Scottish Catholic Observer

Pope Benedict XVI spoke at his general audience this morning about prayer responding to human beings’ desire for God.

In the second of his lessons focusing on the theme of Christian prayer, the Holy Father spoke to pilgrims gathered at the Vatican’s St Peter’s Square (above) on ‘how prayer and religious feeling are a part of humans throughout their lives.’

The Pope said that our age is ‘marked by… an apparent eclipse of God’ but that, at the same time, there are ‘signs of a renewed religious sense.’

“Looking at recent history, the predictions of those who, from the age of Enlightenment, foretold the disappearance of religions and exalted absolute reason, separated from faith, have failed,” Pope Benedict said.

While highlighting that ‘there has never been a great civilisation, from time immemorial to our age, that has not been religious,’ the Pope emphasised that ‘the human being is religious by nature.’

“The image of the Creator is engraved on human beings, who feel the need to find a light to answer the questions regarding the profound meaning of reality; an answer that we cannot find in ourselves, in progress, or in empirical science,” he said.

“We know that we cannot respond alone to our basic need to understand.

“For however much we think we are self-sufficient, we experience that we do not suffice. We need to open ourselves to something else, something or someone that can give us what is missing. We must go out of ourselves and go towards the One who is capable of satisfying the width and breadth of our desire.”

The Holy Father added that we carry in us ‘the desire for God’ and said that the experience of prayer is ‘a challenge for all, a ‘grace’ that must be invoked, a gift of the One to whom we address ourselves.’