Sep 25, 2010 / 20:11 pm
God's forgiveness is the “fulcrum of every reform,” Pope Benedict told a group of Brazilian bishops on Saturday. It is in recognizing “true faults,” purifying herself and reflecting Christ in the world, said the Pope, that the Church might be the “youth of the world.”
The Holy Father met with bishops from the Brazilian Bishops' Conference's "East 1" region on Saturday morning at Castel Gandolfo. In his address to conclude their "ad limina" visit, he discussed the roots of the contemporary spiritual crisis in the "darkening of the grace of forgiveness."
In this darkened context, when the "real and effective" nature of forgiveness goes unrecognized, he told them, the person tends to be "liberated" of fault. But, the Pope observed, such "liberated" people "know it's not true, that sin exists and that they themselves are sinners."
Although some currents of pyschology might find it difficult to admit, the Pope continued, amid people's feelings of fault, there may also be "true fault." And when a person is “so cold so as not to have feelings of fault even when he should,” he must seek to recover such feelings of fault because “in the spiritual order they are necessary for the health of the soul."