A Catholic bishop in Holland recently proposed in all seriousness that Christians refer to God as "Allah," which he thinks would work wonders in Christian-Islamic relations, and he is right, of course. Facing Mecca while praying five times a day would work more wonders still and formal conversion to Islam would be the greatest wonder of all. Reconciliation can always be effected if one party capitulates to the other because there can be no contention where one party declines to contend. This is contingent, of course, on one party having nothing to contend over. Apparently, in the eyes of its harshest critics, the Catholic Church shouldn't contend about anything, least of all matters of faith; but become all-inclusive even if, in the process, it ends up representing nothing.
Leftists in Rome were protesting today the beautification of 498 Spanish martyrs (one Cuban by birth) who were murdered by the Spanish Republicans in the Civil War (1936-39). Why were they protesting? You would scarely believe it.
Every side in every war is permitted to have its own martyrs and honor them in the way it thinks best. The Catholics honor their martyrs by elevating them to sainthood; beautification being the next to last step in that process (canonization is the last).
So guess what the upholders of the Stalinist side in the Spain's Civil War want? Yes, they want the Church to honor the Stalinist "martyrs," to make them Catholic saints too. If it were not so arrogant and non-sensical, their presumptiousness would actually be amusing. Yet they are in deadly earnest, which shows that the world we inherited from our fathers is definitely not the world that we will pass on to our sons.
So what does the future hold? Beliefs will count for nothing. All that will matter is equal representation. Rather than a heaven and a hell, there will be only a place equally heaven and hell, not the old purgatory but the new laboratory; and rather than saints and sinners there will only be victims of God to whom God is beholden to provide a better world regardless of their merits.
Moral relativism is the greatest threat facing the Church — not the contest between good and evil, but the nullification of that contest. In short, the end of civilization and the beginning of what could be called "The Counter-Civilization."
They did it! they beatified him, HURRAH!! our first Cuban Saint, now we must pray to him to liberate our unfortunate Island
ReplyDeleteWe're still shortchanged.... we still need Varela to be beatified and canonized.
ReplyDeleteCounter-Civilization? LMAO! I like. It's another way of saying Post-Modernism –which btw is indeed the crisis and challenge that not only the Church, but the entire world is facing. One objective truth is being squandered for the scattering of subjectively relative experiences. The che phenomena is an example of this. It doesn't matter the objective truth that he was a murderer, rather, one's subjective experience of blindly reading che and admiring korda's image of him (while sipping Mate no doubt) is enough to justify the promotion and emulation of che.
ReplyDeleteIt's all the same: Counter-Civilization indeed!