VATICAN CITY (Catholic Online) - On Wednesday morning, October 17, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI began a new series of teachings to the pilgrims who gather for his weekly General Audience. His message came in the middle of the Synod of Catholic Bishops who are in Rome to launch a global effort for the New Evangelization of the Church throughout the world from October 7 through 28, 2012.

It comes in the wake of his inauguration of the Year of Faith which will conclude on November 24, 2013, the Solemnity of Christ the King. This is all no coincidence; it is one of many examples of the profound, prayerful and prophetic leadership we are experiencing from this successor of Peter. Pope Benedict XVI is the chief "New Evangelizer".

In June of 2010 he officially announced the establishment of a new Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization tasked with evangelizing countries where the Gospel was announced centuries ago, but where its presence in peoples' daily life seems to be all but lost.

Pope Benedict the New Evangelizer is engaging in the work which he has called the whole Church to do. He told the pilgrims - and all who hear or view his message around the globe - that the Year of Faith is meant "to renew our enthusiasm at believing in Jesus Christ, to revive the joy of walking along the path He showed us, and to bear concrete witness to the transforming power of the faith". 

He announced that this series of teachings will explain that living faith "is not something extraneous and distant from real life, but the very heart thereof. Faith in a God Who is love and Who came close to mankind by taking human flesh and giving Himself on the cross to save us and open the doors of heaven for us, is a luminous sign that only in love does man's true fullness lie", he said. "Where there is domination, possession and exploitation, man is impoverished, degraded and disfigured. Christian faith, industrious in charity and strong in hope, does not limit life but makes it human".

"God has revealed Himself with words and actions throughout the long history of His friendship with man. ... He came forth of heaven to enter the world of men as a man, that we might meet and hear Him; and from Jerusalem the announcement of the Gospel of salvation has spread to the ends of the earth. The Church, born of Christ's side, has become the herald of a new hope. ... Yet, from the very beginning, the problem of the 'rule of faith' arose; in other words, the faithfulness of believers to the truth of the Gospel ... to the salvific truth about God and man to be safeguarded and handed down".

The essential framework for the faith, the Pope explained, is to be found in the Creed, in the Profession of the Faith, from which is developed "the moral life of Christians, which there has its foundation and its justification. It is the Church's duty to transmit the faith, to communicate the Gospel, so that Christian truths may become a light guiding the new cultural transformations, and Christians may be able to give reasons for the hope that is in them.

"We are living today in a society that has changed profoundly, even with respect to the recent past, a society in continuous flux", the Holy Father added. "The process of secularization and a widespread nihilist mentality, in which everything is relative, have left a strong imprint on the collective mentality. ... And while individualism and relativism seem to dominate the hearts of so many of our contemporaneous, it cannot be said that believers remain completely immune from these dangers. ... Surveys carried out on all the continents in preparation for the current Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelization have revealed some of these dangers: the faith lived passively or privately, the rejection of education in the faith, the rupture between faith and life".

Benedict XVI went on: "Christians today often do not even know the central core of their Catholic faith, the Creed, thus leaving the way open to certain forms of syncretism and religious relativism, with no clarity about which truths must be believed and the salvific uniqueness of Christianity. We must go back to God, to the God of Jesus Christ, we must rediscover the message of the Gospel and cause it to enter more deeply into our minds and our daily lives".

"In these catecheses during the Year of Faith I would like to help people make this journey, in order to regain and understand the central truths of faith about God, man, the Church, and all social and cosmic reality, by reflecting upon the affirmations contained in the Creed. And I hope to make it clear that these contents or truths of the faith are directly related to our life experience. They require a conversion of existence capable of giving rise to a new way of believing in God".