Pope's Lenten Message

POPE'S LENTEN MESSAGE

Pope’s Lenten message on faith that urges charity

Pope Benedict XVI is urging Christians worldwide during Lent this year to develop a deeper personal relationship with God in Christ which will awaken their love and open their spirits to others. “As a result, love of neighbour will no longer be for them a commandment imposed, so to speak, from without, but a consequence deriving from their faith, a faith which becomes active through love,” the Pope says in his Lenten message released in the Vatican on Friday, February 01, 2013.

“Believing in Charity Calls Forth Charity – We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us,” is the theme of Pope Benedict’s message for Lent this year, which begins on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 13. Lent is a period of 40 weekdays marked by prayer, penance, fasting and good works, as spiritual preparation for Christianity’s greatest feast – Easter, which celebrates the resurrection of Christ after His passion and death. Reflecting on the “indissoluble interrelation" between the theological virtues of faith and charity the Pope said “when we make room for the love of God, we become like him, sharing in his own charity.” “The Christian life consists in continuously scaling the mountain to meet God and then coming back down, bearing the love and strength drawn from him, so as to serve our brothers and sisters with God’s own love.” In this regard, the Pope said that “the greatest work of charity is evangelization,” as it is the “highest and the most integral promotion of the human person.” Works of charity the Pope said are born of faith and flow from the grace that God gives in abundance. “Faith without works is like a tree without fruit: the two virtues imply one another,” the Holy Father said. He further compared the relationship between faith and charity to the relationship between Baptism, the sacrament of faith, and the sacrament of love, the Eucharist, which is the fullness of the Christian journey. 

pope's message