Vatican City, Apr 15, 2009 / 07:59 am
At his first General Audience of this Easter Season, Pope Benedict XVI said before more than 30,000 people that Christians must forcefully proclaim Jesus' Resurrection as “a real historical event, borne out by many authoritative witnesses.”
"The astonishing novelty of the Resurrection is so important that the Church never ceases to proclaim it, perpetuating its memory, especially on Sundays, the Lord's Day and the weekly Easter of the people of God," explained the Pope, who traveled to the Vatican by helicopter from his residence in Castel Gandolfo.
Instead of a far away, mythical story, we must proclaim Jesus' Resurrection as “a real historical event, borne out by many authoritative witnesses,” Pope Benedict insisted. “We affirm it forcefully because, even in our own times, there is no lack of people who seek to deny its historical truth, reducing the Gospel narrative to a myth, thus repeating old worn-out theories as if they were new and scientific."
"Of course, for Jesus the Resurrection was not a simple return to His earlier life on earth," the Pope continued. "Rather it was a passage to a profoundly new dimension of life, one that is deeply new, that involves in a new dimension the whole of the human family."