{"id":416,"date":"2008-01-31T10:09:46","date_gmt":"2008-01-31T10:09:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/01\/faith-and-reason.html"},"modified":"2008-01-31T10:09:46","modified_gmt":"2008-01-31T10:09:46","slug":"faith-and-reason","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/01\/faith-and-reason.html","title":{"rendered":"Faith and Reason"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two messages from Benedict:
\nFirst, yesterday’s catechesis on Augustine:<\/a><\/p>\n

Distance from God means distance from oneself. Addressing his words directly to God he acknowledges (“Confessions,” III, 6, 11): “You are more intimately present to me than my inmost being and higher than the highest element in me,” — “interior intimo meo et superior summo meo” — so that, he adds in another passage remembering the time preceding his conversion, “you were in front of me, but I, instead, had gone far from myself and could not find myself again, and even less could I find you again” (Confessiones, V, 2, 2).
\nBecause Augustine personally experienced this intellectual and spiritual journey, he managed to convey it in his writings with immediacy, depth and wisdom; in another two famous passages of the “Confessions” (IV, 4, 9 and 14, 22), he acknowledged that man is “a great enigma” (magna quaestio) and “a deep abyss” (grande profundum), an enigma and an abyss that Christ alone enlightens and saves.
\nThis is important: A man who is distant from God is also distant from himself, estranged from himself, he can find himself only by meeting God. This path leads to himself, to his true self and identity.
\nIn “De Civitate Dei” (XII, 27) Augustine underlines the fact that the human being is by nature a social animal, but antisocial in his vices. Man is saved by Christ, the only mediator between God and humanity, and as repeated by my predecessor John Paul II (“Augustinium Hipponensem,” 21), he is “the universal path to freedom and salvation.”
\nIn the same text, Augustine affirms that “no one has ever found freedom or will ever find freedom” (“De Civitate Dei,” X, 32, 2) other than by following this path which has always been accessible to man. Christ, as the only route to salvation, is head of the Church and inscrutably united with it. Augustine affirms, “We have become Christ. In fact, if he is the head of man and we are the body, together we make up the whole” (“In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus,” 21, 8).
\nPeople of God and house of God: The Church in the Augustinian vision is closely associated with the concept of the Body of Christ, based on the Christological rereading of the Old Testament and on the sacramental life centered on the Eucharist, in which the Lord gives us his Body and transforms us in his Body. It is then essential that the Church — people of God in the Christological and not sociological sense — be really placed in Christ, who “prays for us, prays in us, is prayed to by us,” as Augustine affirms beautifully on the written page: “He prays for us as our priest, he prays in us as our chief, he is prayed to by us as our God: so we recognize in him our voice, and in ours, his” (“Enarrationes in Psalmos,” 85, 1).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This morning, the Pope addressed the CDF, meeting in Rome. The full text in Italian is here,<\/a> and John Allen summarizes:<\/a><\/p>\n

In late June, the congregation issued a document on the famous phrase from the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) that the one church of Christ \u201csubsists in\u201d the Catholic church. In essence, the congregation asserted that the phrase means the Catholic church alone possesses the fullness of what it means to be a church.
\nDuring the council, some analysts interpreted the phrase \u201csubsists in\u201d as a departure from the traditional claim that the Catholic church is the lone \u201ctrue\u201d church. When the doctrinal congregation issued its clarification, some leaders of other Christian denominations warned of negative ecumenical fallout.
\nIt\u2019s a critique which Benedict obviously does not accept, insisting that the clarification is actually \u201cnecessary for the correct development of ecumenical dialogue.\u201d
\n\u201cFar from impeding authentic ecumenical dialogue,\u201d Benedict said, \u201cit will be a stimulus, so that the debate on doctrinal questions is always marked by realism and full awareness of the aspects that still separate the Christian confessions.\u201d
\n\u201cTo cultivate a theological vision that regards the unity and identity of the church as attributes \u2018hidden in Christ’, so that historically the church would exist only in multiple ecclesial confessions, reconcilable only in an eschatological perspective, would generate a slowdown and ultimately paralysis in ecumenism itself,\u201d the pope said.
\nBenedict also defended a recent doctrinal note on evangelization, asserting that the quest for explicit conversion to Christ remains an essential duty of the faith.
\n\u201cThe recognition of elements of truth and goodness in the religions of the world,\u201d he said, \u201cand of the seriousness of their religious efforts, dialogue with them and a spirit of collaboration for the defense and promotion of the dignity of the person and universal moral values, cannot be understood as a limitation on the missionary duty of the church, which compels it to incessantly announce Christ as the way, the truth and the life,\u201d he said.
\nIn remarks to the pope at the beginning of the audience, American Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, confirmed that his office is preparing a new document on bioethics as a follow-up to the 1987 text Donum Vitae<\/em>.
\nLevada mentioned cloning, embryonic stem cell research, and the situation of frozen embryos as issues to be addressed in that document.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two messages from Benedict: First, yesterday’s catechesis on Augustine: Distance from God means distance from oneself. Addressing his words directly to God he acknowledges (“Confessions,” III, 6, 11): “You are more intimately present to me than my inmost being and higher than the highest element in me,” — “interior intimo meo et superior summo meo”…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nFaith and Reason - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/01\/faith-and-reason.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Faith and Reason - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Two messages from Benedict: First, yesterday’s catechesis on Augustine: Distance from God means distance from oneself. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}