Pope at Audience: ‘Every baptized person is to bear consistent witness to Christ’

During his weekly General Audience, Pope Leo XIV continues reflecting on the Second Vatican Council's 'Lumen gentium' and insists that "every baptized person is an active agent of evangelization, called to bear consistent witness to Christ."

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During his weekly General Audience, Pope Leo XIV continues reflecting on the Second Vatican Council's 'Lumen gentium' and insists that "every baptized person is an active agent of evangelization, called to bear consistent witness to Christ."

By Deborah Castellano Lubov
"Every baptized person is an active agent of evangelization, called to bear consistent witness to Christ in accordance with the prophetic gift which the Lord bestows upon His whole Church."
Pope Leo XIV expressed this during his weekly General Audience on Wednesday morning.
Continuing his catechesis series on the Second Vatican Council and a reading of its documents, the Pope this week revisited the second chapter of the Conciliar Constitution Lumen gentium, devoted to the Church as the people of God, recalling that the messianic people receive from Christ the participation "in the priestly, prophetic and kingly work office through which His salvific mission is carried out."
Common mission that unites the ordained ministries and lay faithful.
The Pope remembered that the Council Fathers teach that the Lord Jesus, through the new and eternal Covenant, has established a kingdom of priests, constituting his disciples as a ‘royal priesthood,’ highlighting that this common priesthood of the faithful is given with Baptism, which enables us to worship God in spirit and truth, and to “confess before men the faith which they have received from God through the Church.”
Furthermore, through the sacrament of Confirmation, he notes all the baptized “are more perfectly bound to the Church … and the Holy Spirit endows them with special strength so that they are more strictly obliged to spread and defend the faith, both by word and by deed, as true witnesses of Christ.”
This consecration, the Pope said is at the root of the common mission that unites the ordained ministries and the lay faithful.
In this regard, Pope Leo remembered when Pope Francis had observed that, “Looking at the People of God is remembering that we all enter the Church as lay people. The first sacrament, which seals our identity forever, and of which we should always be proud, is Baptism. Pope Leo reiterated that through Baptism and by the anointing of the Holy Spirit, the faithful "‘are consecrated as a spiritual house and a holy priesthood’ so that everyone forms the faithful Holy People of God.”
Aimed at our sanctification
The Pope recalled that the exercise of the royal priesthood takes place in many ways, all aimed at our sanctification, first and foremost through participation in the offering of the Eucharist.
"Through prayer, asceticism and active charity, we thus bear witness to a life renewed by God’s grace," the Pope said that as the Council summarizes, “it is through the sacraments and the exercise of the virtues that the sacred nature and organic structure of the priestly community is brought into operation."
The Pope also recalled that the Council Fathers teach that the holy People of God also participate in the prophetic mission of Christ.
"Sense of the faith" and the "consensus of the faithful "
The Holy Father reminded that in this context the important theme of the sense of the faith and the consensus of the faithful is introduced, recalling that the Doctrinal Commission of the Council specified that this sensus fidei “is like a faculty of the whole Church, by which she, in her faith, recognises the revelation handed down, distinguishing between true and false in matters of faith, and at the same time penetrates it more deeply and applies it more fully in life.”
The sense of faith, Pope Leo emphasized, therefore belongs to individual believers not in their own right, but as members of the People of God as a whole.
Lumen gentium, the Pope explained, focuses on this latter aspect, and places it in relation to the infallibility of the Church, to which that of the Roman Pontiff is inherent and by which it is served.
The Holy Father quoted the passage in Lumen gentium that states: “The entire body of the faithful, anointed as they are by the Holy One, cannot err in matters of belief. They manifest this special property by means of the whole peoples’ supernatural discernment in matters of faith when from the Bishops down to the last of the lay faithful they show universal agreement in matters of faith and morals.”
With this in mind, Pope Leo XIV observed, "The Church, therefore, as the communion of the faithful – which naturally includes the pastors, cannot err in matters of faith: the organ through which this truth is preserved, founded on the anointing of the Holy Spirit, is the supernatural sense of faith of the entire People of God, which is manifested in the consensus of the faithful."
Our responsibility as the People of God
From this unity, which the Magisterium of the Church safeguards, the Pope continued, "it follows that every baptized person is an active agent of evangelization, called to bear consistent witness to Christ in accordance with the prophetic gift which the Lord bestows upon His whole Church."
Reminding that the Holy Spirit, the Holy who comes to us from the Risen Christ, “distributes special graces among the faithful of every rank," Pope Leo said that it is through these gifts that the Holy Spirit "makes them fit and ready to undertake the various tasks and offices which contribute toward the renewal and building up of the Church.”
The Pope noted that a particular demonstration of this charismatic vitality is offered by consecrated life, which continually germinates and flourishes through the work of grace. "Ecclesial associations, too," he said, "are a shining example of the variety and fruitfulness of spiritual fruits for the edification of the People of God."
With this sentiment, Pope Leo XIV concluded with an invitation, "let us rekindle in ourselves the awareness of and gratitude for having received the gift of being part of God’s People, and also the responsibility that this entails."