Pope Benedict XVI uses his address to the Roman Curia, delivered each year shortly before Christmas, as an occasion to reflect on Church themes of current importance.

One of the topics the Pope highlighted in this year’s talk was the Word of God, which was the specific focus of the recent Synod of Bishops in Rome.

Here’s an excerpt of what he had to say, as unofficially translated by Zenit:

“This Word has constructed a common history and wishes continually to do so,” Benedict said, in emphasizing that Scripture has the capacity to engage the lives of contemporary human beings when it is properly understood and interpreted. “Thus we are freshly made aware that — precisely because the Word is so personal — we can understand it in correct and total fashion only in the ‘we’ of the community established by God: always fully conscious that we can never completely exhaust it, that it has something new to say to every generation.”

Continued the Pope, “We understood for sure that the biblical writings were composed at determined periods and therefore constitute in this sense something of a book from a past age. But we have seen that their message does not stay in the past nor can it be confined in it: God, in truth, always speaks to the present, and we have heard the Bible in a manner that is full only when we have discovered this ‘present’ of God, which we call now.”

— Tom McFeely