Here and Now with Francis 2/6/16 (John the Baptist, humility, martyrdom, witness, merit, Jesus)

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Our life [that] might always be a place that Christ might grow greater, and we might come down, even to the very end.

From the homily
“John the Baptist, ‘the greatest man born of a woman’ – so says the formula for the canonization of John. But this formula was used not of a Pope, or even of Jesus. That man is the greatest man born of a woman: The greatest saint: Thus Jesus canonized him. [...] “To diminish, diminish, diminish.” That “was the life of John,” Pope Francis repeated. “A great man who did not seek his own glory, but the glory of God”; a man who died in such a prosaic manner, in anonymity. But with this attitude, the Pope concluded, John “prepared the way for Jesus,’ who, in a similar manner, “died in agony, alone, without the disciples’: [...] Reading this passage, seeing how God triumphs: the style of God is not the style of man. Asking the Lord for the grace of humility that John had, and not leaning on our own merits or the glory of others. And above all, the grace that in our life that might always be a place that Christ might grow greater, and we might come down, even to the very end.” [link]

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