Catholics contra mundum
Rutledge, Fleming
CATHOLICS 'CONTRA MUNDUM' THEY GET SOME THINGS RIGHT ¦ suppose a case could be made from 1 Corinthians 1:1017 that Saint Paul would be greatly distressed by the divisions in the Christian...
...How different this is from the American gospel, "God helps those who help themselves...
...No one said it better than Murray Kempton in a 1987 New York Review of Books article: In the thirteenth century, Catholicism was unknown outside Europe, but it is now a universal force...
...but anti-Catholicism seems to be downright fashionable...
...This article is based on a sermon preached at New York's Saint Joseph's Roman Catholic Church in Greenwich Village, January 24, 1993...
...as Christian brothers and sisters, we can certainly disagree without being disagreeable...
...In this confidence, the bishops of your church have continued to speak the truth boldly to the world...
...Amen...
...In Poland and Nicaragua, Chile and El Salvador, churchmen stand reproaching and resisting the excesses of the state...
...On these matters we cannot at present find unity...
...It's hip to rip the cardinal...
...That's the word from this Protestant corner today...
...As Flannery O'Connor remarked, "the truth as Christians know it [is] a light to see the world by," and not, one might add, the other way round...
...Recently I was somewhat taken aback to realize just how much disagreement there still is between Protestants and Catholics in crucial areas such as the role of Holy Scripture...
...Praised be Jesus Christ...
...Praised be Jesus Christ...
...That's not unhealthy, in my view...
...I thank God for the Roman Catholic church around 9 A THANK YOU NOTE the world, fighting tirelessly for human rights...
...It seems to me that the bishops' inability to agree on a statement about women was a very good sign...
...relics and sacramentals...
...what happens in the Mass...
...What matters is the spirit in which the disagreeing gets done...
...I have been noticing this for years myself: racism is a no-no...
...CATHOLICS 'CONTRA MUNDUM' THEY GET SOME THINGS RIGHT ¦ suppose a case could be made from 1 Corinthians 1:1017 that Saint Paul would be greatly distressed by the divisions in the Christian church today...
...As Graham Greene put it in The Power and the Glory, "It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard around you, the greater glory lay around the death: it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful...
...Fleming Rutledge is the pastor of Grace Episcopal Church in New York City...
...FLEMING RUTLEDGE The Rev...
...Your tradition holds fast to this central teaching in a number of other important ways: the prohibition of euthanasia...
...What I would like to reflect on is neither our disagreement nor our agreements, but as a preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ, to celebrate our larger unity in the Lord...
...prayers to the saints...
...gay-bashing is out...
...I am reminded of the refrain used so often by Pope John Paul II on his American trips: "Praised be Jesus Christ...
...And again, "God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us" (5:8...
...I myself am very thankful to Governor Mario Cuomo for his courageous and principled stand against capital punishment...
...From Cardinal Sin down the hierarchy to the simplest nuns, the Philippine church was a critical factor in the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos...
...a strong stand against suicide...
...Human beings, after all, are going to disagree about things until the Kingdom comes...
...What binds us, however, is far stronger than what divides us...
...the definition of sin...
...Shortly before his death, the New York Times quoted the late Father Timothy Healy to the effect that the only permissible prejudice in America today is anti-Catholicism...
...and your voice heard round the world against torture and any other violation of the human body...
...Personally, I am not so interested in the obvious issues that we read about in the newspapers—matters like the ordination of women, birth control, unmarried clergy...
...But I'm not so sure about that...
...Believe it or not, that's the easy stuff...
...In spite of all the progress we've made, there are a good many areas of serious difference between us...
...Let me give just a few examples...
...Mainline Protestantism has made so many accommodations to contemporary culture as to be almost indistinguishable from it sometimes...
...That is the reason for my gratitude to you...
...Second, when I read of martyrs like Archbishop Romero, the Jesuit priests, the Maryknoll nuns, and most recently the five nuns in Liberia, I give thanks to God that he is glorified in these witnesses, who laid down their lives to defend the defenseless...
...One of them was simul peccatoret iustus—saints and sinners simultaneously...
...There are many pressing problems facing you, and we would find ourselves on opposite sides of the fence from time to time...
...This requires enormous courage...
...it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt...
...The Apostle made his appeal to the quarreling Corinthians on the basis of mutual love in Christ...
...Even unbelievers like myself have to concede that the Catholic church has become the steadiest, and in many places the only, defender of human rights the wide world can show...
...In a time when many leaders of Protestant denominations have abandoned theology for sociology, psychology, and anthropology, the Catholic church's teaching office continues to set forth the truths of God sub specie aeternitatis—from the perspective of eternity...
...anti-Semitism is unthinkable...
...I bring a message of encouragement to you in a time when, I would imagine, that it is not easy to be Roman Catholic...
...That is what Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox all have in common: "Praised be Jesus Christ...
...While we were still helpless...
...The whole spectrum of sexual behavior is included here, for as Saint Paul teaches, also in I Corinthians 6:19-20, "Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit....You are not the owner of your own body, you were bought with a price...
...What would upset him, I think, would be not so much the fact that Christendom is divided into Presbyterians, Catholics, Pentecostals, Eastern Orthodox, and so forth, but the lack of love and mutual respect to be found within individual congregations and traditions and among various Christian bodies...
...so glorify God in your body...
...and above all the whole question of justification by grace through faith alone...
...Martin Luther gave us many expressions which later became watchwords of the Reformation...
...Saint Paul was the last man on earth to want to smooth out theological differences...
...Christ died for the ungodly, the half-hearted, and the corrupt—while we were still helpless...
...Third: the Catholic church has steadfastly shown herself to be contra mundum when necessary, "against the world," against the prevailing cultural trends...
...I do not intend to idealize or romanticize Roman Catholicism...
...The really big-time issues are the theological ones...
...the Immaculate Conception...
...That is the irreducible core of our faith...
...having the body present at funerals, and holding to the ancient custom of Christian burial...
...To him, to the Father, and to the Holy Spirit be glory, honor, dominion, and power, now and forever...
...In writing to the Romans, Saint Paul noted that "While we were still helpless, Christ died for the ungodly" (5:6...
...He died to save us before we could make a single move to save ourselves...
...First, the Roman Catholic church has continued to insist on the importance of bodily life before God...
...I feel no dismay about this...
...keeping everyone's feet to the fire on the abortion question...
...We Protestants may disagree about details of these matters, but Christians of all persuasions can be deeply grateful to the Catholic church for not letting any of us forget that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit...
...None of the Protestant bodies has done anything comparable to the Catholic bishops' statements on nuclear weapons and the economy...
...Many of us Protestants, however, if we are honest, will admit that the Roman Catholic church has been standing in the breach where many of us have retreated from the front...
...You have been suffering crucifixion in the world on behalf of us all...
...A Korean archbishop is changing the face of his country's regime...
...In an era when the Protestant mainline churches have experimented with everything from reincarnation to witchcraft to inventing one's own marriage vows, the Catholic church has held fast to the Apostles' Creed...
Vol. 121 • January 1994 • No. 1
