Pope Leo visits the tomb of St Paul and prays: “May the Lord grant me the grace to respond faithfully to his call.”

By Joseph Tulloch

On Tuesday afternoon, Pope Leo XIV visited the Basilica of St Paul outside the Walls, the Roman church traditionally thought to hold the saint’s remains.

After a moment of prayer in front of St Paul’s tomb, the Pope presided over a brief prayer service. �

In his homily, Pope Leo reflected on a reading from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, which, he said, contains three major themes – grace, faith, and justification – which can help illuminate the Petrine Ministry to which he has been called.

Grace

The Pope began by discussing the first of these topics, ‘grace’ – or God’s help.

In his letter to the Romans, Pope Leo said, Paul acknowledges that he encountered Christ only because Christ reached out to him first – his encounter and his subsequent ministry were “the fruit of God’s prior love, which called him to a new life while he was still far from the Gospel”.

St Augustine said something similar, Pope Leo noted, when he asked “How can we choose, unless we have first been chosen? We cannot love, unless someone has loved us first”.

We cannot lead good lives without God’s help, the Pope said, and this reality is “at the root of every vocation”.

Pope Leo delivers his homily   (@Vatican Media)

Faith

The Pope then turned to consider the role of faith in St Paul’s account of his calling.

When God appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus, Pope Leo said, “he did not take away his freedom”, but rather gave him “the opportunity to make a decision”.

“Salvation does not come about by magic”, the Pope explained, “but by a mysterious interplay of grace and faith, of God’s prevenient love and of our trusting and free acceptance”.

Justification

The final aspect of Paul’s calling that Pope Leo considered was that of ‘justification’, or the process of increasing in holiness. The Acts of the Apostles describes how, after his vision of Jesus, Paul ceased persecuting Christians, and began working alongside them.

The Pope urged his listeners to “compete” in showing this kind of love, which led St Paul to give himself so wholly to others that he was eventually martyred.

Love as the basis of every mission

Pope Leo brought his homily to a close with a quotation from Pope Benedict XVI: “God loves us. This is the great truth of our life; it is what makes everything else meaningful”. 

This insight, Pope Leo said, is “the basis of every mission”, including “my own mission as the Successor of Peter and the heir to Paul’s apostolic zeal.”

“May the Lord grant me the grace to respond faithfully to His call”, he concluded. 

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