“Let us continue to pray for peace in Iran and throughout the Middle East, especially for the many civilian victims, including many innocent children”. This was the appeal made by Pope Leo XIV at the end of today’s audience in St Peter’s Square during his greeting to the Italian-speaking faithful. “May our prayer be a comfort to those who suffer and a seed of hope for the future”, the Pope said. He also remembered Father Pierre El Raii, the Maronite parish priest of one of the Christian villages in southern Lebanon that in these days “are once again experiencing the tragedy of war”, whose funeral is being held today. “I am close to all the Lebanese people at this time of grave trial”, Leo XIV assured. The Pope then offered a brief portrait of the priest who was killed: “In Arabic, ‘El Raii’ means ‘the shepherd’. Father Pierre was a true shepherd, who always stayed beside his people, with the love and sacrifice of Jesus the Good Shepherd. As soon as he learned that some parishioners had been wounded in a bombing, he rushed to help them without hesitation. May the Lord grant that the blood he shed be a seed of peace for beloved Lebanon”.
“In the Church there is, and there must be, a place for everyone; and every Christian is called to proclaim the Gospel and bear witness in every environment in which he or she lives and works”,
Leo XIV said in his catechesis, dedicated to the second chapter of Lumen Gentium. “The Church is one but includes everyone”, he explained. “It is a great sign of hope — especially in our times, traversed by so many conflicts and wars — to know that the Church is a people in which women and men of different nationalities, languages and cultures live together in faith: it is a sign placed in the very heart of humanity, a reminder and prophecy of that unity and peace to which God the Father calls all his children”. The Church is not “a people like any other, but the People of God, called together by Him and made up of women and men from all the peoples of the earth”, the Pope said at the beginning of his catechesis. “Its unifying principle is not a language, a culture, an ethnicity, but faith in Christ”, the Pontiff explained. “The Church is therefore — according to a splendid expression of the Council — the assembly of ‘all those who in faith look upon Jesus’. It is a messianic people, precisely because it has Christ, the Messiah, as its head”. “Those who belong to it do not pride themselves on merits or titles, but only on the gift of being, in Christ and through Him, daughters and sons of God”, the Pope stressed:
“Above any task or function, what really matters in the Church is to be grafted onto Christ, to be children of God by grace. This is also the only honorary title we should seek as Christians”,
the Pontiff urged. “We are in the Church in order to receive life from the Father unceasingly and to live as his children and brothers and sisters among ourselves. Consequently, the law that animates relationships in the Church is love, as we receive and experience it in Jesus; and her goal is the Kingdom of God, towards which she walks together with all humanity”.
“Unified in Christ, Lord and Saviour of every man and woman, the Church can never turn inwards on herself, but is open to everyone and is for everyone”,
the Pope exhorted. “If believers in Christ belong to it”, Leo XIV stressed, “the Council reminds us that all men are called to belong to the new People of God. Wherefore this people, remaining one and unique, must extend to the whole world and to all ages, so that the intention of God’s will may be fulfilled, who in the beginning created human nature as one and wants to gather together his children who were scattered”. In this perspective,
“even those who have not yet received the Gospel are, in some way, oriented towards the People of God, and the Church,
cooperating in Christ’s mission, is called upon to spread the Gospel everywhere and to everyone, so that every person may enter into contact with Christ”.