The trinitarian presence in souls gives new meaning to all human relationships, including physical ones, says the Holy Father

This is the catechesis the Holy Father gave during the General Audience on 20 March.

1. In a preceding catechesis I announced that we would return to the topic of the Holy Spirit's presence and action in the soul. Based on theology and rich in spirituality, these themes exert a certain attraction and, one could say, a supernatural fascination for those who desire an interior life, those who are docile and attentive to the voice of the one who dwells in them as in a temple and who enlightens them from within and sustains them on paths consistent with the Gospel. It was these people whom my predecessor Leo XIII had in mind when he wrote the encyclical Divinum Illud on the Holy Spirit (9 May 1897) and later the letter Ad Fovendum on the devotion of the Christian people to the spirit's divine Person (18 April 1902), establishing the celebration of a specific novena in his honour, especially aimed at obtaining the good of Christian unity ("admaturandum Christianæ unitatis bonum"). The Pope of Rerum Novarum was also the Pope of devotion to the Holy Spirit; he knew from what source it was necessary to draw the energy to bring about true good on the social level also. I wanted to call the attention of the Christians of our day to that same source with the encyclical Dominum et Vivificantem (18 May 1986), and I shall now dedicate the concluding part of our pneumatological catechesis to it.

2. We can say that, on the basis of a Christian life characterized by interiority, prayer and union with God, there is a truth which—like all theology and pneumatological catechesis — derives from the texts of Sacred Scripture and especially from the words of Christ and the apostles: that of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit as a divine guest in the souls of the just.

The Apostle Paul asks in his First Letter to the Corinthians (3:16): "Do you not know that... the Spirit of God dwells in you?". Of course, the Holy Spirit is present and at work in the whole Church, as we have seen in preceding catecheses; but the concrete fulfilment of his presence and action comes about in relationship with the human person, with the soul of the just person in whom he establishes his dwelling and pours out the gift which Christ obtained through the Redemption. The action of the Holy Spirit penetrates the depths of the person, the hearts of the faithful, and pours out upon them the light and grace which gives life. This is what we ask in the Sequence of the Mass of Pentecost: "O most blessed light divine, shine within these hearts".

3. The apostle Peter, in turn, in his discourse on Pentecost, after having urged his listeners to convert and be baptized, adds the promise: "You will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit" (Acts 2:38). From this context we see that the promise personally concerns every person who converts and is baptized. Peter, in fact, expressly addresses "each one" of those present (2:38). Later, when Simon the magician asks the apostles to give him the sacramental power, he says: "Give me this power, too, so that anyone upon whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit" (8:19). The gift of the Holy Spirit is understood as a gift given to individual persons. This same affirmation can be verified in the episode of the conversion of Cornelius and his household: while Peter was explaining the mystery of Christ to them, "the Holy Spirit fell upon all who were listening" (10:44). The Apostle therefore recognized that "God gave them the same gift he gave to us" (11:17). According to Peter, the descent of the Holy Spirit signifies his presence in those to whom he communicates himself.

4. In regard to this presence of the Holy Spirit in the person, we must recall the successive ways in which we find the divine presence in salvation history. In the Old Covenant, God is present and manifests his presence first in the "tent" in the desert, then later in the "Holy of Holies" in the temple in Jerusalem. In the New Covenant, his presence is fulfilled in and identified with the incarnation of the Word: God is present among people in his eternal Son through the human nature he assumed in unity of person with his divine nature. By this visible presence in Christ, God prepares a new presence through him, an invisible one that is fulfilled in the coming of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, Christ's presence "in the midst" of people opens up the path for the presence of the Holy Spirit, which is an inner presence, a presence in human hearts. Thus Ezekiel's prophecy is fulfilled (36:26-27): "I will give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you.... I will put my spirit within you".

5. Jesus himself, on the night before his departure from this world to return to the Father through his cross and ascension into heaven, announced the coming of the Holy Spirit to the apostles: "I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth.... He will be in you" (Jn 14:16-17). But Christ himself says that this presence of the Holy Spirit, his indwelling in human hearts which also infers the indwelling of the Father and Son, has a condition, that of love: "Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him" (Jn 14:23).

The reference to the Father and the Son contained in Jesus' discourse includes the Holy Spirit, to whom St Paul and patristical and theological tradition attributes the trinitarian indwelling because he is the Person-Love, and besides, this inner presence is necessarily spiritual. The presence of the Father and Son comes about through love, and therefore in the Holy Spirit. It is in the Holy Spirit that God, in his trinitarian unity, communicates himself to the spirit of each person.

St Thomas Aquinas says that it is only in the spirit of the human person (and of an angel) that this manner of divine presence is possible—through indwelling— because only a rational creature is capable of being raised to knowledge, conscious love and enjoyment of God as an inner guest: this takes place through the Holy Spirit, who, therefore, is the first and most basic gift (Summa Theol. I, q. 38, a.1).

6. Through this indwelling, however, people become "temples of God"—of the triune God—because it is "the Spirit of God (who) dwells in" them, as the Apostle reminds the Corinthians (I Cor 3:16). God is holy and makes holy. The same apostle points out shortly after this: "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?" (I Cor 6:19). Therefore the indwelling of the Holy Spirit implies a particular consecration of the whole human person (whose bodily dimension Paul emphasizes) similar to a temple. This consecration is sanctifying. It is the very essence of the saving grace through which the person is able to participate in God's trinitarian life. Thus an internal source of holiness opens up within the person, from which comes life "according to the Spirit", as Paul says in the Letter to the Romans (8:9): "You are not in the flesh; on the contrary, you are in the Spirit if only the Spirit of God dwells in you". Here is the basis for the hope of bodily resurrection because "if the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit that dwells in you" (Rom 8:11).

7. We must take note that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit—who sanctifies the entire person, body and soul—bestows a greater dignity on the human person, and gives new value to interpersonal relations, bodily ones too, as St Paul notes in the text we quoted from the First Letter to the Corinthians (6:19).

Therefore, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit the Christian is placed in a particular relationship with God, which also extends to all interpersonal relationships, in the family and in society too. When the Apostle says "not to grieve the Holy Spirit" (Eph 4:30), he is speaking on the basis of this revealed truth: the personal presence of an interior guest who can be "grieved" by sin—by every sin—because sin is always contrary to love. In fact, he himself, as the Person Love dwelling in the human being, creates in the soul an inner demand to live in love. St Paul suggests this when he writes to the Romans that "the love of God" (that is, the powerful stream of love which comes from God) "has been poured out into your hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit who has been given to us" (Rom 5:5).