” “"Christ is not two thousand years away, but He is really always with us". With these impromptu words, the Pope ended today the catechesis of the general audience, dedicated (as last Wednesday’s) to the subject of "tradition" in the life of the Church. "The distance of the centuries has been overcome, and the Resurrected offers Himself alive and working for us, in this day of the Church and the world", the last sentence of the catechesis after which Benedict XVI digressed: "And this is our joy! Through Tradition, Christ is not two thousand years away, but He is really always with us, and gives us the truth, the light that makes us live and guides us along the road of life". At the beginning of the audience, as he defined the subject of "apostolic tradition" as a "subject of great relevance for the life of the Church", the Holy Father briefly summed up the meditation of last Wednesday: "The Tradition he said, off the cuff is not a box of dead things, but the live river of Christ’s life that reaches us and involves us, with God, in the history of mankind". Then, he made reference to the Council, for which the Tradition consists in the task entrusted to the apostles to "preach the Gospel to everybody as the source of every absolute truth and every moral rule". "The task entrusted by Jesus to the apostles specified the Pope has been conveyed to their successors. Beyond the experience of personal contact with Christ, a unique and unrepeatable experience, the apostles handed down to their successors the solemn dispatching in the world they received by the Master", which thus becomes "a pastoral, liturgical and prophetic service". ” “
