Wednesday is Ash
Wednesday, when the Church begins the season of Lent. We will spend a few days
this week looking at Pope Benedict XVI’s Message for Lent, 2013. In part one of
the message, the Holy Father asks us to consider the link between faith
(believing in God) and love, which leads us to become devoted to others. His
first teaching is very simple: being a Christian is our response to the calling
God gave us, to the gift of love He shared with us first. He goes on to tell us
that having faith requires us to use not only our hearts, but our intellects as
well, freely choosing to acknowledge that God is the perfect path toward love,
freely choosing to unite our will to His perfect will, and freely letting the
love which results from our encounter with the loving God to flow out onto
others. He teaches us that our love for our neighbor arises naturally from the
total understanding that we are loved, forgiven and even served by the great
God almighty. Why wouldn’t we want to do the same for others? He reminds us that faith tells us that God really
did give His Son for our sakes, and that is the supreme act of love which can
illumine a world grown dim. He concludes part one by reminding us that “that
the principal distinguishing mark of Christians is precisely ‘love grounded in
and shaped by faith’”.
Message of Pope Benedict XVI for Lent 2013
“We have come to know and to believe in the love God has
for us” (1 Jn 4:16)
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
The celebration of Lent, in the context of the Year of
Faith, offers us a valuable opportunity to meditate on the relationship between
faith and charity: between believing in God – the God of Jesus Christ – and
love, which is the fruit of the Holy Spirit and which guides us on the path of
devotion to God and others.
1. Faith as a response to the love of God
In my first Encyclical, I offered some thoughts
on the close relationship between the theological virtues of faith and charity.
Setting out from Saint John’s fundamental assertion: “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us” (1
Jn 4:16), I observed that “being Christian is not the result of an
ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person,
which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction … Since God has first
loved us (cf. 1 Jn 4:10),
love is now no longer a mere ‘command’; it is the response to the gift of love
with which God draws near to us” (Deus Caritas Est, 1).
Faith is this personal adherence – which involves all our
faculties – to the revelation of God’s gratuitous and “passionate” love for us,
fully revealed in Jesus Christ. The encounter with God who is Love engages not
only the heart but also the intellect: “Acknowledgement of the living God is
one path towards love, and the ‘yes’ of our will to his will unites our
intellect, will and sentiments in the all-embracing act of love. But this
process is always open-ended; love is never ‘finished’ and complete” (ibid.,
17). Hence, for all Christians, and especially for “charity workers”, there is
a need for faith, for “that encounter with God in Christ which awakens their
love and opens 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” (ibid., 31a).
Christians are
people who have been conquered by Christ’s love and accordingly, under the
influence of that love – “Caritas Christi urget nos” (2 Cor 5:14) – they
are profoundly open to loving their neighbour in concrete ways (cf. ibid.,
33). This attitude arises primarily from the consciousness of being loved,
forgiven, and even served by the Lord, who bends down to wash the feet of the
Apostles and offers himself on the Cross to draw humanity into God’s love.
“Faith tells us that God has given his Son for our sakes
and gives us the victorious certainty that it is really true: God is love! …
Faith, which sees the love of God revealed in the pierced heart of Jesus on the
Cross, gives rise to love. Love is the light – and in the end, the only light –
that can always illuminate a world grown dim and give us the courage needed to
keep living and working” (ibid., 39). All this helps us to understand that the
principal distinguishing mark of Christians is precisely “love grounded in and
shaped by faith” (ibid., 7). (http://kottayamad.org/message-of-pope-benedict-xvi-for-lent-2013/)
Act of Faith
O my God, I firmly
believe that you are one God in three divine persons, Father, Son and Holy
Spirit. I believe that your divine Son became man and died for our sins,
and that he will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe these
and all the truths which the holy Catholic Church teaches, because in revealing
them you can neither deceive nor be deceived. Amen(http://www.catholic.org/prayers/prayer.php?p=426)
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