To the Bishops of Pennsylvania and New Jersey (U.S.A.) on their "ad Limina" visit

3As Bishops, we have an urgent responsibility to help God's people to understand and appreciate the profound mystery of the Church: to see her above all as the community in which we meet the living God and his merciful love. It must be our pastoral objective to create a more intense awareness of the fact that God, who intervenes in history at times of his choosing, in the fullness of time sent his Son, born of a woman, for the salvation of the world (cf. Gal 4:4). This is the great truth of human history: that the history of salvation has entered the history of the world, making it a history filled with God's presence and punctuated by events overflowing with meaning for the people God calls to be his own. The redemptive work of the Son continues in the Church and through the Church. Indeed, from the beginning God "planned to assemble in the Holy Church all those who would believe in Christ" (Lumen Gentium, 2). In this transcendent, theological sense, the Church is the goal of all things: for God created the world in order to communicate his own infinite goodness and to draw his beloved creatures into communion with himself, a communion brought about by the convocation of all in Christ. This convocation is the Church (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 760). "Just as God's will is creation and is called ?the world', so his intention is the salvation of men, and it is called ?the Church'" (Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, I, 6, 27).