GENERAL AUDIENCE JANUARY 14, 2026 Dear brothers and sisters, good morning and welcome! We have started the cycle of catechesis on Vatican Council II. Today we will begin to look more closely at the Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum, on the divine Revelation. It is one of the most beautiful and important of the Council and, to introduce it, it may be helpful to recall the words of Jesus: “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” ( Jn 15:15). This is a fundamental point of Christian faith, which Dei Verbum reminds us of: Jesus Christ radically transforms man’s relationship with God, which is henceforth a relationship of friendship. Therefore, the only condition of the new covenant is love. Saint Augustine, commenting on this passage of the Fourth Gospel, insists on the perspective of grace, which alone can make us friends of God in his Son ( Commentary on the Gospel of John, Homily 86). Indeed, an ancient motto stated: “Amicitia aut pares invenit, aut facit”, “friendship is born between equals, or makes them so”. We are not equal to God, but God himself makes us similar to Him in his Son. For this reason, as we can see in all the Scripture, in the Covenant there is a first moment of distance, in which the pact between God and mankind always remains asymmetrical: God is God and we are creatures. However, with the coming of the Son in human flesh, the Covenant opens up to its final purpose: in Jesus, God makes us sons and daughters, and calls us to become like Him, albeit in our fragile humanity. Our resemblance to God, then, is not reached through transgression and sin, as the serpent suggests to Eve (cf. Gen 3:5), but in our relationship with the Son made man. The words of the Lord Jesus that we have recalled – “I have called you friends” – are reprised in the Constitution Dei Verbum, which affirms: “Through this revelation, therefore, the invisible God (see Col 1:15; 1 Tim 1:17) out of the abundance of His love speaks to men as friends (see Ex 33:11; Jn 15:14-15) and lives among them (see Bar 3:38), so that He may invite and take them into fellowship with Himself” (no. 2). The God of Genesis already conversed with our first parents, engaging in dialogue with them (cf. Dei Verbum, 3); and when this dialogue was interrupted by sin, the Creator did not cease to seek an encounter with his creatures and to establish a covenant with them. In the Christian Revelation, that is, when God became man in his Son in order to seek us out, the dialogue that had been interrupted is restored in a definitive WISDOM OF Pope Leo XIV
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