Vatican City, 17
February 2013 (VIS) – More than one hundred and fifty thousand people
attended Benedict XVI's second-to-last Angelus in St. Peter's Square
today. The Pope, who appeared at the window of his study at noon,
focuses his Sunday meditation on Lent, "a time of conversion and
penitence in preparation for Easter."
"The Church, who is
mother and teacher," he said, "calls on all of her members to renew
their spirit, to reorient themselves toward God, renouncing pride and
selfishness in order to live in love. In this Year of Faith, Lent is a
favourable time to rediscover faith in God as the fundamental criterion
of our lives and the life of the Church. This always implies a struggle,
spiritual combat, because the spirit of evil, naturally, opposes our
sanctification and tries to turn us from God's path. … Jesus, after
having received 'investiture' as the Messiah?'anointed' by the Spirit?at
his Baptism in the Jordan, was led by the same Spirit into the desert
to be tempted by the devil. On beginning his public ministry, Jesus had
to unmask and reject the false images of the Messiah proposed to him by
the tempter. But these temptations are also the false images of humanity
that have always harassed our consciences, disguising
themselves as convenient and effective, even good proposals."
"The core of these
temptations," Benedict XVI explained, "always consists in
instumentalizing God for our own interests, giving more importance to
success or material goods. The tempter is sly: he doesn't push us
directly toward evil, but toward a false good, making us believe that
power and that which satisfies our basic needs are the true realities.
In this way, God becomes secondary; He is reduced to a means, becomes
unreal, no longer counts, disappears. In the final analysis, faith is
what is at stake in temptation because God is at stake. In the decisive
moments of our lives, but on closer inspection in every moment, we are
faced with a choice: do we want to follow the 'I' or God? Do we want to
seek out selfish interests or the true Good, that which is truly good?"
"As the Church
Fathers teach us, temptation forms part of Jesus' 'descent' into our
human condition, into the abyss of sin and its consequences. It is a
descent that Jesus follows to its very end, even to death on the cross
and the hell of extreme distance from God. … As St. Augustine teaches,
Jesus has taken temptation from us in order to give us victory over it.
Therefore we too have no fear of facing the battle against the spirit of
evil. What is important is that we face it with him, with Christ the
Victor," the pontiff concluded.(Courtesy of VIS:here)
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