Pope's Intentions
Universal: Creation:
That people may learn to respect creation and care for it as a gift of God.
Evangelization: Persecuted Christians:
That persecuted Christians may feel the consoling presence of the Risen Lord and the solidarity of all the Church.
Second Sunday of Easter (Divine Mercy Sunday) - Year B
Commentary of the day
Saint Cyril of Jerusalem (313-350), Bishop of Jerusalem, Doctor of the Church
Catechetical sermons 21, 1-3
« Receive the Holy Spirit »
Having been baptized into Christ, and put on Christ (Gal 3,27), you have been made conformable to the Son of God; for God, having predestined us for adoption (Eph 1,5), formed us (Gn 2,7) according to Christ's glorious body... You have become “christs” by receiving the sign of the Holy Spirit. Everything that has happened to you has been in imitation of Christ, whose images you are.
Having washed in the river Jordan… Christ came up from the waters and the Holy Spirit, in the fullness of his being, alighted on him. In the same way you, after you had come up from the baptismal pool, received the unction and were anointed with the holy chrism which is the Holy Spirit with which Christ himself was anointed... For Christ was not anointed with oil or a material ointment, but the Father, who had appointed him beforehand to be Savior of the whole world, anointed him with the Holy Spirit, as David the Prophet also cried, saying: “God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness above your fellows” (Ps 44[45],8).
And as Christ was in reality crucified, and buried, and raised, so you are, in baptism, accounted worthy of sharing symbolically in his cross, his tomb and his resurrection. So it is, too, regarding the unction. Christ was anointed with a spiritual oil of gladness, that is, with the Holy Spirit, who is called oil of gladness because he is the author of spiritual gladness. In the same way you were anointed with a holy oil that made you partakers and fellows of Christ himself… And you were first anointed on the forehead, that you might be delivered from the shame of the first Adam and that with unveiled face might reflect as in a mirror the glory of the Lord (2Cor 3,16).