Restoration

In an article about the restoration of a Catholic church building in London

there’s this quote from George Weigel:

Thus the New Evangelization requires radically converted disciples, and it requires bold leaders who call the timid to the fullness of conversion. It requires disciples and leaders who are unfailingly pro-life, and who are capable of rebutting the spurious charge that to be pro-life is to be anti-woman. It requires disciples and leaders who are prepared to defend religious freedom in full, and who refuse to concede that religious freedom can be whittled down to freedom of worship. It requires disciples and leaders who are pro-family and pro-marriage, and who are prepared to defend their advocacy against the charge that they are “homophobic.” It requires disciples and leaders prepared to speak truth to power, especially when coercive state power is deployed to impose the agenda of the dictatorship of relativism.

And to form these disciples and leaders, the demands of the New Evangelization require the Church throughout the Anglosphere to learn the lesson that Blessed John Henry Newman tried to teach more than a century ago, and that the sad fate of liberal Protestantism and the disintegration of the Anglican Communion illustrate in our time: that “religion as mere sentiment…is a dream and a mockery.” Religion as “mere sentiment” is our search for God, which inevitably ends up in the sandbox of our own self-absorption, where anything may be countenanced as an expression of my “authenticity.” Biblical religion, by contrast, is about God’s search for us, and our learning to take the same path through history that God is taking: a journey guided, Catholics affirm, by the doctrines of the Church and the regula fidei, the rule of life that is the sacramental system. The New Evangelization requires teachers who teach that, pastors who support that, and disciples who believe that – and believe it, not as a personal lifestyle option, but as the revealed truth of the world, which has been given into our completely unworthy and often trembling hands. It requires evangelical Catholic communities in mission like St Patrick’s, Soho.

This entry was posted in Church, Currents. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s