|
Christ, Not Rules
BY Mark Shea April 13-19, 2008 Issue |
Posted 4/8/08 at 1:05 PM
If you consult the mainstream media, you’d swear that all
Benedict (aka “God’s Rottweiler/The Enforcer/Former Hitler Youth”) did is
concoct new rules and then “lash out” or “crack down” on people for not keeping
them.
Given this view of the faith, discussions in the press often
break down into babble about mortal and venial sin. Little lists are bandied
about and we are told, in the words of one magazine: “Mortal sins are those
that the sinner knows are serious but nonetheless decides to perform. They
include the seven deadly sins as well as countless others, like witchcraft or
skipping out on Sunday Mass.”
Venial sins, we discover, don’t tick off our inexplicably
irritable God as much, but if they pile up, he might lose his always-hair-trigger
temper and damn us anyway.
Happily, you can “wipe the slate clean” by confession.
What is missing from all this? Any concept of life in Christ
as relationship.
Catholic life is, according to the mainstream media, rules
written on a card and stuck to the refrigerator. Break rules on Card A and the
Divine Administrator drops your personnel file in the “Go to Hell” tray for
processing.
Break rules on Card B and the Divine Administrator marks
down the infraction. Earn enough infractions and the Sin Monitor Task Force
transfers your personnel file to the “Go to Hell” tray.
However, if you do the religious equivalent of filling out a
waiver by going to confession, the Divine Administrator will, for inscrutable
reasons, shred your record and let you start your personnel file over.
The goal of the Christian life, in this scenario, is to die
with your personnel file spotless (except maybe for a couple of infractions you
can work off in purgatory). Then God has to let you into heaven, which is this
beautiful park where your favorite dead people have been standing around
waiting for you to arrive.
Way to go! You did all the stuff you needed in order to pass
and now you graduate to the ultimate happy retirement and go fishing!
What’s missing? The notion of a life of virtue spent trying
to cultivate a relationship with God never enters the picture. It’s just a
question of keeping and breaking rules — with rewards entirely external to us.
And nobody (in the mainstream media) really knows why one rule is more important
than another.
Indeed, some of the rules appear to have nothing whatever do
with anything, if you judge by the portrayal of the mainstream media.
A mortal sin to miss Mass? That one must have been stuck in
by the Church to try to control people. When Benedict comes to America he’s
probably going to crack down on people for stuff like that!
There’s no conception that Benedict’s real interest is in
fostering relationship with Jesus Christ. That’s why, when he writes an
encyclical like Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love), the mainstream media are
dumbfounded.
What’s the Chief Bureaucrat of an organization devoted
solely to the promulgation and enforcement of irrational rules doing talking
about love? They then translate this enlightenment of their Stygian ignorance
about the faith into the breathless announcement that Benedict has “grown.”
In the same way, hell seems, in the mind of the mainstream
media, to have nothing to do with relationship.
I constantly meet people who think of hell as an absurdly sadistic
overreaction by a touchy God who gets irrationally angry when people don’t keep
his arbitrary rules.
There is not the slightest grasp that hell is the
“definitive self-exclusion” of a soul from the society of God who has done
everything, including being tortured to death, to bring them close to him.
Hell is not some arbitrary punishment that God sticks on us
like postage stamps because we got too many infractions in the file or forgot
to get a waiver. It is the human heart making the final choice to be bricked
round in the furnace of itself — alone.
In short, people don’t seem to grasp that heaven is simply
the fruit of a life that pursues relationship with God on his terms and hell is
simply the fruit of a life that pursues its own course on its own terms.
Mortal and venial sins are useful distinctions, to be sure.
But if you turn them into another way of trying to be saved by law, you are
stone deaf to the most elementary teaching of the Gospel: that only Christ, not
law, can save us.
Benedict is acutely aware of that, which is why he
constantly refers us not to some mythical list of salvific rules and
regulations, but to Christ. That’s going to be the real message he brings to
our shores.
God willing, even our journalists will start to figure that
out while he’s here.
Mark Shea is senior content
editor for CatholicExchange.com.
Make a Donation now!
Insightful. Informative. Uncompromisingly faithful. The National Catholic Register is more than a newspaper. It’s a cause. Your support for the Register funds important journalism that helps to build a Culture of Life in our nation, and throughout the world. Help us promote the Church’s New Evangelization by donating to the National Catholic Register right now.
Click here to donate
| 
.
