Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Fides Service) - In today's general audience, held in St. Peter's Square in the presence of 30,000 people, Benedict XVI began a new cycle of catechesis dedicated to the mystery of the relationship between Christ and the Church in the light of the experience of the Apostles and the task with which they were entrusted and he said: “The Church was built on the foundation of the Apostles as a community of faith, hope and love. Through the Apostles we reach Jesus himself”. Making his own a proposal for the new millennium to contemplate “the face of Christ” which John Paul II made in his apostolic Letter Novo millennio ineunte, Pope Benedict XVI said: “I intend to demonstrate how precisely the light of that Face is reflected in the face of the Church despite the limits and shadows of our fragile and sinful humanity. After Mary, pure reflection of the light of Christ, the Apostles are the ones who with their word and witness hand on to us the truth of Christ. However their mission is not isolated, it is part of the mystery of communion which involves the whole People of God and is built in stages from the Old to the New Covenant.”
The Holy Father said “if it is separated from the context of the faith and hope of the chosen people the message of Jesus is totally misunderstood”… “Although Jesus’ preaching is always a call to personal conversion, in actual fact his aim is to constitute the People of God whom he came to gather together and save”… “A clear sign of the Nazarene’s intention to gather the community of the covenant in order to reveal in it the fulfilment of the promises made to the Fathers, is the institution of the Twelve”… “by choosing the Twelve, introducing them to communion of life with Him and making them participants in his mission to announce in word and deed the Kingdom, Jesus wishes to say that the definitive time in which God’s promises are fulfilled has come”.
With their very existence the Twelve become “a call to Israel to convert and let herself be gathered in the new Covenant, the complete and perfect fulfilment of the old one. The fact that at Supper before his Passion he entrusts to them the task of celebrating his memorial, shows that Jesus wanted to confer on the whole community in the person of its leaders the mandate to be in history a sign and means of the eschatological gathering initiated in Him”. The twelve Apostles are “the most obvious sign of Christ’s will with regard to the life and mission of his Church, the guarantee that between Christ and the Church there exists no contraposition whatsoever… Between the Son of God made man and his Church there is a profound, indissoluble and mysterious continuity and this is why Christ is present today in his people and especially in those who are the Apostle’s successors”. (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 15/3/2006, righe 33, parole 488)
