Allow me to diverge from my thoughts on the public duty for Catholic voters as I have been struck with inspiration from the Pope Benedict’s last encyclical, Spe Salvi and I may spend the next several days reflecting on the implications this message has on our conversation. He says in paragraph 25, “On the other hand, we must also acknowledge that modern Christianity, faced with the succeses of science in progressively structuring the world, has to a large extent restricted its attention to the individual and his salvation. In so doing it has limited the horizon of its hope and has failed to recognize sufficiently the greatness of its task…” What is the horizon of its hope but the public square? The Holy Father makes the point that much of what belonged the hope for building the Kingdom of God was transferred to what we know call science. Freedom and Reason became the main forces that liberated humanity and became an absolute value for progress. Progress itself became an absolute value as well. In this course of human history, Christianity was relegated to the private sphere, irrelevant to establishing the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God became possible merely by studying human nature, sociology, history, and science. Then we had only to place the right kind of structures to force humanity from the outside into a perfect society…free, happy, and progressing towards greater accomplishment over nature and over itself. The results, of course, as many have noted, not just Christians, have been disastrous. Men such as Karl Marx and Francis Bacon neglected one thing: “human freedom.” And human freedom deals with interior transformation rather than exterior structuring. And this pertains to the transformation that can only take place through a response to the hope that is offered in Jesus Christ.
Tags: hope, Pope Benedict, Public Square, Salvation, Spe Salvi
July 13, 2008 at 10:09 pm |
A response to paragraph 25 as presented by padrechristopher:
While religion often divides, science is an international activity, which transcends borders, cultures, and ideologies. Therefore it can be seen as uniting. At the same time, science is concerned with the individual being. For example, darwinism examines how one is hardwired to ensure the survival of his or her genes in future generations; it even explains how altruistic actions only take place to ensure one’s genetic material’s survival, and the individual is not doing it for the greater good of a group or community. Following a scientific line of thought, cognitive scientists present religion as a coping mechanism for the individual, as it allows them to make sense of his or her world. Therefore, I find one of the greatest challenges for the Roman Catholic Church is to “convince” its community that they NEED to help one another and not that they should (following the idea that good / nice people help one another), especially when the idea conflicts with contemporary, rational, scientific thought. In conclusion, I am not sure how the Kingdom of God fits into the Theology + hip, Science conundrum.