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POPE-AUDIENCE Jul-2-2008 (620 words) With photos. xxxi
Pope says St. Paul represents sublime figure for today's Christians
By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- To learn about Christ and how to live the right way, today's Christians should look to St. Paul, Pope Benedict XVI said at his last weekly general audience before his summer break.
St. Paul the Apostle represents a "sublime and almost inimitable figure" who serves as an example because of his "total dedication to the Lord and his church, as well as his great openness to humanity and its cultures," the pope said July 2.
In his first audience after the June 28 opening of the Pauline year, the pope said the catechesis would be the first of a series dedicated to learning more about this "stimulating figure." The jubilee year will run until June 29, 2009, in commemoration of the 2,000th anniversary of the apostle's birth.
Pope Benedict told the 8,000 pilgrims in the Paul VI hall that it was necessary to learn more about the cultural and historical context in which St. Paul lived in order to understand better his life and work.
"This is the aim of the Pauline year: to learn about St. Paul, to learn the faith, to learn about Christ, to learn the path of the righteous life," he said.
As a Jew, St. Paul was a distinct minority in the Roman Empire where Greek and pagan cultures reigned, the pope said.
But the influential philosophical thought at the time aided the apostle in his mission of evangelization, he said. For example, the first-century Stoic philosopher Seneca taught that God was inside each person, said the pope.
So when St. Paul preached to the Greeks at the Areopagus, his speech that God "does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands" but it is in God that "we live and move and have our being" struck a certain resonance with some of his listeners, the pope said.
The pope said the saint's insistence that people keep foremost in their minds the ideals of truth, honor, justice, purity and excellence drew upon the Stoics' call to uphold the ideals of frugality, moderation, self-discipline and equality among all people.
The apostle's mission was also aided by the Roman Empire's "political-administrative structure," which guaranteed peace and stability from Great Britain to southern Egypt. In his mission to tell the people about Christ, the saint was able to travel through the enormously vast territory freely and safely thanks to the Romans' extensive network of roads, he said.
The people who lived within the Roman Empire also shared "a common fabric of unification" that was based on a common cultural patrimony inherited from Alexander the Great, who sought to erase the divisions between the Greeks and Barbarian cultures.
This universal focus also was present in St. Paul's teachings in the form of Jesus Christ, he said. The apostle tried to overcome the distinctions between Jews, gentiles, slaves and free men and women, by teaching "all of you are one in Jesus Christ," the pope said.
It is often said that St. Paul was a man of Jewish, Greek and Roman cultures, and that these cultures certainly had some influence on the way he carried out his mission, the pope said.
After his general audience, the pope was to fly by helicopter in the evening to his summer residence south of Rome in Castel Gandolfo. He was to stay there until his July 12-21 trip to Australia for World Youth Day.
The weekly general audiences are scheduled to resume Aug. 13.
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Editor's Note: The Vatican text of the pope's remarks in English is available online at: www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2008/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20080702_en.html.
The Vatican text of the pope's remarks in Spanish is available online at: www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2008/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20080702_sp.html.
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