To reduce an appealer's line or scope of appeal on major ethical issues to his family, his locality, or even his nation, strikes me as a kind of creeping, insidious totalitarianism, an overt, brutal infringement on liberty.
"On me be your sin my daughter, and on the day of judgment I will render an account of it for you to the Lord; it is I who will be responsible for this to God."
Does permanence cut against the remaining shreds of humanity left for social networking? Or does anonymity pose too much risk for forming accountable, human structures for communication?
Death Himself, the Evil One who rejoiced while the tiny band of Christians wept at the seeming finality of the Lord’s death, is overthrown in his own realm, as the Lord tramples Satan underfoot like a loathsome weed.
We former Protestants simply expect things to be simple, straightforward, easily consumed, and then easily communicated to to others. And this is a problem to import into Catholicism.
This communal death, this secularization of the nunnery by churchmen who, ironically, use traditional routes of authority to undermine the traditional practices of the nuns, demands atonement.
Stifling Pope Benedict's voice, who is perhaps the moral theologian par excellence, endangers not only the clarity of the moral message of the Church, but the formation of all Christian consciences.
It really wasn't Thomism, but rather, a form of neo-Thomism that became popular during the first half of the 20th century, one that was very heavy on rules and memorizing catechism rather than focusing on some of the softer sides of the Catholic Faith: charity, joy, love.
We in the West can have the kind of world we want as soon as we choose to take responsibility for wanting it enough, unreliant on political ideology and Godlike power. This is what we signed up for. This is classic liberalism, the final test of Man’s perfectibility.
If the Creed has real force in my life, it is not only because I can recite and understand its content, but because I invoke it in a lived expression in daily life.
Christian conscience is the active acceptance of the fruits of true freedom, formed by careful reflection, and deployed in every instance of mundane life.
“Neoliberal Catholicism” represents, to use the words of the philosopher Maurice Blondel (2000), “une alliance contre nature”, a profoundly relativistic and inhumane agenda under the sheepskin of religious orthodoxy.
