‘We live to love and be loved,’ teaches Pope while reflecting on Trinity

Vatican City, Jun 7, 2009 / 07:57 am

Twenty thousand people gathered in St Peter’s Square for the Angelus prayer on Sunday despite poor weather.  Prior to the Marian prayer, Pope Benedict told those present that “the ‘name’ of the Holy Trinity is impressed on everything that exists, because everything comes from love, reaches out for love and is moved by the spirit of love.”

 

Benedict XVI began by explaining that following the Easter Season, which concluded with the Pentecost, the liturgy is marked by three solemnities of Our Lord: the Solemnity of the Holy Trinity; next Thursday, that of Corpus Domini and finally; the following Friday, the Church will celebrate the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

 

The Pope explained that each of these days are all part of the mystery of salvation, “from the Incarnation to the Resurrection and the Ascension and the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

 

“Today,” the Pope continued, “we contemplate the Holy Trinity as it was made known to us by Christ. He revealed to us that God is love 'not in the unity of a single person but in the Trinity of one substance.'”

 

“He is Creator and merciful Father; he is the only Son, eternal wisdom made flesh, who died and rose again for us; he is the Holy Spirit who moves everything, cosmos and history, towards the full and final recapitulation,” he added. “Three Persons who are one God alone because the Father is love, the Son is love and the Holy Spirit is love.”

 

He elaborated that God’s love is “pure, infinite and eternal.”  God “does not live in splendid solitude, rather he is an inexhaustible source of life that ceaselessly gifts itself and communicates. We can, to some extent, perceive this by observing both the macro-universe, our earth, the planets, stars, galaxies, and by observing the micro-universe, cells, atoms and elementary particles.”

 

“The ‘name’ of the Sacred Trinity is impressed on everything that exists, because everything comes from love, reaches out for love and is moved by the spirit of love, naturally with differing degrees of awareness and freedom,” the Holy Father exclaimed.

 

“The greatest proof that we are all made in the image of the Trinity is that only love makes us happy, because we live to love and to be loved,” the Pontiff declared. “Borrowing an analogy from biology, we could say that the human 'genome' is profoundly imprinted with the Trinity of God who is Love.”

 

The Holy Father concluded by calling on Mary because “she welcomed the will of the Father and conceived the Son by the power of the Holy Sprit. The Omnipotent built a temple worthy of Him within her, and made her the model and image of the Church, mystery and home of communion for all mankind. Help us Mary, mirror of the Holy Trinity, to grow in faith in the Trinitarian mystery.”