Pope at Audience: 'Every baptized person is to bear consistent witness to Christ'

"Every baptized person is an active agent of evangelization, called to bear consistent witness to Christ in accordance with the prophetic gift which the Lord bestows upon His whole Church."

Pope Leo XIV expressed this during his weekly General Audience on Wednesday morning.Continuing his catechesis series on the Second Vatican Council and a reading of its documents, the Pope this week revisited the second chapter of the Conciliar Constitution Lumen gentium, dedicated to the Church as the People of God, recalling that the messianic people receive from Christ the participation "in the priestly, prophetic and kingly work office through which His salvific mission is carried out."

The Pope remembered that the Council Fathers teach that the Lord Jesus, through the new and eternal Covenant, have established a kingdom of priests, constituting his disciples as a ‘royal priesthood.' He highlighted that this common priesthood of the faithful is given with Baptism, which enables us to worship God in spirit and truth, and to “confess before men the faith which they have received from God through the Church.”

Furthermore, through the sacrament of Confirmation, he notes all the baptized “are more perfectly bound to the Church … and the Holy Spirit endows them with special strength so that they are more strictly obliged to spread and defend the faith, both by word and by deed, as true witnesses of Christ.”

This consecration, the Pope said is at the root of the common mission that unites the ordained ministries and the lay faithful.

In this regard, Pope Leo remembered when Pope Francis had observed that, “looking at the People of God is remembering that we all enter the Church as lay people. The first sacrament, which seals our identity forever, and of which we should always be proud, is Baptism." Pope Leo reiterated that through Baptism and by the anointing of the Holy Spirit, the faithful "‘are consecrated as a spiritual house and a holy priesthood’ so that everyone forms the faithful Holy People of God.”