Excerpts from Pope Benedict’s Apostolic Letter Porta Fidei – Year of Faith
We cannot accept that salt should become tasteless or the light be kept hidden (cf. Mt 5:13-16). The people of today can still experience the need to go to the well, like the Samaritan woman, in order to hear Jesus, who invites us to believe in him and to draw upon the source of living water welling up within him (cf. Jn 4:14). We must rediscover a taste for feeding ourselves on the word of God, faithfully handed down by the Church, and on the bread of life, offered as sustenance for his disciples (cf. Jn6:51).
The renewal of the Church is also achieved through the witness offered by the lives of believers; by their very existence in the world, Christians are called to radiate the word of truth that the Lord Jesus Christ has left us.
The Year of Faith is a summons to an authentic and renewed conversion to the Lord, the one Saviour of the world.
Faith grows when it is lived as an experience of love received and when it is communicated as an experience of grace and joy. It makes us fruitful, because it expands our hearts in hope and enables us to bear life-giving witness: indeed, it opens the hearts and minds of those who listen to respond to the Lord’s invitation to adhere to his word and become his disciples.