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Last Updated: Friday - 09/24/2010

Week of December 1, 2008

Witness to the Gospel is beautiful, says Benedict

CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE

VATICAN CITY — Beauty that is only skin deep cannot last, cannot lead people to seek what is really true and good and cannot respond to the human longing for something that inspires genuine awe, Pope Benedict said Nov. 25.

The pope said the lives of individual Christians as well as the work of Christian artists, writers and poets should help people see that authentic truth, beauty and goodness are always intertwined.

Pope Benedict said when beauty is understood only as an exterior reality, “as an appearance to be pursued at all costs,” then truth and goodness are left behind.

He quoted the Gospel of Matthew, which urges believers to let their lights shine before all so that “they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly father.”

In the passage, the pope said, the original Greek term translated as “good deeds” literally means “beautiful and good” at the same time.

“Our witness, therefore, must nourish itself with this beauty; our proclamation of the Gospel must be received as something beautiful and new,” the pope said.

Every Christian action and every Christian work, he said, must allow “the beauty of the love of God” to shine through.

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