This week we present the Homily of Pope Leo XIV at St Paul’s tomb on 20 May 2025 in which he points us toward mission in accordance with our vocation, arising from a free response to an authentic encounter with God’s love.
Saint Paul starts by saying that he received from God the grace of his vocation (cf. Rom 1:5). He acknowledges, in other words, that his encounter with Christ and his own ministry were the fruit of God’s prior love, which called him to a new life while he was still far from the Gospel and persecuting the Church. Saint Augustine, who was also a convert, spoke of the same experience in these words: “How can we choose, unless we have first been chosen? We cannot love, unless someone has loved us first” (Serm. 34, 2). At the root of every vocation, God is present, in his mercy and his goodness, as generous as that of a mother (cf. Is 66:11-13) who nourishes her child with her own body for as long as the child is unable to feed itself (cf. SAINT AUGUSTINE, Enn. in Ps. 130, 9).
In the same passage, Paul also speaks of “the obedience of faith” (Rom 1:5), and here too he shares his own experience. When the Lord appeared to him on the road to Damascus (cf. Acts 9:1-30), he did not take away his freedom, but gave him the opportunity to make a decision, to choose an obedience that would prove costly and entail interior and exterior struggles, which Paul proved willing to face. Salvation does not come about by magic, but by a mysterious interplay of grace and faith, of God’s prevenient love and of our trusting and free acceptance (cf. 2 Tim 1:12).
As we thank the Lord for the calling that changed Saul’s life, let us ask him to enable us to respond in the same way to his grace, and to become, ourselves, witnesses of the love “poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom 5:5).