Pope laments Holy Spirit is little known

13 May, 2013 - With vanity one believes himself or herself to be a bit of the winner of the Nobel Prize for Holiness…” This remark was made by Pope Francis when he delivered a brief improvised homily at his Mass, Monday morning, at the Vatican’s Santa Martha residence, attended by some of the employees of Vatican Radio and the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People. Reflecting on an episode of the Christians of Ephesus in the Acts of the Apostles, the Pope lamented that the third person of the Holy Trinity has always been little known. In fact, he said, many Christians, like those of Ephesus, don’t know who the Holy Spirit could be or how He could be.” Sometimes, he said, one hears, “I am Ok with the Father and the Son, because I pray the Our Father and receive His Son, Jesus in Holy Communion, but with the Holy Spirit I don’t know what to do.” “This,” the Pope lamented, “is how the poor Holy Spirit ends up always and does not find a good place in our life.” Instead, the Argentine Pope stressed, the Holy Spirit is an active God in us – God who helps us remember, who invokes in us the "memory" of salvation history and the gifts we have received and without which a Christian becomes a slave to circumstance, to the moment without history. He ceases to be a Christian and becomes and idolater instead. “When a little bit of vanity creeps in, when someone believes to be a winner of the ‘Nobel Prize for Holiness,” then memory does us good, helping us recall that the Lord picked us up from the edge of the flock. Life becomes more fruitful, with the grace of memory, the Pope added.