Add from Benedict xvi

Following Reading on Saints Simon and Jude we find more so penetrating from the Pope himself.

THURSDAY 28^th Oct 2010

From POPE BENEDICT XVI Audience Feb 26, 2009

Called to Carry the Light of God in This World

Really what we must teach is how to be human.

• We must teach this great art: how to be a human being ... If it is true that the human being's "measuring stick" for what is just and what is not lies not within but without, in God, it is important that this God is not distant but recognizable, concrete, and that he enter our life and truly be a friend with whom we can speak and who can speak with us. We must ... learn to know intimately Jesus Christ, the God with the human face, and really come into contact with him. We must learn to listen to him and learn to let him enter into us. Sacramental Communion is precisely this interpenetration between two persons. I do not take a piece of bread or meat, I take or open my heart so that the Risen One may enter the context of my being, so that he may be within me and not only outside me. In this way he speaks within me and transforms my being, giving me the meaning of justice, the dynamism of justice and zeal for the Gospel.
• This celebration, at which God not only comes close to us but also enters the very fabric of our existence, is fundamental to being able truly to live with God and for God and to carry the light of God in this world ... Naturally, while accepting and learning more and more about the aspect of mystery where words and reasoning leave off, it is also completely realistic, because it brings me to God and God to me. And it brings me to the other because the other receives the same Christ. Therefore if the same Christ is in him and in me, the two of us are no longer separate individuals ... Therefore our neighbour is truly near: no longer are we two separate "selves" but we are united in the same "self" of Christ. In other words, Eucharistic and sacramental catechesis must really reach the heart of our existence. It must be an education that opens us to God's voice, that lets us be opened so that the original sin of selfishness may be broken, that in the depths of our existence we may become open, in order to also become truly just. .. We must all work together to celebrate the Eucharist ever more profoundly: not only as a rite, but as an existential process that touches me in the very depths of my being, more than any other thing, and changes me, transforms me. And in transforming me, it also begins the transfor­mation of the world that the Lord desires and for which he wants to make us his instruments.

His Holiness Benedict XVI was elected to the See of Saint Peter in 2005.