Wow, this is a major development, isn’t it? What do you think?
From Rorate Caeli, this excerpt from Cardinal Dias’s homily at the opening of the jubilee of Lourdes:
“The struggle between God and his enemy still takes place, even more so today than at the time of Bernadette, 150 years ago. Because the world finds itself stuck in the swamp of a secularism that wishes to create a world without God; of a relativism that stifles the permanent and unchangeable values of the Gospel; and of a religious indifference that remains undisturbed regarding the higher good of the matters of God and the Church. This battle makes innumerable victims within our families and among our young people. Some months before becoming Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Karol Woytjila said (November 9, 1976): “We are today before the greatest combat that mankind has ever seen. I do not believe that the Christian community has completely understood it. We are today before the final struggle between the Church and the Anti-Church, between the Gospel and the Anti-Gospel.” One thing remains certain: the final victory belongs to God and that will happen thanks to Mary, the Woman of Genesis and of the Apocalypse, who will fight at the head of the army of her sons and daughters against the enemy forces of Satan and will crush the head of the serpent.”
I think of this for many reasons, including the accelerating break-up of TEC and the theological/moral developments (you should pardon the expression) in TEC, but also note the quotation from then-Cardinal Wojtila, which certainly seems a far cry from the mandatory optimism so often enforced in the (Roman) Church after Vatican II, deriving from “Gaudium et spes”.
You will have observed, I’m sure, that Rorate also called the Holy Father’s new encyclical, “Spe salvi” the “Anti-Gaudium et spes”, surely an ironic play on words as GS itself was called the “anti-Syllabus [of Errors, of Bl. Pius IX]” by...Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
These are certainly interesting times.