Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform In The 21st-century Church By George Weigel

By Author: Craig Read
Total Articles: 33
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Culture is King. When your culture is one of worshipping cults, society will implode. The cults of abortion; the cult of Darwin [humans evolved from rats ? Really ?]; globlaoneywarming; Statism; cultural Marxism; relativity; Islam is Peace; and the rest, all point to a lost culture. Christians are portrayed as a lunatic fringe, self-flagellates who are not nearly as sophisticated as say a 1400 year old supremacist moon cult from Mecca, and rather uncivilized as opposed to say Communism or National Socialism which itself is now equated with the direction of 'right wing' [political orientation is not a weather vane]; and evangelical muscularity.
Post-modern culture is a magnificent and terrible failure. It screams 'rationality' yet little which is rational can be discussed. Do you really believe that Dinosaurs 'evolved' out of a lizard ? Is that something a sensible person truly forwards ? Or that a frog evolved into a human ? Come on. Or that a natural trace chemical necessary for life causes weather patterns to change ? Is this not cult stupidity framed in corruption, fraud and irrationality ?
Weigel's book goes ...
... to the heart of what the Leftist media call the 'Catholic problem'. Yet that 'problem' only confirms the insanity of modern culture. An example is question from that smug, insular and buffoonish George Stephanopolous who asked Cardinal Dolan of New York; 'Why do 60% of Catholics have a problem with the Church?', to which Dolan replied, '100 % of my congregation has no problem with the Church so where do you get your number from?'. Little George's insinuation is this: why doesn't the Church became another empty vessel, goose-stepping with government diktat like say Planned Parenthood, ACORN, or the United Church and various Protestant sects ? Little boy George is representative of the media and Marxist culture which animates a deep hatred of anything which promotes the immaterial and which opposes state power. This offends little minds like Georgie's. They must have sad lives.
There is most definitely a material and an immaterial world. Miracles and the unexplainable do exist --past, present and future.. Like the caterpillar dying and becoming the butterfly, the impossible becomes the possible in both the material and immaterial world. It is proud and empty hyperbole which screams 'we know it all'. The smart man says 'I know little'. As with the human incapability to understand climate, or how dinosaurs or mammals actually did come into being; the immaterial escapes those stricken by their egos, saturated in their narcissism.
The modern cult does have a church – it is the Holy Church of Narcissism.
In comes Weigel, famous Catholic apologist and writer; and founder of the James Madison Institute [link]. Culture is King and our culture is rotten. Just watch TV or Hollyweird to see how destructive it is. The state is driving out the immaterial, the truly religious based, and the immanent spirituality which is necessary for a high culture:
“It was Christ whom Jacobin politics, in a line from Robespierre to Stalin, sought to drive out of the future of the West by the brutal suppression of the Church. It is Christ whom the twenty-first-century Christophobes fear. And if the West is to recover from the crisis of civilizational morale in which it has been immolating itself in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, it is Christ, through Evangelical Catholicism, who will help humanize the earthly city through the agency of the City of God, present in an anticipatory way in the counter-culture... “
Yet in less than a decade after the Council [Vatican II 1965], the high culture of the West took a sharp turn toward an aggressive and hegemonic secularism that, in the twenty-first century, manifests itself as Christophobia: a deep hostility to Gospel truth (especially moral truth) and a determination to drive Christians who affirm those truths out of the public square and into a privatized existence on the margins of society.38 In these circumstances, the preaching of the Gospel and the living-out of Gospel truths in activities ranging from health care to foster care to education are profoundly counter-cultural.
Hating Christianity is not just the purview of Moslems. They are enthusiastically joined by the cult members of the state, who rejoice in secularism and abhor the Church for its lack of 'relativity' and 'rationality'. The ignorance of those who believe that the Church is irrational is overpowering. It was the Church which promoted and defended free-will, freedom, faith through reason and standards of conduct premised on rationality. But why think when bumper stickers are so much easier to affix to your life ?

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Books on Civilization can be a real eye-opener into how certain cultures and religions have changed and evolved over the years. You can find more about this in Books on Civilization .