Replies

NYer, I hope you don’t mind (ask the mod to delete if you do) but I’d like to post something that I posted on Fr Z’s blog.

“I like Fr Z’ s remark about the “Virtual Pope” that the media has created. The press is running with it, but at least people are reading it and may actually start to think.

Realistically, I thought he was simply saying we shouldn’t approach with the negatives first. We need to give people a positive view, not only of God, but of their own lives.

“Why am I here, where am I going?” We all die, so everybody asks that question. Our Mother, the Catholic Church, has the answer. Look at the beautiful things the Pope has said about the Church in the last few days.

His criticism was not of orthodoxy, but of the people who are withholding it by not presenting the Church as a loving virginal mother, the Bride of Christ, a mother but at the same time not fulfilled until the end time.

We have been unable to express this. The great literary converts of the pre-Vatican II era did not come to the Church because they wanted to live like good middle class church ladies or gentlemen (not that there’s anything wrong with being one, if that’s what you are – they’re essential) but because that was where salvation from death and meaninglessness lay, and the Church, being a good mother, would extend it to them. Read Julien Green.”

For those who don’t know, Julien Green was an American, born in the South, who spent most of his life in Paris. He was ravingly gay, fought against it, was a Catholic convert, and finally writes in his famous journals that he was so happy that he had lived long enough that he no longer had any sexual desires at all! But he saw the message of the church, and even though he wasn’t perfect, he felt encouraged to come in and cling to it no matter how far he strayed. And he strayed a lot less further than he would have if he hadn’t been a Catholic.

We need to get back to a Church like that. In the last few days, the Pope has said (in homilies) some beautiful things about the Church as our Mother, and this is what people are looking for.