Monday, January 13, 2020

Community Depends Upon the Public Unity of Faith


Community is built up only when the individuals within the community share with one another what is deepest in them, only if they bring out and openly share their most intimate religious matters.

"I think that the time has come for us to dispel the modern illusion that religion is the most intimate business, which we deal with by ourselves alone, and that these intimate matters should not be brought into the public arena. When we thus reduce faith to a spirituality that has no connection with reality, we first strip faith itself of its reality, but than we also rob human fellowship of its most precious dimension. The end result is the individual on one side and the pure collectivity on the other. Community, in which individuals remain themselves but at the same time encounter what is truly human in their fellow--this community is not built up when man keeps to himself what is deepest in him. Furthermore, man needs this kind of community if he is to be himself. That is why we have the duty of making public what is most intimately ours, of bringing it forth and allowing it to put its stamp on the world around us. It is up to us not to let the world be without God but, rather, to convey God into the midst of it through our faith."
Joseph Ratzinger, Dogma and Preaching, San Francisco: Ignatius, 2011, 282.

We must evangelize the culture by boldly proposing and defending the Catholic faith. The meta-historian Christopher Dawson spent his life demonstrating the central historical relevance of the Catholic Church. He wrote that the Catholic Press "somehow manages to be entirely out of touch with the real world--to live in the atmosphere of the sacristy--and yet at the same time to be thoroughly unsupernatural and materialistic."
Christina Scott, A Historian and His World, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction, 1992, 91-92.