CAFOD receives special greeting from Pope Benedict XVI
CAFOD director Chris Bain attended Pope Benedict’s weekly General Audience on Wednesday morning. During the Audience, Chris presented Pope Benedict with a copy of CAFOD’s 50 year anniversary book, and Pope Benedict offered a particular greeting to CAFOD. He said:
“I greet the group from CAFOD, with gratitude for the agency’s fifty years of charitable activity on behalf of the Church in England and Wales. Upon all present at today’s Audience, I invoke God’s blessings.”
His Holiness continued his catechetical reflections on the Year of Faith, saying, “Our continuing catechesis for the Year of Faith, we now consider the reasonableness of faith as an encounter with the splendour of God’s truth. Through faith we come to true knowledge of God and ourselves, and learn to live wisely in this world as we await the fullness of life and happiness in the next. Faith and reason are meant to work together in opening the human mind to God’s truth.
By its nature, faith seeks understanding, while the mind’s search for truth finds inspiration, guidance and fulfilment in the encounter with God’s revealed word. Far from being in conflict, faith and science go hand in hand in the service of man’s moral advancement and his wise stewardship of creation. The Gospel message of our salvation in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, offers us a true humanism, a “grammar” by which we come to understand the mystery of man and the universe.
In this Year of Faith, may we open our minds more fully to the light of God’s truth, which reveals the grandeur of our human dignity and vocation."
