, of
the proclamation of the Word of God, of the celebration of the sacraments – he underscored
- that comes to us and which we call Tradition. It guarantees that what we believe
is the original message of Christ, preached by the apostles. " Pope Benedict concluded:
"The widespread contemporary tendency to relegate faith to the private sphere contradicts
its very nature. We need the Church to confirm our faith and to experience together
the gifts of God: His Word , the Sacraments, the sustenance of grace and witness of
love. So our "I" in the "we" of the Church will be able to perceive that it is, simultaneously
recipient and protagonist of an event that surpasses it: the experience of communion
with God who establishes communion between people. The new life I live in Christ through
the gift of his Spirit is received and nourished within the Church’s communion. In
this sense, the Church is our Mother. As Saint Cyprian says, “No one can have God
as Father who does not have the Church as Mother”. Dwelling in the Church’s living
Tradition, may we mature in the faith we have received and, by putting it into practice,
become beacons of Christ’s light and peace in our world”.