Pope Leo XIV at General Audience
Pope at Audience: 'Every baptized person is to bear
consistent witness to Christ'
During his weekly General Audience, Pope Leo XIV continues
reflecting on the Second Vatican Council's 'Lumen gentium' and insists that
"every baptized person is an active agent of evangelization, called to
bear consistent witness to Christ."
By Deborah Castellano Lubov
"Every baptized person is an active agent of
evangelization, called to bear consistent witness to Christ in accordance with
the prophetic gift which the Lord bestows upon His whole Church."
Pope Leo XIV expressed this during his weekly General
Audience on Wednesday morning.
Continuing his catechesis series on the Second Vatican
Council and a reading of its documents, the Pope this week revisited the second
chapter of the Conciliar Constitution Lumen
gentium, dedicated to the Church as the People of
God, recalling that the messianic people receive from Christ the
participation "in the priestly, prophetic and kingly work office through
which His salvific mission is carried out."
Common mission that unites the ordained ministries and lay
faithful.
The Pope remembered that the Council Fathers teach that the
Lord Jesus, through the new and eternal Covenant, have established a kingdom of
priests, constituting his disciples as a ‘royal priesthood.' He highlighted
that this common priesthood of the faithful is given with Baptism, which
enables us to worship God in spirit and truth, and to “confess before men the
faith which they have received from God through the Church.”
Furthermore, through the sacrament of Confirmation, he notes
all the baptized “are more perfectly bound to the Church … and the Holy Spirit
endows them with special strength so that they are more strictly obliged to
spread and defend the faith, both by word and by deed, as true witnesses of
Christ.”
This consecration, the Pope said is at the root of the
common mission that unites the ordained ministries and the lay faithful.
In this regard, Pope Leo remembered when Pope Francis had
observed that, “looking at the People of God is remembering that we all enter
the Church as lay people. The first sacrament, which seals our identity
forever, and of which we should always be proud, is Baptism." Pope Leo
reiterated that through Baptism and by the anointing of the Holy Spirit, the
faithful "‘are consecrated as a spiritual house and a holy priesthood’ so
that everyone forms the faithful Holy People of God.”
Aimed at our sanctification
The Pope recalled that the exercise of the royal priesthood
takes place in many ways, all aimed at our sanctification, first and foremost
through participation in the offering of the Eucharist.
"Through prayer, asceticism and active charity, we thus
bear witness to a life renewed by God’s grace," the Pope said. As the
Council summarizes, “it is through the sacraments and the exercise of the
virtues that the sacred nature and organic structure of the priestly community
is brought into operation."
The Pope also recalled that the Council Fathers teach that
the holy People of God also participate in the prophetic mission of Christ.
"Sense of the faith" and the "consensus
of the faithful"
The Holy Father reminded that in this context the important
theme of the sense of the faith and the consensus of
the faithful is introduced. He recalled that the Doctrinal Commission
of the Council specified that this sensus fidei “is like a
faculty of the whole Church, by which she, in her faith, recognises the
revelation handed down, distinguishing between true and false in matters of
faith, and at the same time penetrates it more deeply and applies it more fully
in life.”
The sense of faith, Pope Leo emphasized, therefore belongs
to individual believers not in their own right, but as members of the People of
God as a whole.
Lumen gentium, the Pope explained, focuses on
this latter aspect, and places it in relation to the infallibility of the
Church, to which that of the Roman Pontiff is inherent and by which it is
served.
The Holy Father quoted the passage in Lumen gentium that
states: “The entire body of the faithful, anointed as they are by the Holy One,
cannot err in matters of belief. They manifest this special property by means
of the whole peoples’ supernatural discernment in matters of faith when from
the Bishops down to the last of the lay faithful they show universal agreement
in matters of faith and morals.”
With this in mind, Pope Leo XIV observed, "the Church,
therefore, as the communion of the faithful – which naturally includes the
pastors, cannot err in matters of faith: the organ through which this truth is
preserved, founded on the anointing of the Holy Spirit, is the supernatural
sense of faith of the entire People of God, which is manifested in
the consensus of the faithful."
Our responsibility as the People of God
From this unity, which the Magisterium of the Church
safeguards, the Pope continued, "it follows that every baptized person is
an active agent of evangelization, called to bear consistent witness to Christ
in accordance with the prophetic gift which the Lord bestows upon His whole
Church."
Reminding that the Holy Spirit, “distributes special graces
among the faithful of every rank," Pope Leo said that it is through these
gifts that the Holy Spirit "makes them fit and ready to undertake the
various tasks and offices which contribute toward the renewal and building up
of the Church.”
The Pope noted that a particular demonstration of this
charismatic vitality is offered by consecrated life, which continually
germinates and flourishes through the work of grace. "Ecclesial
associations, too," he said, "are a shining example of the variety
and fruitfulness of spiritual fruits for the edification of the People of
God."
With this sentiment, Pope Leo XIV concluded with an
invitation: "Let us rekindle in ourselves the awareness of and gratitude
for having received the gift of being part of God’s People, and also the
responsibility that this entails."
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