Pope: The Eucharist Is Nucleus of the Mission
The Pope stated this Monday in an audience with Brazilian bishops in Rome for their five-yearly visit.
"The disappearance of the missionary spirit perhaps is not due so much to limitations and deficiencies in the external forms of the traditional missionary action but to forgetting that the mission must be nourished by a more profound nucleus," the Pontiff said. "This nucleus is the Eucharist."
"For the Continental Mission to be really effective, it must begin from the Eucharist and lead to the Eucharist," he added, referring to the mission called for by Latin American and Caribbean bishops who gathered with Benedict XVI in 2007 in Aparecida, Brazil.
The Holy Father noted that Jesus came "to show us, with his words and his life, the ordinary ways of salvation, and he ordered us to transmit this revelation to others with his own authority."
He continued, "This being so, we cannot elude this thought: Men might be saved by other ways, thanks to God's mercy, if the Gospel is not proclaimed to them, but can I be saved if through negligence, fear, shame or because of following false ideas, I fail to proclaim it?"
Benedict XVI pointed out that "the call to the mission is not something destined exclusively to a restricted group of members of the Church, but an imperative addressed to every baptized person, an essential element of his vocation."
"In fact," he said, "the mission is the overflowing of the flame of love that inflames in the heart of the human being, which, on opening to the truth of the Gospel and allowing himself to be transformed by it, begins to live his life."
The Pope noted that "the challenges of the present context could lead to a reductionist view of the concept of mission." This concept "cannot be limited to a simple search for new techniques and ways that make the Church more attractive and capable of overcoming the competition with other religious groups or relativist ideologies."
The Pontiff continued: "The Church does not work for itself: It is at the service of Jesus Christ; it exists to make the Good News accessible to all people. .. The Church is catholic precisely because it invites every human being to experience the new existence in Christ.
"Hence, the mission is no more than the natural consequence of the very essence of the Church, a service of the ministry of the union that Christ willed to carry out in his crucified body."
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To read the complete article, go to Zenit- 2010-10-05
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