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- Pope Benedict Declared the Year of Paul in June 2008
Pope Benedict on St Paul
10th June, 2009 - Posted by CatholicLIFE -
Read Pope Benedict’s homily announcing the Year of St Paul which he delivered at St Paul’s Basilica Outside-the-Walls on 28 June 2007. Homily: Pope Benedict Announces the Year of Paul.
“Paul knew he was “called to be an apostle”, that is, that he had not presented himself as a candidate, nor was his a human appointment, but solely by a divine call and election.
The Apostle to the Gentiles repeats several times in his Letters that his whole life is a fruit of God’s freely given and merciful grace (cf. I Cor 15: 9-10; II Cor 4: 1; Gal 1: 15). He was chosen to proclaim “the Gospel of God” (Rom 1: 1), to disseminate the announcement of divine Grace which in Christ reconciles man with God, himself and others.
From his Letters, we know that Paul was far from being a good speaker; on the contrary, he shared with Moses and Jeremiah a lack of oratory skill. “His bodily presence is weak, and his speech of no account” (II Cor 10: 10), his adversaries said of him.
The extraordinary apostolic results that he was able to achieve cannot, therefore, be attributed to brilliant rhetoric or refined apologetic and missionary strategies.
The success of his apostolate depended above all on his personal involvement in proclaiming the Gospel with total dedication to Christ; a dedication that feared neither risk, difficulty nor persecution.
“Neither death, nor life”, he wrote to the Romans, “nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (8: 38-39).
From this we can draw a particularly important lesson for every Christian. The Church’s action is credible and effective only to the extent to which those who belong to her are prepared to pay in person for their fidelity to Christ in every circumstance. When this readiness is lacking, the crucial argument of truth on which the Church herself depends is also absent.”
Posted on: June 10, 2009
Filed under: Blog News
1 Comment
Phil Robinson
June 16th, 2009 at 7:41 am
I am finding this blog very inspiring. In the 21st century we are chronologically so far removed from the early Church that it is hard to imagine those early times and the example of the first apostles in proclaiming the faith. I look forward to walking with St. Paul and his example of courage in the apostolate.
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