February 01, 2013 - Pope Benedict XVI is urging Christians worldwide during Lent
this year to develop a deeper personal relationship with God in Christ which will
awaken their love and open their spirits to others. “As a result, love of neighbour
will no longer be for them a commandment imposed, so to speak, from without, but a
consequence deriving from their faith, a faith which becomes active through love,”
the Pope says in his Lenten message released in the Vatican on Friday. “Believing
in Charity Calls Forth Charity – We have come to know and to believe in the love God
has for us,” is the theme of Pope Benedict’s message for Lent this year, which begins
on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 13. Lent is a period of 40 weekdays marked by prayer, penance,
fasting and good works, as spiritual preparation for Christianity’s greatest feast
– Easter, which celebrates the resurrection of Christ after His passion and death.
Reflecting on the “indissoluble interrelation" between the theological virtues of
faith and charity the Pope said “when we make room for the love of God, we become
like him, sharing in his own charity.” “The Christian life consists in continuously
scaling the mountain to meet God and then coming back down, bearing the love and strength
drawn from him, so as to serve our brothers and sisters with God’s own love.” In
this regard, the Pope said that “the greatest work of charity is evangelization,”
as it is the “highest and the most integral promotion of the human person.” Works
of charity the Pope said are born of faith and flow from the grace that God gives
in abundance. “ Faith without works is like a tree without fruit: the two virtues
imply one another,” the Holy Father said. He further compared the relationship between
faith and charity to the relationship between Baptism, the sacrament of faith, and
the sacrament of love, the Eucharist, which is the fullness of the Christian journey.