THE LOGIC OF THE GOSPEL CHALLENGES
THE LOGIC OF THE WORLD

At the beginning of the audience, Card. Roger Etchegaray, president of the Central Committee for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, gave the following address of homage to the Holy Father.

Holy Father,

It is since the beginning of your pontificate that you have invited us to start the countdown for the year 2000. With the itinerary you outlined in Tertio Millennio Adveniente we can neither make a mistake nor waste our breath.

Now, the Great Jubilee is knocking at our doors and, under the wind of the Holy Spirit, it urges us to open the real door, the one that symbolises the Holy Door, that of the heart which gives access to the grace of conversion and reconciliation. The horizon of the Millennium is so close that the approach path and the goal are becoming more and more confused, so that in these days our attention is directed above all to the preparation of a Calendar to be submitted to you and to studying a reception plan for welcoming pilgrims whose technical complexity cannot disguise the spiritual clarity of the event.

But Rome will not be the Jubilee's only pole of attraction. You have wished that also the Holy Land and all the local Churches, in the variety of their cultures, should "simultaneously" - the expression is yours -, be places for the same Gospel renewal, encouraged and undoubtedly inspired by what will happen in the Church of Peter and Paul.

At the end of our works, I can testify that Christian communities everywhere are journeying towards the Jubilee with youthful exuberance, reviving their threefold missionary, ecumenical and social commitment, knowing that this Jubilee shows and at the same time puts to the test the challenge the logic of the Gospel never ceases to launch to the logic of the world.

Yes indeed, today this challenge is a gigantic challenge. We must accept it with you as David did, with his bare hands, stretched out towards God our Father and towards all our brothers and sisters. Holy Father, now the Jubilee is very close also for you. May our Lady of Lourdes give us the joy to live it together.