The Cross is salvation and judgment

VATICAN - WORDS OF DOCTRINE: Rev Nicola Bux and Rev Salvatore Vitiello -

Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - Contemplating Jesus, from whom our faith comes and by whom it is made perfect, we cannot fail in these coming days of holy spiritual tension, to see the close connection which exists between the Cross of Christ and the mission of the Church. The Cross is the Christian's sign of identification and, consequently, the identification sign in every place where Christians are present, places inhabited by a "new presence" by people destined to be ever more perfectly, the "mystical body" of the Lord, His presence in the world.

In this sense the Cross is potentially and objectively missionary: to announce and to carry the Cross is to announce and to carry Christ, who conquered death and thus gave new meaning to suffering, giving it that horizon of redemption and sharing, which makes it truly a "place of salvation".

The Cross of Christ is a place of salvation, the source of all possible salvation: those to whom salvation is offered, also non Christians, will be saved solely thanks to the Cross of Christ and not without participation in ecclesial mediation (cfr. Dominus Jesus). This certainty supports and animates mission, rendering every baptized Christian a 'bearer of the cross' in the explicitly visible sense and in the spiritual sense.

The Cross, before which every man, directly or indirectly, must stand, in order to understand himself more radically, is also a "place of judgment". In this context, judgment and salvation are to be seen not in counter-position, but closely connected to one another, in that necessary complementarity without which there would be no proper respect or authentic participation of human freedom in the plan for salvation.

As the Holy Father recalls: " With death, our life-choice becomes definitive—our life stands before the judge. Our choice, which in the course of an entire life takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms. There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell. On the other hand there can be people who are utterly pure, completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbors—people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfillment what they already are" (Spe Salvi 45).

The Cross demands our act of faith, it demands clarity and frank announcement of the one truth which saves, and above all, willingness to "offer ourselves as a living and pleasing sacrifice to God " for our own salvation and the salvation of the world. From the daily martyrdom of "little crosses" which all of us bear, to the great call to bear supreme witness, every Christians knows that his own personal victory and that of the whole world lies, "in hoc signo", in the sign of the Cross

(Agenzia Fides 2/4/2009; righe 37, parole 520)