BENEDICT XVI

A KNOWLEDGE WHICH GIVES LIFE SAVOR
IN THE ECCLESIAL COMMUNITY,
PERSONAL FAITH GROWS AND MATURES

IN THE ECCLESIAL COMMUNITY,
PERSONAL FAITH GROWS AND MATURES
Today I would like to take another step in our reflection, starting once more with a few questions: Does faith have a solely personal, individual nature? Does it concern only myself? Do I live my faith alone? Of course, the act of faith is an eminently personal act; it happens in the deepest part of us and signals a change in direction through personal conversion. It is my life that changes, that is given a new direction. But this faith of mine is not the result of my own solitary reflection, it is not the product of my thought, it is the fruit of a relationship, a dialogue, in which there is a listener, a receiver, and a respondent; it is communication with Jesus that draws me out of the "I" enclosed in myself to open me to the love of God, the Father. It is like a rebirth in which I am united not only to Jesus, but also to all those who have walked and are walking on the same path; and this new birth, that begins with Baptism, continues for the rest of my life. I cannot build my personal faith in a private dialogue with Jesus, because faith is given to me by God through a community of believers that is the Church and projects me into the multitude of believers, into a kind of communion that is not only sociological but rooted in the eternal love of God who is in Himself the communion of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; it is Trinitarian Love. Our faith is truly personal, only if it is also communal: it can be my faith only if it dwells in and moves with the "we" of the Church, only if it is our faith, the common faith of the one Church.
It is in the ecclesial community that personal faith grows and matures. It is interesting to observe how in the New Testament the word "saints" designates Christians as a whole, and certainly not all would have qualified to be declared saints by the Church. What is meant, then, by this term? That whoever had lived the faith in Christ Risen was called to become a point of reference for all others, setting them in this way in contact with the Person and the Message of Jesus, who reveals the face of the Living God. And this holds true also for us: a Christian who lets himself be guided and gradually shaped by the faith of the Church, in spite of his weaknesses, his limitations, and his difficulties, becomes like a window open to the light of the living God, receiving this light and transmitting it to the world.
Today's widespread tendency to relegate faith to the private sphere contradicts its very nature. We need the Church in order to confirm our faith and in order to experience the gifts of God: His Word, the Sacraments, the support of grace, and the witness of love. Like this, our "I" can be perceived in the "we" of the Church and, at the same time, be the recipient and the protagonist of an overwhelming event: experiencing communion with God, that is the foundation of communion among men. In a world in which individualism seems to rule personal relationships, making them ever more fragile, the faith calls us to be the People of God, to be Church, bearers of the love and communion of God for all mankind (cf. Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, n. 1).
General audience,
Saint Peter's Square, October 31, 2012

THE DESIRE FOR GOD IS WRITTEN IN THE HUMAN HEART
In a very significant way, the Catechism of the Catholic Church opens precisely with the following consideration: "The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to Himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for" (n. 27).
A statement like this, that even today in many cultural contexts seems quite acceptable, even obvious, might, however, be taken as a provocation in the West's secularized culture. Many of our contemporaries might actually object that they have no such desire for God. For large sectors of society, He is no longer the one longed for or desired but rather a reality that leaves them indifferent, one on which there is no need even to comment. In reality, what we have defined as "the desire for God" has not entirely disappeared and it still appears today, in many ways, in the heart of man. Human desire always tends to certain concrete goods, often anything but spiritual, and yet it has to face the question of what is truly "the" good, and thus is confronted with something other than itself, something man cannot build but he is called to recognize. What can really satisfy man's desire?
In my first Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, I sought to analyze how such dynamism can be found in the experience of human love, an experience that in our age is more easily perceived as a moment of ecstasy, of leaving oneself, like a place in which man feels overcome by a desire that surpasses him. Through love, a man and a woman experience in a new way, thanks to each other, the greatness and beauty of life and of what is real. If what is experienced is not a mere illusion, if I truly want the good of the other as a means for my own good, then I must be willing not to be self-centered, to place myself at the other's service, even to the point of self-denial. The answer to the question on the meaning of the experience of love then passes through the purification and healing of the will, required in loving the other. We must cultivate, encourage, and also correct ourselves, so that this good can truly be loved.
Through this journey, one will be able to deepen gradually one's knowledge of that love, initially experienced. And the mystery that it represents will become more and more defined: in fact, not even the beloved is capable of satisfying the desire that dwells in the human heart. In fact, the more authentic one's love for the other is, the more it reveals the question of its origin and its destiny, of the possibility that it may endure for ever. Therefore, the human experience of love has in itself a dynamism that refers beyond the self; it is the experience of a good that leads to being drawn out and finding oneself before the mystery that encompasses the whole of existence.
One could make similar observations about other human experiences as well, such as friendship, encountering beauty, loving knowledge: every good experienced by man projects him toward the mystery that surrounds the human being; every desire that springs up in the human heart echoes a fundamental desire that is never fully satisfied. Undoubtedly, by such a deep desire, hidden, even enigmatic, one cannot arrive directly at faith. Men and women, after all, know well what does not satisfy them, but they cannot imagine or define what the happiness they long for in their hearts would be like. One cannot know God based on human desire alone. From this point of view He remains a mystery: man is the seeker of the Absolute, seeking with small and hesitant steps. And yet, already the experience of desire, of a "restless heart" as St. Augustine called it, is very meaningful. It tells us that man is, deep down, a religious being.
We must therefore maintain that it is possible also in this age, seemingly so blocked to the transcendent dimension, to begin a journey toward the true religious meaning of life, which shows how the gift of faith is not senseless, is not irrational. This is not, then, about suffocating the longing that dwells in the heart of man, but about freeing it, so that it can reach its true height. When, in desire, one opens the window to God, this is already a sign of the presence of faith in the soul, faith that is a grace of God. St. Augustine always says: "So God, by deferring our hope, stretched our desire; by the desiring, stretches the mind; by stretching, makes it more capacious."
General audience,
Saint Peter's Square, November 7, 2012

IT IS HE WHO FIRST ILLUMINATES US AS WE JOURNEY TO HIM
I wish to recall, however, that God's initiative always precedes every human initiative and on our journey toward Him too it is He who first illuminates us, who directs and guides us, ever respecting our inner freedom. It is always He who admits us to intimacy with Him, revealing Himself and giving us the grace to be able to accept this revelation in faith. Let us never forget St. Augustine's experience: it is not we who possess the Truth after having sought it, but the Truth that seeks us out and possesses us. God never tires of seeking us; He is faithful to the human being whom He created and redeemed; He stays close to us in our life because He loves us. This is a certainty that must accompany us every day.
A particularly dangerous phenomenon for faith has arisen in our times: indeed, a form of atheism exists which we define, precisely, as "practical," in which the truths of faith or religious rites are not denied but are merely deemed irrelevant to daily life, detached from life, pointless. So it is that people often believe in God in a superficial manner, and live "as though God did not exist." By obscuring the reference to God, the ethical horizon has also been obscured, to leave room for relativism and for an ambiguous conception of freedom which, instead of being liberating, ends by binding human beings to idols. Were God to lose His centrality, man would lose his rightful place; he would no longer fit into creation. What answers, therefore, is faith required to give, "with gentleness and reverence," to atheism, to skepticism, to indifference to the vertical dimension, in order that the people of our time may continue to ponder the existence of God and take paths that lead to Him? I want to point out several paths that derive both from natural reflection and from the power of faith itself. I would like to sum them up very briefly in three words: the world, man, faith.
The first word: the world. St. Augustine, who spent much of his life seeking the Truth and was grasped by the Truth, wrote a very beautiful and famous passage in which he said, "Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air distending and diffusing itself, question the beauty of the sky... question all these realities. All respond: 'See, we are beautiful.' Their beauty is a profession. These beauties are subject to change. Who made them if not the Beautiful One who is not subject to change?" (Sermon 241, 2: pl 38, 1134). The world is not a shapeless mass of magma, but the better we know it and the better we discover its marvelous mechanisms the more clearly we can see a plan, we see that there is a creative intelligence.
The second word: man. Again, St. Augustine was to write a famous sentence in which he says that God is more intimate to me than I am to myself (cf. Confessions III, 6, 11).
Hence, he formulates the invitation, "Do not go outside yourself; return to yourself: the truth is higher than my highest and more inward than my innermost self" (De Vera Religione, 39, 72). This is another aspect that we risk losing in the noisy and dispersive world in which we live: the ability to pause and look deeply into ourselves and to reinterpret the thirst for the infinite that we bear within us, that impels us to go further and to refer to the One who can quench it.
The third word: faith. We must not forget, especially in the situation of our time, that the life of faith is a path which leads to the knowledge of and encounter with God. Those who believe are united to God and open to His grace, to the power of His love. Thus, their existence becomes a witness, not of themselves but of the Risen One, and their faith does not hesitate to shine out in daily life, open to dialogue that expresses deep friendship for the journey of every human being and can bring hope to people in need of redemption, happiness, a future. Faith, in fact, is an encounter with God who speaks and works in history and converts our daily life, transforming within us mentalities, value judgments, decisions, and practical actions. Faith is not an illusion, a flight of fancy, a refuge or sentimentalism; rather it is total involvement in the whole of life and is the proclamation of the Gospel, the Good News that can set the whole of the person free. Many people today have a limited idea of the Christian faith, because they identify it with a mere system of beliefs and values rather than with the truth of a God who revealed Himself in history, anxious to communicate with human beings in a tête-à-tête, in a relationship of love with them. In fact, at the root of every doctrine or value is the event of the encounter between man and God in Jesus Christ. Christianity, before being a moral or an ethic, is the event of love, it is the acceptance of the Person of Jesus. For this reason, the Christian and Christian communities must first look and make others look to Christ, the true Way that leads to God.
General Audience,
Paul VI Audience Hall, November 14, 2012

WHILE GOD REVEALS HIMSELF, MAN,
KNOWING HIM, DISCOVERS HIMSELF
Faith leads to the discovery that the meeting with God enhances, perfects, and exalts all that is true, good, and beautiful that exists in man. So it happens that while God reveals Himself and lets Himself be known, man comes to realize who God is and, in knowing Him, discovers himself, his true origin, his destiny, the greatness and dignity of human life.
Faith makes possible authentic knowledge about God which involves the whole human person: it is a "sapere," that is, a knowledge which gives life a savor, a new taste, a joyful way of being in the world. This knowledge of God through faith is not only intellectual but also vital. It is the knowledge of God-Love, thanks to His own love. The love of God, moreover, makes us see, opens our eyes, enables us to know the whole of reality, in addition to the narrow views of individualism and subjectivism that confuse consciences.
The Catholic Tradition, from the outset, rejected the so-called "fideism," which is the desire to believe against reason. "Credo quia absurdum" ("I believe because it is absurd") is not a formula that interprets the Catholic faith. Indeed, God is not absurd; if anything, He is a mystery. The mystery, in its turn, is not irrational but is a superabundance of sense, of meaning, of truth. If, looking at the mystery, reason sees darkness, it is not because there is no light in the mystery, but rather because there is too much of it. Just as when humans raise their eyes to look at the sun, they are blinded; but who would say that the sun is not bright or, indeed, the fount of light? Faith permits us to look at the "sun," God, because it is the acceptance of His revelation in history and, so to speak, the true reception of God's mystery, recognizing the great miracle. God came close to man; He offered Himself so that man might know Him, stooping to the creatural limitations of human reason (cf. Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogmatic Constitution, Dei Verbum, n. 13). At the same time, God, with His grace, illuminates reason, unfolds new horizons before it, boundless and infinite. For this reason, faith is an incentive to seek always, never to stop and never to be content in the inexhaustible search for truth and reality. The prejudice of certain modern thinkers, who hold that human reason would be as it were blocked by the dogmas of faith, is false.
Exactly the opposite is true, as the great teachers of the Catholic Tradition have shown. St. Augustine, before his conversion, sought the Truth with great restlessness through all the philosophies he had at his disposal, finding them all unsatisfactory. His demanding, rational search was a meaningful pedagogy for him for the encounter with the Truth of Christ. When he says, "I believe, in order to understand, and I understand the better to believe" (Discourse 43, 9: PL 38, 258), it is as if he were recounting his own life experience. Intellect and faith are not foreign or antagonistic to the divine Revelation but are both conditions for understanding its meaning, for receiving its authentic message, for approaching the threshold of the mystery.
General Audience,
Paul VI Audience Hall,
November 21, 2012

WE CAN TALK ABOUT GOD
BECAUSE HE HAS TALKED TO US
How can we talk about God today? The first answer is that we can talk about God because He has talked to us; so the first condition for speaking of God is listening to all that God Himself has said. God has spoken to us! Talking about God means first of all expressing clearly what God we must bring to the men and women of our time: not an abstract God, a hypothesis, but a real God, a God who exists, who has entered history and is present in history; the God of Jesus Christ as an answer to the fundamental question of the meaning of life and of how we should live. Consequently speaking of God demands familiarity with Jesus and His Gospel. In his First Letter to the Corinthians [St. Paul] writes: "When I came to you, brethren, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified" (2:1-2). The first real fact, therefore, is that Paul does not speak of a philosophy that he developed, he does not speak of ideas that he found elsewhere or invented, but of a reality of his life, he speaks of the God who entered his life, he speaks of a real God who is alive, who spoke with him and will speak with us, he speaks of the Crucified and Risen Christ.
Communicating faith, for St. Paul, did not mean putting himself forward, but rather saying openly and publicly what he had seen and heard in his encounter with Christ, what he had experienced in his life that was transformed by that encounter: it meant putting forward Jesus whom he felt present within him and who became the true orientation of his existence, to make it clear to all that Jesus is necessary to the world and crucial to every person's freedom. The Apostle is not satisfied with proclaiming words but expends his whole life in the great work of faith. To speak of God, we must leave Him room, trusting that He will act in our weakness: we must make room for Him without fear but with simplicity and joy, in the deep conviction that the more we put Him at the center rather than ourselves, the more fruitful our communication will be. At this point we should ask ourselves: how did Jesus communicate? Jesus, in His oneness, speaks of His Father–Abba–and of the Kingdom of God, His gaze full of compassion for the hardships and difficulties of human life. He speaks with great realism and, I would say, that the essential feature of Jesus' proclamation is that it makes clear that our life and the world are worthy of God. Jesus shows that in the world and in Creation God's face shines out and He shows us that God is present in the daily events of our life. Both in the parables on nature, the mustard seed and the field with various seeds, and in our own life–let us think of the parable of the Prodigal Son, of Lazarus and of other parables of Jesus. From the Gospels we see that Jesus takes an interest in every human situation that He encounters, He immerses Himself in the reality of the men and women of His time, with complete trust in the Father's help. And that in this history, although hidden, God is really present and if we are attentive we can encounter Him. And the disciples, who live with Jesus, the crowds who meet Him, see His reaction to the most disparate problems, they see how He speaks, how He behaves; in Him they see the action of the Holy Spirit, the action of God. In Him proclamation and life are interwoven: Jesus acts and teaches, always starting from a close relationship with God the Father. This style becomes an essential indication for us as Christians: our way of living in faith and charity becomes a way of speaking of God today, because it shows, through a life lived in Christ, the credibility and realism of what we say with words, which are not solely words but reveal the reality, the true reality.
General Audience,
Paul VI Audience Hall , November 28, 2012

WE CAN TALK ABOUT GOD
BECAUSE HE HAS TALKED TO US
How can we talk about God today? The first answer is that we can talk about God because He has talked to us; so the first condition for speaking of God is listening to all that God Himself has said. God has spoken to us! Talking about God means first of all expressing clearly what God we must bring to the men and women of our time: not an abstract God, a hypothesis, but a real God, a God who exists, who has entered history and is present in history; the God of Jesus Christ as an answer to the fundamental question of the meaning of life and of how we should live. Consequently speaking of God demands familiarity with Jesus and His Gospel. In his First Letter to the Corinthians [St. Paul] writes: "When I came to you, brethren, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified" (2:1-2). The first real fact, therefore, is that Paul does not speak of a philosophy that he developed, he does not speak of ideas that he found elsewhere or invented, but of a reality of his life, he speaks of the God who entered his life, he speaks of a real God who is alive, who spoke with him and will speak with us, he speaks of the Crucified and Risen Christ.
Communicating faith, for St. Paul, did not mean putting himself forward, but rather saying openly and publicly what he had seen and heard in his encounter with Christ, what he had experienced in his life that was transformed by that encounter: it meant putting forward Jesus whom he felt present within him and who became the true orientation of his existence, to make it clear to all that Jesus is necessary to the world and crucial to every person's freedom. The Apostle is not satisfied with proclaiming words but expends his whole life in the great work of faith. To speak of God, we must leave Him room, trusting that He will act in our weakness: we must make room for Him without fear but with simplicity and joy, in the deep conviction that the more we put Him at the center rather than ourselves, the more fruitful our communication will be. At this point we should ask ourselves: how did Jesus communicate? Jesus, in His oneness, speaks of His Father–Abba–and of the Kingdom of God, His gaze full of compassion for the hardships and difficulties of human life. He speaks with great realism and, I would say, that the essential feature of Jesus' proclamation is that it makes clear that our life and the world are worthy of God. Jesus shows that in the world and in Creation God's face shines out and He shows us that God is present in the daily events of our life. Both in the parables on nature, the mustard seed and the field with various seeds, and in our own life–let us think of the parable of the Prodigal Son, of Lazarus and of other parables of Jesus. From the Gospels we see that Jesus takes an interest in every human situation that He encounters, He immerses Himself in the reality of the men and women of His time, with complete trust in the Father's help. And that in this history, although hidden, God is really present and if we are attentive we can encounter Him. And the disciples, who live with Jesus, the crowds who meet Him, see His reaction to the most disparate problems, they see how He speaks, how He behaves; in Him they see the action of the Holy Spirit, the action of God. In Him proclamation and life are interwoven: Jesus acts and teaches, always starting from a close relationship with God the Father. This style becomes an essential indication for us as Christians: our way of living in faith and charity becomes a way of speaking of God today, because it shows, through a life lived in Christ, the credibility and realism of what we say with words, which are not solely words but reveal the reality, the true reality.
General Audience,
Paul VI Audience Hall , November 28, 2012