With the Advent, "the People of God resumes its path, to live the mystery of Christ in history". Yesterday morning, those words were spoken by Benedict XVI, while he introduced the Angelus prayer. "Christ is the same as yesterday, today and for ever in the future", he admonished, while history "changes and asks for constant evangelization; it needs to be renewed from inside, and the only real novelty is Christ: He is total fulfilment, the bright future of man and the world". The Advent, stated the Pope, "is the right time to awaken our hearts to waiting for the One ‘who is, was and will come’": "so, the believer is always vigilant, animated by the intimate hope to meet the Lord". Therefore, the first Advent Sunday was "a really special day to offer the whole Church and all the men of goodwill my second encyclical, which I wanted to dedicate exactly to the subject of Christian hope", and whose title "is Spe Salvi, for it starts with the expression of Saint Paul: ‘Spe Salvi Facti Sumus We were saved in hope’". In this, like in other excerpts of the New Testament, recalled the Pope, "the word ‘hope’ is closely connected with the word ‘faith’. It is a gift changing the lives of those who receive it, as demonstrated by the experiences of lots of man and woman saints". (To be continued)
