- Feb 5, 2002
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What we have emanating from Rome today is chaos and confusion.
Within 24 hours last month, three mainstream Catholic websites ran stories describing Pope Francis’s meeting with the members and consultors of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, with the following headlines:
Then there are Tohu wa-bohu (Jeremiah 4:23, citing Genesis 1:2): a Hebrew phrase that can be rendered as “chaos and confusion.”
What we have emanating from Rome today is Tohu wa-bohu.
Chaos and confusion, of the sort suggested by those three headlines, disturb the peace and unity of the Church, especially among its most devout people. Chaos and confusion are impediments to vocation recruitment: Many are willing to take up the burdens and challenges of priestly or consecrated life for the sake of a mystery of divine love; few are going to give their lives for a question mark (and those who do are almost certainly heading for trouble). Chaos and confusion are grave impediments to evangelization: Who wants to join the Church of Maybe, which is just the Church of the Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age tarted up with smells and bells?
And Tohu wa-bohu — chaos and confusion — are precisely what the Office of Peter in the Church was created to mitigate.
Christ promised that, through the work of the Holy Spirit, the Church would be preserved in the truth (John 14:16-17). Having promised that, Christ established the Petrine Office — what we know as the papacy — to give specific, historical form to that promise. Thus the job description of the pope, the Bishop of Rome, is encapsulated in Luke 22:32, when the Lord Jesus, at the Last Supper, commanded Peter to “strengthen your brethren.”
Continued below.
www.catholicworldreport.com
Within 24 hours last month, three mainstream Catholic websites ran stories describing Pope Francis’s meeting with the members and consultors of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, with the following headlines:
There is legitimate theological diversity in the Catholic Church. (Thomists and ressourcement theologians both contributed to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council.) There are legitimate differences of theological method in advancing a dynamic orthodoxy. (See the works of Fr. Thomas Joseph White, OP, and Fr. Robert Imbelli.) There are even legitimately different ways of expressing enduring truths of Catholic faith. (Compare the style of the first and third chapters of John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical, Veritatis Splendor, with that of the second chapter).
Then there are Tohu wa-bohu (Jeremiah 4:23, citing Genesis 1:2): a Hebrew phrase that can be rendered as “chaos and confusion.”
What we have emanating from Rome today is Tohu wa-bohu.
Chaos and confusion, of the sort suggested by those three headlines, disturb the peace and unity of the Church, especially among its most devout people. Chaos and confusion are impediments to vocation recruitment: Many are willing to take up the burdens and challenges of priestly or consecrated life for the sake of a mystery of divine love; few are going to give their lives for a question mark (and those who do are almost certainly heading for trouble). Chaos and confusion are grave impediments to evangelization: Who wants to join the Church of Maybe, which is just the Church of the Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age tarted up with smells and bells?
And Tohu wa-bohu — chaos and confusion — are precisely what the Office of Peter in the Church was created to mitigate.
Christ promised that, through the work of the Holy Spirit, the Church would be preserved in the truth (John 14:16-17). Having promised that, Christ established the Petrine Office — what we know as the papacy — to give specific, historical form to that promise. Thus the job description of the pope, the Bishop of Rome, is encapsulated in Luke 22:32, when the Lord Jesus, at the Last Supper, commanded Peter to “strengthen your brethren.”
Continued below.
<i>Tohu wa-bohu</i> on the Tiber
www.catholicworldreport.com
