Saturday, May 07, 2005

Spring Cleaning?

Apparently, even the Jesuits enjoy a little spring cleaning every now and then. (Less now, more then.)

I always enjoy waking up and reading some news that will not only brighten my day but give me a sense of hope for the future, especially the Catholic future, even when it applies to those "in the Jesuit tradition," as they so often are fond of saying.

Editor of Jesuit Magazine Leaving
The editor of the Jesuit weekly America is leaving the magazine after the Vatican received complaints about articles he published on touchy issues such as same-sex marriages and stem cell research, Jesuit officials said Friday.

Read the rest of it here.

How do they say it, "ad maiorem dei gloriam"? All to the greater glory of God. Apparently so.

Makes me want to go back and read some de Lubac, especially his comments on the papacy.

"For a long time I had happened to say in friendly conversations: 'After Paul VI, my candidate is Wojtyla.'"

As John Paul the Great came and the 80's too, Cardinal de Lubac commented, "I suffered to see that many continued to have the same belligerent attitude toward him that they had had toward Paul VI, an attitude that springs above all from a hostility to the papacy, to the guardian of our Faith."

What about his fellow Jesuits?
"I suffer doubly today because of the attitude of some of my brothers in his regard and because of all of which this is a sign. But, as he wrote to me, 'we have firmly hoped, we will always hope, and we are and will be happy'."

"Christ is closer than ever to Peter in the insults."

"... acrimonious voices of protest are raised .... It is by some of her sons, unfaithful to their own vocation, that she is publicly ridiculed in the person of her chief pastor."

"It is a question of the very foundations of the faith, of Catholic morality and discipline, which the body of bishops united to the Pope has the mission to maintain."

"Finally, ... the dispute with the papacy is increasing in Catholicism at the time when, among Christians of other confessions, the awareness of an urgent need for unity is awakening or deepening."

"If the person of the Pope is thus disputed, it is often in reality because of what is most incontestable about him .... Throughout, it is the principle of the papacy, the very function of Peter that is the object of the dispute. It thereby receives the supreme homage. ... insofar as this function is assured, whatever the tides of history, the light of Christian revelation remains intact and what one rightly calls, in a unique sense, the Christian revolution preserves its inexhaustible power. That is the rock against which break the efforts of perversion, of rupture or 'radical change' that can always find, in troubled circumstances, so much unconscious complicity."

Spoken like a true "man of the Church," homo ecclesiaticus, as Fr. Fessio has called him.

ad maiorem dei gloriam

No comments: