Theme of Pope’s general audience: ‘We are children of God’
September 08, 2021
Continuing his weekly Wednesday general audience series on St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, Pope Francis spoke on September 8 about St. Paul’s “teaching on the radical newness of our life in Jesus Christ.”
Previous addresses in the series were entitled “Introduction to the Letter to the Galatians“ (June 23), “Paul, the true apostle“ (June 30), “There is just one Gospel“ (August 4), “The Mosaic Law“ (August 11), “The propaedeutic value of the Law“ (August 18), “The dangers of the Law“ (August 25), and “Foolish Galatians“ (September 1).
“By his incarnation, death and resurrection, the Son of God has reconciled us with the Father, given us birth to new life and bestowed on us a share in his divine sonship,” the Pope said, in the words of the official Vatican summary of his remarks. “Through faith and baptism, we have been interiorly transformed; now, having ‘put on Christ’, we have become a new creation.”
The summary continued:
This new identity transcends all other ethnic, social and religious differences: in Christ, “there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female” (Gal 3:28).
We Christians can often take for granted this newness of life bestowed at our baptism. Conscious of our dignity as sons and daughters of the Father, may we resolve to reconcile every division, to embrace fully our oneness in Christ and our vocation to be convincing witnesses of the unity to which, in God’s saving plan, the entire human family is called (cf. Gaudium et Spes, 1).
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