Is the Church an enemy of modernity? (Main Forum)

by Helen , The other side of Australia, Tuesday, July 03, 2012, 19:43 (351 days ago)

http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/homepage/inquiries-and-interviews/detail/articolo/...

Benedict XVI proclaims that the papacy’s strength lies solely in God’s grace. Hence the Pope re-evokes the scene of the conferral of the primacy on Peter, when Jesus announces the passion and asks Peter to follow him. The Church’s biggest problems derive from human weakness.”

I think the 'human weakness' response is wearing a bit thin. They are not so understanding about secular life but when it comes to looking into their own house, suddenly it is 'human weakness'. Am I being hard in my judgment? Yes, most probably I am, but you can't keep telling the 'ordinary Catholic' how to live because being ordained gives us an extra rung up the ladder to God and then when some commit outrageous crimes, try and get out of it by 'we are only human'. Yes, we all are - equally.

In the Church an enemy of modernity?

“Absolutely not. The Church distances itself from modernity when modernity turns into an uncritical religion and becomes irrational. Since the beginning of the modern age the Church has found itself battling against attempts to elevate reason to divinities that are averse to Christianity. In actual fact, the Christian tradition has sought the help of reason. Two good examples are Thomas Aquinas’ theological architecture and Dante’s poetic transposition of this in his Divine Comedy. The Church has never feared modernity itself, unless it becomes an antireligious system. And the Church has never been an enemy of true science, meaning science which does not become dogmatic processing.”

Is Aquinas the best he can come up with when talking about modernity? Have we no recent examples eg. Elizabeth Johnson??

Let us light a candle and say to the dark, we beg to differ