Christian life is a battle each person must fight against the temptation to be self-sufficient and against a paganism disguised as sacredness, Pope Francis wrote in an introduction to a small book distributed to participants at the Synod on Synodality. Source: CNS.
Such “spiritual worldliness,” he wrote, “though it be camouflaged with the appearance of the sacred, it ends up being idolatrous because it does not recognise the presence of God as Lord and liberator of our lives and of the history of the world. It leaves us prey to our capricious desires.”
The booklet contains two republished essays by the Pope that are “united by the concern, which I feel to be a loud call from God to the entire Church, to remain vigilant and to fight with the strength of prayer against every concession to spiritual worldliness”, he wrote.
Titled, Holy, Not Worldly: God’s Grace Saves Us From Interior Corruption, the booklet was released by the Dicastery for Communication and the Vatican publishing house on Friday and was offered to the more than 350 participants attending the afternoon session of the Synod of Bishops on Synodality.
“I offer these texts to the reader as an opportunity to reflect on his life and on the life of the Church, with the conviction that God asks us to be open to his newness, he asks us to be unquiet and never satisfied, searching and never stuck in comfortable opacity, not defended within the walls of false certainties, but walking on the road of holiness,” the Pope wrote.
“Christian life is a battle” against the temptation of closing in on oneself, he wrote, and instead to let God’s love dwell within.
This battle is not in vain or without hope, he wrote, “because this battle has already been won by Jesus,” who, with his resurrection, “has made it possible for us to become new persons.”
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In book given at synod, Pope warns against idolatry camouflaged as sacred (By Carol Glatz, CNS via OSV News)
