A redeemed humanity is born

The descent of the Holy Spirit produces in the mystical Body of Christ, that is, in the Church, the same effects, so to speak, that it produced on the physical body of flesh of Jesus. Jesus was resurrected by the power of the Holy Spirit: the physical body of Jesus has been absorbed, so to speak, by the divine, inexhaustible and eternal life, which is the Spirit of the Father, which is poured out in fullness upon Him, the head of His mystical Body. That of Jesus, in fact, is not a "simple" resuscitation, like that of Lazarus, but it is the entry of Jesus, of Christ marked by wounds and death, into the glory of the Father, into his world, into his life. . And so the life-giving Spirit, which the Father poured out on Him, descends from the head to all his members, to the whole Body of that Head, that is, to the Church.

And so the whole mystical Body, the whole Church, and therefore each of us, lives by the same life of Christ, which pours into us, and in some way reproduces itself, according to the similarity of the vine and the branches, in which the sap vital spreads throughout the plant. Thus each of us, grafted into Christ through Baptism and continually united to Him in the Eucharist and the Sacraments, can, according to the words of Saint Ignatius, choose and desire for ourselves what Christ desired: in other words, live like Him, loving what He loved and showed us in the Beatitudes: meekness, mercy, humility, purity of heart, love for the justice of the Kingdom, to the point of becoming meek and humble like He is. In fact, the Holy Spirit conforms us to Christ, makes us similar to Him; he makes the old Adam die in us to make us clothe ourselves with the new, the one created according to God in justice and holiness. The Spirit is in fact the very holiness of the Father and of the Son, because he proceeds from the Father and the Son; it is through the Spirit that the Father was pleased with the Son, and it is again through the Spirit that the Son was pleased with the Father. The Spirit consecrated the man Jesus for the mission received from the Father, and in the Spirit the Word, becoming incarnate, said: "Behold, I come to do your will". In the Holy Spirit the Son intimately felt the will of the Father, and in the Spirit he obeyed out of love: all this is communicated to each of us, who in the same Spirit is consecrated as a son in the Son, and sent on that mission that the wisdom of the Father has granted to him.

In the grace of the Holy Spirit, therefore, the whole Church is enriched with an immense multiplicity of gifts and vocations, from the most extraordinary ones and the highest charisms up to those, no less necessary, more frequent and more humble, which however all have a single lowest common denominator: love. In fact, God is love, and the Spirit leads to him and comes from this. From here we recognize the different interior motions: if they come from faith, hope and charity, and lead to an increase in them, they are from God. The fruit of the Spirit is in fact love, joy, peace, goodness, faithfulness, benevolence, meekness , self-control.

In this decade we can pray for the whole Church and for each one, for all the people and situations we know, so that they will all be vivified by the Holy Spirit: the Spirit, according to the promise of Jesus, will remind us of what He told us, will bring it to our ear, will make it resonate not only in the head, but also in the heart. And this is what we need, because his word is the Word himself, he is the risen one, continually present to us. And his word is always effective: it does what the Father sent it to do, precisely because the Spirit vivifies it, making it go from a "dead word" to a "living word".

Mary is the woman par excellence, a person of the Church, moved by the Spirit and fully filled by it: "full of grace", from the Annunciation, mother of the living at the foot of the Cross, with the Church, in the continuous Pentecost of history, she continually supplicates to obtain for us the only gift that Jesus explicitly tells us to ask for: "if you, who are evil, know how to give good things to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Spirit to those who ask for it".