We again present Our and your question: what is greater now need the Church? Today we will give a very simple answer, which you, because you are good, because you are faithful, because you are fervent, can understand and accept: the Church needs obedience. Yes, Sons and Daughters, who love the Church: of obedience. And even more than the external passive and executive obedience, the internal and spontaneous spirit of obedience.

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At this moment We do not intend to talk about these same themes, beautiful, if complex and delicate, about the freedom of the children of God, about the sacred character of conscience and about the fullness that Christian life gives to the human personality; but we simply want to remember how these prerogatives of the Christian soul are not offended, but are well protected and moderated by the obedience in force in the community fabric of the Church, when we reflect that the order, that is, the perfection, the fullness, at which the economy of Christian salvation, are not strictly anthropocentric (as the modern mentality is tempted to believe), but theocentric.

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Pope St. Paul VI

General Audience

October 5, 1966