[Knitting A Conundrum]

so, if you are rude to me, come into my house, trash my rules, make fun of what I believe in, and I ask you to go, I have a heart of darkness for doing it?

This is what a lot of people have been doing with the church.

[Mill John Stuart]

Somehow my earlier reply did not get through. You seem to raise a serious question, deserving a serious answer. I saw a priest in Nicaragua who ran schools, churches, womens' centers, and reconciliation meetings between Contras and Sandinistas. He would travel on foot and by mule with a group of lay workers hundreds of miles throughout the countryside around the town of Waslala. He spent something like 150 days on the road each year establishing the link between the Catholic Church and the tiny communities in the nearby mountains. His perspective came from the tradition of Vatican II and liberation theology. He said we should see the face of Christ in the face of the shoe shine boy. People worked with him who were both Sandinista and Contra and everything in between. His people served as "delegates of the word" in the tradition of the Christian Base Communities of Liberation Theology. Ratzinger's crackdowns and censures were directed against people like him, people who clearly had great faith in the church, who were clearly within the house, and were building it and holding it together. Yes, you would have to say that in driving people like these out of the Church, Ratzinger was creating and giving life to the very heart of darkness, he is ostensibly fighting against.