More on Spe Salvi and Engaging the Public Square

Pope Benedict said, “On the strength of his hope, Augustine dedicated himself completely to the ordinary people and to his city–renouncing his spiritual nobility, he preached and acted in a simple way for simple people.”  If this does not point out some of the most central points of this blog then I don’t know what does.  Part of the challenge for me is to take so much of the wisdom of our tradition and distill it for folks who are educated and full of information in so many ways, yet are still simple on the level of faith and on the level of life.  Are the people in the congregation fired up about tackling the major cultural problems of this secular-progressivist society?  Probably not.  Do they need to be?  I don’t think so.  This is why there is the academic side of this question, and then on the other side (the more important side for us pastors) there is the pedagogical.

For example, I have encountered many instances where people identify a strong and spirited congregation by looking at how much of a percentage do church stuff.  Is that really what we are about when we say that the people of God must live out their faith?  A large part of our mission as priests, with Augustine as our model, is to remind the people of God of their dignity in the simplicity of their lives.  They need not start a television show, or lead a large church group, or start a new ministry.  Where they are is where God is sending them.  Are they looking for where God is sending them in their life now?  Or are they regretting that they cannot dedicate as much time being a lector, or attending church functions, or helping out at the pantry.  I cannot overemphasize that I do not mean to discourage by any means participation in the ecclesial life of the Church.  But, obviously, not everyone is supposed to help out on the Church grounds beyond what is their duty (tithing, participation in some community functions).  If this were so, the Church should be crowded with thousands of people all the time, and the world would be vacuous of Christians.  Rather, it is supposed to be the opposite.  The people of God ARE the leaven that God places in the dough that is the world to make it rise.  Brothers, let us preach this tirelessly.

Spe Salvi and the Public Square

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.