I cite the below in the face of the brouhaha that appears around Pope Francis for his ongoing reform of the Church, i.e. the paranoia of the "conservative" and the fantasy of the "liberal." Both are working in a superficiality apart from the knowledge of the heart. Hence, The Year of Mercy.
* * * * *
Archbishop John R. Quinn writes that the first clearly
attested synod was held in the year AD 175 to deal with the Montanist heresy.
This heresy, named after its leader, Montanus, may be described in simple terms
as a combination of severity and exuberance. It was excessively rigorous in
moral and ascetical matters, requiring married people to separate or to live in
continence. On the other hand, its adherents indulged in demonstrative display
of alleged invasion by the Holy Spirit.”[1]
From
the very beginning the Church had to decide “the blazing controversy over the Law
of Moses, in particular, the dietary laws and the religious rite of
circumcision.””How did the Church resolve this problem?” Quinn answers: “looking
into the New Testament, we see that there were three factors involved in settling
the problem: pastoral experience, the appeal to Scripture, and the Jerusalem
meeting of the leaders. No one of these three factors alone determined the
solution; they were all interrelated
“The relationship
between doctrine and pastoral experience was of crucial important. The solution
to the controversy did not come simply from an abstract examination of
doctrinal principles. It was through and in the pastoral experience of the exemplary
Christian life of the Gentiles whom Paul baptized without the requirement of circumcision,
and of the outpouring of the Spirit on Cornelius and his Gentile friends as soon
as Peter had preached the Gospel to them (Acts 10), that a singularly important
doctrinal development took place in the Church. This doctrinal development
occurred because the Church discerned between God working in the existential situation
of the Church and her actual experience. Further, the searing controversy over
the freedom of Gentle Christians from the Law powerfully dramatized that
discernment is not easy. In this New Testament concern, the plan of God for the
Church was discerned only after long, arduous search and controversy. The path
was not self-evident.”
Quinn
then remarks: “This crisis of the primitive Church stands as a perpetual
warning to the Church of every age that it cannot expect to find easy of quick
solutions to its doctrinal and pastoral problems any more than the primitive
Church did.”
The
first converts to the Church are Jews prone to the fundamentalism of the Law as
evidenced in all the encounters of Our Lord with the Judaism of His day. It is
not surprising that both reactions occur: rigorism on the one hand and
enthusiastic laxism after His departure on the other. The criterion of truth
centered on the real can only take place where there is an experience of lived
faith – an experience of self-transcendence – which is an experience of the
Person of Christ as Revelation of the Father. After the split of the Church in
1054 as East (Constantinople) and West (Rome), there is an eventual shallowing
of experiential depth that eventually spawns Jansenism as an elitist
pharisaical rigorism, which is immediately countered by the appearance of the
Lord to St. Margaret Mary: “Jesus Christ, my kind Master, appeared to me. He
was a blaze of glory – his five wounds shining like five suns, flames issuing
from all parts of his human form, especially from his divine breast which was
like a furnace, and which he opened to disclose this utterly affectionate and
loveable Heart, the living source of all those flames. It was at this moment
that he revealed to me the indescribable wonders of his pure love for mankind:
the extravagance to which he’d been led for those who had nothing for him but
ingratitude and indifference. ‘This hurts me more that everything I suffered in
my passion. Even a little love from them in return – and I should regard all
that I have done for them as next to nothing, and look for a way of doing still
more.”[2]
The
above may be of some help in considering what Pope Francis is doing until now
and with the “Year of Mercy.”
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