Thursday, August 08, 2013

Ongoing Political Clericalizing of the Church: Article from the NCR: “Pope Francis is unsettling -- and dividing -- the Catholic right" David Gibson Religion News Service | Aug. 8, 2013”




Comment  by blogger:

A)   Revelation is a Person whom you must become by entering into the inner reality of that Person. Since Jesus Christ as Person is pure relation to the Father, when He becomes incarnate, He reveals Himself to be “prayer.” And so, Simon is able to testify that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God,” by praying with Christ to the Father (Lk. 9, 18). He is then able to experience within himself what it means to be “Son” as relation to the Father.

Benedict XVI’s large point is that Scripture is not revelation, “For revelation always and only becomes a reality where there is faith. The nonbeliever remains under the veil of which Paul speaks in the third chapter of his Second Letter to the Corinthians. He can read Scripture and know what is in it, can even understand at a purely intellectual level, what is meant and how what is said hangs together - and yet he has not shared in the revelation. Rather, revelation has only arrived where, in addition to the material assertions witnessing to it, its inner reality has itself become effective after the manner of faith. Consequently, the person who receives it also is a part of the revelation to a certain degree, for without him it does not exist. You cannot put revelation in your pocket like a book you carry around with you. It is a living reality that requires a living person as the locus of its presence.”[1]

            The faith of the Church cannot be reduced to a text in the form of an ideology concerning which there can be political discrepancy. For the truth of revelation to take place, there must be the gift of self in the form of prayer in order to “know” Him Who is prayer (Total Relation to the Father). Only then, can you understand Him (intelligere = ab intus legere: to read from within) as a believer. Short of this, you are dealing with a script that will be treated ideologically with liberal or conservative political interpretations. But we are no longer talking about “faith.”

B)   Concerning this, St. Josemaria Escriva wrote: “Children of my soul, let no one come to me with fastidious hair-splitting, when what is needed now is firm doctrinal integrity. Let us abhor the easy irenicism of those who hope to pacify everyone, pigeonholing some as ‘on the left’ and others as ‘on the right, only to deftly situate in a ‘prudent center’  - away with extremism, they exclaim – what is the fruit of their own dialectical game, alien to supernatural realities.

“They are the ones who invent the game and decide the position of the rest. And the fruit of these typical false postures of certain ecclesiastics who betray their vocation is a frivolous compromise, diluted doctrine, a distancing of the people from their pastors, a loss of moral authority, and the appearance in the Church of parties and factions. In the end, they have been entrapped by a dialectic opposed to the truth, because it does violence to reality. One sees that they pay more attention to the judgment of men than that of God.
“The remedy of remedies is piety.” (Letter, February 1974).




[1] J. Ratzinger, “God’s Word,” Ignatius (2008) 52.

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