Rome Newsroom, Jun 1, 2023 / 10:15 am (CNA).

Cardinal Robert Sarah urged students studying at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas to ask in prayer for “an intimate and profound union with the Lord and with one another.”

Speaking at a Mass to mark the close of the academic year at the university in Rome known as the Angelicum, the Guinean cardinal spoke about the danger of division in the Church and the importance of prayer.

“Jesus asks that each person may live in love and in true unity, a deep communion, in the image of the Trinitarian communion. A union that immerses our lives fully in Jesus, just as Jesus’ life is immersed in the Father,” Sarah said in his homily.

He added: “Such a union is undoubtedly expressed in a Christian life of deep and intense prayer addressed to the Lord, which in daily life is manifested in a gaze of charity toward the brothers and sisters we meet.”

Seminarians, priests, religious, and laypeople studying philosophy and theology at the pontifical university attended the Mass on May 25.

The prefect emeritus of the Vatican Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments reflected on Jesus’ priestly prayer at the Last Supper in which the Lord prayed: “that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me” (John 17:21).

Sarah said: “Jesus calls for them to be a family of God … Jesus knows well that the spirit of division, hatred, or mutual contempt would destroy his Church and mission. It does not matter how the devil is dressed. Everything that divides is still inspired by him.”

“The danger of division, of infighting, of confusion in doctrinal and moral teaching is so grave that Jesus ventures an ambitious, lofty, almost impossible prayer: He asks the Father that his disciples have the same unity that exists between the two of them.”

The 77-year-old cardinal reminded the students that “if theological study does not make us grow in the love of God and neighbor, if we only work hard to pass the exams, then we are killing ourselves for nothing.”

“In our time, it is urgent to restart the missionary commitment to courageously bring the Gospel of Christ everywhere, but preaching must begin with prayer and the concrete witness of that evangelical love expressed with the death of Jesus on the cross and which impels us to look at others before themselves, to spend one’s life for the Gospel and not for one’s own interest or advantages,” he said.

Sarah is the author of a number of books on the spiritual life, including “The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise.”

He said: “Jesus tells us that we should always be able to begin our prayer with this attitude of raising our eyes to heaven, detaching our attention, even physically, from our worries, from our earthly worries and turning towards the high, towards heaven, towards the Father who dwells in it.”

“A gaze bowed and closed in on ourselves does not open us up to God, it does not allow us to enter into a deep and intimate relationship with him. Before we begin to pray, we must, like Jesus, lift our eyes, take them away from our thoughts, even the thought of study and exams, so that we can truly and fully immerse ourselves in him, in his divine dimension.”

Sarah told the students that “the more we know the Lord the more we can love him.”

The Angelicum, which is one of seven pontifical universities in Rome, has 1,000 students coming from almost 100 countries around the world.

“We are called, like St. Paul, to have courage and to give our life for the Lord in everything that we are given to live, without fearing the cross, but like Jesus, embracing it tenderly, since that cross is the road to eternity, to fullness of God’s glory,” Sarah said.

“Let us ask the Lord, through the intercession of the Virgin Mary, to tend through our lives to an intimate and profound union with the Lord and with one another, to become credible witnesses of the Risen One.”

Matthew Santucci contributed to this story.