EVANGELII GAUDIUM - page 100

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123. Popular piety enables us to see how the
faith, once received, becomes embodied in a cul-
ture and is constantly passed on. Once looked
down upon, popular piety came to be appreciated
once more in the decades following the Council.
In the Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi, Pope Paul
VI gave a decisive impulse in this area. There
he stated that popular piety “manifests a thirst
for God which only the poor and the simple can
know”100 and that “it makes people capable of
generosity and sacrifice even to the point of her-
oism, when it is a question of bearing witness
to belief ”.101 Closer to our own time, Benedict
XVI, speaking about Latin America, pointed out
that popular piety is “a precious treasure of the
Catholic Church”, in which “we see the soul of
the Latin American peoples”.102
124. The Aparecida Document describes the
riches which the Holy Spirit pours forth in pop-
ular piety by his gratuitous initiative. On that be-
loved continent, where many Christians express
their faith through popular piety, the bishops
also refer to it as “popular spirituality” or “the
people’s mysticism”.103 It is truly “a spirituality
100 No. 48: AAS 68 (1976), 38.
101 Ibid.
102 Opening Address of the Fifth General Conference of
the Latin American and Caribbean Bishops (13 May 2007), 1:
AAS 90 (2007), 446.
103 Fifth General Conference of the Latin American
and C aribbean Bishops, Aparecida Document, 29 June 2007, 262.