Christians should not be using the Gospel to accuse people and speaking bad about them and should instead bring people to the message of the gospel by exemplifying it in how they live their life.
The Pope said, “In a globalized but fragmented, hurried world devoted to consumerism, in contexts where family and social roots sometimes appear to dissolve, there is no need for finger-pointing Christians, but for passionate witnesses that radiate the Gospel,” he told people in attendance at the fifth World Congress of the Benedictine Oblates at the Vatican on September 15th.
He continued saying “This is always the temptation, to go from ‘Christian witnesses’ to ‘Christian accusers,'” the pope continued. “There is only one accuser: the devil; let us not assume the role of the devil, let us assume the role of Jesus.”
As the congress is usually held every 4 years, and is a international gathering of the Benedictine oblates, lay or consecrated people who live their life according to the monastic “Rule of St Benedict” with prayer and service.
He began to encourage the participants to be “seekers of God” by contemplating creation, events going on everyday, the people they meet with everyday as well as by, “living your work as prayer, to the point of making the very means of your work into instruments of blessing.”
The pope brought up the historical role of the monasticism in the West where he said, “evangelical model of life marked by prayer and work,” which led to the “peaceful conversion and integration of numerous populations” in the pre medieval societies. He continued by saying, “All this zeal is born from a passion for the Gospel,”
He also talked about the Benedictine call to hospitality, which St. Benedict has a whole chapter in the book on monastic life.
“As oblates, your big monastery is the world, the city, the workplace,” the Pope told the participants, “and there you are called to be models of welcome by respecting who knocks on your door and giving preference to the poor.”
“This is what welcoming is. The temptation is to close yourself, and today in our society, in our culture — even Christian culture — one way of closing yourself is gossip, which ‘dirties’ others,” The Pope continued, “Sometimes it seems that our society is slowly suffocating in locked vaults of selfishness, in individualism and indifference, and gossip closes us in this.”
He also told the participants that “If you reform your life to not speak badly about others, you will keep the door open to your cause for canonization!”
