Eve of All Saints

Could this be true?

"I'll tell you a secret, an open secret: these world crises are crises of saints. "God wants a handful of men 'of his own' in every human activity. Then...'pax Christi in regno Christi' - 'the peace of Christ in the kingdom of Christ'" [The Way 301].

Fr. Neuhaus commented:

“I'm not sure what Malraux meant by it, but it is one of those oracular pronouncements that have about them the ring of truth. At the threshold of the Third Millennium, it seems that the alternatives to religion have exhausted themselves. That is true of the materialistically cramped rationalisms of the Enlightenment encyclopaedists, which, along with ideological utopianisms, both romantic and allegedly scientific, have been consigned, as Marxists used to say, to the dustbin of history. The perversity of the human mind will no doubt produce other ideological madnesses, but at the moment it seems the historical stage has been swept clean, with only the religious proposition left standing. That is certainly the intuition that informs John Paul II's repeated exhortation, "Be not afraid!"--an exhortation addressed to the entire human community.”[11]

Is This Theologically Feasible?

The ideological structures have in fact collapsed. Could a new truth be emerging now by dint of the praxis of prayer and self-giving as service in ordinary work (where the whole philosophical corpus of modernity has been heading [but incorrectly understood and labeled “German Idealism”]). Could it be understood not as a doctrinaire conservatism but as a true “liberalism” of self-transcendence – a praxis - where the truth emerges from the experience of the self as self-transcendence? And could this truth be the truth of the human person that can be found, as the Second Vatican Council teaches in Gaudium et spes #24: “Man, the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds himself by the sincere gift of himself.” Could it be that this non-doctrinaire liberal formulation of the Magisterium of the Church be the key to the emergence of the truth that has its prototype in Jesus Christ that will make us free (Jn. 8, 32)? Recall that the “theological epistemology” of Ratzinger offers a “liberal” praxis to achieving a “knowledge” of Jesus Christ as transcendent, personal Deity. He offered St. Luke’s “And it came to pass as He was praying in private, that his disciples also were with him.” They were able to transcend contingent sensible knowledge of the man Jesus of Nazareth to draw from the experience and consciousness within themselves as “Other Christs” and transfer that consciousness as the concepts and word: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt. 16, 16).

Could this be where the Spirit is leading the entire world at the present moment? Could it be that we have actually reached the historical moment when The words uttered to St. Josemaria Escriva become historical actual: “If you put me at the center of all human activities… by fulfilling the duty of each moment, in what appears important and what appears unimportant, I will draw everything to myself. My kingdom among you will be a reality!”

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