I
have spent the last thirty-three years
of my priesthood and forty-two years of my consecrated religious life, mostly
as a priest, educator in faith and life, writer, and pastoring youth. To be
with the Church, according to me is, that to think with the Church one requires that one thinks. Only through thinking that the
Church doctrines, dogmas and directives appeal to the will and to reason.
We believe understanding, and understand believing. Above all, loving we obey, and we are enlightened. We then open
to the light. We hear and heed to the heart, and not just “hearing
about,” being apprised of. The faith matter is not mere “theological data”.
Instead of turning away from facts, it is meant to dive deeply into “thinking about reality”.
We often run the risk of substituting reality with subjective imagination and
faith-expressions, instead of treading
truth with passion and reason. Going behind the non-essentials, leads
often to confusion, corruption, and contempt.
The
Church has no power to declare the bad to be good. God is Absolute Good. We
need to be realistically grounded and not be on “high spiritual romance”.
Things can always be otherwise. If so, Church-sin can do “immense social harm” if we think with Church’s thinking,
and not think.
To
some conservative factions of the Catholic Church who consider him to be a dangerously progressive, the present Pope Francis in
his epiphany homily this year on the issue of
ideological splits in Church, asked the faithful to abandon
“ecclesiastical ideologies”, and focus on poor, not 'theory'. He warned against
“basking in some elegant religious theory” instead of finding “God who comes
down to visit us”, especially in the poor. The Church needs to ensure that
"our faith will not be reduced to an assemblage of religious devotions or
mere outward appearance.” Pope Francis allows “the possibility of blessing
couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples without officially
validating their status or changing in any way the Church’s perennial teaching
on marriage”. On this controversial blessing of the same-sex couples, while
making efforts to make LGBTQ Catholics feel welcome, he stresses that the
ordinary pastoral blessing is not heretical and that it has no doctrinal
grounds to reject.
A
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) Christian
tries to follow a man-Jesus who, without any formal scientific theological qualification,
confronted difficult questions of life and society, with responses arising out
of common sense, for the common good. His responses based themselves on
understanding of his Father’s will and the real situation of the person in time
and place, and the rest did not matter for him. He did not act according to set precedence, norms, rules,
rituals, canons, or magisterium. Jesus mostly took a different path naturally
programmed by God his Father, to outgrow his ministry. He often engaged in “disruptive
behaviour” in all that he said, did or failed to do. He, the ‘untrained’ one, trained himself the Father’s way, who is ever
understanding, gentle, kind yet firm.
For the religious leaders, Jesus seemed to be “intrinsically
disordered”, one who was disrespectful to
the prevalent religious laws and directives. Jesus had a “theological discourse”,
while exposing the Samaritan woman’s multiple marriages and her cohabiting nature
— irregular sexual relationship. Unlike other ‘religious experts’ (Pharisees,
Scribes), Jesus the teacher committed himself
to educating with the heart, with ‘loving kindness’, and dialogued with sinners
with respect and dignity, calling them
to repentance. He did not condone sins, neither condemn them.
God through the Church calls all to conversion and commission
all to be his messengers of love — the good news. Jesus the Messiah, the Saviour
of the world, likewise want the Church, his Body, to act in ways that fittingly
qualifies its members, in Jesus’ mode of ministry. Breaking the religious rules
(man-made), can hasten the ‘salvation of the world’. This is the vision
of Christ, — the coming of the Kingdom of God. This is the thinking of the
Church — a new way of ordering
things, with love and non-violence. Like Jesus, the Church too has to face the
resistance of “the world,” — cruelty,
corruption, betrayal, denial, lies, hatred
and violence. God, the Absolute, who is all love,
is above all religions or societal norms. Our pettiness and stupidity, our
human justification cannot mow down His love. God meets us as we ARE, because
God IS — Absolute Being without any form. Human encounter with God is devoid of
judgments that are subject to the religious and societal norms. This is the new thinking of the Church, inaugurating the new
creation and bringing humanity into
communion with God.
Therefore, the traditionalists are rightly to be
disturbed, just as those religious leaders two thousand years ago. They engineered the 'blasphemer-Jesus’ execution
because he posed a threat to the status quo, to their control over the religiosity
of the common people. The hardness
of human heart rejects God’s merciful love, and tries to “usurp the place of
God”.
The secular cultural world, with regard to the Church,
considers that something in her that is indissolubly linked to the human heart.
Whereas, for Christians, the Church acts as the conscience of people, to act
for the common good and coexist peacefully. It is a ‘religion of freedom’, enlightened by the high reason of
Christian faith in Jesus. She constructs common goals and tries to solve concrete
problems of the society. The Church
combines the secular and the religious dimensions, converging on a common and mutual enrichment. Facing a crisis of
values and the loss of the religious living, the Church validly still continues
to build up the kingdom of God — the Absolute, within a secularized world.
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