"Lord and Giver of Life" - St. JPII (Intro)

[MariaChristi]

I’m beginning this thread on a “providential” day: First Saturday of the Month of August, the month dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and also Aug. 6, Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord. How providential to begin to read, ponder, and prayerfully discuss how to live this beautiful encyclical, written by a great saint of our time!

God in His Loving Providence gave us the Great Gift of the Holy Spirit, yet many neglect this Gift. St. John Paul II wanted the Church to be renewed and experience a new Pentecost, a new “awakening” to this Gift of God. He longed to be "transfigured’ himself as a son of God and son of Mary. He had taken for his papal Motto “Totus Tuus” (All Yours) being consecrated to Jesus through Mary using the method of St. Louis de Montfort in True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

We begin this Encyclical, by the power of the Holy Spirit, trusting in the intercession of Our Mother. Humbly, let us begin by praying: Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful; kindle in them the fire of Your Love. Send forth your Spirit, O Lord, and they shall be created. And You shall renew the face of the earth. Let us pray. God our Father, pour out the gifts of your Holy Spirit on the world. You sent Your Spirit on Your Church, to begin the teaching of the gospel; now let the Spirit continue to work in the world through the hearts of all who believe. Through Christ, our Lord Amen.

“DOMINUM ET VIVIFICANTEM” (Latin translated into English: "Lord and Giver of Life)
On the Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church and the World
INTRODUCTION

1. The Church professes her faith in the Holy Spirit as “the Lord, the giver of life.” She professes this in the Creed which is called Nicene- Constantinopolitan from the name of the two Councils-of Nicaea (A.D. 325) and Constantinople (A.D. 381)-at which it was formulated or promulgated. It also contains the statement that the Holy Spirit “has spoken through the Prophets.”

These are words which the Church receives from the very source of her faith, Jesus Christ. In fact, according to the Gospel of John, the Holy Spirit is given to us with the new life, as Jesus foretells and promises on the great day of the Feast of Tabernacles: "If any one thirst let him come to me and drink. He who believeth in me as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’"1 And the Evangelist explains: "This he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive."2 It is the same simile of water which Jesus uses in his conversation with the Samaritan woman, when he speaks of "a spring of water welling up to eternal life,"3 and in his conversation with Nicodemus when he speaks of the need for a new birth “of water and the Holy Spirit” in order to "enter the kingdom of God."4

The Church, therefore, instructed by the words of Christ, and drawing on the experience of Pentecost and her own apostolic history, has proclaimed since the earliest centuries her faith in the Holy Spirit, as the giver of life, the one in whom the inscrutable Triune God communicates himself to human beings, constituting in them the source of eternal life.

1. This faith, uninterruptedly professed by the Church, needs to be constantly reawakened and deepened in the consciousness of the People of God. In the course of the last hundred years this has been done several times: by Leo XIII, who published the Encyclical Epistle Divinum Illud Munus (1897) entirely devoted to the Holy Spirit; by Pius XII, who in the Encyclical Letter Mystici Corporis (1943) spoke of the Holy Spirit as the vital principle of the Church, in which he works in union with the Head of the Mystical Body, Christ 5; at the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council which brought out the need for a new study of the doctrine on the Holy Spirit, as Paul VI emphasized: "The Christology and particularly the ecclesiology of the Council must be succeeded by a new study of and devotion to the Holy Spirit, precisely as the indispensable complement to the teaching of the Council."6

In our own age, then, we are called anew by the ever ancient and ever new faith of the Church, to draw near to the Holy Spirit as the giver of life…

I’ve underlined parts that stood out for me. The Holy Spirit may touch each of us in different ways. I look forward to any comments as we go along. Footnotes are found by scrolling down to the end of the encyclical. In the 6 footnotes in this section, Scripture is most significant, but depending on your time, other eferences can be found on the internet.