Pope to Czech Republic: Christ is our Only Hope!

'Only Christ can be our certain hope. This is the message that we Christians are called to spread every day, through our witness".

VATICAN CITY (VIS) - Sunday morning, Sept. 27, 2009, the Holy Father travelled by plane from Prague to Brno, the second largest city of the Czech Republic, where at 10 a.m. he celebrated Mass on the esplanade near the city airport.Among the thousands of people present were faithful from Slovak, Polish,Austrian and German dioceses.

The readings of the ceremony were focused on the theme of hope. In his homily the Holy Father affirmed that "history has demonstrated the absurdities to which man descends when he excludes God from the horizon of his choices and actions, and how hard it is to build a society inspired by the values of goodness, justice and fraternity, because the human being is free and his freedom remains fragile".

"In the modern age both faith and hope ... have been relegated to the private and other-worldly sphere", said the Pope, "while in day-to-day public life confidence in scientific and economic progress has been affirmed. We all know that this progress is ambiguous: it opens up possibilities for good as well as evil", yet it is "not enough to guarantee the moral welfare of society.

"Man needs to be liberated from material oppressions", he added, "but more profoundly, he must be saved from the evils that afflict the spirit. And who can save him if not God, Who is Love and has revealed His face as Almighty and Merciful Father in Jesus Christ? Our firm hope is therefore Christ".

Pope Benedict went on: "Here, as elsewhere, many people suffered in past centuries for remaining faithful to the Gospel, and they did not lose hope; many people sacrificed themselves in order to restore dignity to man and freedom to peoples, finding in their generous adherence to Christ the strength to build a new humanity.

"In present-day society, many forms of poverty are born from isolation,from being unloved, from the rejection of God and from a deep-seated tragic closure in man who believes himself to be self-sufficient, or else merely an insignificant and transient datum; in this world of ours which is alienated 'when too much trust is placed in merely human projects', only Christ can be our certain hope. This is the message that we Christians are called to spread every day, through our witness".

At the end of Mass and before praying the Angelus Benedict XVI noted how Moravia, the region in which Brno is located, "is blessed with a number of Marian shrines that are visited by crowds of pilgrims throughout the year".

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And he called upon the Virgin to "keep the flame of faith alive in all of you, a faith that is nourished by traditions of popular piety with deep roots in the past, which you rightly take care to maintain, so that the warmth of family conviviality in villages and towns may not be lost. At times one cannot help noticing, with a certain nostalgia, that the pace of modern life tends to diminish some elements of a rich heritage of faith. Yet it is important not to lose sight of the ideal expressed by traditional customs, and above all to maintain the spiritual patrimony inherited from your forebears, to guard it and to make it answer to the needs of the present day.'