VATICAN CITY, SEP 5, 2007 (VIS) – This morning, the Pope travelled by helicopter from his summer residence at Castelgandolfo to the Vatican, where he landed shortly before 10 a.m. He then went to St. Peter’s Square where he presided at his weekly general audience, attended today by 16,000 people.
Continuing his series of catecheses on the Fathers of the Church, the Holy Father returned to consider the figure of St. Gregory of Nyssa (335-395) – who had also been the subject of last week’s catechesis – highlighting how the bishop saint always “showed a highly elevated sense of man’s dignity.”
For St. Gregory, “man’s aim is to make himself like God … through love, knowledge and the practice of virtues, … in a perpetual and dynamic adherence to good, like a runner stretching forwards.”
However, “the perfection that makes us participants in God’s own sanctity is not something granted forever,” the Holy Father warned. Rather it is “a permanent journey, a constant commitment to progress … because complete likeness to God can never be achieved, The history of each soul is that of a love … open to new horizons, because God continually expands the possibilities of the soul, so as to make it capable of ever greater good.”
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