Pope Encourages Young Churches, “Continent of Hope”

Pope Benedict XVI addressed two very important groups last week, encouraging new and vibrant parts of the Church to be steadfast in the Faith while also sharing it joyfully.

In a September 5 message to the Pan-African Congress of Catholic Laity, he called on lay Catholics there to evangelize their “continent of hope.”

“The love for life and for the family, a sense of joy and sharing, the enthusiasm of living the faith are all values that I have seen during my travels in Africa and that are still etched in my heart,” he said. And joy, which rejects the dark relativism crippling other parts of the world, should lead the African lay faithful to be “’ambassadors’ of the Good News.”

Later in the week, Pope Benedict passed on a similar message to 100 recently consecrated mission-territory Bishops.

“The Church is born of the mission and grows with the mission,” he said, and “the faith is a gift to be welcomed into our hearts and lives, one for which we must always thank the Lord.”

The Role of the Laity

Last week, the Vatican released a message Pope Benedict XVI sent to the 6^th Assembly of the International Catholic Action Forum. In this message, he reminded the laity that they are “co-responsible” for the Church’s mission, not merely “collaborators” with the clergy.  Lay people are therefore called to work in communion with Church leaders, and they are called to take formation very seriously. He said:

Feel the commitment to work for the Church’s mission to be your own…through prayer, through study, through active participation in ecclesial life, through an attentive and positive gaze at the world, in the continual search for the signs of the times.

Society needs courageous witnesses, he went on to say, so that people in darkness may see the light of the Gospel and find hope.

An example of this courageous witness can be seen in St. Juan Diego, who was canonized by Blessed John Paul II in 2002. Juan Diego was the poor, native of Mexico who reported the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe—an apparition that significantly inspired hope and the spread of Catholicism in Mexico, and one that still inspires people today.

In an address given to the Catholic Association of Latino Leaders (CALL) last week, Supreme Knight of the Knight of Columbus, Carl Anderson, encouraged his listeners to be like Juan Diego: