Pope at Audience: 'Holiness is not a privilege for the few'
By Deborah Castellano Lubov
"Holiness is not a privilege for the few, but a gift that commits every baptized person to strive for the perfection of charity, that is, the fullness of love towards God and towards one’s neighbour."
Pope Leo XIV expressed this during his weekly General Audience in the Vatican on Wednesday morning, continuing his catechesis series on the Second Vatican Council and its documents, and citing the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen gentium on the Church.
READ POPE LEO'S FULL CATECHESIS HERE
The Pope this week continued reflecting on the Constitution and recalled how Lumen gentium dedicates an entire chapter, the fifth, to the universal vocation to holiness of all the faithful, insisting that every one of us is called to live in the grace of God, practising the virtues and imitating Christ.
He began by pointing out that the highest level of holiness, as in the early days of the Church, is martyrdom, the “supreme witness of faith and charity,” and for this reason, the Council text teaches that every believer must be ready to confess Christ even unto blood, "as has always been the case and continues to be so today."
This readiness to bear witness, the Pope said, is realized every time Christians leave signs of faith and love in society.
Pope Leo at General Audience (@Vatican Media)
Fostering a holy life
Pope Leo reminded those gathered that all the sacraments, and in a preeminent way the Eucharist, "are nourishment that fosters a holy life, assimilating every person to Christ, the model and measure of holiness."
The Pope said that Jesus sanctifies the Church, adding that, "holiness is, from this point of view, His gift, which is manifested in our daily life every time we receive it with joy and respond to Him with commitment."
The Holy Father recalled that Saint Paul VI, in his 20 Oct. 1965 General Audience, taught that the Church, to be authentic, requires that all the baptized must “be holy, that is, truly worthy, strong and faithful children of hers.”
This, Pope Leo reminded, is realized as an inner transformation, whereby the life of every person is conformed to Christ by virtue of the Holy Spirit.
Called to a serious change of life
He recalled that Lumen gentium describes the holiness of the Catholic Church as one of her constitutive characteristics.
This, he clarified, does not mean that she is so in a full and perfect sense, but that she is called to confirm this divine gift during her pilgrimage towards the eternal destination, walking “amid the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God.”
The sad reality of sin in the Church, that is, in all of us, Pope Leo said, invites each person to carry out a serious change of life, entrusting ourselves to the Lord, who renews us in charity. "It is precisely this infinite grace, which sanctifies the Church, which delivers a mission to us to carry out day after day: that of our conversion."
Pope Leo XIV delivers catechesis at General Audience (@Vatican Media)
"Therefore, holiness," he added, "does not only have a practical nature, as if it were reducible to an ethical commitment, however great, but concerns the very essence of Christian life, both personal and communal."
Not shackles, but liberating gifts
In this regard, the Pope remembered in a special way those men and women who consecrate their lives to God through the evangelical counsels: poverty, chastity and obedience, which express their complete trust in God’s providence, modelled on Christ’s gift of himself to the Father with a pure heart.
"These three virtues," he insisted, "are not rules that shackle freedom, but liberating gifts of the Holy Spirit, through which some of the faithful are wholly consecrated to God."
Poverty, he said, expresses complete trust in Providence, freeing one from calculation and self-interest; obedience takes as its model the self-giving that Christ offered to the Father, freeing one from suspicion and domination; chastity is the gift of a heart that is whole and pure in love, at the service of God and the Church.
"By conforming to this style of life," the Holy Father marveled, "consecrated persons bear witness to the universal vocation of holiness of the entire Church, in the form of radical discipleship."
And thus, he said, "the evangelical counsels manifest full participation in the life of Christ, unto the Cross: it is precisely by the sacrifice of the Crucified One that we are all redeemed and sanctified!"
No human experience God does not redeem
By contemplating this event, Pope Leo insisted, "we know that there is no human experience that God does not redeem: even suffering, lived in union with the passion of the Lord, becomes a path of holiness."
"Thus," the Pope suggested, "the grace that converts and transforms life strengthens us in every trial, pointing us not toward a distant ideal, but towards the encounter with God, who became man out of love."
Pope Leo XIV concluded by imploring the Blessed Mother, the all-holy Mother of the Incarnate Word, to always sustain and protect our journey.
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