Kathryn Lopez of NRO interviews George Weigel about his new book, Evangelical Catholicism.
Here's one excerpt:
LOPEZ: Why do “twenty-first century Christophobes” fear Christ?
WEIGEL: The secular Christophobes of the West fear Christ because they imagine him to be an enemy of autonomy, which they define as the highest of human values. But this rather misses the point: autonomy for what? The sandbox of solipsism, the playpen of self-absorption, can get rather lonely after awhile. When honest secularists recognize that loneliness in themselves, the hand of Christ will be there to lift them out of the sandbox or playpen and into a maturity and happiness built, not from “autonomy,” but from living a commitment to truth and with compassion for others. And that hand of Christ will be extended by the people of the Church, who are, in Pius XII’s wonderful image, Christ’s “mystical body” in the world.
Read the whole thing. . .it is WELL worth your time!
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Well, that was depressing...only because of where I live and to what I am exposed on a regular basis, which passes for Catholicism here. The other day I wrote that we are just skimming the surface here, no one daring or desiring to "put out into deep water." And then, here in this article, was hope.
ReplyDeleteI really liked the comments on "Cultural Catholicism", "baptized pagans", "first-principles issues", "proposal to change the truth about...", "the beautiful may be a privileged window into the true and the good."
Thanks for sharing this link.
How to put this shortly and politely? The cancerous cultural Marxism that is eating Western civilization alive primarily aims at dismantling gender, race and class thru feminism, multiculturalism and redistributionism, creating a new order dominated by vengeful victims. The RC church, by holding to an all-male priesthood & traditional marriage, supports natural binary gender. But its egalitarian-infected "social justice" trance supports the dissolution of natural ethnic and racial communities (almost always White) and natural means of wealth creation and prosperity. So Weigel's "good news" is, to me, fatally flawed.
ReplyDeleteI feel as if we are re-living the barbarian invasions, with the Church both encouraging us to pay tribute to them and inviting them in at the same time.
The Church's primary mission isn't the salvation of Western Culture. The Church's primary (and only) mission is the salvation of souls. Western Culture provides the best environment for the propagation of the gospel but not the only one. Western, liberal democratic republics run by free market capitalism have served the Church's goals admirably, and I'd personally prefer to see them flourish as a matter of policy. However, the Gospel comes first. Always, first. When any one of pillars of Western Culture moves against the Gospel, it's the enemy.
DeleteBTW, I couldn't agree more that cultural Marxism is a pernicious cancer that threatens the life of the Church.
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