God’s love, mercy and goodness lie at the foundation of every vocation, including that of the pope, Pope Leo XIV said yesterday. Source: CNS.
“Let us ask the Lord for the grace to cultivate and spread his charity and to become true neighbours to one another,” he said, paraphrasing his predecessor, Pope Francis, in a homily at Rome’s Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls yesterday.
“Let us compete in showing the love that, following (St Paul’s) encounter with Christ, drove the former persecutor to become ‘all things to all people,’ even to the point of martyrdom,” he said.
The Pope visited the basilica and tomb of St Paul two days after the Mass for the inauguration of his Petrine ministry in St Peter’s Square. It was part of a series of visits to the city’s major papal basilicas after his election.
People cheered and applauded as he entered the basilica, and he blessed the crowds. He walked to the steps descending to the apostle’s tomb where he knelt briefly in silent prayer.
The prayer service was dedicated to St Paul, the so-called “Apostle to the Gentiles” who brought the Gospel to peoples across the central and eastern Mediterranean, exemplifying evangelical zeal and the missionary spirit.
The visit was part of entrusting “the beginning of this new pontificate to the intercession of the apostle,” the Pope said.
Pope Leo’s homily reflected on a reading chosen from the opening of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, where the apostle expresses his complete allegiance to the Lord and his faith in God’s justifying action in Jesus.
St Paul received the grace of his vocation from God, acknowledging “that his encounter with Christ and his own ministry were the fruit of God’s prior love, which called him to a new life while he was still far from the Gospel and persecuting the Church,” the Pope said.
St Augustine also was a convert who experienced choosing God after having realised God had chosen him first, he said. “We cannot love unless someone has loved us first.”
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Every vocation, even the Pope’s, springs from God’s love, Pope says (By Carol Glatz, CNS)
