Pope Leo XIV has urged Christians to set aside time in their daily lives to speak with God in prayer, warned about the harm to one’s relationship with God when this is ignored. Source: CNA.
“Time dedicated to prayer, meditation and reflection cannot be lacking in the Christian’s day and week,” the pontiff said during the catechesis at his general audience in the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall yesterday.
The Pope devoted the second week of his series of teachings on the documents of the Second Vatican Council to a closer examination of the dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum, dedicated to divine revelation.
Pointing to the document, he highlighted listening and dialogue with God as foundations of a Christian life.
“From this perspective, the first attitude to cultivate is listening, so that the divine Word may penetrate our minds and our hearts; at the same time, we are required to speak with God, not to communicate to him what he already knows, but to reveal ourselves to ourselves,” Leo said.
The Pope also drew on the human experience of friendship to warn about the dangers of neglecting one’s spiritual life: “Our experience tells us that friendships can come to an end through a dramatic gesture of rupture, or because of a series of daily acts of neglect that erode the relationship until it is lost.”
“If Jesus calls us to be friends, let us not leave this call unheeded. Let us welcome it, let us take care of this relationship, and we will discover that friendship with God is our salvation,” he said.
The Pope insisted that this living relationship with God is cultivated above all through prayer, understood as an authentic friendship with the Lord.
This experience, he explained, is achieved first of all in liturgical and community prayer, “in which we do not decide what to hear from the Word of God, but it is he himself who speaks to us through the Church.”
It is also achieved in personal prayer, which takes place “in the interiority of the heart and mind,” and which should form part of every believer’s day and week.
The Pope stressed that only from a personal relationship with God is it possible to bear authentic witness to the faith: “Only when we speak with God can we also speak about him.”
FULL STORY
Pope Leo XIV urges making time ‘to speak with God’ (By Victoria Cardiel, CNA)
RELATED COVERAGE
Pope at Audience: Vatican II calls us to friendship with Christ (Vatican News)
