In distancing us from ourselves, we distance ourselves from Christ

The first way we distance ourselves from Christ is by distancing ourselves from our very selves. In that text from the Exercises twenty years ago, Father Giussani quoted a phrase from Pope John Paul II that is still decisive for us today: "there will be no faithfulness... if a question isn't found in man's heart to which only God... is the answer." He doesn't say there will be no faithfulness if we're not good, if we're not coherent, if we lack the energy. No. There will be no faithfulness -- in other words, in the end Christ will not matter to us -- without a question to which only He is the answer. If this question is not rooted in the depths of our I, and if we are not loyal to it, sooner or later Christ will not matter to us anymore. Like many others, we too will go away. For this reason, our first loyalty is to our humanity, to our cry, to the urgent need of our heart.

Fr. Julian Carron, Exercises of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, Rimini, 2007, pp. 8-9 (English transl, Fr. William Vouk et al.).

Can you believe it?

That's three posts for this month, not even counting this one!

Wow!

Who is the real liberal Catholic?

A nice post by Shawn of NLM on the opposition of some Catholics to Pope Benedict's recent decision to liberalize the use of the "traditional Latin Mass". He notes that if you look at the historical meaning of what a "Catholic liberal" is, the Holy Father fits the bill far more than those opposing this liberalization.

Hey libs: do you want to stop genocide or not?

Jonah Goldberg has a succinct column examining the hypocrisy inconsistency of many liberals (including many running for their party's presidential nomination) on the question of using force to stop genocide.

Comments

I know posts have been extremely sparse here over the last several months... I appreciate those of you who poke your heads in on occasion, as well as those who feel moved to offer a thought or two. Rest assured that vulgarity and spam aside, comments are not moderated... I feel that if you take the time to offer a thought, I'm happy to give you the space. Nor does disagreement (even strong disagreement) concern me... I'd hate for someone to think that I ignored/deleted a comment because I didn't like the conclusions or consequences of the comment.