Revisiting the Apostles Peter and Paul today should be much more than just a liturgical celebration. It is going back to the sources of our vision. And our mission can only follow our vision. Otherwise we are lost.

Through Peter and Paul, the sign of Pentecost becomes a reality. Together they represent the catholicity of the Church as the new community that speaks all languages and ventures beyond cultural boundaries. This is what mostly challenges the Church today: to speak the languages of peoples and to address the culture. For both Peter and Paul it was a long way from Jerusalem to Rome through Athens. In the same way it is a long way for us today to come to grips with world issues and, on top of all this, with the issue of what the Church is really meant to bring to the world.

Peter and Paul are two very important cornerstones of the Church. They belong in world history to the victims of violence and not to the perpetrators. The struggle of St Paul was the struggle of the martyr. "I have fought the good fight," he writes to Timothy, "I have kept the faith." Paul was a man who was ready to let himself be wounded and that was his real strength.

The Church even today can convince people only insofar as her ambassadors are ready to let themselves be wounded. Where the readiness to suffer is lacking, so too is the essential evidence of truth on which the Church depends.

The Church's struggle can only be the struggle of the martyrs because the world is saved not by the sword of the conquerors but by the sword of those who suffer.

The more the historical circumstances change, the more the need for the Church to go back to these sources and there to rediscover her true identity. Going back to Peter and Paul means returning to the dramatic shifts which marked the missionary vocation of the Church under their leadership, guidance and inspiration. Official Judaism at that time opposed their strategy as betrayal of the Torah and of monotheism itself.

But their boldness was the real turning point for Christianity when the Church opened wide her doors to pagans. They were determining factors in this fundamental shift.

Today we again need their boldness. We seem to be closing too many doors.

We need to rediscover Apostolic leadership. In our situation today, where the communication of the faith is concerned, we can receive a precious input from our origins.

This is where the dialectic between Peter and Paul which was so productive for Christianity at its inception can still be fruitfully revisited.

Since the Second Vatican Council, the buzzword in the Church was 'aggiornamento' or renewal, which in most cases meant structural refurbishment. But it seems that now more than ever we need to move on to something more radical and that goes more directly to the foundations of the Church.

We actually need a "shaking of the foundations," to quote Paul Tillich.

Perhaps more than just renewal, we need a refounding of the Church. There is so much that is happening around us, in the Church and outside, which is going unnoticed.

This can only give to the world an alienated Church, far from the one promised and built on the rock.