Following on from a post yesterday of the new CDF Prefect, there was an interview on Vatican Radio with Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller.
As someone, who I must admit occasionally uses labels but hates being labelled I found this extract interesting about polarisation, most interesting that he is not quite able to find words to describe "progressives or whatever you call them". What seems to be a theme in his writings, is that faith changes lives, that there is a difference between notional belief, a vague intellectual committment, and real belief in Christ, that belief is actually about submitting oneself "unconditionally" to Christ, over and above our "own personal ideology". The label most Germans apply to him is "conservative" more or less the same labels they apply to the Pope.
I think we are in for something good and interesting.
Q: - You first year in the job begins with a bang, the Synod of bishops. But on a personal level what are your hopes for your first year?
A: - Naturally, I have thought of how I would fill this role. I do not believe I was summoned by the Holy Father to fill a bureaucratic post and carry out – so to speak – a bureaucratic task, but as a theologian. So above all, I asked myself; what ails the life of the Church? In many countries, there is a strong polarization: Traditionalists against progressives or whatever you would call them. This must be overcome, we need to find a new and fundamental unity in the Church and individual countries. Unity in Christ, not a unity produced according to a program and later invoked by a partisan speaker. We are not a community of people aligned to a party program, or a community of scientific research, our unity is gifted to us. We believe in the one Church united in Christ. And if you believe in Christ, really believe - not manipulating the teachings of the Church, or singling out individual points to support your own personal ideology, but rather unconditionally entrusting yourself to Christ - then the unity of the Church is also important. Then the Church will not be – as it is sometimes described in Scripture – torn apart by jealousy and ambition. This is my underlying aim: To reduce the tensions within the Church "
6 comments:
As they say:
Benedict is the Pope of Christian Unity!
Good luck to the Archbishop then - read the SSPX opinion of his appoinment:
http://www.sspx.co.uk/attachments/article/401/SEPT%202012%20web.pdf
Father, I have a prejudice: I believe the majority of modern theologians are a plague upon Mother Church. The language of +++Muller reinforces my prejudice, in that whilst appearing plausible, in fact, he is saying I am right and you, who disagree with me, are wrong. Indeed, one man's interpretation of scripture/doctrine/Vatican II/whatever, is another man's 'heresy'. Yet, surely in Mother Church there can be only one Truth. I thought I knew that Truth, until Vatican II came along and then every crackpot started preaching their own truths. +++Muller, to me, preaches, in Vatican II speak, a 'truth' of variable meaning. Let him prove himself by action: resolve the Linz and like problems; let him anathamatize the priestly and lay organisations in blatant contradiction of the Magisterium and Discipline of Mother Church, et al.
He certainly got off to a good start in his avowed aim of reducing tensions in The Church by his prejudicial outpouring regarding SSPX.
I would also like him to disavow the German 'Church Tax' which has been [mis]used to bolster overinflated Chanceries and ant-Magisterium movements in that country. For the German Bishops' Conference to, de facto, debar from the Sacraments those wishing to make individual payments, as opposed to the 'system' is sacrilegious - by their fruits ..... .
The church I attend is Oratory based, preaching only orthodox Catholicism.
Sixupman,
There is one Truth, indeed but that is person not a set of doctrines. Doctrinal propositions give us insight into that Person, here there have always been tensions, obviously between East and West, between persons too, or schools of theology. The problem is going beyond acceptable differences. In his own diocese Abp M. seems to have kerbed the more excessive deviations, certainly of lay challenges to the heirarchy, the We are Church stuff for example.
"Christian virtue is a question not so much of doing as of being.
When you hear it said of someone "He's a different man since he fell in love" you have a clue what must happen to the Christian.
As you are, so you will act: love affects one's being, and therefore, in consequence, one's behavior--even though you do the same things you will do them differently--and it is when you can say "I live, now not I" that you can go on to say "I can do all things"; and you can say the latter because you add, with the docility of a child, "in Him who strengthened me."
Are we really Catholic?
Are we sons and daughters of our Mother?
*
Perhaps we are seeing in this polarisation of "traditionalists and progressives" the process by which the teachings of Vatican 2 are worked out and received by the Church. Given that we are approaching the 50th anniversary of the opening of V2 It is likely that this process has some way to run yet. Let us pray that the Church can find a way of conducting this process without rancour.
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