“Also for today’s Church the time of the desert can be transformed into a time of grace, because we have the certainty that God can make the living water that satisfies and quenches our thirst gush forth even from the hardest rock”. The Pope said this during the catechesis of today’s general audience, dedicated to the Lenten season. The focus was on the “ambivalent situation” experienced by the People of Israel during their forty-year journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, which also “describes the condition of the Church journeying through the desert of the world and history”. “In this desert – Benedict XVI explained – we believers have certainly the chance to live a strong experience of God, one that strengthens the spirit, confirms the faith, feeds hope and stimulates charity”. But the desert “is also the negative aspect of the reality around us: dryness, poverty of values and words of life, secularism and the materialistic culture, which cause man to be confined within the horizons of this world and deprive him of any reference to the transcendent”. According to the Pope, this is also the “environment in which the sky above us is dark, because it is darkened by the clouds of selfishness, incomprehension and falsehood”. (continued)

22/02/2012 -