Sacraments
“The Feast of Jesus’ Baptism invites every Christian to remember their own Baptism”. Pope Francis said this during his Angelus prayer yesterday as he addressed a crowd of 20,000 faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square, focusing on a theme dear to him: the date of Baptism. “I cannot ask you the question whether you remember the day of your Baptism, because the majority of you were babies, like me; we were baptised as babies”, Pope Francis said off the cuff. “But I ask you another question: do you know the date of your baptism? Do you know which day you were baptised?”. “Let us all think about it”, he invited the faithful: “And if you do not know the date or have forgotten it, when you go home, ask your mother, your grandmother, your uncle, your aunt, your grandfather, your godfather, your godmother: what was the date? And we should always remember that date, because it is a date of celebration, it is the date of our initial sanctification, the date on which the Father gave us the Holy Spirit who makes us walk, the date of the great forgiveness”. After the Angelus prayer, before bidding farewell to the faithful, Pope Francis went back to that theme: “Do not forget your homework: what is the date of my Baptism? What day was I baptised?”. Shortly before, the Pope reminded the faithful that he had baptised 34 babies in the Sistine Chapel: “Upon them, and upon all the children who have been baptised recently, I invoke the maternal protection of the Mother of God, so that, helped by the example of their parents and godparents, they may grow as disciples of the Lord. I wish you all a good Sunday and a good journey in the year that has just begun, thanks to the light that Jesus gave us in His Birth”.
