Get acquainted with saints, Pope tells audience
August 25, 2010
“Everyone should have a saint who is familiar to him,” Pope Benedict XVI told his weekly public audience on August 25. The faithful, he said, should become familiar with saints, and recognize them both as intercessors and as models for imitation, and thus as companions on the road to salvation.
The Pope told the crowd at his summer residence that he felt a special kinship with “St. Joseph and St. Benedict, after whom I am named, and among others there is St. Augustine.” His devotion to St. Augustine, he said, grew from his study of the great theologian, and his admiration for his “restless and constant search for truth.”
St. Augustine, the Pontiff continued, was relentless in that quest, even when it was difficult; “he never stopped, he was never satisfied with what gave him only a glimmer of light.” Ultimately the saint realized that “it was not he who found the Truth, but Truth itself-- which is God-- pursued him and found him."
Pope Benedict contrasted this quest by St. Augustine with the tendency of the modern mind to avoid tough questions, to distract oneself with passing things. He exhorted his audience: “Have no fear of the Truth. Never stop your journey toward it.”
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