ROME — Pope Francis urged Christians on Saturday to seek deeper unity in common faith and to “have the audacity to be one.”
Christ, Light of the Gentiles, draws everyone to himself with “the meek and merciful force of his paschal mystery,” the pope told a group of bishops associated with the Focolari movement.
This is “God’s dream,” he continued. “It is his plan to reconcile and harmonize everything and everyone in Christ.”
In the midst of a closed and fragmented world, “the Spirit calls us to have the audacity to be one,” he said, and offers unity as a gift.
This unity that God seeks does not cancel differences, he insisted, but “enhances and harmonizes them.”
Pope Francis incenses an image of Jesus Christ as he celebrates an Easter mass, in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican, Sunday, April 1, 2018. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)
“The unity that Jesus Christ has given us and continues to give us is not unanimity, it is not getting along at all costs,” he stated. “It obeys a fundamental criterion, which is respect for the person, respect for the face of the other, especially the poor, the little one, the excluded.”
In his meeting with the bishops, held in the Vatican’s Hall of the Popes, Francis reminded his hearers that “bishops are at the service of the people of God, so that they may be built up in the unity of faith, hope and charity.”
“In the heart of the bishop, the Holy Spirit impresses the will of the Lord Jesus: that all Christians may be one, to the praise and glory of the Triune God and that the world may believe in Jesus Christ,” he said.
The pope also took pains to assert that the bishops are not “at the service of an external unity, or of ‘uniformity,’” but rather of communion in “the Church as a living body, as a people on a journey through history and at the same time beyond history.”
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