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“Let us love the Church as our true mother!” |
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09/11/2009 (1:32)
“Let us love the Church as our true mother! Even when we see some shadows or blemishes on her face, let us serve her with concrete action within our communities.” With this exhortation, Benedict XVI ended his intense visit to the Diocese of Brescia on Sunday, November 8th, before the faithful of Concesio in the Church of St. Anthony, where Giovanni Battista Montini, who would become Paul VI, was baptized as on September 30th, 1897.
“It’s not easy being a Christian”, the Pope said, “it takes courage and tenacity not to comply with the mentality of today’s world, not to be seduced by the sometimes powerful calls of hedonism and consumerism, to face, if necessary, misunderstandings and sometimes even real persecution.”
Earlier on Sunday, Benedict XVI visited the home of the late pope, and inaugurated the new headquarters of the Paul VI Institute, which stands next to this house.
Quoting his predecessor’s teachings about the education of young people, the Pope recalled that “the current agnostic indifference, critical pessimism, and the materialist ideology of social progress are not sufficient for the human spirit, which is open to other horizons of truth and life.”
In fact, young people seek authentic humans relationships and answers to their questions about meaning; they must be helped to have a “strong thinking” in order to serve the truth of Christ in charity. Faced with a spreading culture that casts doubts on the value of the person and the goodness of life, Benedict XVI concluded, young people need to be educated above all through testimony, and for Christian educators, through the testimony of faith.
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