[ebb tide]

The Pope: formal obedience reduces the Decalogue to a mask

[ebb tide]

The Pope warns against a “literal obedience” of the Ten Commandments, which behind the “pharisaic mask of suffocating correctness” hides “something bad and unresolved”. Francis emphasizes, at the general audience, that by crossing the limit indicated by the biblical law, men and women are not carrying out a “formal legal” transgression but they are “hurting themselves and others”, while, instead, by reaching and “touching the heart”, the Decalogue leads us “to his truth, namely, to his poverty, which becomes authentic and personal openness to the mercy of God, which transforms and renews us”.