Holy Mass in Le Bourget (1 June 1980)

On 1 June 1980, the Holy Father celebrated Mass in Le Bourget, a suburb of Paris. In his homily, the Pope meditated on the words of Jesus in the Gospel, "Go into all the world" (Mk 16:15).

I will begin by thanking from the bottom of my heart all those who made a point of gathering here this morning, even coming from the distant provinces of France. To all, my most fervent wishes, and in particular to mothers, on this Mother's Day. I now invite you to gather with me.

1. The words we have just heard have a double meaning: they end the Gospel as the time of the revelation of Christ, and at the same time they open it up to the future as the time of the Church, that of an unceasing duty and a mission.

Christ says: Go!

It indicates the direction of the road: all nations.

He specifies the task: Teach them, baptize them.

The Church remembers these words on this solemn day, when she especially wants to adore God in the interior mystery of the Life of the Divinity: God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

May these words constitute the essential foundation of our meditation, when we all find ourselves, by an admirable disposition of Providence, very close to Paris, which is the capital of France, one of the capitals of Europe, a among many others, certainly, but unique in its kind, and one of the capitals of the world.

In the last sentence recorded in the Gospel, Christ said: "Go into all the world" [ 1 ].

I am with you today, dear Brothers and Sisters, in one of those places from which, in a particular way, we see "the world", we see the history of our "world" and we see the "world contemporary, the place from where this world knows and judges itself, knows and judges its victories and its defeats, its sufferings and its hopes.

Allow me to be taken, with you, by the incredible eloquence of the words that Christ addressed to his disciples. Allow us through them to fix our eyes, at least for a moment, on the unfathomable mystery of God, and to touch what in man is enduring and therefore most human.

Allow us to prepare ourselves in this way for the celebration of the Eucharist, on the Solemnity of the Holy Trinity.

2. Christ said to the Apostles: "Go... teach all the nations...". Just as today I find myself practically in the capital of France, so, a year ago, on this same day of the first Sunday after Pentecost, I found myself in a large meadow in the old capital from Poland, in Krakow, in the city where I lived and from where Christ called me to the Roman See of the Apostle Peter. I had there before my eyes the known faces of my compatriots, and I had before my eyes the whole history of my nation, since its baptism. This rich and difficult history had begun, in an admirable way, almost exactly at the moment when the last words of Christ addressed to the Apostles were realized: "Teach all the nations, baptize them...". With baptism the nation was born and its history began.

This nation ― the nation of which I am the son ― is not foreign to you. Especially in the most difficult periods of its history, it found in you the support it needed, the main trainers of its culture, the spokespersons of its independence. I can't not remember it right now. I speak with gratitude...

Much later than here, the missionary paths of the successors of the Apostles reached the Vistula, the Carpathians, the Baltic Sea... Here, the mission given by Christ to the Apostles after the Resurrection very quickly found a beginning of realization, if not in a certain way from the apostolic period, at least from the second century, with Irenaeus, this great martyr and apostolic father, who was bishop of Lyons. Moreover, in the Roman Martyrology, mention is very often made of Lutetia Parisiorum ...

First Gaul, then France: the Eldest Daughter of the Church!

Today, in the capital of your nation's history, I would like to repeat those words which constitute your title of pride: Eldest Daughter of the Church.

And I would like, by taking up this title, to adore with you the admirable mystery of Providence. I would like to pay homage to the living God who, acting through the peoples, writes the history of salvation in the heart of man.

This story is as old as man. It even goes back to its “prehistory”, it goes back to the beginning. When Christ said to the Apostles: "Go, teach all the nations...", he has already confirmed the duration of the history of salvation, and at the same time he announced this particular stage, the last stage.

3. This particular history is hidden in the most intimate of man, it is mysterious and yet real also in its historical reality, it is clothed, in a visible way, with facts, events, human existences, individualities. A very large chapter of this history has been inscribed in the history of your homeland, by the sons and daughters of your nation. It would be difficult to name them all, but I will mention at least those who have exercised the greatest influence in my life: Joan of Arc, François de Sales, Vincent de Paul, Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort, Jean-Marie Vianney , Bernadette of Lourdes, Thérèse of Lisieux , Sister Elisabeth of the Trinity, Father de Foucauld, and all the others. They are so present in the life of the whole Church, so influential by the light and the power of the Holy Spirit!

They would all tell you better than I that the history of salvation began with the history of man, that the history of salvation always knows a new beginning, that it begins in every man coming into this world. In this way, the history of salvation enters into the history of peoples, nations, homelands, continents.

The history of salvation begins with God. This is precisely what Christ revealed and declared to the end when he said, "Go....teach all nations, baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Mind ".

“To baptize” means “to immerse”, and the “name” means the very reality that it expresses. To baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit means to immerse man in that very Reality which we express by the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Reality which is God in his Divinity: the Reality utterly unfathomable, which is completely recognizable and comprehensible only to itself. And at the same time, baptism immerses man in this Reality which, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, has opened up to man. It really opened up. Nothing is more real than this openness, this communication, this gift to man of the ineffable God. When we hear the names of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, they speak to us precisely of this gift, of this unheard-of "communication" of God which, in itself, is impenetrable to man...2 ].

The words that Christ, at the end of his historic mission, addressed to the Apostles, are an absolute synthesis of all that had constituted this mission, step by step, from the Annunciation to the Crucifixion... and finally at the Resurrection.

4. At the heart of this mission, at the heart of Christ's mission, there is man, every man. Through man, there are nations, all nations.

Today's liturgy is theocentric, yet it proclaims man. She proclaims it, because man is at the very heart of the mystery of Christ, man is in the heart of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And that from the start. Was he not created in the image and likeness of God? Apart from that, man has no sense. Man has meaning in the world only as the image and likeness of God. Otherwise it has no meaning, and one would come to say, as some have asserted, that man is only a “useless passion”.

Yes. It is the man who is also proclaimed by today's liturgy.

“To see your sky, the work of your fingers, / the moon and the stars, which you stared at, / what is man, that you remember him, / the son of Adam, that you take care of him? / Hardly did you make him less than a god, / crowning him with glory and splendor; / you gave him authority over the works of your hands, / everything was put under your feet by you” [ 3 ].

5. The man... the praise of the man... the affirmation of the man.

Yes, the affirmation of the whole man, in his spiritual and bodily constitution, in what manifests him as a subject externally and internally. Man adapted, in his visible structure, to all the creatures of the visible world, and at the same time inwardly allied with eternal wisdom. And this wisdom, too, is announced by today's liturgy, which sings of its divine origin, its perceptible presence in all the work of creation to say at the end that it "finds its delight with the sons of men” [ 4 ].

What have the sons and daughters of your nation not done for the knowledge of man, to express man by formulating his inalienable rights! We know the place that the idea of ​​liberty, equality and fraternity holds in your culture, in your history. Basically, these are Christian ideas. I say this while being well aware that those who first formulated this ideal in this way did not refer to man's alliance with eternal wisdom. But they wanted to act for the man.

For us, the interior alliance with wisdom is at the base of all culture and of the true progress of man.

Is the contemporary development and progress in which we participate the fruit of the alliance with wisdom? Are they not only an ever more exact science of objects and things, on which the vertiginous progress of technique is built? Doesn't man, the craftsman of this progress, increasingly become the object of this process? And now there is more and more collapsing in him and around him this alliance with wisdom, the eternal alliance with wisdom which is itself the source of culture, that is to say of the true growth of the man.

6. Christ came into the world in the name of man's covenant with eternal wisdom. In the name of this alliance, he was born of the Virgin Mary and he announced the Gospel. In the name of this covenant, "crucified... under Pontius Pilate" he went to the cross and was resurrected. In the name of this covenant, renewed in his death and in his resurrection, he gives us his Spirit...

The covenant with eternal wisdom continues in Him. It continues in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. It continues as teaching the nations and baptizing, as the Gospel and the Eucharist. It continues as the Church, that is to say the Body of Christ, the people of God.

In this alliance, man must grow and develop as man. He must grow and develop from the divine foundation of his humanity, that is, as the image and likeness of God himself. He must grow and develop as a son of divine adoption.

As sons of divine adoption, man must grow and develop through everything that contributes to the development and progress of the world in which he lives. Through all the works of his hands and his genius. Through the successes of contemporary science and the application of modern technology. Through all that he knows about the macrocosm and the microcosm, thanks to ever more perfected equipment.

How is it that, some time ago, man discovered in all this gigantic progress a source of threat to himself? In what way and by what paths have we arrived at the fact that, at the very heart of modern science and technology, has appeared the possibility of the gigantic self-destruction of man; that everyday life offers so many proofs of the employment, against man, of what should be for man and should serve man?
How did we get here? Has not man on the march towards progress taken only one path, the easiest, and neglected the covenant with eternal wisdom? Didn't he take the “spacious” way, neglecting the “narrow” way [ 5 ]?

7. Christ says: “All power has been given to me in heaven and on earth” [ 6 ]. He says this when the earthly power — the Sanhedrin, the power of Pilate — showed its supremacy over Him, by decreeing his death on the cross. He also says this after his resurrection.

“Power in heaven and on earth” is not power against man. It is not even a power of man over man. It is the power that allows man to reveal himself to himself in his royalty, in all the fullness of his dignity. It is the power of which man must discover the specific potency in his heart, by which he must reveal himself to himself in the dimensions of his consciousness in view of eternal life. Then all the force of baptism will be revealed in him, he will know that he is "immersed" in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, he will find himself completely in the eternal Word, in infinite Love.

It is to this that man is called in the covenant with eternal wisdom.

Such is also the "power" that Christ has "in heaven and on earth."

Today's man has greatly increased his power on earth, he even thinks of his expansion beyond our planet.

One can say at the same time that the power of the man on the other man becomes always heavier. By abandoning the covenant with eternal wisdom, he knows less and less how to govern himself, nor does he know how to govern others. How urgent has the question of basic human rights become!

What a threatening face totalitarianism and imperialism reveal, in which man ceases to be the subject, which is equivalent to saying that he ceases to count as man. It only counts as a unit and an item!

Let us listen once again to what Christ says with these words: "All power has been given to me in heaven and on earth", and let us meditate on the whole truth of these words.

8. Christ, at the end, says this again: “I am with you always, until the end of the world” [ 7 ]; it therefore also means: today, in 1980, for any era.

The problem of the absence of Christ does not exist. The problem of its remoteness from the history of man does not exist. God's silence with regard to the worries of the heart and the fate of man does not exist.

There is only one problem that always and everywhere exists: the problem of our presence with Christ. Of our permanence in Christ. Of our intimacy with the authentic truth of his words and with the power of his love. There is only one problem, that of our fidelity to the alliance with eternal wisdom, which is the source of a true culture, that is to say of the growth of man, and that of fidelity to the promises of our baptism in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit!

So allow me, to conclude, to ask you:
France, eldest daughter of the Church, are you faithful to the promises of your baptism?

Allow me to ask you:
France, Daughter of the Church and educator of peoples, are you faithful, for the good of man, to the covenant with eternal wisdom?

Forgive me this question. I asked it as the minister does at the time of baptism. I asked it out of concern for the Church of which I am the first priest and the first servant, and out of love for the man whose definitive greatness is in God, Father Son and Holy Spirit.

[ 1 ] Mk 16, 15.

[ 2 ] Rom 8, 26.

[ 3 ] Ps 8, 4-7.

[ 4 ] Pr 8, 31.

[ 5 ] Cf. Mt 7, 13-14.

[ 6 ] Mt 28, 18.

[ 7 ] Mt 28, 20.

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