The Gift of His Person

"Faith is primarily a response to God’s love, and the greatest mistake we can make as Christians is, in the words of Saint Augustine, 'to claim that Christ’s grace consists in his example and not in the gift of his person' (Contra Iulianum opus imperfectum, II, 146). How often, even in the not too distant past, have we forgotten this truth and presented Christian life mostly as a set of rules to be kept, replacing the marvelous experience of encountering Jesus – God who gives himself to us – with a moralistic, burdensome and unappealing religion that, in some ways, is impossible to live in concrete daily life" (Pope Leo XIV).