Cardinal calls saints 'living' catechesis for the world

Vatican City, May 9, 2012 / 11:05 am

The prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, said the lives of the saints are one of the most effective ways to transmit faith to the world.

Cardinal Piacenza made his comments during the homily for the opening Mass of the International Congress on Catechesis entitled, “Christian Initiation and the New Evangelization.”

During the May 8 event, he said the task of catechesis is “to overcome religious illiteracy” and “to teach what God has spoken to us,” yet without becoming “paralyzed by endless methodological questions.”

“The methodological questions, dear friends, are fully overcome by the saints who, with their simplicity and their lives, are the most effective living catechesis that God himself offers to his people,” the cardinal said.

He also referred to the Year of Faith Pope Benedict XVI has announced for October of this year, in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council and the 20th anniversary of the promulgation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The task of catechesis requires the free cooperation of believers, encouraged by the grace of God, to promote the task of the new evangelization, Cardinal Piacenza continued.  

“We must acknowledge that the moral life, both intra and extra ecclesia, has been terribly weakened by insufficient catechesis, by a formation incapable, perhaps, of providing reasons for the demands of the Gospel and of showing how in the concrete existential experience they are extraordinarily humanizing,” he said.