The Emeritus Pope said “inner hygiene” is Key and “the Truth, Love and Goodness that Come from God, Make Man Pure”
Vatican insider staff
Turin
August 30, 2015
“The truth, love and goodness that come from God, make man pure and truth, love and goodness come together in the Word which brings liberates a world that no longer thinks of God from ‘forgetfulness’.” This was at the heart of the homily which the Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI pronounced during a mass he presided over this morning in the Teutonic Cemetery church in the Vatican. The mass was attended by members of the Schuelerkreis (Ratzinger’s “student circle”) and the New Schuelerkreis, who gathered at Castel Gandolfo in recent days to reflect on the theme “How to speak to God today”. The priest and philosopher Tomas Halik also participated. The news was posted on the Ratzinger Foundation website.
Does not the evil that afflicts us come from the outside? This was the essence of the question posed by the Emeritus Pope in his German homily. We need to be cleansed of all the impurity that exists out there: “We could respond to the many illnesses and sometimes epidemics that threaten us, by maintaining an external cleanliness,” Benedict XVI said. It is important to care for our exterior in this way so that death does not prevail, the Emeritus Pope said. But this is not enough, he added, because there is also “the epidemic of the heart” to consider, that inner epidemic that “leads to corruption and other filth, the kind of filth that drives man to think only of himself and not of goodness.” So, aside from worship, ethos, “inner hygiene” in other words, also plays a decisive role: “What does a pure man do? What is the real power of purification? How does one come to have a cleansed heart?” Benedict XVI asked.
“In another passage of the Gospel,” he continued, “the Lord says to his people: ‘You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you’.” So we become pure by means of the Word: “The Word is Jesus Christ himself and we come across the Word even in those who reflect It, those who show us the face of God and reflect his meekness, his humble heart, his simplicity, his lovingness, his sincerity.”
FROM THE BOOK OF HEAVEN
V29 – 3.16.31 – I was continuing my “I love You” in the Divine Fiat, and was thinking to myself: “But, is my love Pure?”
“My daughter, in order for you to be able to give Me a pure love, a glance to your interior says everything: if your heart palpitates, yearns for, desires only My Love; if your hands operate only for love of Me; if your feet walk only out of love; if your will wants only My Love; if your intelligence seeks always the way to love Me; your ‘I love You’ with the word—do you know what it does? It gathers all together the whole complex of the love that you have inside yourself, and makes it one, and forms an act of pure and complete love for your Jesus. So, your word does nothing other than make known its extension of the love that you have inside yourself. But if inside not everything is love, since the pure fount is missing inside, there can be neither pure nor complete love.”
