Vatican City, Jun 11, 2017 / 08:11 am
Through God's mercy the Church can become an image of the communion and goodness of the Trinity, Pope Francis said Sunday in St. Peter's Square.
"The Christian community, though with all its human limitations, can become a reflection of the communion of the Trinity, of its goodness and beauty," he said Jun 11 during his Angelus address.
"But this – as Paul himself testifies – passes necessarily through the experience of the mercy of God, of his pardon."
The Pope's address on Trinity Sunday reflected on the "mystery of the identity of God," which so affected St. Paul.
"God is not distant and closed in on himself," Francis reflected, "but rather is the Life which wishes to communicate itself; he is openness; he is the Love which redeems man's infidelity."
God's revelation "has come to completion in the New Testament thanks to words of Christ and to his mission of salvation," he said.
Christ "has shown us the face of God, One in substance and Triune in Persons; God is all and only Love, in a subsisting relationship that creates, redeems, and sanctifies all: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit."
The Son of God showed that God first sought us, and revealed that eternal life is precisely "the immeasurable and gratuitous love of the Father that Jesus gave on the Cross, offering his life for our salvation."
"And this love, by the action of the Holy Spirit, has irradiated a new light upon the earth and in every human heart that welcomes it."
"May the Virgin Mary "help us to enter ever more, with our whole selves, into the trinitarian Communion, to live and bear witness to the love that gives sense to our existence," Pope Francis concluded.