J.P. II's Catholic Laity - 3 - The World needs your Testimony

J.P. II’s Catholic Laity- 3 - The World needs your Testimony
www.cinopsbegone.blogspot.com/ Thurs. Feb. 21, 2008

The world today needs to see your love for Christ; it needs public testimony of the religious life: as Paul VI once said: ‘Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he listens to teachers he does so because they are witnesses.’

If the nonbelievers of this world are to believe in Christ, they need your faithful testimony – testimony that springs from your complete trust in the generous mercy of the Father and in your enduring faith in the power of the cross and the resurrection.

Thus the ideals, the values, the convictions that are the basis of your dedication to Christ must be translated into the language of daily life. Among the people of God, in the local ecclesial community, your public testimony is part of your contribution to the mission of the Church.

As St. Paul says: ‘You are a letter from Christ … written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but tablets of human hearts.’ Philippines, February 17, 1981

The above are significant excerpts from a book” The Private Prayers of Pope John Paul II – a Life in Prayer, Atria Books, N.Y., London, Toronto, Sydney, 2005

The Mind and Heart of Pope John Paul II:

Better equipped than anyone else for the close combat of controversy, the Holy Father detests polemics and their summary classifications. It is true that heaven has endowed him with two charismata which dispense him from becoming involved in our wretched disputes.
The first is the ability to act by his presence alone, as everyone could see on the day of his enthronement when, before he had said more than three words, diplomats were to be seen weeping in their official seats – a phenomenon as rare as April showers in the Sahara.
When there is a difference of opinion in the Church, he gets the opponents together, sits down at the end of the table and the problems disappears. This has been seen at certain synods which promised to be stormy and finished as peaceful sunsets, everyone having realized, under the Pope’s gaze, that the person opposite also had his reasons, not all of them bad.
Another gift – which also make him the man he is – is the ability to go back to first causes, far back into history or deep into theology. The reader will have noticed more than once in the preceding pages that the Pope never hesitates to back to Genesis or beyond and deduce consequences far ahead in the future. 78-9

The above from the book, “Be Not Afraid!” Pope John Paul II speaks out on his life, His beliefs, and his inspiring vision for humanity, Andre Frossard and Pope John Paul II, First published in Great Britain in 1984 by the Bodley Head Ltd.

George H. Kubeck, Duplicate and or translate into Spanish and Vietnamese