By 
VATICAN CITY — Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday called on Christians to be capable of “viewing the world in a positive light,” while urging them to be actively committed to transforming society according to the spirit of the Gospel, without watering down the Christian message.
“It is certainly not by watering down the content or softening the demands that Christianity can be made attractive,” he recalled on Wednesday, citing the address he delivered to the plenary assembly of the Dicastery for Evangelization, Section on Fundamental Questions Regarding Evangelization in the World, on May 28.
During the general audience held in St. Peter’s Square on Oct. 7, the pontiff resumed his catechetical series dedicated to the texts of the Second Vatican Council, following last week’s pause, when he reflected on his apostolic journey to France.
Leo thus continued his catechesis on the conciliar constitution Gaudium et Spes. In particular, he focused his reflection on Chapter 4 of the first part of the document, which is devoted to the Church’s mission in the contemporary world.
“It is the task of the whole people of God, especially pastors and theologians, to discern what in the cultures of our time is worthy of consideration, always taking the word of God and the tradition of the Church as the supreme criteria for discernment. This requires a balanced mind, free from cultural trends, capable of viewing the world in a positive light whilst remaining steadfast in preserving and presenting the Gospel message in its entirety,” he said.
We ‘cannot accept the oppression of the weak’
Before thousands of pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square, Leo XIV reflected on the vocation of the lay faithful in the world and recalled that Vatican II fostered a new awareness of the responsibility of all the baptized in the Church’s mission.
Referring to the concrete demands of the Christian faith, Leo XIV said that, by worshipping Christ, “the believer cannot accept the oppression of the weak and the poor, nor the unjust structures that perpetuate conditions of dependence and injustice.”
“The social doctrine of the Church guides the actions of Christians, who collaborate with all people of goodwill in promoting the common good,” he added.
The principal settings for this evangelizing mission, the Holy Father recalled, are the family and the workplace, though it extends to every sphere of life.
The Church’s purpose is not political
The pontiff also made clear that the Church’s purpose is not political in nature but consists rather in bearing witness to faith and charity.
“The council fathers remind us that the Church’s mission is fulfilled also in contributing to the construction of the earthly city. However, her methods and aims are not primarily of a political order; rather, they consist in bearing witness to faith and charity, together with commitment for justice, peace, and fraternity,” he said.
The Church’s ‘first mission’
Leo XIV further explained that the Second Vatican Council reminds us that the Church is neither “above” nor “beside” the world but is, as it were, grafted into it.
In this sense, he emphasized that the Church “journeys through history in the midst of peoples and cultures,” though its “first mission” remains “to help people be attentive to the profound questions of life: those concerning our origin and our destiny, as well as those concerning the meaning of love and suffering.”
“The logic of profit at all costs and the manipulation of information risk exerting undue pressure on people to conform to a lifestyle centered on the consumption of material goods, but our hearts are made to look upwards,” he said.
Consistency between the ‘faith we profess and our lives’
Leo then recalled that proclaiming the Gospel requires consistency of life on the part of believers. To carry out the Church’s evangelizing mission effectively, the pontiff said, “it is necessary for every baptized person to commit to cooperating with the grace of the Holy Spirit, so that their faith may be living and expressed in consistent behavior.”
In this context, he recalled that the council fathers stated that the discrepancy between professed faith and daily life “deserves to be counted among the more serious errors of our age.”
The importance of the rosary
During his greetings to Italian-speaking faithful after the catechesis, the pope recalled the Oct. 7 liturgical memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary and emphasized the importance of this traditional Marian prayer, noting that it is “greatly cherished in the Church’s tradition.”
The Holy Father stressed that Mary is a “sure refuge amid the difficulties of life.” The memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary, celebrated each year on Oct. 7, recalls the special protection of the Virgin Mary over the Church and encourages devotion to the holy rosary as a path of contemplation, conversion, and the strengthening of faith.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News. It has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.
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Hypocrisy, or deflection, or both? One wonders if this is craftily meant to counter the amoris laetitia conference currently happening. (Though here he harps on more social justice stuff, with the usual marxist tinge, e.g. “unjust structures.”) The promotion of the error/heresy of allowing communion for the divorced and remarried is already center stage, in which the watering down of the moral law is accomplished by recourse to the concrete case, lived experience, gradualism, etc. Leo has generally been continuing the whole project started by Francis of the dismantling of theology via the latter kind of tricks. But remember folks, if you’re “traditional,” or don’t go along with the synodal wave and other ideological currents engulfing the hierarchy, you are denied accompaniment and mercy and even have excessive demands placed on you.
Wake up Christians! Just after the Pope visit to France, the Left and followers of the religion of peace have unleashed terror in France under the cover of “school protests”:
“The prosecutor’s office IN ORLÉANS, THE HISTORICAL SITE OF JOAN OF ARC’S VICTORY OVER THE ENGLISH, has launched an investigation into STUDENT RIOTERS CHANTING A RAP SONG HONORING ISLAMIST MILITANTS WHO MASSACRED 137 FRENCH NATIONALS, including three Jewish children.
Who The Protesters Are Lionizing
Between March 11 and March 19, 2012, Mohamed Merah, a French citizen of Algerian origin, carried out a series of jihadi attacks in Toulouse and Montauban, killing seven people, including two soldiers, a rabbi, and three Jewish children aged 3, 5 and 8 years old. Merah chased the 8-year-old girl, Miriam Monsonego, and grabbed her by the hair, paused to reload, then shot her in the head.”
“Catholic Diocese Asks Parishioners Not to Conflate Attack on Church With Islam
Meanwhile, in a move that has shocked Catholics just days after Pope Leo XIV visited France, student rioters vandalized the Church of St. Hilaire in Soullans on October 6 in the Vendée district while singing the rap song M*R*H.
https://www.meforum.org/fwi/fwi-news/french-student-rioters-sing-jihadi-rap-glorifying-islamist-mass-murderers
The Pope omits mentioning the origin of the October 7 date to commemorate Our Lady of the Rosary!
October 7 was the day when in 1571, Christian warriors praying the Rosary by instruction of Pope Saint Pius V, WITH DIVINE HELP DESTORYED A MUCH LARGER MUSLIM FLEET AND FRED THOUSANDS OF CHRISTIAN SLAVES AT THE big BATTLE OF LEPANTO!
UNTIL VATICAN II, THE DATE WAS CELEBRATED BY THE CHURCH AS THE DAY OF OUR LADY OF VICTORY. VII CHANGED IT TO LADY OF THE ROSARY.
“Pope warns that ‘watering down’ Christianity’s demands won’t make it more attractive”.
Yep. Tried it for fifty years. Doesn’t work.
The Pope omits mentioning the origin of the October 7 date to commemorate Our Lady of the Rosary!
October 7 was the day when in 1571, Christian warriors praying the Rosary by instruction of Pope Saint Pius V, WITH DIVINE HELP DESTORYED A MUCH LARGER MUSLIM FLEET AND FRED THOUSANDS OF CHRISTIAN SLAVES AT THE big BATTLE OF LEPANTO!
UNTIL VATICAN II, THE DATE WAS CELEBRATED BY THE CHURCH AS THE DAY OF OUR LADY OF VICTORY. VII CHANGED IT TO LADY OF THE ROSARY
The change occurred 100 years ago. Posting false info twice doesn’t make it more true.
The readers of CWR must rise to the occasion and create a record-breaking thread of delight and support for Pope Leo XIV in his message that the Truth must no longer be watered down.
In FOCUSING on the Documents of Vatican II, he is pivoting from the self-validating Synod on Synodality (say what?) which would seem to replace (!) the recent Council, with its subliminal mainstreaming of the homosexual lifestyle larded up with a few extravagant Study Group reports (under the so-called “principle of gradualism,” especially Study Group #9).
Also back on THE TABLE, possibly, is the irreducible difference between coherent governance and a certain style (?) of greater “communio” among those who are sacramentally baptized (with distinctive roles in the world) and those who are sacramentally ordained (with distinctive responsibilities/roles within the Mystical Body of Christ and the Apostolic Succession).
This article about unambiguous/non-ambivalent fidelity to the mystery of the Incarnation is to be READ ALONGSIDE the recent articles by Filip Mazurczak on Pope Leo’s “pivot” toward Europe in Pope Leo XIV and Europe – Catholic World Report, and by Fr. Robert Imbelli comparing the pope’s refreshing clarity to St. Paul The Pauline Leo – Catholic World Report.
Is it possible under Pope Leo XIV—with his future appointments and awaited consistory of (new) cardinals—that we will again recognize the vitality reported a century ago by G.K. Chesterton:
“Those runners [messengers of the Gospel] gather impetus as they run. Ages afterwards they still speak as if something had just happened. They have not lost the speed and momentum of messengers; they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild eyes of witnesses. . . .We might sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows old” (“The Everlasting Man,” 1925).
“Watering down demands not a good idea.”
Such as the one hour eucharistic fast? Shortening and simplifying the liturgy? Adjusting Mass and saints day schedules? Abandoning Ember Days? Making annulment routinely available?
You are free to fast for longer and continue to celebrate Ember days. What on earth are you complaining about?
If the Holy Father does not want Christianity to be watered down, he ought
to start with axing same sex blessings and Communion for the divorced and
remarried without annulments. And let’s go back to calling adultery what
Christ called it – a sin, not an “irregular situation.”
Leo XIV continues to speak in generalities when exhorting Christians to practice the faith. Example, the reference to the Address of Leo XIV to Participants in the Plenary Assembly is not explicative, rather it is more of the same lacking specificity. Reminding, I’m sure many, of those well drawn sermons that in the end say nothing.
When he is more specific he’s suggestive of placing greater interest in unity and inclusion, rather than sexual mores setting up a hierarchy of values. Whereas the Christian community at large, the Body of Christ seeking definition and reasonable certitude on precisely how to live their lives are instead led to wander beyond the doctrinal fence that identifies the sheepfold.
About the “doctrinal fence,” we hope that future discourses will salvage “Veritatis Splendor” from the swamp—and which explicitly establishes the natural law and moral absolutes as part of the Church’s ordinary magisterium:
“This is the first time, in fact, that the MAGISTERIUM of the Church [caps added!] has set forth in detail the fundamental elements of this [‘moral’] teaching, and presented the principles for the pastoral discernment necessary in practical and cultural situations which are complex and even crucial” (Veritatis Splendor, VS, n. 115).
“The Church is no way [!] the author or the arbiter of this [‘moral’] norm” (VS, n. 95).
“…the commandment of love of God and neighbour does not have in its dynamic any higher limit, but it does have a lower limit, beneath which the commandment is broken” (VS, n. 52)
“…the Church’s Pastors have the duty to act in conformity with their apostolic mission, insisting that ‘the right of the faithful’ [italics] to receive Catholic doctrine in its purity and integrity must always be respected” (VS, n. 113).
Bending low, Jesus uplifted the lowly. “The believer cannot accept the oppression of the weak and the poor, nor the unjust structures that perpetuate conditions of dependence and injustice” – Pope Leo. XIV.
Please honor Our Lady of the Rosary. Read G.K. Chesterton’s great poem Lepanto, memorializing the miraculous victory, thanks to the Virgin Mary intercession, of the Catholic warriors that prayed the rosary before the battle and sopped the advance of Islam in the Mediterranean for a while and freed thousands of Christian slaves at the battle of Lepanto, October 7, 1571:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47917/lepanto
Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix of All Graces, pray for us!
“It is certainly not by watering down the content or softening the demands that Christianity can be made attractive,”
With all due respect, I don’t know how Pope Leo can keep a straight face and say that considering his tacit approval for the push to normalize sexual immorality through his constant appointment, toleration and promotion of clerics who openly dissent from Church moral teaching!
For clerics like Leo, the “demands of Christianity” seem to begin and end with nebulous “social justice” issues. Individual justice and morality are distantly last. And yet the Blessed Mother reportedly told the Fatima children that more people go to hell for sins of the flesh than for anything else!
I am reminded of some pointed comments by Blessed Fulton J. Sheen:
“Sometimes people are interested in social justice to cover up the want of individual justice.”
Words have little value when they come from Rome. What has value is action. The counsel to not water down the demands of Christianity has little value to those who sit listening in the pews. This counsel is of infinite value and importance to the Pope, cardinals, archbishops, and bishops along with every single dicastery in the Vatican. Do not teach moral purity while discussing or synodaling about heresy, immorality, and seeking to undermine Tradition and Truth.
Stop talking and begin to act – Pope Leo, your actions always speak louder than your words.