This is all to say, that I have not seen the article and so I cannot comment on it directly. So guess what? I will comment on it indirectly. In so doing, I will preface my comments with the caveat: “as reported by CNS.” In other words they are not necessarily aimed at the OR article or author. With that let me say why I think that this particular article is worthy of mention.

CNS portrays Facchini as presenting as fact rather than theory, biological evolution and common descent, though Facchini reverses it and calls it more properly man’s assent from the subpersonal animal kingdom. With common “ascent” as the precommitment, Facchini then is made to go on to provide a theological explanation for man arising from “prehuman” animals.

He also attempts to distinguish his theological speculation from what he believes to be Intelligent Design’s unwarranted “intrusion” of theology into science. I have exhausted what I have to say on this issue in past posts so I will not again explain what I find erroneous about this statement other than to say that he is painting with a rather broad brush. The originators of the ID movement do not generally enter into theology. They do impose some philosophical speculation, in varying degrees, but for many they no more than most scientists similarly do unawares.

I do not know how this article is framed. Now if this was contextualized as theological speculation about how Christian teaching could be reconciled with a scientific theory, this would comment worthy–though would might ask why a biologist would be the one to do such commentary. However, if the OR article is substantially as CNS makes it out to be then I find this to be problematic.

As OR is “the Holy See’s official organ of information,” it seems to me that OR’s appearing to promote a debated scientific theory as settled fact goes well beyond magisterial competence and so beyond OR’s charter. Taking this as a pretext in order to explain how God then “did” bring about humans of in the context of theology is likewise misleading.

Facchini seems to be orthodox in his portrayal of man’s special dignity with respect to the rest of the animal kingdom. In general, the few details provided in the CNS article suggest that his attempt to show how the theological truth of man’s special status can be consistent with the theory of biological evolution is plausible, though I do not know Facchini’s qualifications in Catholic philosophy or theology. However, I do hope that his article makes more qualifications about his theological theory than the CNS article seems to think. Absent these qualifications, I would say from the few quotes we do get from the CNS article there appear to be some philosophical issues in his theory:

The article said that, “when the biological conditions necessary for supporting a being capable of reflective thought were attained, the will of God, the creator, freely desired it, and man came to be.”

The article posed the question: Does this mean that humans evolved from chimpanzees?

“No, it might be better to say that at some point God willed a spark of intelligence to light up in the mind of a nonhuman hominid and thus came into existence the human as a being, as a subject capable of thought and the ability to decide freely,” it said.

My difficulties with what seems to be suggested here is that the human person is an animal with the added faculties of intellect and will. This is perhaps an Aristotelian way of looking at it though I suspect that it may not even be as integral a view as Aristotle, much less than say St. Thomas Aquinas.

What I mean is that the human soul must not be viewed as an animal soul with some additional faculties (intellect and free will). Rather, the human soul is different in kind from animal souls. The faculties do not arrive later to bring about a human person. The faculties are manifestations of the uniquely human, spiritual soul which is made in the image and likeness of God. These faculties, or at least the potency for these faculties, are necessary features for human personhood because these faculties are prerequisite for the capacity for love.

A further conundrum would the timing for this “spark of intelligence.” If this comes about “from without” after conception, as I take the quote to indicate, we would have two separate creatures who share the same exact DNA, though the former would have to be annihilated to make way for the human. My hylomorphic sensibilities tell me that this would obviate the principle of individuation for the unique substantial form. While discontinuity of species is an perennial problematic artifact of common descent theories, it it is to be resolved it will require much more philosophical precision than is apparent here.

I am also sensitive to the way in which Facchini describes this transition as his tone, again intuited from the quotes, suggests a presupposition of Cartesian mechanism with primacy given to material processes. This bias is to be expected from a scientist as it is rampant among even faithful and well theologically formed Catholics who have been schooled in the Cartesian school that is our academy of science in the west. It is however, problematic because leads to reductionist thought. It also tends to portray God in Deist terms: as “outside” His creation who imposes Himself upon “natural” processes and therefore, so it is thought, as an “imagined interference” with modern science.

Thus, I would argue that theological theories trying to reconcile the theory of biological evolution with Christian anthropology require a solid formation in classical metaphysics by a scholar who has adequately purged, or is at least sensitive to the fact that he has not, modern philosophical biases from his thinking.

Again, I do not want to pin these short comings on OR or Facchini at this point: i.e. presupposing evolution (though given the author’s expertise this would be of no surprise but it would be that OR would run it that way), presupposing the facticity of personal theological speculation, and the apparent philosophical issues. It very well could be the fault of CNS in the way they are reporting it. Perhaps it is CNS rather than OR who is promoting evolution as a Catholic teaching?

Has anyone seen the article to which CNS refers?

you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted;

but when you grow old,

you will stretch out your hands,

and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.”

He said this signifying by what kind of death he would glorify God.

Jn 21:15-19

“The man who finds fault with himself accepts all things cheerfully— misfortune, loss, disgrace, dishonor and any other kind of adversity. He believes that he is deserving of all these things and nothing can disturb him. No one could be more at peace than this man.” - Saint Dorotheus, abbot

May we pray for the courage to see our true selves as revealed to us through God.

… And when he had said this, he said to him, “Follow me.”

This would be an extremely long post if I were to address each and every one of his contradictions in thought. He has many that he seems not to be aware of: his dogmatic dichotomy between the Catholic Church as an institution and the Christian religion; his ability to admire the Church’s teaching on how sexual intercourse should be entered into while rejecting its admonition that it is exclusive to complementary marriage, his apparent acceptance of the Church’s teaching about the Eucharist and its ability to confect it while rejecting its teaching authority.

The reason he is able to uncritically accept these contradictory views, it seems to me, begins with the common dissenter’s confusion about faith and reason. He suggests this much by his favorable reference to Robert McClory’s Faithful Dissenters, a contradiction in terms if there ever was one. Padgett applies McClory’s half-baked ideas to arrive at the conclusion that by rejecting Church teaching, U.S. Catholics are, in fact, being “good Catholics.” What does he mean by this and how is this related to the confusion to which I refer?

What he means is that he accepts what he thinks to be the Church’s teaching on the importance of reason in one’s faith life (though he does not explain what he accepts it). However, like most dissenters, he is confused about the structure of faith and the role of reason in faith. This allows him, when combined with sloppy history, to believe that dissenters within the Church have always used their reason to correct erroneous Church teachings. He trots out the dissenters’ favorite canard, slavery, to attempt to demonstrate this point. This, of course, is also conflated with the history of personal failings of members and leaders of the Church thereby confusing doctrinal purity with personal impeccability.

Thus, Padgett believes, individual dissenters have always been the vanguard against the Church going astray, permanently at least, in her beliefs. So now that U.S. Catholics are using their “reason” to come to their own views about such things as women’s ordination, homosexuality, contraception, sex outside of marriage, etc. (N.B. that as is usual, his list is heavily weighted with moral issues as these are most susceptible to fallen human caprice) U.S. Catholics are now filling the role of “good” Catholics from the past. Padgett thinks that this, along with the so-called “pedophile” tragedy has “made the laity’s self-reliant spirit irradicable.”

It is hard to believe that anyone who has honestly looked at the Catholic responses to such inveracity can still hold these views without some sort of emotional precommitment that requires such rationalization. Regardless, it is not coincidental that his views reflect a cacophony of Protestant nominalism, Enlightenment rationalism, modern radical individualism, and neo-modern nihilism (ala Nietzsche and Sarte by which one creates his own reality according to his will). This is, after all, the philosophical patrimony of modernism that subjugates our culture and ironically allows us to believe (or at least claim) that we are thinking when we are blindly following the proverbial pack with lemming-like abandon.

If Padgett were to realize that faith is not simply a direct fruit of reason, he might be more cautious about his self-appointment as the final arbiter of truth. Rather, appropriating a phenomenology of faith from the Church’s rich intellectual tradition would uncover for him at least three basic components. Christian faith firt requires some intellectual object for consideration. Thus, reason is brought into play.

However, the difference between Christian reason and rationalism is that faith is not the simple correspondence of proposition to the terminus of one’s rational process. Reason is employed to make reasonable one’s submitting himself in trust to the Proposer–that is, Jesus Christ Himself. In doing so, one must also submit in trust to His chosen Mediator of Truth–the Hierarchically structured Church which is the visible manifestation of His Mystical Body. Thus, the next step for Christian faith is that the Christian responds in trust to God’s initiating offer of Himself. Thus again, reason makes trust reasonable.

But trust is still not Christian faith. Faith must be supernaturalized. Faith is finally Christian when the Christian receives the theological virtue of faith, ordinarily by means of sacramental grace. This is faith through grace and it is where the rationalist often goes wrong. He rejects this gift of grace because he understands from his Protestant culture, that grace annihilates his fallen human nature and so what one knows by reason can now be overturned by faith. To the rationalist, this means, and rightly so, an annihilation of his authentic humanity. Unfortunately, the rationalist then rejects faith as anti-human.

The Liberal Protestant tradition simply segregates these two realms from one another. The modern, Catholic rationalist dissenter is less consistent. He accepts faith when it accords with his “reason” (read caprice) and rejects it other wise. Thus, he is not open in trust to the Truth of Christ and does not experience, and so cannot conceive of, faith as something more certain than reason alone.  Without this faith, this belief, he fails to understand her teaching–as St. Augustine’s sage insight tells us: “I believe that I may understand.”  The dissenter is then left to trade faith illumined reason mediated by the Church and kept pure by the Holy Spirit, for worldly wisdom which St. Paul reminds us is foolishness to God (1Cor 3:19).

However, the Christian tradition purified of this Protestant fideism (and other errors) understands that human nature is not radically corrupted but only wounded. Further, it understands that human nature is not opposed to grace. In fact, human nature is made for grace. Grace is a partaking in the divine nature (see 2 Pt 1:4). As St. Basil indicates in today’s Office of Readings, it gives us a likeness to God–divinizing us. Rather than damaging human nature, it heals fallen nature, it elevates nature, and it perfects nature.

Correcting himself on these points will be the first intellectual steps in Padgett’s becoming an authentically “good Catholic.” Perhaps he is now confused because he was initially poorly catechized by a dissenting Catholic. I do not know this but, unfortunately, that is not unlikely these days. However, dissenting faith cannot be sustained. One cannot have true communion with God while pursuing falsehoods that take one in the opposite direction from Truth Himself.

We can pray that the death of “liberal Catholicism” will open the way to the recognition that if one is to accept Christ, he must accept the Totus Christus–the Whole Christ. This includes His Mystical Body, the Church, constituted on earth with a hierarchical structure. At that point U.S. Catholics will indeed begin to know better.

That is not to say, that these commentators do not adequately understand the viewpoint of those mostly affected by current culture, perhaps including the majority of Catholics in the West. However, it certainly saddles them with biases, leaving them confused and unable to adequately explain the Church’s response to cultural challenges.

In this article, David Van Beima asks if “Liberal Catholicism” is dead. The first thing to note is the uncritical acceptance of such a misleading term. Van Beima does not even try to define it, presupposing that it is universally understood. In fact, what he means by the phrase one would have to try to draw from his article.  In doing so, one would be led to suppose that he intends: those who wish to consider themselves Catholic while at the same time rejecting Church teaching AND actively working to change the Church structures and teaching to accord with their political/social agenda.

Van Beima believes that Vatican II is the watershed event in the “liberal rebellion” in American Catholicism. It is good that here he seems to limit his scope to the Catholic Church in the U.S.  Like too many U.S. journalists, he is apparently quite myopic in his view of the Church and the world, not seeing its scope beyond that of its U.S. context.  Furthermore, rebellion is the correct term.  However, this rebellion would not have been possible to have exploded to the extent it did in the wake of the Second Vatican Council had it not already been underway for some decades prior to the Council.  Thus, suggesting that Vatican II was the sole, or at least primary, cause is not defensible.

He interprets the Council has having “overhauled much of Catholic teaching and ritual.” Of course, no Church teaching was overhauled. In fact, there was nothing “new” from the Council in terms of Church teaching. It did clarify and make authoritative many developments that had matured over the previous centuries.  Neither can the Council be saddled with the “overhaul” of, and confusion associated with, the liturgy that occurred in its aftermath. Of course, that is the view of those whom Van Beima has in mind with his “liberal” referent. He writes:

But Vatican II meant even more to a generation of devout but restless young people in the U.S. rather than a course correction, Terrence Tilley, now head of the Fordham University’s theology department, wrote recently, his generation perceived “an interruption of history, a divine typhoon that left only the keel and structure of the church unchanged.”

Tilley confirms as appropriate the “hermeneutic of discontinuity” to which B16 often makes reference as accurately characterizing those theologians who fall into this camp. They are “liberal” precisely because they adopt the agenda to spread their disintegrating hermeneutic to the rest of the Church. What characterized these “liberals” was the desire to impose a secular political structure on the Church. Van Beima calls it democracy while I would argue their agenda was rather an oligarchy of the libertine intelligentsia. Another feature of this “liberalism” was a primacy of conscience which I would more properly characterize as a replacement of the Magisterium instituted by Christ with a magisterium of individual whim. He identifies the main organs of this movement:

Its perspectives were covered in The National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal and America. Martin Sheen held down Hollywood, and the movement even boasted its own cheesy singing act: the St. Louis Jesuits. The reformers’ premier membership organization was Call to Action, but their influence was felt at the highest reaches of the American Church, as sympathetic American bishops passed left-leaning statements on nuclear weapons and economic justice.

There is no surprise here. But it is interesting to note that Van Beima clearly sees the so called St. Louis Jesuits’ and their music as an organ of “liberal rebellion.” With all there is to dispute with Van Beima’s view of the Church in this article, one observation that is not up for debate in my view is his characterization of them as “the movement['s] . . . own cheesy singing act.”

In fact, I do believe that this “cheesy” music and its imposition on the liturgy has done major damage to the laity’s self-understanding of the Church through its diminution of the transcendent experience of the Mass. When the Mass becomes the venue for campy music and the insipid taste endemic in the personal creative expression rampant during these decades (and not yet completely expunged from the scene today), it is no wonder that so many poorly catechized Catholics stopped practicing their faith and others grew in disdain for the Church which no longer seemed to mediate to them in the Mass, albeit through accidents but important accidents, the Sacrifice of Calvary but now subjected them to an aesthetic milieu that they would have turned off if it had been on the TV.

But I digress. Van Beima again quotes Tilley on the state of this movement:

Remarks Tilley, “For a couple of generations, progressivism was an [important] way to be Catholic.”

Then he adds, “But I think the end of an era is here.”

Van Beima says that “progressives” have essentially been so successful in changing the views of the average Catholic that they no longer seem relevant with any sort of unique message. He says that for a short time, they had a rallying cry around the perceived heirarchy’s complicity in the sex abuse scandal since JPII “remained mostly silent.” But now with B16’s visit and in his taking the issue on directly, he has changed the dynamic.

The first one can say is that it would be hard to argue that JPII was silent about it. He called the U.S. Cardinals to Rome within two months after the Boston Globe kicked off the press frenzy and said to them:

Like you, I too have been deeply grieved by the fact that priests and religious, whose vocation it is to help people live holy lives in the sight of God, have themselves caused such suffering and scandal to the young. Because of the great harm done by some priests and religious, the Church herself is viewed with distrust, and many are offended at the way in which the Church´s leaders are perceived to have acted in this matter. The abuse which has caused this crisis is by every standard wrong and rightly considered a crime by society; it is also an appalling sin in the eyes of God. To the victims and their families, wherever they may be, I express my profound sense of solidarity and concern.

Regardless of the erroneous contrast between JPII and B16, it is interesting to me the way that B16’s visit and especially his words have been taken. Whether this is a watershed event in the way that the media will cover the Church in this regard and the way the Church will be viewed by the laity, I doubt. It rather reflects the fact that there has been very little in terms of new news to keep the flames fanned. Nevertheless, it is gratifying that for once, the majority in the media have allowed the Catholic Church, in the person of B16, to express without skeptical commentary, its remorse for what has happened in the past and its resolve to ensure that nothing like this happens again in the future.

Van Beima’s quoting of Fr. Thomas Reese’s observation that “reform” movements need a visible enemy against which to organize as his rationale for the lack of steam among the graying activists is worth noting. The libertine rebels did everything they could to demonize Church teachings they did not like along with the hierarchy. But JPII was even more visibly affable than B16 and this did little to change the way he was demonized. Rather, what we are seeing is the dying out of the old guard and its replacement by a worldly and largely religiously indifferent generation.

The newer generations are not the social activists that arose in the rebellious 1960s. The Gen Xer’s and later generations are not rebels in the same sense. Their parents were the rebels and so in order to reject their parents, they are more content to just indulge themselves in all that the culture of hedonism has to offer.

Nevertheless, Van Beima is correct in his general assessment. “Liberal Catholicism” is dead but this does not mean that there will be a large return to orthodoxy. Rather, there will simply be a largely impassive laity who will either stop practicing their faith or simply go to church on Sunday and do what the culture tells them they need to be doing for their self-fulfillment the rest of the time.

This provides much opportunity, however. There will be less and less confusion generated by activist dissenters within the Church as the dissenters die out. The work in pre-evangelization of the wayward Catholics who remain will no longer not need to be focused on trying to clarify the confusion within the Church and instead will be able to be focused on the authentic beauty to be found in Church teaching and the genuine joy to be attained in conforming one’s life to the truth of the Gospel.

The damage that dissenters have done to the faith has been incalculable. Perhaps some will come to recognize that their desire for an socially activist church devoid of truth and any demands for self control can never be realized. Without truth one can only offer hedonism as an attraction to fallen man. The grim fruits of hedonism is an inward turn to dehumanizing selfishness and around this no church can flourish. So yes, “liberal Catholicism,” using Van Beima’s definition, is dead. However, now the hard work toward the new springtime in the Church can begin to start showing fruit.

For you say, “I am rich and affluent and have no need of anything,” and yet do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. - Revelation 3:17

This one goes a leap beyond the believable I think, even for the most fervent Catholic haters. We become defiled through our desire for revenge. Forgiveness is an act of the will, a gift to another which comes from sorrow.

Nietzsche’s almost unwilling final affirmation of the ascetic impulse echoes St. Augustine’s basic insight into the human condition. Our hearts are restless. The human animal wishes to give itself to something higher. It is a need more basic than our instinctual urges. It is a nature more fundamental than everything our age wishes us to affirm as natural.

Our restless hearts suggest that the real dangers of the present age are not to be found in an open-ended, nihilistic nonjudgmentalism that encourages us to imagine our world devoid of compelling truths. Such possibilities are abroad, but, as anyone who has been exposed to our educational establishment knows, it requires the constant infusion of disciplinary energy to keep young people from actually believing something.

Instead, if Nietzsche is right, the danger we face may be idolatry. Deprived of a God worth worshipping, we will find substitutes, even to the point of ­prostrating ourselves before birds or animals or reptiles that our modern minds have transformed from graven images into shrill moral imperatives and brittle political causes.

The last century’s graveyards testify to the reality of this danger. Turned away from something truly greater than ourselves, we do not come to rest in a modest ­loyalty to humanity. Instead, as Nietzsche’s and Augustine’s insights into the human condition warn us, we fall into a devotion to subhuman primal powers that reward our service with debasement.

What comes to mind in reading this conclusion is the way in which so many in from those in politics, to the new media, to the entertainment field have piled on to the man-made global warming bandwagon. The way that these folks have embraced the theory that man-made emissions are driving the climate into a sustained and dangerous warming trend borders on religious adherence. Despite the fact that man made global warming is an unproven theory, a scientific theory based upon heuristic computer models and which requires much more evidence to either confirm or deny, the response to those who point this out ranges from being ignored to attacked as a “denier.“

Reno points out how Nietzsche reluctantly admits that there is an inherent human impulse to asceticism in the human soul. There is an innate desire in man to master his inclinations in order to subordinate them to the greater good. Reno indicates that Nietzsche has discovered man’s inclination toward the transcendent; toward the infinite. Man is naturally religious because, as St. Augustine pointed out, he has an inbuilt restlessness until he rests in God.

Neo-modern culture has bought into the European model of secularism in which God is excluded from public life and reasoned discussion. I’ll do another post on the evolution of modern thought that contributed to this later, but for now it is enough to note this presents secularists with a problem. They are trying to have culture without cult and they cannot have it. This type of secularism represses the human person and so it is rebuffed by the masses. I suspect that even the rabid secularists sense an interior dissatisfaction with their “faith.” This leaves them in desperate need of a religion, but it needs to be a godless one. Thus, we are presented with the global warming faith. I suspect that the fideistic reaction that we are seeing from this mass of secularists reveals that Al Gore has handed them the religion that they were seeking.

It is not coincidental that this “religion” is one that requires self-sacrifice for a purpose which transcends themselves. Sacrifice is at the root of religion for the reasons to which Reno’s article alludes. Thus, we see this unreasoned, “religious” rush to a self-transcending faith and an attendant “fundamentalist” reaction to those who would deny the truth of this new found faith.

The problem that these secularists will find with this faith is that it will ultimately collapse because it will be unsatisfying. One can see this in that the high priest and a good number of its prophets (see here, here, and here) want others to do the sacrificing. This is not surprising for the reason at root for the uncritical rejection of Christian faith by so many of these Western secularists is its moral demands. Whether human caused global warming will be debunked by science before it is abandoned by its religious adherents is anyone’s guess. However, any religion without self sacrifice is doomed to fail.

“Our new Federal lawsuit will show the almost incomprehensible national security risks to America and the world as a result of the destruction of the wall separating Church and State in the United States armed forces. The United States military is actively engaged in a pernicious and pervasive pattern and practice of unconstitutional rape of the precious religious freedoms of our honorable and noble sailors, soldiers, airmen, marines, national guard, reservists and veterans. This evil is a noxious, institutional force-feeding of fundamentalist Christianity by our nation’s military command structure in complete defiance of the United States Constitution.”

The truth behind our motivations are very rarely initially understood. Given that faith in God doesn’t depend on knowledge as much as with understanding, atheism can never be the conclusion of a scientific or philosophical theory, but a premeditated act of the will. One cannot disprove that which isn’t learned, but received. God will not allow Himself to be revealed to the proud through theory and logic, but to those willing to seek Him with a sincere heart.

I believe the conversion to atheism has less to do with one’s intellectual discovery, and more to do with a calculated cop out based on a human weaknesses (sin). A term known as cognitive dissonance can be explained as the feelings we all experience when our beliefs and behaviors don’t match up. The most powerful type of dissonance are those which are based on our self-image when we experience feelings such as foolishness, shame, embarrassment, and guilt. In order to avoid these uncomfortable and most undesirable feelings about ourselves, we are left with three choices; we either change our behaviors (faith, religion), justify and rationalize our behaviors by changing the conflicting beliefs (atheism/agnostic), or justify our behaviors by adding new cognitions (heretics). Proof once again that more sin is the punishment of our sins.

“Once I taste of the spirit, all carnal things become meaningless” - The Ascent of Mount Carmel by Saint John of the Cross

Despite the cancellation, students helped organize a speech of John Corvino off campus.

“Gay and lesbian relationships make some people happy. And I don’t just mean that they make people feel good. They are an important avenue of meaning and fulfillment in people’s lives,” said Corvino, who teaches at Wayne State University. “If we’re going to deny that experience to an entire group of people, we better have a darned good reason.”

“The way gay and lesbian people are treated in our society is morally wrong. I’m asking people to make moral judgments not on whom they love, but on whether they love.”

“Some people refer to me as a fallen Catholic. I didn’t fall. I leapt. We should not confuse complete faith in God with complete faith in our ability to discern God’s voice.”

“Of course two men can’t make a baby. But is making babies the only legitimate reason for having sex?”

“The usual response to a gay person is not ‘Hey, no fair. How come he gets to be gay and I don’t?’ We can continue to support (heterosexual marriage) while recognizing that it’s not right for everyone.”

For as long as one pursues this type of self-gratifying sexuality which is based on the desire to “love” and to be “loved” on one’s own terms, the more his psychological & spiritual health suffers up to the point of corruptness and spiritual death. Because sexuality forms an integral part of our personality, it makes sense to those who suffer from a wounded sense of sexual identity to believe sexual orientation is tied to something significantly more than the sexual act; consequently; love and acceptance becomes something that must be earned by the other but is a conditional entitlement or right which must be afforded to the self.

“I will lead you into the desert that I may speak to your heart…” (Hos 2:16)

“My grace is sufficient for you, for in weakness, power reaches perfection” (2 Cor 12:9)

As this was her fourth baby, all of her friends were sure that she should do something to ensure that she did not have another. She replied that her diabetes was the only reason that she was thinking that this should be her last child; but then again, God may have other plans. One lady replied: “God has nothing to say about it! He created Adam and Eve and after that He has no place in procreation.”

This was an interesting, if not surprising, response from an Evangelical Christian. It is also quite ironic that this desire to keep God isolated from one’s life is so wide spread among some Christians. After all, Christianity is all about communion with God in the Truth–His Son, Jesus Christ.  This means necessarily that God must be invited in to all aspects of every person’s life.  I remember a friend, a former Catholic who had taken up his wife’s Methodist faith, once informed me that he did not want to know God’s will for him because he was afraid of what God might want him to do.

While this certainly reveals a confused understanding of God, His solicitude and love for each person, and His Providence it also reflects the perennial problem that all human beings have suffered since the Fall. That is learning to trust God. For most believers, once one is given a correct understanding of God and His Providence it becomes a “no brainer” to choose to trust God. The difficulty lies in carrying this out.

At times it is quite easy to trust; when one comes to terms with the reality that there is no other choice. At other times, it becomes a real struggle. It is a real temptation to want to go one’s own way. I find that in my experiences.  Sometimes, I can be tempted to rationalize or even to coopt God into my own plans.  It is only with real effort that I am brought to realize this and to prayerfully discern whether a course of action is simply my will or also His. At root is fear; fear of self-denial, fear of having to die to myself.  When I fail and succumb to this fallen temptation, I subliminally accept as my own those words of the young mother’s friend, that I consciously reject: with respect to this matter at least, “God has nothing to say about it.”

For the movie of our life can be used to judge us. We will sorrowfully relive the bad times and joyfully revisit the good. (Romans 2:1-16)

It is then we will fully realize how our unkind thoughts and selfish choices wounded others, and led us away from our loving Father. (Matthew 25: 31-46)

And each time we ignored God’s voice, our conscience grew more deaf, and our heart hardened. (Matthew 24:12, Hebrews 3:8,15)

No matter what you’ve done, there is good news, since Jesus came not to condemn the world, but to save it. (Isaiah 1:18; John 3:16-17; Romans 5:8)

Jesus can heal your memories and forgive your past, if you accept His mercy. You really can be freed from the addiction of sin and find lasting peace. (Matthew 11:28)

May God abundantly bless those who love enough to humbly bring others to Christ.

H/T Catholic Education Resource Center