Watch out for stiffness. Behind is not the Spirit

Pope Francis has warned the Christian faithful against proposals of rigid religiosity that deviate from Christ’s message: “Be attentive to the rigidity they offer you! Because behind all rigidity there is something wrong, there is not the Spirit of God ”.

During the general audience of this Wednesday, September 1, which he presided over from the Paul VI room of the Vatican, the Holy Father warned that the problems encountered by the Galatians in the time of Saint Paul stemmed from the temptation to leave the path begun In welcoming the gospel, “they can be repeated. In fact, we have seen that it has been repeated in history ”.

These temptations, in particular, would be, mainly, that of “falling into formalism, which is one of the temptations that lead you to hypocrisy.” Fall into formalism and deny the new dignity they have received ”.

The Pope drew attention to the fact that “the terms with which the apostle addresses the Galatians are not courteous. In the other Letters, it is easy to find the expression “brothers” or “the dearest”, not here. He generically says “Galatians” and calls them twice “idiots”, which is not a polite term. He does it not because they are not intelligent, but because, almost without realizing it, they run the risk of losing the faith in Christ which they have embraced with so much enthusiasm ”.

This risk that the Galatians allowed themselves to be drawn into is the cause of Saint Paul’s anger, the Pontiff explained, and this is reflected in the tone of the Letter.

The Galatians “are foolish because they do not realize that the danger is to lose the precious treasure, the beauty of the newness of Christ”.

“The Apostle’s wonder and sadness are evident. Not without bitterness, he provokes these Christians to remember the first announcement made by him, with which he offered them the possibility of acquiring a hitherto unexpected freedom ”.

In the Letter he addressed to the Galatian community, Paul tries to “put Christians in a dead end so that they become aware of the stakes and do not allow themselves to be enchanted by the voice of the sirens who want to lead them to a religiosity based solely on the scrupulous observance of the precepts ”.

Because, “these new preachers who had arrived there, in Galatia, had convinced them that they had to return and also assume the precepts which were observed and which led to perfection before the coming of Christ, which is the gratuity of Salvation. “.

The Galatians, on the other hand, “understood very well what the apostle was referring to. Certainly, they had experienced the action of the Holy Spirit in the community: as in the other Churches, charity and various charisms were also manifested among them ”.

“Put in difficulty, they must necessarily answer that what they lived was the fruit of the newness of the Spirit. So, at the beginning of his coming to faith, there was the initiative of God, not of men. The Holy Spirit had been the protagonist of his experience; to put him in the background now to give primacy to his own works would be foolish. Holiness comes from the Holy Spirit. It is the gratuity of the redemption of Jesus. This justifies us ”.

The danger that St. Paul warns the Galatians against is the same that can arise today, the Pope stressed.

“Also, still in history, even today, similar things are happening to what happened to the Galatians. Even today, someone who says to us: ‘No, holiness is in these precepts, in these things … you must do this and that’ comes to warm our ears, and they put us before a rigid religiosity that takes away our freedom in the Spirit who gives us the redemption of Christ ”.

The Holy Father underlined that the Letter to the Galatians “will help us not to listen to these somewhat fundamentalist proposals which lead us to regress in our spiritual life, and to try to advance in the paschal vocation of Jesus”.

The Pope concluded by recalling that “God is always near us. With your kindness. It’s like the Father going up to the roof every day to see if the son would come back. The love of the Father does not tire us. Let us ask for the wisdom to always be aware of this reality and to expel the fundamentalists who offer a life of artificial lights, far from the resurrection of Christ. Light is necessary, but wise light, not artificial light ”.