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Below is the sermon of H.E. Card. Mauro Gambetti during the celebration of the Holy Mass on Sunday, August 25, on the occasion of the Rimini Meeting.

“Today concludes the long discourse of Jesus’ revelation that has been with us for several weeks: He is the bread descended from heaven, flesh to eat and blood to drink, the food of eternal life.

The outcome is not a happy one. In a crescendo of drama, punctuated by the increasingly scandalized reactions of the Jews, eventually even many of the disciples murmur, “This word is harsh! Who can hear it?” The original Greek significantly uses the adjective sklerós: Jesus’ is a “sclerotic” speech, recalcitrant to all normal intelligence and understanding.

It concerns us, because it involves our theology, which on the mystery of the Body of Christ stutters (mostly with the categories of scholasticism not always well understood), and because our ecclesial witness, 60 years after the Council, shows that it still does not know how to say that, as Paul writes, we are members of his body.

It is a matter of faith. In the first reading, Joshua, the sole survivor of those who had come out of Egypt, questions the faith of the people of Israel who had entered the Promised Land. The people must decide – in the etymological sense: de-caedĕre, “to cut off” – to set their lives in the new condition of freedom. Joshua does not ask the people what organization to give to the community, but what faith they have.

Something similar applies to us, who have entered the Church, which is fraternity, community, synodality, family of families…, without having lived through the conciliar epic. We find ourselves in the promised land of “communion and therefore liberation,” as Fr. Giussani put it, and the question asked of us is not so much about ecclesial structure but about faith.

Who does one want to serve? Which god to serve? In biblical language ‘serving’ God alludes to a joyful and liberating relationship that enhances the energies of the soul, removing it from daily bondages and the oppression of evil. The decision of faith is not simply a choice, it is a generative act, for although man does not have absolute freedom, he can decide to whom he will surrender his freedom, whom he will serve, and consequently what freedom he will live by.

The problem is serious, because easily man can be scandalized by God. Perhaps because of the expectations/pretensions that never leave man’s heart: well-being, health, success, protection, miracles–all things that perish and risk being idols. What do we believe in? Or, in whom do we believe? Every day we have to make up our minds.

The people say well: we will serve the Lord, for He is our God. ‘Our’ in the sense that He has shown His favor to us and we acknowledge His work. The decision of faith begins like this: from amazement at the love that feeds you, contemplates you, regenerates you. When we come into the world, we don’t know a great deal about our mother, our father; we simply, affectively recognize them turned toward us and intuitively entrust ourselves to their care.

The decision of faith is first and foremost a spiritual act, rooted in the heart, in the sanctum of freedom: not a mere intellectual adherence to formulations of truth or sound doctrinal principles, but an involvement of our intimacy, fragile and vulnerable, but also as bright and pure as that of a child.

In the inner self one is open to the action of the Spirit. There one can begin to know the love of God poured out in the heart, which shows itself in the humanity of Jesus, coincidentally under the categories of weakness and foolishness at the judgment of the world. From there a “spiritual” and not just “literal” listening to the Gospel and the person of Jesus originates. And from there one can really begin to understand something.

Otherwise, one cannot believe in the “body of Christ,” as Jesus implies: But there are some among you who do not believe. And many are leaving.

Do you also want to leave? It is the question of a man who is aware that he cannot tell the truth about himself any better than this, consigned to his mission, stripped of all reason and anchored only in the love that makes him a neighbor and at the same time can make him alone. From Jesus’ inner self flows the vulnerable word of a love that absolutely wants to be reciprocated, but in freedom.

Peter, like the others, does not understand, but gives voice to that child within him: Lord […] You have words of eternal life, and to that adult who confesses his faith – we have believed and known that you are the Holy One of God.

Do you hear the echo of the dialogue between the angel Gabriel and the Virgin betrothed? Mary, help us to eat the Gospel and understand the Body of Christ, to have life in us and make God present in the midst of His people, telling of Jesus’ divine humanity, the “communion and therefore liberation,”, evangelii gaudium.”

The Holy Mass