Opening his mouth, he stirred controversy (sorry; we were practicing Greek participles yesterday.)
When I clicked on the headline, I had misread it as "irreligious remarks" which would have been a very different controversy. This one is less surprising but still awkward. There is one God. He has made all of us for himself and therefore al…
Opening his mouth, he stirred controversy (sorry; we were practicing Greek participles yesterday.)
When I clicked on the headline, I had misread it as "irreligious remarks" which would have been a very different controversy. This one is less surprising but still awkward. There is one God. He has made all of us for himself and therefore all of us desire him and are searching for him, but often while not understanding what it is we desire and what it is that we should be searching for; as Yogi Berra famously allegedly said: if you don’t know where you are going, you might not get there.
If virtue is in the middle, then one extreme is to tell everyone they're going to hell for not being Catholic (then they respond that they don't want to spend eternity with a God who is like that, and then you have lost your fish), and the other extreme is to tell everyone that the Catholic Church has nothing to offer them that they cannot find somewhere else, or, by omission, to fail to ever tell anyone that the Catholic Church has something to offer him/her that he/she cannot find anywhere else.
It is poetic to say that we humans are all children of God but to the best of my knowledge this could not possibly be correct in any technical sense, because words have meanings (what is it that happens when a person is baptized?) It would be correct to say that we humans are all created in the image and likeness of God (a very great dignity). It would be correct also to say that we humans are all brethren ("brothers and sisters" or "sisters and brothers" if we have to be modern in our English), since it is a simple truth that we are all descended from Adam and Eve; Jesus became our brother according to the flesh by taking on human nature, and so we could say that he is everyone's brother while being both poetic and true, but in these sorts of conversations I think any mention of Jesus is avoided. There are probably some other friendly things that a person could say to a mixed crowd that sound uplifting while still being true... maybe someone should put out a brochure "things to say to people of all faiths to help them get along together if you are the Pope", I don't know.
I don’t know that it’s incorrect to say that we are all children of God. St. Paul does as much in his Areopagus address, saying that both he and the unbaptized Greek pagans with whom he is speaking are “God’s offspring” (Acts 17:29).
If I am going to make an effort to not take the Pope out of context and instead to be very careful to understand what his intentions are, I ought also to extend the same consideration to St. Paul; in Acts 17:29, evidently, he is quoting part of a line in a Greek poem which up to that point had been talking about the omnipotence and omnipresence of "Zeus" (immediately before that, he quoted something else that we don't have the original of), and he goes on to say that therefore, as a logical conclusion from the writings of the Greeks' own authors, we ought not to think that the divinity has any resemblance to an inanimate idol made by human hands, I.e., we ought to reject idol worship as nonsensical. The philosophers listening to him were probably on board with that idea (of course! we don't really believe in idols either! so old-fashioned!), but not on board with the rest of what he said (i.e. that God is not something like the Force in Star Wars, and that God demands repentance.)
Opening his mouth, he stirred controversy (sorry; we were practicing Greek participles yesterday.)
When I clicked on the headline, I had misread it as "irreligious remarks" which would have been a very different controversy. This one is less surprising but still awkward. There is one God. He has made all of us for himself and therefore all of us desire him and are searching for him, but often while not understanding what it is we desire and what it is that we should be searching for; as Yogi Berra famously allegedly said: if you don’t know where you are going, you might not get there.
If virtue is in the middle, then one extreme is to tell everyone they're going to hell for not being Catholic (then they respond that they don't want to spend eternity with a God who is like that, and then you have lost your fish), and the other extreme is to tell everyone that the Catholic Church has nothing to offer them that they cannot find somewhere else, or, by omission, to fail to ever tell anyone that the Catholic Church has something to offer him/her that he/she cannot find anywhere else.
It is poetic to say that we humans are all children of God but to the best of my knowledge this could not possibly be correct in any technical sense, because words have meanings (what is it that happens when a person is baptized?) It would be correct to say that we humans are all created in the image and likeness of God (a very great dignity). It would be correct also to say that we humans are all brethren ("brothers and sisters" or "sisters and brothers" if we have to be modern in our English), since it is a simple truth that we are all descended from Adam and Eve; Jesus became our brother according to the flesh by taking on human nature, and so we could say that he is everyone's brother while being both poetic and true, but in these sorts of conversations I think any mention of Jesus is avoided. There are probably some other friendly things that a person could say to a mixed crowd that sound uplifting while still being true... maybe someone should put out a brochure "things to say to people of all faiths to help them get along together if you are the Pope", I don't know.
I don’t know that it’s incorrect to say that we are all children of God. St. Paul does as much in his Areopagus address, saying that both he and the unbaptized Greek pagans with whom he is speaking are “God’s offspring” (Acts 17:29).
If I am going to make an effort to not take the Pope out of context and instead to be very careful to understand what his intentions are, I ought also to extend the same consideration to St. Paul; in Acts 17:29, evidently, he is quoting part of a line in a Greek poem which up to that point had been talking about the omnipotence and omnipresence of "Zeus" (immediately before that, he quoted something else that we don't have the original of), and he goes on to say that therefore, as a logical conclusion from the writings of the Greeks' own authors, we ought not to think that the divinity has any resemblance to an inanimate idol made by human hands, I.e., we ought to reject idol worship as nonsensical. The philosophers listening to him were probably on board with that idea (of course! we don't really believe in idols either! so old-fashioned!), but not on board with the rest of what he said (i.e. that God is not something like the Force in Star Wars, and that God demands repentance.)