Shortly before traveling to Nicaea, the Pope issued a warning: he said that the heresies confronted by the council whose 1,700th anniversary he was about to celebrate just hours later are reappearing.
POPE LEO
But there is also another challenge, which we might call a “new Arianism,” present in today’s culture and sometimes even among believers. This occurs when Jesus is admired on a merely human level, perhaps even with religious respect, yet not truly regarded as the living and true God among us.
At the same time, the Pope reflected on how the Christian faith develops through dialogue with new cultural and historical contexts.
He said that although Christianity may appear to be something static, in reality it is not.
POPE LEO
Here too we learn an important lesson: the Christian faith must always be expressed in the languages and categories of the culture in which we live, just as the Fathers did at Nicaea and in the other Councils. At the same time, we must distinguish the essence of the faith from the historical formulas that express it — formulas that are always partial and provisional and can change as doctrine is more deeply understood.
In fact, the Council of Nicaea opened new fields of reflection within the Church. Successive councils either deepened or refined what was said there.
Pope Leo XIV delivered these reflections during the meeting he held with bishops, priests, and religious from Turkey in the Latin Cathedral of the Holy Spirit. In this place, opened for worship in the nineteenth century, relics of the second pope in history are kept: the martyr Saint Linus, the direct successor of the apostle Peter.
JRB
