Pope tells Christians to let truth shine through them

(September 03, 2012) Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday concluded a 3-day meeting of his former students urging Christians that the quest for truth should never be an excuse for intolerance. The annual gathering of Pope Benedict’s former students, known as “Ratzinger Schülerkreis”, the German for ‘Ratzinger Student Circle’, that has been meeting for the past 30 years, took place this year at the papal summer residence in the hill town of Castel Gandolfo outside Rome, where the Pope is spending his summer. This time the participants examined the Catholic Church’s ecumenical dialogue with Lutherans and Anglicans. In his homily at the concluding Mass, the Pope lamented that today “the concepts of truth and intolerance are almost fused together, so that to say that one has the truth has become synonymous with intolerance.” He also said that we Christians do not dare to believe or to speak about the truth. The Pope said that in a certain sense, it is true that no one can say that he “possesses” the truth, precisely because “we belong to the truth which is a living thing.” And so, he said, we must learn anew “to allow ourselves to be led by the truth. Then the truth will be able to shine through us anew, for the salvation of the world.”