Our Lady of Grace Church (and School) is located on the next street over from Cynthia’s home where I live in Chicago.
Looking out our front windows, we see the cross atop “Our Lady."
Every time I go past the "Our Lady," I am reminded of the high degree of enlightenment that is routinely embedded in Catholic parish "mission statements."
I seen nothing like this enlightenment in politics.
After all, Trump took over because America lost faith in goodness.
And although one can be good without God, it is faith communities that continually and fundamentally remind us that goodness is (or so we hope and believe), rooted in the goodness of God, who, according to the epistle of John, is Love.
For me, it is a fact “as plain as potatoes” that rigid, unbending, authoritarian absolutists tend to take control of organizations.
And when they do, these rigid, unbending, authoritarian absolutists try to impose their essentially fearful belief in the primacy of God's damning judgments. God becomes a kind of laundry list bean counter whose invariable rules, when breached, will send YOU to hell for all eternity.
In Matthew’s 23rd chapter, we find one of Jesus' more startling “woe passages”:
"Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces. And you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites who travel across land and sea to make a single convert, and when he becomes a convert, you make him twice as much a child of hell as you yourselves are.”
Keeping in mind the centrality of generous "mission statements" like Our Lady of Grace's, I say that Catholic churches will experience renaissance only if we stop putting up doctrinal barriers to participating in the spirit of Jesus.
Any meaningful church -including the Catholic Church - will welcome all people and let them all speak, with no need for doctrinal precision, from the love and generosity in their hearts.
If we were reflexively and thoroughly welcoming of all people evidently imbued with the joy, generosity and love of liberated spirit, I believe the rigid, restrictive, fundamentally punitive exemplars of church hierarchs would undergo a spiritual sea change, shifing away from any vestige of “fire and brimstone” punitiveness as “the prime moral mover," re-incarnating themselves as people who embody fundamental human goodness, just as goodness has self-evidently manifested in the lived lives of Pope Frances and Pope Leo the 14th.
What are we waiting for?
All we have to lose are the chains that shackle us to the horrifying visions of cruel, crusading medieval moralists, and inquisitorial Torquemadas.
The overall situation we have inherited is exemplified by the 12 year reign of Bishop Salvatore Matano in my family’s home Diocese of Rochester, New York, where I grew up and was formally educated through 13 years of Catholic, education supervised by the Mercy Sisters and the Basilian Priests.
You will find it very difficult to locate a critical word of Bishop Matano and the public record.
But if you dig deep enough, and talk with any knowledgeable, studious, generous Catholic in the Rochester Diocese, you will get an earful.
I don’t think anyone Spends eternity in a Hellish place even remotely reminiscent Have a Emily evil, Catholic, fever. Dreams.
And it is not my desire to do anything that suggests Bishop Matano - and his “Karass” -should be condemned.
But they need to be replaced, And measures need to be taken to prevent these rigid punitive, judgmental people from taking power in the Roman Church’s hierarchy.
These folks rise in organizational hierarchies, because organizational hierarchies, favor rigidity and doctrinaire adherence.
They should be replaced because of what Jesus tells us in the 23rd Chapter of Matthew’s gospel.
I believe one cannot have "salvation assurance" so long as one wonders if s/he is saved.
Only by living with the supposition that all people will ultimately be saved is salvation assurance vouchsafed, and then not directly, but only as a function of living in love, and experiencing the heavenly effect of "being" in love.
The lemma in the above meme includes spending any time trying to figure out if you yourself are saved.
"Salvation Assurance" is a state of being arising from being in love, acting out of love, and spending zero time being cruel or approving of cruelty in others.
When we surrender to love and love takes control of the way we live our lives, they we are - self-evidently - saved.
Salvationo is not a reward.
Salvation is not a gold star God places on our forehead.
Salvation is an automatic consequence of "Right Living" which means living kindly, generously, lovingly...
always turning one's back on cruelty.
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