In Georges Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest, the elderly Curé de Torcy gives his young priest friend a bit of advice about proclaiming the Gospel: “The Word of God is a red-hot iron,” he says. “Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes later.”
One could probably craft a meditation on the state of the Catholic soul today in terms of the tension between those two values — truth and comfort. We want the church to offer comfort, which among other things implies that Catholics shouldn’t brutalize one another in internal tribal warfare. Yet we also want the church to be bold in proclaiming the truth that saves, which inevitably means that sometimes lines have to be drawn and feelings may be bruised.
The $64,000 question is, can we do both? Can the Catholic church be both the “sacrament of the unity of the human race” and a fearless evangelical force?
Read it all.
John Allen in NCR: A 'Dallas experiment' in orthodoxy and openness
In Georges Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest, the elderly Curé de Torcy gives his young priest friend a bit of advice about proclaiming the Gospel: “The Word of God is a red-hot iron,” he says. “Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes later.”
One could probably craft a meditation on the state of the Catholic soul today in terms of the tension between those two values — truth and comfort. We want the church to offer comfort, which among other things implies that Catholics shouldn’t brutalize one another in internal tribal warfare. Yet we also want the church to be bold in proclaiming the truth that saves, which inevitably means that sometimes lines have to be drawn and feelings may be bruised.
The $64,000 question is, can we do both? Can the Catholic church be both the “sacrament of the unity of the human race” and a fearless evangelical force?
Read it all.