VATICAN CITY, APRIL 29, 2011 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI is urging the faithful to live in a “paschal way” and to proclaim the resurrection of Christ every day of the year, and not just at Easter.
The Pope said this during a meditation on the meaning of Christ’s resurrection, which he gave Wednesday at the weekly general audience. The Pontiff arrived to St. Peter’s Square by helicopter from the papal summer residence of Castel Gandolfo, where he has been staying since Sunday.
He called the Resurrection “the heart of the Christian mystery” and “the foundation of our faith”: “Radiating from Easter, as from a luminous, incandescent center, is all the liturgy of the Church, bringing with it content and meaning.”
“Faith in the Risen Christ,” the Pontiff continued, “transforms our existence, effecting in us a continuous resurrection.”
The Holy Father said Easter “bears the novelty of a profound and total passage from a life subject to the slavery of sin to a life of liberty, animated by love, the force that brings down every barrier and constructs a new harmony in one’s heart and in one’s relationship with others and with things.”
“Every Christian, just as every community, if he lives the experience of this passage of Resurrection, cannot but be the ferment of a new world, giving himself without reservations for the most urgent and just causes, as the testimonies of saints demonstrate in every age and place,” he added.
Witnesses of a new life
Benedict XVI said that Christians, if they believe that Christ’s resurrection “has renewed man,” must be “luminous witnesses of this new life that Easter has brought.”
“Easter,” he continued, “is a gift to receive ever more profoundly in faith, to be able to act in every situation, with the grace of Christ, according to the logic of God, the logic of love.”
“The light of Christ’s Resurrection must penetrate this world of ours, it must reach — as a message of truth and life — all men through our daily witness,” the Pontiff affirmed.
“Yes, Christ is truly risen,” the Holy Father proclaimed. “We cannot keep only for ourselves the life and joy that he has given us in his Easter, but we must give it to all those we approach.
“It is our task and our mission: to arouse in our neighbor hope where there is despair, joy where there is sadness, life where there is death.”
He said that witnessing the “joy of the Risen Lord” every day is to live in a “paschal way,” and that by doing so one proclaims that “Christ is not an idea or a memory of the past, but a Person who lives with us, for us and in us, and with him, by and in him, we can make all things new.”
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Full text: www.zenit.org/article-32419?l=english
