This Is the Wood of the Cross: Come, Let Us Worship
Ecce lignum crucis, in qua salus mundi pependit! Venite adoremus!
Today this confession was made in St Peter's Basilica for the first time in the third millennium. On this very day, Good Friday, the same overwhelming truth has been proclaimed on all the continents, in all the countries of the world: Ecce lignum crucis!
Christ's Church confesses this divine and human reality: Crux, ave Crux! Adoramus te, Christe, et benedicimus tibi, quia per sanctam crucem tuam redemisti mundum.
The Church has confessed this for the past two millennia. Today for the first time she has confessed it throughout the world and here in Rome with this Via Crucis around the Colosseum. Let us carry this truth into the third millennium. Let us profess that through his Cross, the Son of God, in accepting this humiliation, a punishment intended for slaves, opened to humanity the way to glorification. Therefore we kneel in adoration today.
Adoramus te, Christe, et benedicimus tibi, qui per sanctam crucem tuam redemisti mundum.
May this truth, confessed today in St Peter's Basilica and here at the Roman Colosseum, be for us the light and strength of this period which we inaugurated a few months ago.
Ave Crux, ave Crux of the Roman Colosseum!
Ave on the threshold of the third millennium!
Ave down through all the years and centuries of this new era that is opening before us!
Praised be Jesus Christ!
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