Yesterday's Audience

Zenit's daily dispatch from yesterday includes the translation of B16's audience. His remarks were a commentary on part of Psalm 135 (6). Because of its length, I'll post the entire thing in the comments section of this post, but I always think extemporaneous remarks are extremely interesting, so those are right here. At the end of his prepared remarks, in which he was discussing St. Cyprian's view of the Psalm, Benedict put aside his papers and conclude spontaneously:

With these words, the holy Doctor of the Church develops the psalm with a litany of the benefits that God has given us, adding it to what the psalmist still did not know, but still hoped for, the true gift that God has given us: the gift of the Son, the gift of the Incarnation, in which God has been given to us and with which he remains with us, in the Eucharist and in his Word, every day until the end of history.

We run the danger that the memory of evil, of the evils suffered, is often stronger than the memory of the good. The psalm helps to awaken in us the memory of the good, of all the good the Lord has done to us and does to us, and that we can see if our heart is attentive: It is true, God's mercy is eternal, it is present day after day.