Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Wednesday, April 06, 2005 A curious insight Lawrence Auster makes a fascinating point about the Second Vatican Council, that a poisonous philsophy crept into its description of humanity which was fully adopted by John Paul II. He quotes Gaudium et Spes and discusses its buried meaning, he writes, ". . . the understanding that the advent of Jesus Christ had permanently altered human nature. All men were now linked with Christ, regardless of whether they followed him or not." "Now every person was Christ-imbued, simply by virtue of being human." The effect of this is manifested in the view of the Church that "Man, secular man, is both god-like and oppressed, and it is the mission of the Church to serve and protect him." Perhaps this helps to explain my own distaste at Sunday Mass in the various prayers which are devoted to making the poor unpoor. The underlying assumption being that we must make the poor prosperous before we can expect them to repent of their sins and become Christian. In fact that we have to solve every social ill before we ask anyone to devote their lives to Jesus. That it is social ills themselves that prevent people from coming to Christ. I often hear about our "preferential option for the poor" as if that means something great and momentous. And we must pray for world peace as if human nature is about to change if only we will it strongly enough (the fallen world will miraculously become unfallen if we only try harder to make it so, and this can be done without reference to Jesus but to better social engineering by sincere people). I have to agree with Lawrence in a number of his posts that John Paul II did not seem to insist that Jesus was essential to salvation when promotng ecumenism; that his later globetrotting seemed more for the sake of his popularity and pleasure than in evangelizing the nominal Christian and the lost and searching. I felt his preaching reflected cant and spiritual boilerplate and I never felt that John Paul would have understood me personally if he'd had the chance. posted by Mark Butterworth | 12:59 PM | |
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