Pope's Intentions
Universal: Care for the suffering That, rejecting the culture of indifference, we may care for our neighbors who suffer, especially the sick and the poor.
Evangelization: Openness to mission That Mary’s intercession may help Christians in secularized cultures be ready to proclaim Jesus.
Thursday of the Seventh week of Easter
Commentary of the day
Symeon the New Theologian (c.949-1022), Greek monk, saint of the Orthodox churches
Ethics 1, 6-8
"So that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me"
The body of Christ’s Church, harmonious result of the coming together of his saints from the beginning of time, reaches its perfectly balanced and integral constitution in the union of the children of God, the firstborn whose names are written in heaven ( cf Lk 10,20)… Our Savior-God himself shows us the indissoluble and indivisible character of union with himself when he says to the apostles: “I am in the Father and the Father is in me; you in me and I in you” (Jn 10,38; 14,20). And he spells this out even more clearly by adding: “I have given them the glory you gave me, that they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be perfectly one.” And again: “That the love with which you have loved me may be in them and that I also may be in them”…
How marvellous this inexpressible condescension of the love God bears for us, he who is the friend of man ! (Wsd 1,6). That which he is by nature with regard to his Father he grants us to be by adoption and grace in his own regard…The glory given to the Son by the Father, the Son in his turn gives to us through divine grace. Even better: just as he is in the Father and the Father in him so will the Son of God be in us and we in the Son through grace, if we desire it. Having once become like us through the flesh, he has made us sharers of his divinity and incorporates us all in him. In addition, the divinity in which we participate by this communion is not divisible into separate parts but it necessarily follows that we too, once we have become inseparable from it in truth, are inseparable from the one Spirit, making up one body with Christ.