The call to the religious life is thus turned upside down: WORLD --- CHURCH --- CHRIST
Once the world is assumed to be first to call, two effects generally follow: a criticism of the Church and a diminished love of Christ and the Cross by becoming anti-Christ. Peter Berger cuts with a keen blade this false idea that the Church and service to the world are incompatible:
One may begin by admiring Christians for their political involvements. But then one must also admire all the others, including the Black Muslims, the atheists, who share these involvements. If the political struggles have become the very reason for being a Christian in the first place, this reason will
lose some plausibility, the more one involves oneself in these struggles. If secular aims define the mission of the Church in society, the conclusion that the Church is finally unnecessary is inevitable, no matter how noble the secular aims may be.
The Church and the world are not mutually exclusive. Priests who have left the ministry because they wanted to serve the world, have emphasized unwittingly the point of vocation. They acknowledged that their priesthood needed a victimhood, but they interpreted victimhood solely in terms of service to the world, rather than also bearing the guilt and sin and poverty of the world in the Name of Christ. They were right in affirming that a cultic religion is insufficient; they were wrong in assuming that the only way to practice victimhood was to turn it into servanthood in the economic and political order.
The prophet Amos warned against those who were concerned only with the hunger of the world, while forgetting that there is a greater hunger for the Word of God. Young priests sensing too much stress on the ecclesiastical and too little on the social, began to move out of the sanctuary into the slums. This exodus in many was prompted by a high idealism and a grief at seeing the Church so little involved in the arena of politics and economics.
They knew that faith must not be kept within Church walls; that the Vatican Council bade the Church to be more concerned with the temporalities of the economic and social order; that some pastors dragged their feet against an authentic ecumenism; that the poverty from which so many in the world suffer has profound political and economic overtones; that when no one in the Church protests injustice, the world makes known its disgust with the Church; that many in the Church acted as if they domesticated God or cornered Him in parochial traps; that concern with humanity and its woes is to be defined sometimes are reactors rather than actors with regard to the tangled anti-culture mess of the day.
But when we start with the world and not with Christ, something goes wrong. Too often such souls end in worldliness. Then there has to be written in chancery records what Paul had to write about Demas: "Demas has deserted me because his heart was set on this world." - 2Tim. 4:10 -
The tragedy of the Church is................
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Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
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