One God, One Christ, One Church, One People

Realism is the Word of God. Only the Word of God is real. Everything else is a secondary reality, and real only in relation to it.

“Furthermore, the Word of God is the foundation of everything, it is the true reality. And to be realistic, we must rely upon this reality. We must change our idea that matter, solid things, things we can touch, are the more solid, the more certain reality. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount the Lord speaks to us about the two possible foundations for building the house of one's life: sand and rock. The one who builds on sand builds only on visible and tangible things, on success, on career, on money. Apparently these are the true realities. But all this one day will pass away. We can see this now with the fall of large banks: this money disappears, it is nothing. And thus all things, which seem to be the true realities we can count on, are only realities of a secondary order. The one who builds his life on these realities, on matter, on success, on appearances, builds upon sand. Only the Word of God is the foundation of all reality, it is as stable as the heavens and more than the heavens, it is reality. Therefore, we must change our concept of realism. The realist is the one who recognizes the Word of God, in this apparently weak reality, as the foundation of all things. Realist is the one who builds his life on this foundation, which is permanent. Thus the first verses of the Psalm invite us to discover what reality is and how to find the foundation of our life, how to build life (Benedict XVI, Keynote Address, Synod of Bishops on “The Word of God,” Oct , 6, 2008).

        God proclaims the Covenant with Abram who believes the Word: that, because of his belief, he will be the father of all the nations of the earth.

Genesis 17 The promise of the Covenant to Abram: You will be father to all the nations of the earth

 “When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him and said, “I am God Almighty^[a]; walk before me faithfully and be blameless. ² Then I will make my covenant between me and you and will greatly increase your numbers.”

³ Abram fell facedown, and God said to him, ⁴ “As for me, this is my covenant with you:You will be the father of many nations. ⁵ No longer will you be called Abram^[b]; your name will be Abraham,^[c] for I have made you a father of many nations. ⁶ I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. ⁷ I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. ⁸ The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God.”

15 The Covenant of Abram with God

 After this, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision:

“Do not be afraid, Abram.
    I am your shield,^[a]
    your very great reward.^[b]”

² But Abram said, “Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless and the one who will inherit^[c] my estate is Eliezer of Damascus?” ³ And Abram said, “You have given me no children; so a servant in my household will be my heir.”

⁴ Then the word of the Lord came to him: “This man will not be your heir, but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir.” ⁵ He took him outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring^[d] be.”

⁶ Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.

⁷ He also said to him, “I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it.”

⁸ But Abram said, “Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?”

The Covenant:

⁹ So the Lord said to him, “Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon.”

¹⁰ Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other; the birds, however, he did not cut in half. ¹¹ Then birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away.

¹² As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. ¹³ Then the Lord said to him, “Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there. ¹⁴ But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. ¹⁵ You, however, will go to your ancestors in peace and be buried at a good old age. ¹⁶ In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.”

¹⁷ When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. ¹⁸ On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, “To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi^[e] of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates— ¹⁹ the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites,²⁰ Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, ²¹ Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites.”

        This covenant of the Word spoken by God and received by Abram determines the structure, dynamic and meaning of the human race and all history.

         The symbol of the furnace in the vision is the death to the protagonist who does not keep his side of the covenant. By sinning, we did not keep our side. Nevertheless, God, Who is Love as total Self-gift, becomes man and takes our place and fulfills the covenant of the Word such that the promise of the Lord to Abraham will be fulfilled in Christ, i.e. that the Abraham’s paternity in faith will extend to the ends of the earth. There will be one God, one faith, one Believing Man, one people.

        So that the Word of God to Abram be fulfilled, and man having failed through sin, God becomes man and takes his place in the covenant relation, and freely goes to death for us. Christology [one divine Person, two natures: divine and human, their relation being the divine Person) becomes the explanation of reality. Jesus Christ is the way the reality of the Word of God is fulfilled, that is, for man to be man he must receive the Word of God into himself and make the sincere gift of himself; and the Word of God can extend to all peoples in that Christ, Who is the Word of God, is the very meaning of man.

        Let’s say it differently. Once God becomes man and enters man’s side of the covenant, the universality of one religion [which is not a religion but an anthropology becomes possible because man as Christ transcends “religions” as positivist truth-claims and can reach to the experience of imaging God that all ‘religions” reflect on and objectify in concepts. Christ, the God-man, is not a religious figure but the definitive anthropology of man. If God became man, and we can experience Him by His extending sacraments to us, we can know Him experientially in ourselves [More to the point, we can “know” Him by living His Life which is self-transcendence as self-gift. St. Josemaria’s experience is critical here as “Ipse Christus”]. Since “religions” are practices of dealing with a “god” who is the greatest and most in a human category, say, First Cause, First Mover, Necessary Being, Perfect Being, Final Cause,   Hence, they are offered as different “religions.” But again, once God becomes Man, every man has access to God in every authentic performance of being man. Hence, God in Christ makes it possible that there be one religion that is constructed on the mystical anthropology of the God-man.[1]

 The problems Ratzinger offers are the nature of the Covenant of God with Abram and the Testimony of God through Moses. The problem: the Covenant is for all time extends to all people. The Torah (Ten commandments and the Law) seems to be proposed to the Jews only as their law as a concrete people. But Christ teaches that the Torah as ten commandments is for all people, and is concretely Himself: “You have heard of old…, but I say to you…” (Mt. 5). That is, it seems that the covenant with Abram is a “testament” with Abram, and only him. The same with Moses. It seems that gave the Torah to Moses as prophet to the Jews only to guide them as a people.

   But the whole thing changes on the basis of the Christology. Christ is at once Perfect God and Perfect Man. And so the testaments to both Abram and Moses are really covenants (a two sided operation in which God and man are two free and responsible protagonists) (Ratzinger, 71), or testaments (one sided from God to man). In the covenant with Abram, the business of cutting the animals in half with the fire passing between them presages what will happen to either side if he fails in fidelity. The puzzling part was how God could be a protagonist threatened with death. The Christology of Chalcedon and Constantinople III give the answer. For love of man, God takes up man’s covenantal responsibility and takes his place for the failure of sin. “God is faithful, for he has put himself under a debt to us, not as if he had received anything from us, but by promising us so much. The word of promise was too little for him: he wanted to bind himself in writing, by giving us, as it were, a handwritten version of his promises.”[2] Notice now that God enters into man’s side of the covenant, universality becomes possible because Christ, as God-man, transcends “religions” as positivist truth claims and can reach to the imaging experience of all “religions” – and therefore all become one. Ecumenism is built on this Christological perspective.

Answers from the CCC: #528: “The Epiphany is the manifestation of Jesus as Messiah of Israel, Son of God and Savior of the world. The great feast of Epiphany celebrates the adoration of Jesus by the wise men (magi) from the East, together with his baptism in the Jordan and the wedding feast at Cana in Galilee.²¹² In the magi, representatives of the neighboring pagan religions, the Gospel sees the first-fruits of the nations, who welcome the good news of salvation through the Incarnation. The magi's coming to Jerusalem in order to pay homage to the king of the Jews shows that they seek in Israel, in the messianic light of the star of David, the one who will be king of the nations.²¹³ Their coming means that pagans can discover Jesus and worship him as Son of God and Saviour of the world only by turning towards the Jews and receiving from them the messianic promise as contained in the Old Testament.²¹⁴ The Epiphany shows that "the full number of the nations" now takes its "place in the family of the patriarchs", and acquires Israelitica dignitas²¹⁵ (is made "worthy of the heritage of Israel").

Ratzinger:  this text “sees in the Magi the origin of the Church formed out of te pagans; the Magi afford an enduring reflection on the way of the pagans.

            “We can see how the CCC views the relationship between Jews and the nations of the world as communicated by Jesus; in addition, it offers at the same time a first presentation of the mission of Jesus. Accordingly, we say that the mission of Jesus is to unite Jews and pagans into a single People of God in which the universalist promises of the SS are fulfilled that speak again and again of the nations worshiping the God of Israel…”[3]

            What does all this mean? That Jesus Christ – the one God - is Himself the fulfillment of the Jewish Covenant of faith. Old and New Testaments, Jesus and the Sacred Scripture of Israel, appear here as indivisible. The new thrust of his mission to unify Israel and the nations corresponds to the prophetic thrust of the Old Testament itself.

* * * * * *

Dominus Iesus: CDF August 6, 2000.

VI. THE CHURCH AND THE OTHER RELIGIONS
IN RELATION TO SALVATION

20.  From what has been stated above, some points follow that are necessary for theological reflection as it explores the relationship of the Church and the other religions to salvation.

Above all else, it must be firmly believed that “the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and baptism (cf.Mk 16:16; Jn 3:5), and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through baptism as through a door”.⁷⁷ This doctrine must not be set against the universal salvific will of God (cf. 1 Tim 2:4); “it is necessary to keep these two truths together, namely, the real possibility of salvation in Christ for all mankind and the necessity of the Church for this salvation”.⁷⁸

The Church is the “universal sacrament of salvation”,⁷⁹ since, united always in a mysterious way to the Saviour Jesus Christ, her Head, and subordinated to him, she has, in God's plan, an indispensable relationship with the salvation of every human being.⁸⁰  For those who are not formally and visibly members of the Church, “salvation in Christ is accessible by virtue of a grace which, while having a mysterious relationship to the Church, does not make them formally part of the Church, but enlightens them in a way which is accommodated to their spiritual and material situation. This grace comes from Christ; it is the result of his sacrifice and is communicated by the Holy Spirit”;⁸¹ it has a relationship with the Church, which “according to the plan of the Father, has her origin in the mission of the Son and the Holy Spirit”.⁸²

21.  With respect to the way in which the salvific grace of God — which is always given by means of Christ in the Spirit and has a mysterious relationship to the Church — comes to individual non-Christians, the Second Vatican Council limited itself to the statement that God bestows it “in ways known to himself”.⁸³  Theologians are seeking to understand this question more fully.  Their work is to be encouraged, since it is certainly useful for understanding better God's salvific plan and the ways in which it is accomplished. However, from what has been stated above about the mediation of Jesus Christ and the “unique and special relationship”⁸⁴which the Church has with the kingdom of God among men — which in substance is the universal kingdom of Christ the Saviour — it is clear that it would be contrary to the faith to consider the Church as one way of salvation alongside those constituted by the other religions, seen as complementary to the Church or substantially equivalent to her, even if these are said to be converging with the Church toward the eschatological kingdom of God.

Certainly, the various religious traditions contain and offer religious elements which come from God,⁸⁵ and which are part of what “the Spirit brings about in human hearts and in the history of peoples, in cultures, and religions”.⁸⁶ Indeed, some prayers and rituals of the other religions may assume a role of preparation for the Gospel, in that they are occasions or pedagogical helps in which the human heart is prompted to be open to the action of God.⁸⁷ One cannot attribute to these, however, a divine origin or an ex opere operato salvific efficacy, which is proper to the Christian sacraments.⁸⁸ Furthermore, it cannot be overlooked that other rituals, insofar as they depend on superstitions or other errors (cf. 1 Cor 10:20-21), constitute an obstacle to salvation.⁸⁹

22.  With the coming of the Saviour Jesus Christ, God has willed that the Church founded by him be the instrument for the salvation of all humanity (cf. Acts 17:30-31).⁹⁰ This truth of faith does not lessen the sincere respect which the Church has for the religions of the world, but at the same time, it rules out, in a radical way, that mentality of indifferentism “characterized by a religious relativism which leads to the belief that ‘one religion is as good as another'”.⁹¹ If it is true that the followers of other religions can receive divine grace, it is also certain thatobjectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation.⁹²  However, “all the children of the Church should nevertheless remember that their exalted condition results, not from their own merits, but from the grace of Christ. If they fail to respond in thought, word, and deed to that grace, not only shall they not be saved, but they shall be more severely judged”.⁹³ One understands then that, following the Lord's command (cf. Mt 28:19-20) and as a requirement of her love for all people, the Church “proclaims and is in duty bound to proclaim without fail, Christ who is the way, the truth, and the life (Jn 14:6). In him, in whom God reconciled all things to himself (cf. 2 Cor 5:18-19), men find the fullness of their religious life”.⁹⁴

In inter-religious dialogue as well, the mission ad gentes “today as always retains its full force and necessity”.⁹⁵  “Indeed, God ‘desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth' (1 Tim 2:4); that is, God wills the salvation of everyone through the knowledge of the truth. Salvation is found in the truth. Those who obey the promptings of the Spirit of truth are already on the way of salvation. But the Church, to whom this truth has been entrusted, must go out to meet their desire, so as to bring them the truth. Because she believes in God's universal plan of salvation, the Church must be missionary”.⁹⁶ Inter-religious dialogue, therefore, as part of her evangelizing mission, is just one of the actions of the Church in her mission ad gentes.⁹⁷Equality, which is a presupposition of inter-religious dialogue, refers to the equal personal dignity of the parties in dialogue, not to doctrinal content, nor even less to the position of Jesus Christ — who is God himself made man — in relation to the founders of the other religions. Indeed, the Church, guided by charity and respect for freedom,⁹⁸ must be primarily committed to proclaiming to all people the truth definitively revealed by the Lord, and to announcing the necessity of conversion to Jesus Christ and of adherence to the Church through Baptism and the other sacraments, in order to participate fully in communion with God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Thus, the certainty of the universal salvific will of God does not diminish, but rather increases the duty and urgency of the proclamation of salvation and of conversion to the Lord Jesus Christ.

* * * * * * *

            I. THE CHURCH IS ONE

"The sacred mystery of the Church's unity" (UR 2)

813 The Church is one because of her source: "the highest exemplar and source of this mystery is the unity, in the Trinity of Persons, of one God, the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit."²⁵⁹ The Church is one because of her founder: for "the Word made flesh, the prince of peace, reconciled all men to God by the cross, . . . restoring the unity of all in one people and one body."²⁶⁰ The Church is one because of her "soul": "It is the Holy Spirit, dwelling in those who believe and pervading and ruling over the entire Church, who brings about that wonderful communion of the faithful and joins them together so intimately in Christ that he is the principle of the Church's unity."²⁶¹ Unity is of the essence of the Church:

What an astonishing mystery! There is one Father of the universe, one Logos of the universe, and also one Holy Spirit, everywhere one and the same; there is also one virgin become mother, and I should like to call her "Church."²⁶²

814 From the beginning, this one Church has been marked by a great diversity which comes from both the variety of God's gifts and the diversity of those who receive them. Within the unity of the People of God, a multiplicity of peoples and cultures is gathered together. Among the Church's members, there are different gifts, offices, conditions, and ways of life. "Holding a rightful place in the communion of the Church there are also particular Churches that retain their own traditions."²⁶³ The great richness of such diversity is not opposed to the Church's unity. Yet sin and the burden of its consequences constantly threaten the gift of unity. and so the Apostle has to exhort Christians to "maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace."²⁶⁴

815 What are these bonds of unity? Above all, charity "binds everything together in perfect harmony."²⁶⁵ But the unity of the pilgrim Church is also assured by visible bonds of communion: 
- profession of one faith received from the Apostles; 
-common celebration of divine worship, especially of the sacraments; 
- apostolic succession through the sacrament of Holy Orders, maintaining the fraternal concord of God's family.²⁶⁶

816 "The sole Church of Christ [is that] which our Savior, after his Resurrection, entrusted to Peter's pastoral care, commissioning him and the other apostles to extend and rule it.... This Church, constituted and organized as a society in the present world, subsists in (subsistit in) in) the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him."²⁶⁷

The Second Vatican Council's Decree on Ecumenism explains: "For it is through Christ's Catholic Church alone, which is the universal help toward salvation, that the fullness of the means of salvation can be obtained. It was to the apostolic college alone, of which Peter is the head, that we believe that our Lord entrusted all the blessings of the New Covenant, in order to establish on earth the one Body of Christ into which all those should be fully incorporated who belong in any way to the People of God."²⁶⁸

Wounds to unity

817 In fact, "in this one and only Church of God from its very beginnings there arose certain rifts, which the Apostle strongly censures as damnable. But in subsequent centuries much more serious dissensions appeared and large communities became separated from full communion with the Catholic Church - for which, often enough, men of both sides were to blame."²⁶⁹ The ruptures that wound the unity of Christ's Body - here we must distinguish heresy, apostasy, and schism²⁷⁰ - do not occur without human sin:

Where there are sins, there are also divisions, schisms, heresies, and disputes. Where there is virtue, however, there also are harmony and unity, from which arise the one heart and one soul of all believers.²⁷¹

818 "However, one cannot charge with the sin of the separation those who at present are born into these communities [that resulted from such separation] and in them are brought up in the faith of Christ, and the Catholic Church accepts them with respect and affection as brothers .... All who have been justified by faith in Baptism are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers in the Lord by the children of the Catholic Church."²⁷²

819 "Furthermore, many elements of sanctification and of truth"²⁷³ are found outside the visible confines of the Catholic Church: "the written Word of God; the life of grace; faith, hope, and charity, with the other interior gifts of the Holy Spirit, as well as visible elements."²⁷⁴ Christ's Spirit uses these Churches and ecclesial communities as means of salvation, whose power derives from the fullness of grace and truth that Christ has entrusted to the Catholic Church. All these blessings come from Christ and lead to him,²⁷⁵ and are in themselves calls to "Catholic unity."²⁷⁶

Toward unity

820 "Christ bestowed unity on his Church from the beginning. This unity, we believe, subsists in the Catholic Church as something she can never lose, and we hope that it will continue to increase until the end of time."²⁷⁷ Christ always gives his Church the gift of unity, but the Church must always pray and work to maintain, reinforce, and perfect the unity that Christ wills for her. This is why Jesus himself prayed at the hour of his Passion, and does not cease praying to his Father, for the unity of his disciples: "That they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be one in us, . . . so that the world may know that you have sent me."²⁷⁸ The desire to recover the unity of all Christians is a gift of Christ and a call of the Holy Spirit.²⁷⁹

821 Certain things are required in order to respond adequately to this call: 
- a permanent renewal of the Church in greater fidelity to her vocation; such renewal is the driving-force of the movement toward unity;²⁸⁰ 
- conversion of heart as the faithful "try to live holier lives according to the Gospel";²⁸¹ for it is the unfaithfulness of the members to Christ's gift which causes divisions; 
- prayer in common, because "change of heart and holiness of life, along with public and private prayer for the unity of Christians, should be regarded as the soul of the whole ecumenical movement, and merits the name 'spiritual ecumenism;"'²⁸² 

Since true religion is the anthropology of experiencing Christ by self-gift which is not reducible to conceptual formulas alone (this would be ideology). Ratzinger writes that “the encounter of the religions is not possible by renouncing truth but only by a deeper entering into it. Skepticism does not unite people. Nor does mere pragmatism. Both renunciation of truth and conviction does not elevate man but hands him over to the calculations of utility and robs him of his greatness…. What we need is the willingness ot look behind the alien appearances and look for the deeper truth hidden there.

            “Furthermore, I need to be willing to allow my narrow understanding of truth to be broken down. I shall learn my own truth better if I understand the other person (note “person”) and allow myself to be moved along the road to the God who is ever greater, certain that I never hold the whole truth about God in my own hands but am always a learner, on pilgrimage toward it, on a path that has no end.”[4]

-fraternal knowledge of each other;²⁸³ 
- ecumenical formation of the faithful and especially of priests;²⁸⁴ 
- dialogue among theologians and meetings among Christians of the different churches and communities;²⁸⁵ 
- collaboration among Christians in various areas of service to mankind.²⁸⁶ "Human service" is the idiomatic phrase.

822 Concern for achieving unity "involves the whole Church, faithful and clergy alike."²⁸⁷ But we must realize "that this holy objective - the reconciliation of all Christians in the unity of the one and only Church of Christ - transcends human powers and gifts." That is why we place all our hope "in the prayer of Christ for the Church, in the love of the Father for us, and in the power of the Holy Spirit."²⁸⁸

---

[1] Hence, all become one. More, if God becomes man in Christ, and each man can become Christ through Baptism, then all can experience God in themselves by becoming Christ in the practice of going out of themselves in ordinary non-religions-secular life.

[2] Augustine En in ps 109; Ratzinger, op. cit. “Many Religions…” 72.

[3] J. Ratzinger, ‘Many Religions – one Covenant: Israel, the Church and theWorld,” Ignatius (1999) 26 à

[4] J. Ratzinger, “Many Religions – One Covenant,” Ignatius (1999) 110.

Remarks on Whittaker Chambers "Witness" - C. J. McCloskey

WITNESS
by Whittaker Chambers - reprint published by Regnery History, 2014

"A man is not primarily a witness against something. That is only incidental to the fact that he is a witness for something." — Whittaker Chambers, Witness, 1952

"Witness," by Whittaker Chambers, is one of the most important books of the last century, and I predict it's a book that will never go out of print or at least prove unavailable in one way or another to anybody using the new technologies!

Why is that? Because it is a great true story of conversion from a false god to the true God of the Bible, set against a backdrop of the mid-20th century battle between good and evil.

I first read Witness as a high school student and then again at Columbia University, where Chambers also studied under still-famous professors such as Mark Van Doren.

Evidently it was in his time at Columbia that he was attracted to communism. Without telling the whole story, which really must be read in solitude, he fell for the great line of communism as the savior of humanity.

Unlike the many armchair communists among intellectuals of his time, Chambers from the start joined as someone actually wanting to effect change, identifying deeply with those suffering poverty and injustice (reading Les Miserables was a groundbreaking experience in this regard). Within a few years he went underground as a communist spy.

His break with communism came in stages. At one point in his journey he realized, "Economics is not the central problem of this century. It is a relative problem which can be solved in relative ways. Faith is the central problem of this age." Interestingly enough, when Chambers finally broke completely with communism he did not immediately denounce the agents with whom he had worked, the best-known being Harvard blueblood Alger Hiss, a lawyer who worked for the State Department and was a member of the circle advising President Roosevelt on foreign affairs.

Would that Hiss had likewise seen the light and confessed, but evidently he never repented. After the collapse of the Soviet empire, government records unearthed there showed clearly that Hiss had, indeed, functioned as a communist spy for many years, receiving orders ultimately from Moscow.

CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE ONLINE...
http://www.catholicity.com/mccloskey/witness.html

Offerings from Charles Taylor and Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) as an analysis of cause and response to the Nihilism in both the Christian West and Islamic East.

I offer this by Michael Ortiz:

Distorting Christian History to Defend Islam:WSJ (February 12, 2015, op. ed)

Secularism didn’t save the West from religious excesses, and it won’t save us from jihadists.

"In an attempt to find a peaceful alternative for those in the Islamic world who advocate violence for political and religious goals, Christians in the West shouldn’t distort the history of Christianity, or stand idly by while others do so. Letting this version of events shape perceptions of Christian history invariably means a portrait of religion as a force of darkness, while science and technology will always be beacons of sanity and light.

"The narrative portraying religious conviction as antithetical to reasoned comity among people and nations is easy enough to fall into. At the national prayer breakfast last week, for instance, President Obama compared the excesses of the Crusades and the Inquisition to the terrorism of today’s radical Islam. The president went on to condemn (rightly) those who advance their religious convictions with violence.

"But what he and many others miss is the conviction that Western core values come from a faith in which God enters into human history precisely to save the world from the erring reason that fails, among other things, to recognize that terrorism is an affront to God and humanity.

"The all-too-common narrative goes like this: Centuries ago, Catholics and Protestants gladly burned heretics up and down Europe by the thousands until, thank God—or All Powerful Goodness, as Ben Franklin would put it—the rise of Enlightenment thinkers banished the barbarity that is somehow native to religious fervor. Only with the liberalizing mandates of Vatican II (1962-65), we’re told, did Catholicism—usually the main boogeyman in this version of history—come to grips with the idea of democracy and religious freedom, and finally extinguish the last embers of the Inquisition.

"This narrative is false according to the historical record and to the origins and abiding ethos of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant. Historians call this the la leyenda negra—the “Black Legend”—because it blackens the name of Catholicism in particular and religion in general. According to this legend, the Inquisition is on a continuum with the Holocaust and the terrors of Stalinism.

"Yet objective historians realize that in the most infamous example, in Spain, several popes condemned the Inquisition’s excesses. Moreover, the 6,832 members of the clergy executed by the Spanish Republican Red Terror in 1936 is more than twice the number of those executed in 345 years of the Inquisition in Spain.

"Far from being an enemy of reason and peace, Christianity’s overwhelming message through the centuries has been one of tolerance, a message that underpins many of the values that people of all faiths, and of no faith, can live by. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI ’s work as a theologian has done great service in trying to correct the erroneous view that faith and civil tolerance must always be opposed.

"He looks forthrightly at the negative aspects of the rise of democracies in the West, while not forgetting their positive legacies. As then- Pope Benedict pointed out in a 2005 address to the Roman Curia—the church’s governing body—popes of the 19th century condemned democracy because so many of its exponents were claiming “to embrace with their knowledge the whole of reality to its limit, stubbornly proposing to make” God completely “superfluous.” He thus reminds us that a Western culture beset by nihilism cannot provide a way out of the nihilism of the jihadist.

"If we say to followers of Islam that the only way to rid the faith of extremists is to accept “modernity,” are we also asking them to accept a world view that embraces a growing agnosticism about the fundamentals of civilized living?

"While we celebrate our freedoms, such freedoms also give us rampant abortion, commercialized eroticism and laws that make marriage anything one wishes it to mean. If we want the Muslim world to emulate our institutions of democracy, perhaps we should give them reasons for believing that democracy doesn’t automatically have to jettison publicly held moralities that actually ensure those freedoms in the first place.

"Benedict XVI saw with his own eyes a Europe in flames after the Allies defeated Hitler ’s self-made religion of blood. Yet he rightly remembered in that 2005 address the hope of the mid-20th century for a state that was “not neutral regarding values but alive, drawing from the great ethical sources opened by Christianity.” If we betray this hope today, it will not only be the West that suffers."  

Mr. Ortiz teaches at the Heights School, in Potomac, Md.

            The following phrase of Michael Ortiz: “a Western culture beset by nihilism cannot provide a way out of the nihilism of the jihadist,” awakened a Ratzinger caveat in me that I had read and internalized from a 1993 CWR: “And Marxism Gave Birth to… NIHILISM.” But before getting to Ratzinger, let me offer the take of Charles Taylor on the causes of secularist modernity. 

Charles Taylor: The Principal Cause of Modernity: The Christian Theocracy of Christendom (A Corrupted Version of Christian Life - a rationalization of faith. Pope Francis calls this a reduction of faith to ideology)      

He (Taylor) says in his “foreword” to the interview of Ivan Illich by David Caley.[1] He writes that “Illich argues that Western modernity finds its original impetus in a mutation (all underline mine) of Latin Christendom, a mutation in which the Church began to take with ultimate seriousness its power to shape and form people to the demands of the Gospel. I had been working for a number of years on a project to account for the rise of secular civilization and the basic thesis of my account was similar to Illich’s. But I had no idea of the parallels until David Cayley brought Illich’s thought to public attention in a radio series a few years ago…

            “What I call a ‘mutation’ in Latin Christendom could be described as an attempt to make over the lives of Christians and their social order, so as to make them conform thoroughly to the demands of their faith. I am talking not of a particular, revolutionary moment but of a long, ascending series of attempts to establish a Christian order, of which the Reformation is a key phase. As I see it, these attempts show a progressive impatience with older modes of religious life in which certain traditional collective, ritualistic forms coexisted uneasily with the demands of individual devotion and ethical reform … In Latin Christendom, the attempt was made to impose on everyone a more individually committed and Christocentric religion of devotion and action, and to suppress or even abolish older, supposedly ‘magical’ or ‘superstitious’ forms of collective ritual practice.

            “Allied with a neo-Stoic outlook, this became the charter for a series of attempts to establish new forms of social order. These held to reduce violence and disorder and to create populations of relatively pacific and productive artisans and peasants who were more and more induced/forced into the new forms of devotional practice and moral behavior, be this in Protestant England, Holland, or later the American colonies, or in Counter-Reformation France, or in the Germany of the Polizeistaat.

            “This creation of a new, civilized, ‘polite’ order succeeded beyond what its first originators could have hoped for, and this in turn led to a new reading of what a Christian order might be, one which was seen more and more in ‘immanent’ terms. (The polite, civilized order is the Christina order.) This version of Christianity was shorn of much of its ‘transcendent’ content, and was thus open to a new departure, in which the understanding of good order – what we could call the modern moral order – could be embraced outside of the original theological, Providential framework, and in certain cases even against it (as by Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, and in another way David Hume).

            “The secularization of Western culture, and, indeed, widespread disbelief in God have arisen in close symbiosis with this belief in a moral order of rights-bearing individuals who are destined (by God or Nature) to act for mutual benefit. Such an order thus rejects the earlier honor ethic which exalted the warrior, just as the new order also tends to occlude any transcendent horizon… This understanding of order has profoundly shaped the modern West’s dominant forms of social imaginary: the market economy, the public sphere, the sovereign ‘people.’

            “This, in bare outline, is my account of secularization, one in which I think Illich basically concurs. But he describes it as the corrupting of Christianity. To illustrate he draws, again and again, on the familiar parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus’ story about an outsider who helps a wounded Jew. For Illich this story represents the possibility of mutual belonging between two strangers. Jesus points to a new kind of fittingness, belonging together, between the Samaritan and the wounded man. They are fitted together in a proportionality which comes from God, which is that of agape, and which became possible because God became flesh. The enfleshment of God extends outward, through such new links as the Samaritan makes with the Jew, into a network which we call the Church. But this is a net work, not a categorical grouping [me: an “institution”] that is, it is a skein of relations which link particular, unique, enfleshed people to each other, rather than a grouping of people together on the grounds of their sharing some important property. Corruption occurs when the Church begins to respond to the failure and inadequacy of a motivation grounded in a sense of mutual belonging by erecting a system. This system incorporates a code or set  of rules, a set of disciplines to make us internalize these rules, and a system of rationally constructed organizations – private and public bureaucracies, universities, schools – to make sure we carry out what the rules demand. All these become second nature to us. We grow accustomed to decentering ourselves from our lived, embodied experience in order to become disciplined, rational, disengaged subjects. From within this perspective, the significance of the Good Samaritan story appears obvious: it is a stage on the road to universal morality of rules.

            “Modern ethics illustrates this fetishism of rules and norms… Not just law but ethics is seen in terms of rules - as by Immanuel Kant, for example The spirit of the law is important, where it is so, because it too expresses some general principle. For Kant the principle is that we should put regulation by reason, or humanity as rational agency, first. In contrast, as we have see, the network of agape puts first the gut-driven response to a particular person. This respone cannot be reduced to a general rule. Because we cannot live up to this – ‘Because of the hardness of your hearts’ – we need rules. It is not that we could just abolish them, but modern liberal civilization fetishizes them. We think we have to find the right system of rules, of norms, and then follow them through unfailingly. We cannot see any more the awkward way these rules fit enfleshed human beings, we fail to notice the dilemmas they have to  sweep under the carpet: for instance, justice versus mercy; or justice versus a renewed relation, as we saw in South Africa with its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a shining attempt to get beyond the existing codes of retribution.

            “Within this perspective, something crucial in the Good Samaritan story gets lost. A world ordered by this system of rules, disciplines, and organizations can only see contingency as an obstacle, even an enemy and a threat. The ideal is to master it, to extend the web of control so that contingency is reduced to a minimum. By contrast, contingency is an essential feature of the story of the Good Samaritan as an answer to the question that prompted it. Who is my neighbor? The one you happen across, stumble across, who is wounded there in the road. Sheer accident also has a hand in shaping the proportionate, the appropriate response. It is telling us something, answering our deepest questions: this is your neighbor. But in order to hear this, we have to escape from the monomaniacal perspective in which contingency can only be an adversary requiring control. Illich develops this theme profoundly …

            “This is why Illich’s work is so important to us today. I have found it more than useful, even inspiring, because I have been working over many years to find a nuanced understanding of Western modernity. This would be one which would both give a convincing account of how modernity arose and allow for a balanced account of what it good, even great, in it, and of what is less good, even dangerous and destructive. Illich’s understanding of our modern condition as a spinoff from a ‘corrupted’ Christianity captures one of the important historical vectors that brought about the modern age and allows us to see how good and bad are closely interwoven in it. Ours is a civilization concerned to relieve suffering and enhance human well-being, on a universal scale unprecedented in history, and which at the same time threatens to imprison us in forms that can turn alien and dehumanizing. This should take us beyond the facile and noisy debate between the boosters and knockers of modernity or the ‘Enlightenment project.’

            “Illich, in his overall vision and in the penetrating historical detail of his arguments, offers a new road map, a way of coming to understand what has been jeopardized in our decentered, objectifying, discarnate way of remaking ourselves , and he does so without simply falling into the clichés of anti-modernism.

            “Codes, even the best codes, can become idolatrous traps that tempt us to complicity in violence. Illich reminds us not to become totally invested in the code – even the best code of peace-loving, egalitarian variety – of liberalism. We should find the center of our spiritual lives beyond the code, deeper than the code, in networks of living concern, which are not to be sacrificed to the code, which must even from time to time subvert it. This message comes out of a certain theology, but it should be heard by everybody….” Charles Taylor.[1]

   Joseph Ratzinger... 

[Catholic World Report January (1993) 54]

... makes the same point:  to the statement put to him that "nihilism is rapidly taking the place of Marxism," he respondes: "it is explained by the encroachment of relativism and subjectivism, an inevitable consequence of a world overwhelmed by the alleged certainties of natural or applied science. Only what can be tested and proved appears as rational. [Sensible] experience has become the only criterion guaranteeing truth. Anything that cannot be subjected to mathematical or experimental verification is regarded as irrational. 
   "This restriction of reason has the result that we are left in almost total darkness regarding some essential dimensions of life. The meaning of man, the bases of ethics, the question nof God cannot subjected to reational experience, verified by mathematical formulae. And so they are left to subject sensibility alone. This is serious because if, in a society, the bases of ethical beha ior are abandoned to subjectivity alone, released from common motives for being and living, handed over to pragmatism, then it is man himslf who is trheatened.
   "The great ideologies [me: Marxism and liberal capitalism] have been able to give a certain ethical foundation to society. But today, Marxism is crumbling and liberal ideology is so split into fragments that it no longer has a common, solid, coherent view of man and his future. In the present situation of emptiness, there looms the terrible danger of nihilism, that is to say, the denial or absence of all fundamental moral reference for the conduct of social life. This danger becomes visible in the new forms of terrorism." 
         That is to say...
"Even though perverted, the political, social terrorism of the 1960s had a certain kind of moral ideal. But today, the terrorism of drug abuse, of the Mafia, of attackes on foreigners, in Germany and elsewhere, no longer has any moral basis [me: considere ISIS]. In this era of sovereign subjectivity, people act for the sole pleasure of acting, without any reference other than the satisfction of 'myself.'
     "Just as the terrorism that was born from the Marxism of yesterday put its finger on the anomalies of our social order, in the same way the nihilistic terrorism of today ought to show us the course to be followed for a reflection on the bases of a new ethical and collective reason."

Blogger: What does that mean? It means that we have to confront the nihilism in the West (in ourselves) that has produced such a total subhumanity such as ISIS [because the culture of the U.S. is now a global culture], and broaden our reason by developing the culture toward the peripheries that Francis is calling for. Only the beginnings of a liberation from self will overcome nihilism. As abstract and impossible as that may sound, all we have to do is begin and other powers will emerge. 

The Epistemology of Regensburg

“A critique of modern reason from within”

          Benedict XVI ended his talk:

“And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly….

          “The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application….

          “We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, of we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons….

          “Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions.

          “A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. At the same time… modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which it methodology has to be based.

          “Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought – to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding….

          “The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur – this is the program with which a theology grounded in biblical faith enters into the debates of our time.

---

[1] David Caley, “The Rivers North of the Future,” Anansi (2005)XI-XIV.

[2] (The Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI, `Let God’s Light Shine Forth,’ ed. Robert Moynihan, Doubleday [2005] 34-35).

Educating Youth By Personal Encounter - An Experience

These are two important pieces on formation of youth: by Luigi Giussani and Pope Francis on Luigi Giussani The Risk of Education: Discovering Our Ultimate Destiny (Luigi Giussani, 2001) BY: David John Seel, Jr.

For those who consciously connect apprenticeship to Jesus with its cultural impact, there is a new form of ecumenism emerging. Among some thinkers the Reformed emphasis on cultural transformation is being fused with a Catholic sacramental vision of reality. Others are incorporating similar views into an expanded understanding of kingdom living that is both deeply spiritual and profoundly earthy. For twenty years, the theme of “holiness in the heart of the world” has been characteristic of the Catholic Fraternity of Communion and Liberation. Begun in 1954, this lay renewal movement seeks to bring Christ into the woof and warp of everyday living. Its founder is Father Luigi Giussani, for many years a high school teacher in Milan, Italy. He is the author of more than twenty books and in 1995 won Italy’s prestigious National Catholic Culture Prize. He regularly calls modern skeptics to affirm an openness to existence, “a capacity to comprehend and affirm reality in all of its dimensions.” Reminiscent of C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, Giussani challenges modern unbelievers to allow the full weight of God’s inescapable reality to impinge on one’s beliefs and loves. This Catholic thinker remains largely unknown within Protestant circles. But his latest book, The Risk of Education: Discovering Our Ultimate Destiny, warrants a wider readership. The book is a provocative study of Christian education and spiritual formation. For Monsignor Giussani there is no reality apart from Christ—a fact that must be understood existentially and verified personally. This, he argues, is the core mission of education. In contrast, what is offered today as Christian education in many churches and schools is woefully ineffective. Both Christian and secular polls show there is no measurable statistical difference in behavior between teenagers who attend these programs and those who do not. Giussani suggests a possible remedy; thus it’s important for youth ministers and Christian educators to familiarize themselves with his work. He writes, “Only a faith arising from life experience and confirmed by it (and, therefore, relevant to life’s needs) could be sufficiently strong to survive in a world where everything points in the opposite direction.” Giussani’s pedagogy involves the following five components. Total Meaning of Reality “To educate,” Giussani writes, “means to help the human soul enter into the totality of the real.” Genuine education must face the deeper “why” questions. There can be no complete understanding of reality that doesn’t also address meaning. As one high school student observed, “They make us study a great number of things, but they don’t help us to understand their meaning, and so we don’t know why we have to study.” An education filled with “whats” without “whys” is an education in practical nihilism. The most common adolescent response to such an education in meaninglessness is fanatical single-issue activism or casual nothing-matters indifference. Giussani believes that conscientious spiritual formation by Christian parents is routinely undermined by their choice of secular schools. “The status of the family as an educator is particularly reflected in the collaborators they choose for their children’s education. It is surprising to watch the common spectacle of families who, after teaching specific beliefs for years, don’t worry about the way in which their children will test them out during adolescence. In this way, they unwittingly but nonetheless disastrously allow the ‘neutral,’ secular school to continue unhampered its work of destruction and disorientation. I would like to stress that a secular school does not just threaten certain values; more radically, it threatens the integrity of the student’s soul, his vital energy, and any conception of life in which his family has educated him.” Explanatory Hypothesis All education begins with an explanatory hypothesis. Learned from parents and peers, every person begins with a set of assumptions about reality. At first these assumptions are held without question. But for convictions to become one’s own and to grow into adult maturity, it is necessary that these initial assumptions become a problem. This is the most strategic period for Christian education. However, in our postmodern society many young people grow up without a given tradition or starting point. These adolescents start processing life in a void. Life for them is a series of negations: nothing is true, nothing is stable. Consequently, nothing matters. From such beginnings, a teenager’s psychological and spiritual development is intrinsically harmed. “Today, more than ever, society is the sovereign educator or perhaps more correctly, mis-educator. In this climate, the educational crisis appears first as a lack of awareness.” True learning requires a point of departure, a hypothesis with which to compare new ideas. Such is the marked advantage of children raised in genuinely Christian homes. Here a given tradition is the starting point for the child’s intellectual and psychological development. Present Personal Authority However, a young adult is incapable of moving from tradition to conviction without the help of a teacher or guide. Father Giussani writes, “Psychologically, a genuine dependence on a total meaning of reality requires that the student not engage in the verification process alone, as an independent ‘abstract’ undertaking: he must do it in community.” This is precisely the kind of community that is impossible in secular schools where pluralism and the assumptions of neutrality undermine a unified worldview. Secular schools affirm fragmentation and subjectivism. In contrast, Giussani argues that the present, personal authority of a teacher is indispensable in Christian education. It is the educator who embodies and makes the explanatory hypothesis real. “The educational role of a person with true authority is first of all one of coherence: a continual reminder of ultimate values and of our commitment to them, a steady standard for judging all of reality, and a stable safeguard of the constantly renewed link between the student’s shifting attitudes and the ultimate, total sense of reality.” All true education necessitates the embodied presence of a teacher who consistently lives the ideal. Education is incarnational at its core. Giussani explains, “To educate means to offer a proposal, this proposal will reach the student’s heart and move him only if it is carried by an energy originating from the presence of the educator.” Personal Verification The student must undertake a process of personal verification. “Even a clear presentation of the meaning of things and the real, intense authority of the educator is insufficient to meet the needs of the adolescent. He must instead be stimulated to personally confront his own origin. This means that the student must verify the traditional contents being offered to him, which can be done only if he himself takes the initiative: no one else can do it for him.” True Christian education must be more than indoctrination. To teach is to encounter the power of the imago dei—the other as a self-determining spiritual being. The student must be free to establish his or her convictions. Particularly in Christian schools, students must be allowed to challenge, raise questions, and express uncertainty. Teachers must work to respect the process and create a safe environment for critical inquiry. True convictions that will stand up under life’s pressures cannot be fostered in any other way. Risk of Freedom Giving the student freedom to question involves taking a risk. The spiritual moorings of a life are finally at stake. Students can be programmed to give the “spiritually correct” responses. They can tell parents, youth leaders, and Christian educators what they want to hear. But such students, if biblical truth is not also their own settled conviction, will fail life—the bigger test. In the end, Christian education is not about information transfer as much as life transformation. “The purpose of education is to fashion a new human being: for this reason, the active factors of the education process must guide the pupil to act with increasing independence and to face the world around him on his own. To do this, we must increasingly expose him to all the elements of his environment, while gradually allowing him more responsibility for his choices.” In the end, reality is the best teacher. Reality reveals what the student actually believes. It also reveals whether what they believe is true. It is only as the teacher steps back that out of the shadows the Truth, by which the teacher is inspired, assumes his place. Monsignor Luigi Giussani offers Christian educators a pedagogy that serves to confront the student’s heart with the total meaning of reality. “To educate means to help the human soul enter into the totality of the real.” In the end we want real truth, real convictions, real living. It’s quite a challenge for a parent or an educator, but nothing less will do. As I write these words, I have six weeks left to teach my high school seniors. Soon they will leave my apologetics classroom to face academic secularity and college social life. Have I done my job well? Are they ready? No one feels the risk of education more than Christian teachers who watch their students accept high school diplomas. It is then that we remember the words of John the Baptist, “He must increase, and I must decrease.”

* * * * * * * * * 

Pope Francis (as Cardinal Bergoglio) comments on Giussani’s “El Atractivo de Jesucristo:” [Book Fair, 2001, Buenos Aires]

“I agreed to present this book by Father Giussani for two reasons. The first and more personal one is the good that this man has done me, in my life as a priest, through the reading of his books and articles. The second reason is that I am convinced that his thought is profoundly human and reaches man’s innermost longings. I dare say that this is the most profound, and at the same time understandable, phenomenology of nostalgia as a transcendental fact. There is a phenomenology of nostalgia, nóstos algos, feeling called home, the experience of feeling attracted to what is most proper for us, most consonant with our being. In the context of Fr. Giussani’s reflections, we encounter instances of a real phenomenology of nostalgia.

“The book presented today, El atractivo de Jesucristo, is not a theological treatise, it is a dialogue of friendship; these are table conversations between Father Giussani and his disciples. It is not a book for intellectuals, but for people who are men and women. It is the description of that initial experience, which I shall refer to later on, of wonder which arises in dialogue about daily experience that is provoked and fascinated by the exceptionally human and divine presence and gaze of Jesus Christ. It is the story of a personal relationship–intense, mysterious, and concrete at the same time–of an impassioned and intelligent affection for the person of Jesus, and this enables Fr. Giussani to come to the threshold, as it were, of Mystery, to speak familiarly and intimately with Mystery.

“Everything in our life, today just as in Jesus’ time, begins with an encounter. An encounter with this Man, the carpenter of Nazareth, a man like all men and yet different. The first ones, John, Andrew, and Simon, felt themselves to be looked at into their very depths, read in their innermost being, and in them sprang forth a surprise, a wonder that instantly made them feel bound to Him, made them feel different.

“When Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love Me?”, “his ‘Yes’ was not the result of an effort of will, it was not the fruit of a ‘decision’ made by the young man Simon: it was the emergence, the coming to the surface of an entire vein of tenderness and adherence that made sense because of the esteem he had for Him–therefore an act of reason;” it was a reasonable act, “which is why he couldn’t not say ‘Yes.’”

“We cannot understand this dynamic of encounter which brings forth wonder and adherence if it has not been triggered–forgive me the use of this word–by mercy. Only someone who has encountered mercy, who has been caressed by the tenderness of mercy, is happy and comfortable with the Lord. I beg the theologians who are present not to turn me in to the Sant’Uffizio or to the Inquisition; however, forcing things a bit, I dare to say that the privileged locus of the encounter is the caress of the mercy of Jesus Christ on my sin.

“In front of this merciful embrace–and I continue along the lines of Giussani’s thought–we feel a real desire to respond, to change, to correspond; a new morality arises. We posit the ethical problem, an ethics which is born of the encounter, of this encounter which we have described up to now. Christian morality is not a titanic effort of the will, the effort of someone who decides to be consistent and succeeds, a solitary challenge in the face of the world. No. Christian morality is simply a response. It is the heartfelt response to a surprising, unforeseeable, “unjust” mercy (I shall return to this adjective). The surprising, unforeseeable, “unjust” mercy, using purely human criteria, of one who knows me, knows my betrayals and loves me just the same, appreciates me, embraces me, calls me again, hopes in me, and expects from me. This is why the Christian conception of morality is a revolution; it is not a never falling down but an always getting up again.

“As we shall see, this authentic, in a Christian sense, conception of morality which Giussani presents has nothing to do with the spiritualistic-type quietisms of which the shelves of the religious supermarkets of today are full. Trickery. Nor with the Pelagianism so fashionable today in its different, sophisticated manifestations. Pelagianism, underneath it all, is a remake of the Tower of Babel. The spiritualistic quietisms are efforts at prayer and immanent spirituality which never go beyond themselves.

“Jesus is encountered, just as 2,000 years ago, in a human presence, the Church, the company of those whom He assimilates to Himself, His Body, the sign and sacrament of His Presence. Reading this book, one is amazed and filled with admiration at the sight of such a personal and profound relationship with Jesus, and thinks it is unlikely to happen to him. When people say to Fr. Giussani, “How brave one has to be to say ‘Yes’ to Christ!” or, “This objection comes to my mind: it is evident that Fr. Giussani loves Jesus and I don’t love Him in the same way,” Giussani answers, “Why do you oppose what you think you don’t have to what you think I have? I have this yes, only this, and it would not cost you one iota more than it costs me.… Say “Yes” to Jesus. If I foresaw that tomorrow I would offend Him a thousand times, I would still say it.” Thérèse of Lisieux says almost exactly the same thing: “I say it, because if I did not say ‘Yes’ to Jesus I could not say ‘Yes’ to the stars in the sky or to your hair, the hairs on your head…” Nothing could be simpler: “I don’t know how it is, I don’t know how it might be: I know that I have to say ‘Yes.’ I can’t not say it,” and reasonably; that is to say, at every moment in his reflections in this book, Giussani has recourse to the reasonableness of experience.

“It is a question of starting to say “You” to Christ, and saying it often. It is impossible to desire it without asking for it. And if someone starts to ask for it, then he begins to change. Besides, if someone asks for it, it is because in the depths of his being he feels attracted, called, looked at, awaited. This is the experience of Augustine: there from the depths of my being, something attracts me toward Someone who looked for me first, is waiting for me first, is the almond flower of the prophets, the first to bloom in spring. It is the quality which God possesses and which I take the liberty of defining by using a Buenos Aires word: God, in this case Jesus Christ, always primerea, goes ahead of us. When we arrive, He is already there waiting.

“He who encounters Jesus Christ feels the impulse to witness Him or to give witness of what he has encountered, and this is the Christian calling. To go and give witness. You can’t convince anybody. The encounter occurs. You can prove that God exists, but you will never be able, using the force of persuasion, to make anyone encounter God. This is pure grace. Pure grace. In history, from its very beginning until today, grace always primerea, grace always comes first, Then comes all the rest.”