OPEN THE DOORS TO CHRIST
THE NEW EVANGELIZATION

Doors to open? 

For the Holy Father and for the Church, doors are a constant theme:

_*  Crossing the Threshold of Hope
_*  The threshold to the Third Millennium,
_*  Opening the doors to Christ

We Catholics make manifest visibly spiritual realities. Popes through the centuries have opened the Holy Door, a real door, to make manifest a special grace, a special year of favor before the Lord. Indeed, in the Vatican, there is a door which is now walled shut.  On the feast of the Assumption, August 15, 1999, the Archdiocese of Denver sealed the Holy Door of the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.

The Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, the Universal Pastor of all, will open the holy doors and lead us across the threshold into the third millennium.  He will "Open the Doors to Christ". 

The door will be wide open to welcome the savior and to welcome all who would come to him. It will be the time of great reconciliation.

We pray now like the apostles and Mary in the upper room, for the New Advent, a New coming of the Holy Spirit. May the Holy Spirit, the principal mover of you and me, move us to walk through the Holy Door with the Holy Father.

May the world come with us. May all of the sins of the past be reconciled, old divisions, old wounds healed, old stains of sin be removed. May the Church once again breath with both lungs. May the world once again see the Bride of Christ made whole and clean before her Spouse, Our Lord Jesus. We join the with Holy Father. We groan inwardly as we wait in the night of the advent.

In recent years the distance which separates the Churches and Ecclesial Communities from one another has diminished significantly. Even so it is still too great! Too great! Christ did not will it so! We must do everything possible to restore the fullness of communion. We cannot stop along this path. Let us turn once again to Jesus' priestly prayer, in which he says: "that they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you ... so that the world may believe that you have sent me" (Jn 17:21). May these words of Christ be for us all an exhortation to make an effort on behalf of the great work of unity, on the threshold of the Year 2000 which is drawing to a close. (Poland: Address of the Holy Father at the Ecumenical Prayer Service, June 1, 1997)

"We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved" (Rom 8:22-24). Christians are called to prepare for the Great Jubilee of the beginning of the Third Millennium by renewing their hope in the definitive coming of the Kingdom of God, preparing for it daily in their hearts, in the Christian community to which they belong, in their particular social context, and in world history itself. (Tertio Millennio Adveniente, 44)

Open wide the doors to Christ! Come Lord Jesus!