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GENERAL AUDIENCE TODAY
Our ageless Pope!
'No human cry is
not heard by God'
Continuing his catechesis on Christian prayer, Pope Benedict today turned to the teaching of the Apostle Paul, whose letters show us that “in reality there is no human cry that is not heard by God” and that “prayer does not exempt us from trial and suffering”, “but allows us to live and cope with a new force, with the same confidence of Jesus”.
Here is how he synthesized the catechesis in English:
In our catechesis on Christian prayer, we now turn to the teaching of the Apostle Paul. Saint Paul’s letters show us the rich variety of his own prayer, which embraces thanksgiving, praise, petition and intercession.
For Paul, prayer is above all the work of the Holy Spirit within our hearts, the fruit of God’s presence within us. The Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness, teaching us to pray to the Father through the Son.
In the eighth chapter of the Letter to the Romans, Paul tells us that the Spirit intercedes for us, unites us to Christ and enables us to call God our Father.
In our prayer, the Holy Spirit grants us the glorious freedom of the children of God, the hope and strength to remain faithful to the Lord amid our daily trials and tribulations, and a heart attentive to the working of God’s grace in others and in the world around us.
With Saint Paul, let us open our hearts to the presence of the Holy Spirit, who prays with us and leads us to an ever deeper union in love with the Triune God.
He also had special words for Caritas Internationalis which recently received new statutes from the Vatican:
I am pleased to greet Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, President of Caritas Internationalis, together with Members of the Executive Board and Representative Council. Your presence here today expresses your communion with the Successor of Peter and your readiness to welcome the new juridical framework of your organization. I thank you for this and I am certain that the new structures will support and encourage your important service to those most in need.
At the end of the GA, the Pope also had these words to say about the observance yesterday of the World Day for Families:
Yesterday, Tuesday, May 15th, we celebrated the World Day of Families, established by the United Nations and dedicated this year to balance between two closely related issues: family and work.
This should not hinder the family, but rather support and unite it, helping it to be open to life and to enter into a relationship with society and with the Church.
I also hope that Sunday, the Lord's Day and weekly celebration of His Resurrection, will be a day of rest and an opportunity to strengthen family ties. This comes two weeks before the opening in Milan on May 29 of the weeklong VII World Encounter of Families, where the Pope will be present for the last three days.
Finally, to the Italian-speaking pilgrims, he had these messages:
My thoughts now go to the representatives of the Catholic community Shalom.
Dear friends, you are celebrating the 30th anniversary of your founding, Thank you for your presence. May this anniversary, like the approval of your statutes, serve to encourage you to proceed in your evangelical witness with enthusiasm. An enthusiasm I can see here today!
My prayers and my blessing go with you so that you may be joyous instruments of the love and mercy of God among all those whom you encounter in your missionary activities.
To young people, the sick, and the newlyweds: The Solemnity of the Ascension of our Lord , which we celebrate tomorrow, invites us to look to Jesus who, ascending to heaven, entrusted to his Apostles the mandate of bringing his message of salvation throughout the world. May we all place our enthusiasm in the service of the Gospel.
For some reason, a number of the photos posted by the news agencies today are in black-and-white.
Here is a translation of the full catechesis:
Dear brothers and sisters,
In the last catecheses, we reflected on prayer in the Acts of the Apostles. Today I wish to start speaking about prayer in the Letters of St. Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles.
First of all, I wish to note that it is not by chance that his Letters are introduced by and close with expressions of prayer: at the start, thanksgiving and praise, and at the end, a wish that the grace of God may guide the journey of the community to whom the letter is written.
The contents of the Appostle's letter develops beetween his opening formulation: "First, I give thanks to my God through Jesus Christ" (Rm 1,8),and the final wish: "The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you" (1Cor 16,23),.
St. Paul's prayer is manifested in a great richness of forms that go from thanksgiving to benediction, from praise to request and intercession, from hymn to supplication. A variety of expressions that demonstrate how prayer involves and penetrates every situation in life, be it personal, or that of the community that it concerns.
A first element that the Apostle wants us to understand is that prayer should not be seen simply as a good work done by us towards God, as an action of ours. It is, first of all, a gift, a fruit of the living and vitalizing presence of the Father and Jesus Christ in us.
In the Letter to the Romans, Paul writes: "In the same way, the Spirit too comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself intercedes with inexpressible groanings" (8,26).
And we know that what the Apostle says is true: "We do not know how to pray as we ought". We want to pray, but God is distant. We do not have the words, the language, to speak with God, not even the thought. We can only open ourselves up, place our time at God's disposition, wait for him to help us to enter into a true dialog with him.
The Apostle says that it is precisely this lack of words, this absence of words, and yet the desire to enter into a contact with God, that is prayer, prayer that the Holy Spirit not just understands but that he brings and interprets to God. Our very weakness becomes, through the Holy Spirit, true prayer, true contact with God. The Holy Spirit is almost the interpreter who makes us and God understand what we want to say.
In prayer we experience, more than in other dimensions of existence, our weakness, our poverty, our being creatures - because we are faced with the omnipotence and transcendence of God. The more we progress in listening to God and in dialog with him, so that prayer becomes the daily breath of our spirit, the more we also perceive a sense of our limitations, not just in front of the concrete situations of every day, but in our very relationship with the Lord.
Thus the need to trust grows in us, to entrust ourselves ever more to him. We understand that "we do not know how to pray as we ought" (8,26). And it is the Holy Spirit who helps us in our inability, he enlightens our mind and warms our heart, guiding us in addressing ourselves to God.
For St. Paul, prayer is, above all, the working of the Holy Spirit in our humanness, and by taking charge of our weakness, he transforms us from men bound to material realities into spiritual men.
In the First letter to the Corinthians, Pail says: "We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the things freely given us by God. And we speak about them not with words taught by human wisdom, but with words taught by the Spirit, describing spiritual realities in spiritual terms" (2,12-13). By inhabiting our human frailty, the Holy Spirit changes us, intercedes for us, and leads us towards the highness of God (cfr Rm 8,26).
With the presence of the Holy Spirit our union with Christ is realized, because it is the Spirit of the Son of God, in which we have been made his children.
St. Paul speaks of the Spirit of Christ (cfr Rm 8,9) and not just of the Spirit of God. It is obvious: If Christ is the Son of God, his Spirit is also the Spirit of God, and so, if the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ had become very close to us in the Son of God and Son of man, the Spirit of God also becomes the human spirit. Thus we can enter into the communion with the Spirit.
It is like saying that not just God the Father became visible in the incarnation of the Son, but the Spirit of God manifested itself in the life and actions of Jesus, of Jesus Christ who lived and was crucified, died and resurrected.
The Apostle points out that "no one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit" (1Cor 12,3). Thus, the Spirit orients our heart toward Jesus Christ, such that "yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me" (cfr Gal 2,20).
In his Catecheses on the Sacraments, St. Ambrose states, reflecting on the Eucharist: "Whoever is inebriated in the Holy Spirit is rooted in Christ" (5, 3, 17: PL 16, 450).
I would like now to show three consequences in our Christian life when we allow, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit of Christ to work in us as the interior principle of all our actions.
First of all, with prayer inspired by the Holy Spirit, we are in a condition to abandon and overcome every form of fear or slavery, living the authentic freedom of the children of God.
Without the prayer that daily nourishes our being in Christ, in an intimacy that grows progressively, we find ourselves in the condition described by St. Paul in the Letter to the Romans: we do not do the good we want, but we do the evil we do not want (cfr Rm 7,19).
This is the expression of the human being's alienation, the destruction of our freedom: through the circumstances of being who we are by virtue of original sin, we want the good that we do not do, and we do what we do not want to do, evil.
The Apostle wants us to understand that it is not our will that liberates us from these conditions, not even the Laws, but the Holy Spirit. And since "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom" (2Cor 3,17), in prayer we experience the freedom given by the Spirit: an authentic freedom, which is freedom from evil and sin for good and for life, for God.
The freedom of the Spirit, St. Paul continues, is never to be identified with libertinage, nor with the possibility of choosing evil, but with "the fruit of the Spirit (which) is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Gal 5,22).
This is true freedom: to be able to truly follow the desire for good, for true joy, for communion with God, and not to be oppressed by circumstances which ask us to go in other directions.
A second consequence that we can experience in our life when we allow the Spirit of Christ to work in us is that the relationship with God becomes so profound that it cannot be undermined by any reality or situation.
We can also understand then that prayer does not liberate us from trials and sufferings, but makes us able to live them in union with Christ, with his sufferings, in the hope of participating also in his glory (cfr Rm 8, 17).
Many times, in our prayer, we ask God to be liberated of physical and spiritual ailments, and we do so with great confidence. Nonetheless, we often have the impression that we have not been heard, and we therefore risk discouragement and failing to persevere.
In fact, there is no human cry that is not heard by God, and it is precisely in constant and faithful prayer that we understand with St. Paul that "the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us" (Rm 8,18).
Prayer does not exempt us from trials and sufferings, but, St. Paul says, "we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies" (Rm 8,23). He says that prayer does not exempt us from suffering but allows us to live this suffering and confront it with new strength, with the same trust as Jesus had, when, according to the Letter to the Hebrews, "In the days when he was in the flesh, he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence" (5,7).
The answer of God the Father to the Son, to his loud cries and tears, was not to liberate him from his sufferings, from the Cross, from death, but a fulfillment which was much greater, a response that was far more profound. Through the Cross and death, God responded with the Resurrection of his Son, with new life.
Prayer animated by the Holy Spirit brings us, too, to live every day the journey of life with its trials and sufferings, in full hope and trust in God who answers us as he answered his Son.
Thirdly, the prayer of the believer is also open to the dimensions of all mankind and of creation, taking upon himself "creation's eager expectation of the revelation to the children of God" (Rm 8,19).
This means that prayer, sustained by the Spirit of Christ that speaks within our own intimacy, never remains closed in on itself, it is never just a prayer for me, but opens up to sharing the sufferings of our time, the suffering of others.
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It becomes an intercession for others, therefore a liberation from myself, a channel of hope for all creation, expression of that "love of God poured out into our hearts through the holy Spirit that has been given to us" (cfr Rm 5,5). This is the very sign itself of true prayer, when it does not end with ourselves, but opens up to others and therefore, frees us, and helps towards the redemption of the world.
Dear brothers and sisters, St. Paul teaches us that our prayer must open us to the presence of the Holy Spirit, who prays in us with 'inexpressible groanings', in order to bring us to adhere to God with all our heart and all our being.
The Spirit of Christ becomes the strength of our 'weak' prayer, the light of our 'extinguished' prayer, the fire of our 'arid' prayer, giving us true interior freedom, teaching us to live by confronting the trials of existence, in the certainty that we are not alone, opening us to the horizons of mankind and creation 'groaning in labor pains even until now" (Rm 8,22). Thank you.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/05/2012 08:02] |