Benguela, 21 May, 2024 / 10:39 PM
Christians, whose lives are characterized by vices, including jealousy and envy, sadden the Holy Spirit, the Catholic Bishop of Benguela Diocese in Angola has said.
In his homily on May 19, Pentecost Sunday, at Our Lady of Navigators Parish of his Episcopal See, Bishop António Francisco Jaca challenged followers of Jesus Christ to live a life of service, keen on the needs of their brothers and sisters.
“The Gifts or Charisms that God has bestowed on this or that brother or sister are not meant to arouse jealousy, envy, intrigue; you can't be jealous,” Bishop Jaca said.
The Local Ordinary of Benguela Diocese, who doubles as President of the Episcopal Commission for Culture and Social Communications of the Bishops' Conference of Angola and São Tomé and Príncipe (CEAST) added, “Everyone who has received a gift needs to accept it, make it fruitful and put it at the service of the community.”
“If we don't do anything for the Church, if we don't feel the need to put the gifts we've received at the service of others, if we come to Church on Sundays and go home and nothing else happens during the week, we don't do anything else in our parish, and we don't feel the need for the Holy Spirit's presence, He would be saddened because we don't let Him act in us,” the Angolan Catholic Bishop emphasized.
According to him, “to celebrate the feast of Pentecost is to become aware of the action of the Holy Spirit in us.”
“The Spirit of God who descended on the disciples and on Mary continues to descend today on the Church and on each one of us,” the Angolan member of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) further said.
Today, he continued, “we are called to become aware of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church and in our lives. We need to invoke him in all our activities, so that he may guide our steps.”
“We need to allow the Holy Spirit to produce in us the gifts that he gives; we need the gifts of the Holy Spirit to be at the service of the community,” the Bishop of Benguela Diocese since June 2018, following his transfer from Caxito Diocese said.
He added, “It is God's Holy Spirit who gives us the strength to bear witness to the faith.”
“The Holy Spirit gives us the strength to bear witness to our faith and to bear witness to our faith is to evangelize,” Bishop Jaca said.
Followers of Jesus Christ, he said, have the duty “to make the word of God reach our brothers and sisters, in our own home, in our family, in the place where we work, anywhere, with our way of being and acting.”
The Angolan Catholic Bishop went on to emphasize the need for Christians to seek the power of the Holy Spirit in fostering their identity as witnesses of Jesus Christ.
He explained, “We must identify ourselves as Christians. And this is only possible with the power of God's Holy Spirit. We need God's Holy Spirit to do his work of sanctification in us so that we are not just Christians in name, but true disciples of Jesus.”
“We need to evaluate our Christian life, to know how we are doing, how we are doing on our Christian journey, how we are doing in our sacramental life, how we are doing in our prayer life, how we are doing in our family, which is also the domestic church,” he said.
Bishop Jaca also called upon Christians to surrender their lives to the Holy Spirit.
“We need to let ourselves be acted upon by the Holy Spirit, and let Him instruct us on how to proceed,” he said.
In allowing the Holy Spirit to work in us, the Catholic Church leader said, “we will know how to deal with our family; we will know how to educate our children, how to live as a Christian family, how to contribute so that our parish grows and bears fruit in vocations to the Priesthood, to Religious Life, and to Family Life.”
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