By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY — The greatest enemy of faith is fear, Pope Francis said at his weekly general audience.
That is why faith is the first gift “that must be welcomed and asked for daily, so that it may be renewed in us. It is seemingly a small gift, yet it is the essential one,” he said May 1 in the Paul VI Audience Hall.
Continuing a series of audience talks about vices and virtues, the pope reflected on the virtue of faith.
Faith is the act by which a person freely commits him- or herself to God, he said.
Pope Francis recounted the story of the disciples crossing the lake in a boat with Jesus, but beginning to panic when the boat started to fill up with water in a storm.
They woke Jesus who had been sleeping and were upset he seemed not to care they were in danger. Jesus rebukes them, saying, “Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?”
Pope Francis said, “Here, then, is the great enemy of faith: It is not intelligence, it is not reason, as, alas, some continue obsessively to repeat.” The enemy is “simply fear.”
“Faith is the virtue that makes the Christian,” he said.