Vatican City, Dec 7, 2011 / 12:06 pm
Pope Benedict XVI told pilgrims at today’s general audience that through prayer Jesus calls the “childlike” into a loving relationship with him and the Father.
In his “cry of exultation,” Jesus “gives thanks to the Father because he has willed to reveal the mystery of salvation not to the wise and learned, but to the ‘little ones,’” the Pope told several thousand pilgrims gathered in the Vatican’s Paul VI Audience Hall on Dec. 7.
Pope Benedict continued his weekly catechesis on prayer with a mediation on the “jewel” of Christ’s prayer, his “Hymn of Joy,” which is found in the Gospels of St. Matthew 11:25-30 and St. Luke 10:21-22.
This prayer, he said, is the “apex of a path of prayer in which Jesus’ profound and intimate communion with the Father in the Holy Spirit and His divine sonship clearly emerges.”