Looking at the state of the world today, the Pope departed from his prepared remarks and said, "Perhaps today, we faithful truly believe in the Judge; we all expect justice. We see so many injustices in the world, ... and we expect justice. ... We hope that whoever comes can bring justice. In this context we pray to Jesus Christ to come as a Judge. ... The Lord knows how to come into the world and create justice."
"Hoping for justice in the Christian sense means ... that we too begin to live under the eyes of the Judge, ... creating justice in our own lives,” the Pontiff said.
If we live our lives in a just way, “we can open the world to the coming of the Son and prepare our hearts to welcome the Lord Who comes," remarked Pope Benedict.
Modern Man and Jesus’ Birth
Returning to his prepared text, Benedict XVI focused on the fact that Jesus’ birth is a matter of history: "He Who was generated by the Father in eternity became a man in history thanks to the Virgin Mother. The true Son of God is also a true Son of man.”
“Today, in our secularized world,” the Pope lamented, “these concepts do not seem to count for very much. People prefer to ignore them or to consider them superfluous to life, advancing the pretext that they are so far distant as to be practically untranslatable into convincing and significant words.”
There is also a “view of tolerance and pluralism” in today’s world that says that believing the Truth exists is an “attack on tolerance and the freedom of man,” Benedict said. If, however, truth is cancelled, is man not a being deprived of meaning? Do we not force ourselves and the world into a meaningless relativism?"