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Aug
16
Co-Workers of the Truth 8/16
Posted By reynor | Filed Under Co-Workers of the Truth, Pope Benedict XVI
There is taking place at the present time a silent exodus from the Church. The inner consensus of belief seems, somehow, to have lost the power to control it that it would perhaps have had a generation ago…One problem here is that the Church can present to us only what she has and what she is. But we cannot begin with the way she presents herself; we must go to the roots. If there do not exist in the Church strengths that have something to offer us today, then her presentation of herself will be of little value to us.
These strengths undoubtedly do exist in the Church, for the Gospel has not become void and Christ has not departed from us. We do not place our hope in strategies; on the contrary, Christ is our hope. We must proceed to and from his presence. What is central must remain central.
The Church erred when she yielded to a perhaps half-hearted desire to prove that even without the good news of God and his Christ she was still a good and useful philantropic organization. Granted, the philanthropic contribution of the Church is of enormous importance - a task imposed on her by the Lord. But we must realize that she is not just one welfare organization among others that wants to assure her place in the social scene, but that her activity springs from the deeper power of a love that wants only to communicate itself, that she is active, not because she wants to be in the limelight, but because “the love of Christ urges us on”. It must be evident that God is something of which humanity stands in need.
The Church must proclaim her belief courageously and without embarassment, must confess what she knows is salvific: that she has to do with God and God has to do with us; that she can therefore bring humanity into contact with him…It would be a great error, however, to think we are reflecting the views of Pope John XXIII and the Council merely because we follow every fashion that is considered modern.
To be courageous can also mean to be nonconformist, to oppose something that everyone else accepts and so in a moment’s time to find oneself suddenly in the minority. In the last analysis, the world is ultimately governed by courageous minorities that really have something to offer, not by some superficial mass phenomenon.
From: Deutsche Tagespost, July 29, 1989
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