Lumen Fidei - page 7

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5. Christ, on the eve of his passion, assured Pe-
ter: “I have prayed for you that your faith may not
fail” (Lk 22:32). He then told him to strengthen
his brothers and sisters in that same faith. Con-
scious of the duty entrusted to the Successor of
Peter, Benedict XVI proclaimed the present Year
of Faith, a time of grace which is helping us to
sense the great joy of believing and to renew our
wonder at the vast horizons which faith opens
up, so as then to profess that faith in its unity and
integrity, faithful to the memory of the Lord and
sustained by his presence and by the working of
the Holy Spirit. The conviction born of a faith
which brings grandeur and fulfilment to life, a
faith centred on Christ and on the power of his
grace, inspired the mission of the first Christians.
In the acts of the martyrs, we read the following
dialogue between the Roman prefect Rusticus
and a Christian named Hierax: “‘Where are your
parents?’, the judge asked the martyr. He replied:
‘Our true father is Christ, and our mother is faith
in him’”.5 For those early Christians, faith, as an
encounter with the living God revealed in Christ,
was indeed a “mother”, for it had brought them
to the light and given birth within them to divine
life, a new experience and a luminous vision of
existence for which they were prepared to bear
public witness to the end.
6. The Year of Faith was inaugurated on the
fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second
5 Acta Sanctorum, Junii, I, 21.