John Allen lays out some interesting points in his recent piece, including the following starkly true statement. Excerpts:
...The typical Christian in the world today isn’t a middle-class white male in Dubuque pulling up to church in his Lincoln Continental. She is an impoverished black mother of four in Nigeria, or a Dalit grandmother in India, or an exploited Filipina maid in Saudi Arabia. They often face hardships that are hard for most American Christians, accustomed to material comfort and lacking any real experience of religious persecution, to fathom.
Until you get that, you won’t see the full story of Christianity in this era...
I, then, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through love, 3striving to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace: one body and one Spirit, as you were also called to the one hope of your call; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.--Ephesians 4:1-6
John Paul II (soon to be canonized a saint) reiterated the Gospel call for the unity of Christians in his encyclical letter Ut Unum Sint. Excerpts:
Ut unum sint! (May they be one)...The courageous witness of so many martyrs of our century, including members of Churches and Ecclesial Communities not in full communion with the Catholic Church, gives new vigour to the Council's call and reminds us of our duty to listen to and put into practice its exhortation. These brothers and sisters of ours, united in the selfless offering of their lives for the Kingdom of God, are the most powerful proof that every factor of division can be transcended and overcome in the total gift of self for the sake of the Gospel.
Christ calls all his disciples to unity. My earnest desire is to renew this call today, to propose it once more with determination, repeating what I said at the Roman Colosseum on Good Friday 1994, at the end of the meditation on the Via Crucis prepared by my Venerable Brother Bartholomew, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. There I stated that believers in Christ, united in following in the footsteps of the martyrs, cannot remain divided. If they wish truly and effectively to oppose the world's tendency to reduce to powerlessness the Mystery of Redemption, they must profess together the same truth about the Cross.1 The Cross! An anti-Christian outlook seeks to minimize the Cross, to empty it of its meaning, and to deny that in it man has the source of his new life. It claims that the Cross is unable to provide either vision or hope. Man, it says, is nothing but an earthly being, who must live as if God did not exist.
Pope Francis: Yes, for me ecumenism is a priority. Today there is an ecumenism of blood. In some countries they kill Christians for wearing a cross or having a Bible and before they kill them they do not ask them whether they are Anglican, Lutheran, Catholic or Orthodox. Their blood is mixed. To those who kill we are Christians. We are united in blood, even though we have not yet managed to take necessary steps towards unity between us and perhaps the time has not yet come. Unity is a gift that we need to ask for.
I knew a parish priest in Hamburg who was dealing with the beatification cause of a Catholic priest guillotined by the Nazis for teaching children the catechism. After him, in the list of condemned individuals, was a Lutheran pastor who was killed for the same reason. Their blood was mixed. The parish priest told me he had gone to the bishop and said to him: "I will continue to deal with the cause, but both of their causes, not just the Catholic priest's." This is what ecumenism of blood is. It still exists today; you just need to read the newspapers. Those who kill Christians don't ask for your identity card to see which Church you were baptized in. We need to take these facts into consideration...
The martyrs, the greatest Christian witnesses to the faith and the truth of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, challenge their brethren, separated and divided in the face of tremendous challenges from the world, the flesh, and the devil these days. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church, as Tertullian wrote, and perhaps also the bond of charity which holds the whole together, mediating the Holy Spirit, opening a door through their sacrifice as Jesus did.
I have been writing hitherto on the assumption that the people in the next pew afford no rational ground for disappointment. Of course if they do – if the patient knows that the woman with the absurd hat is a fanatical bridge player or the man with squeaky boots is a miser and an extortioner – then your task is so much the easier. All you then have to do is to keep out of his mind the question ‘If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?’ You may ask whether it is possible to keep such an obvious thought from occurring even to a human mind. It is, Wormwood, it is! Handle him properly and it simply won’t come into his head.--C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Letter 2
...I've received numerous requests to comment on the sensational story in an Italian newspaper Thursday suggesting the existence of a shadowy "gay lobby" in the Vatican, linking it to the prospect of blackmail and suggesting that such dark forces may have factored into Benedict XVI's decision to resign.
For what it's worth, I'll lay out my initial reaction here...
In terms of the story's specifics, I don't know whether it's accurate that a commission of three cardinals created by Benedict XVI to investigate the Vatican leaks affair, composed of Cardinals Julian Herranz Casado, Jozef Tomko and Salvatore De Giorgi, actually considered possible networks inside the Vatican based on sexual preference, but frankly, it would be a little surprising if they hadn't.
Here's why. In 2007, Msgr. Thomas Stenico in the Congregation for Clergy was suspended after being caught on hidden camera making contact with a young man posing as a potential "date" in gay-oriented chat rooms, then taking him back to his Vatican apartment. In 2010, a "Gentlemen of the Pope" named Angelo Balducci was caught in a wiretap trying to arrange sexual hookups through a Nigerian member of a Vatican choir. Both episodes were highly public and caused massive embarrassment.
In that context, it would seem odd if the cardinals didn't at least consider the possibility that somebody with a big secret to hide might be vulnerable to pressure to leak documents or spill the beans in other ways...
In the comments, "CAELewis" shares a common complaint:
It is so (expletive) difficult to focus on the good that the global Church does when the "leadership" is embroiled in all the evil and corruption that is constantly reported. It's hard to remain a proud, faithful, involved member in this institution when its leadership doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to a picture of a Christian based on the Gospel. Apostolic succession or not, can this really be Jesus' church?
Which prompted me to add my two cents.
Yes, since it's the Church of he who came for sinners, not for the righteous; for the sick, not for the well. We keep on going out to the nations to draw in the rest of the sinners of the world to join us--of course there will be scandal. Of course there will be trouble. It's a Church-full of sinners on the long, slow road to Calvary to die and be raised again.
What do we do? Walk the road to Calvary, fasting and praying, doing penance for our sins and the sins of others. We pour ourselves out to God and receive him in return, then, deified and sanctified, strengthened beyond our own finitude into everlasting grace and strength, we can be God's face in the word, God's hands, God's feet, doing works of mercy, mediating divine life and love into the cosmos at large. We can raise up our neighbors, our brothers, our enemies, our friends, into communion with the life and love of God.
lays out some interesting points in his recent piece, including the following starkly true statement. Excerpts:
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, Letter 2
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to see the road to be walked laid out in clarity.