On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Pope Leo XIV Prays for World Without Prejudice, Persecution

“We little ones can raise our voices and always seek dialogue rather than violence to resolve problems, especially on this day that commemorates the Shoah,” he said, adding that we must eliminate “all forms of antisemitism.”

The word of God is a living reality

In his main message at the Jan. 28 audience, Pope Leo continued his series of talks on the dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum of the Second Vatican Council. He focused on divine revelation and reflected in particular on the relationship between sacred Scripture and tradition.

The word of God “is not fossilized, but rather it is a living and organic reality that develops and grows in tradition,” he said.

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On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Pope Leo XIV Prays for World Without Prejudice, Persecution

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He pointed to the teaching of St. John Henry Newman, doctor of the Church, who in his work “The Development of Christian Doctrine” affirmed that Christianity — both as a communal experience and as a doctrine — is “a dynamic reality.”

Leo noted that this understanding is already present in the Gospel, when Jesus uses the parables of the seed to express a life that develops thanks to an inner vital force.

Scripture and tradition: An inseparable unity

Following the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, the pope emphasized that sacred Scripture and tradition “are so linked and joined together that one cannot stand without the others.”

Quoting Dei Verbum, he said “there exists a close connection and communication between sacred tradition and sacred Scripture. For both of them, flowing from the same divine wellspring, in a certain way merge into a unity and tend toward the same end.”

Church tradition, he explained, “branches out throughout history through the Church, which preserves, interprets, and embodies the word of God.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, citing a motto of the Church Fathers, also affirms that “sacred Scripture is written principally in the Church’s heart rather than in documents and records.”

The pontiff recalled two classic expressions of the Christian tradition. St. Gregory the Great famously said “the sacred Scriptures grow with the one who reads them” and St. Augustine observed that “there is only one word of God that unfolds through Scripture, and there is only one Word that sounds on the lips of many saints.”

Safeguarding the deposit of faith

Leo XIV also quoted the exhortation of the Apostle Paul to Timothy: “O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you.”

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This passage, he said, is echoed by Dei Verbum, which states that “Sacred tradition and sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God, committed to the Church,” whose interpretation belongs to the “living teaching office of the Church, whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ.”

The pope explained that the term “deposit” is juridical in origin and imposes a precise duty: to preserve the content — “which in this case is the faith” — and to transmit it intact.

For this reason, he stressed that the “deposit” of the word of God “is still in the hands of the Church and all of us,” who, in our various ecclesial ministries, are called to preserve it “in its integrity, as a lodestar for our journey through the complexity of history and existence.”

Hannah Brockhaus is Catholic News Agency's senior Rome correspondent. She grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and has a degree in English from Truman State University in Missouri.