Vigils Reading – St Paul VI

ONE MUST KNOW HUMANITY

IN ORDER TO KNOW GOD

From a homily by St Pope Paul VI4

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God is! God truly exists. He lives, a personal, provident God, possessed of

an infinite goodness. And indeed, he is good, not only in himself, but most

especially also toward us. He is our creator, our truth, our happiness. Therefore,

when one strives, as a human being, to fix one’s mind and heart on God with

the self-emptying that leads to contemplation, one engages in an activity of the

soul that can be considered the noblest and most perfect of all; it is an activity,

we would say, that countless fields of human endeavor in our day could and

should pursue to the highest level…

Human beings continually lament their lot. In the past and even now they

judge others inferior to themselves, and therefore, can be continuously

overbearing and secretive, greedy, and aggressive. Unhappy with themselves,

they either laugh or weep… They are a worthy object of religious reflection on

account of the innocence of their infancy, the mystery of their need, and the

tender love that their sorrows incite; initially they think only of themselves, and

only later care for society at large. They praise times past and at the same time

long for what is to come, dreaming that it will be happier than what went before;

on the one hand they can be guilty of terrible crimes and on the other show signs

of a holy life. And so it goes on…

The religion that is the worship of God who desired to become man, and

a religion which is the worship of ‘man’ who wishes to become like God, are

continually in conflict with each other…

Since this is how things are, it is true to say that the Catholic religion and

human life are united in a friendly alliance, and that each works together with

the other for the common human good. The Catholic religion is on the side of

the human race, and it is, in a certain way, the life of the human race. Indeed, it

should be called ‘the life’ because of the sublime doctrine, perfect from every

point of view, which it gives us about humanity; it hands on this doctrine

reliably because it has its knowledge from God. For in order for us deeply to

know humanity, true humanity, integral humanity, it is necessary that we first

know God himself…

Let us remember that the face of Christ, the Son of Man, is to be seen in

every human face, especially one marked with tears and sorrows; and when we

recognize the face of the heavenly Father in the face of Christ,—as he says,

“Whoever sees me, sees the Father,”—then our way of appraising human

concerns is transformed into Christianity, which is completely centered on God.

Therefore, we can only describe things in this way: namely, that in order that

God be known it is necessary to know the human person. Let us then strive to

attain a love for the human person, not as a means to an end, but rather as a

primary end point, by way of which we come to our final end which transcends

all human realities.

4 From the Homilies of Saint Paul VI, Pope (At the last public session of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, December 7,

1965: AAS 58 [1966], 53, 55-56, 58-59)9