By Josephine Peterson / CNS
ALL baptised Christians share in the Church’s mission and, guided by the Holy Spirit, are fit for renewing and building up the Church, Pope Leo XIV said at his weekly general audience.
Every person baptised was called to bear witness to Christ, and the whole Church, beyond its leaders, has a role in preserving the truth of the faith, the pope said in St Peter’s Square on March 18.
Continuing his series of reflections on the Second Vatican Council, the pope focused on the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (“Lumen Gentium”), and the participation of the lay faithful in Jesus Christ’s “priestly, prophetic and royal offices,” that is, the offices of teaching, sanctifying and governing.
Everyone entered the Church as a layperson, Pope Leo said.
Through Baptism and Confirmation, the faithful were “more perfectly bound to the Church” and are endowed “with special strength” by the Holy Spirit, so that they were “more strictly obliged to spread and defend the faith, both by word and by deed, as true witnesses of Christ,” he said, quoting the document.
“This consecration is at the root of the common mission that unites the ordained ministries and the lay faithful,” Pope Leo said.
In fact, everyone was called to bear witness to the truth of the faith, he said.
The Doctrinal Commission of the Council specified that the sense of faith “belongs to individual believers not in their own right, but as members of the People of God as a whole,” the pope said.
The function of the Holy Spirit is to lead Christians to the truth, and because the entire body of the faithful is anointed by “the Holy One,” he said, “the Church, therefore, as the communion of the faithful — which naturally includes the pastors — cannot err in matters of faith”.
“From this unity, which the Magisterium of the Church safeguards, it follows that every baptised person is an active agent of evangelisation, called to bear consistent witness to Christ in accordance with the prophetic gift which the Lord bestows upon His whole Church,” he said.
The Holy Spirit, who comes from the Risen Christ, he said, distributed “special graces” among all the faithful, who were then able to contribute to the renewal and building of the Church.
“Dear friends, let us rekindle in ourselves the awareness of and gratitude for having received the gift of being part of God’s people; and also the responsibility that this entails,” he said.
