Tough break for the "Spiritual but not Religious" community...

The CDF weighs in on the "neo-Gnostic" and "neo-Pelagian" strain in modern culture:

//12. The place where we receive the salvation brought by Jesus is the Church, the community of those who have been incorporated into this new kind of relationship begun by Christ (cf. Rom 8:9). Understanding this salvific mediation of the Church is an essential help in overcoming all reductionist tendencies. The salvation that God offers us is not achieved with our own individual efforts alone, as neo-Pelagianism would contend. Rather, salvation is found in the relationships that are born from the incarnate Son of God and that form the communion of the Church. Because the grace that Christ gives us is not a merely interior salvation, as the neo-Gnostic vision claims, and introduces us into concrete relationships that He himself has lived, the Church is a visible community. In her we touch the flesh of Jesus, especially in our poorest and most suffering brothers and sisters. Hence, the salvific mediation of the Church, “the universal sacrament of salvation”,[19] assures us that salvation does not consist in the self-realization of the isolated individual, nor in an interior fusion of the individual with the divine. Rather, salvation consists in being incorporated into a communion of persons that participates in the communion of the Trinity.

13. Both the individualistic and the merely interior visions of salvation contradict the sacramental economy through which God wants to save the human person. The participation in the new kind of relationships begun by Jesus occurs in the Church by means of the sacraments, of which Baptism is the door,[20] and the Eucharist is the source and the summit.[21] In this, the inconsistency of the claims to self-salvation that depend on human efforts alone can be seen. Faith confesses that we are saved by means of Baptism, which seals upon us the indelible mark of belonging to Christ and to the Church. The transformation of the way of living our relationships with God, with humanity, and with creation derives from Baptism (cf. Mt 28:19). Thus, purified from original, and all other sins, we are called to a new existence conforming to Christ (cf. Rom 6:4). With the grace of the seven sacraments, believers continually grow and are spiritually renewed, especially when the journey becomes more difficult. When they abandon their love for Christ by sinning, believers can be re-introduced into the kind of relationships begun by Christ in the sacrament of Penance, allowing them to again walk as He did (cf. 1 Jn 2:6). In this way, we look with hope toward the Last Judgement, in which each person will be judged on the authenticity of one’s love (cf. Rom 13:8-10), especially regarding the weakest (cf. Mt 25:31-46).//

The Pope, it turns out, is Catholic.

Father Z advises:

Today in the Pauline Chapel of the Apostolic Palace, Pope Francis celebrated Mass for his Name Day, the Feast of St. George.   There is a transcript.

Among the things the Holy Father said is this.

And so the Church was a Mother, the Mother of more children, of many children. It became more and more of a Mother. A Mother who gives us the faith, a Mother who gives us an identity. But the Christian identity is not an identity card: Christian identity is belonging to the Church, because all of these belonged to the Church, the Mother Church. Because it is not possible to find Jesus outside the Church. The great Paul VI said: “Wanting to live with Jesus without the Church, following Jesus outside of the Church, loving Jesus without the Church is an absurd dichotomy.” And the Mother Church that gives us Jesus gives us our identity that is not only a seal, it is a belonging. Identity means belonging. This belonging to the Church is beautiful.

You say "dogma" like it is a bad thing.

Jonah Goldberg on Dogma.

Once you get through the dazzling prose, the hilarious jokes, the compelling history, and the utterly tasteful nudity, the argument at the core of Tyranny of Clichés is that contemporary liberals and self-proclaimed centrists are far more dogmatic than conservatives. Now, that's not the problem. I like dogma. The problem is that liberals don't recognize or acknowledge their own dogmatism. They think they are free thinkers, empiricists, fact-finders, and pragmatists.

Conservatives have dogma, too. And that's a good thing. The difference is that we know where ours comes from. It's the difference between a devout orthodox Christian and a person who "doesn't believe in religion" but is passionate about "spirituality." Both have dogmatic convictions. But the Catholic knows their source: Church teaching, scripture, tradition, etc. The self-proclaimed spiritualist floats through life, like a jellyfish in the ocean, scooping up the bits and pieces he needs, bending to the circumstances, riding whatever currents he finds himself in, collecting magical anecdotes that confirm what he already believes.

In Christianity, the opposite of "religion" is not "spirituality"; it is "superstition."

A Facebook post made the following observation:

This was posted today from one of my friends who is a very Emergent Christian. "The most boring and unproductive question a person can ask of a religion is whether or not it's true" - Alain de Botton

It may not be the case that Alain de Botton and the emergent guy are indifferent to the truth. What they may be saying is that "talking about religion" is the problem because simply talking about religion can in no way get us to the truth. Religion is one of those things, according to this view, which is not subject to discussion because it is motstly or entirely subjective - something proven or not proven in the interiority of the human.

Of course, the problem with that perspective is that it makes communication impossible because unless there is something objective about the thing we are discussing, then everyone's separate "interiority" is equally uncommunicable - perhaps even the statement that ""The most boring and unproductive question a person can ask of a religion is whether or not it's true" is itself an incommunicable thought.

Pope John Paul II in Fides et Ratio offered this on the problem of defining the religious as incommunicable:

"Deprived of reason, faith has stressed feeling and experience, and so run the risk of no longer being a universal proposition. It is an illusion to think that faith, tied to weak reasoning, might be more penetrating; on the contrary, faith then runs the grave risk of withering into myth or superstition."

Pope Benedict XVI follows up on the role of reason in Christianity and his tour de force at Regensburg, a part of which is the following:

"The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective "conscience" becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate."

We are either reasoning creatures or we are not. God has either made reason a touchpoint for everyone or He has not. If either of those two statements are true, then any belief that cannot be proven by contingent, empirical data is mere superstition.

And if that last bit is true, then who cares what Alain de Botton "thinks"?

Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus - Muslim Version.

The "religion" is Christianity.

This is a very serious presentation of the Muslim view of Christianity and Christ.

It's worth watching, not the least reason for which is that it reminds us why theology and philosophy still matter.

Best Priest Rap ever...

...in response to the "I love Jesus, but I hate religion" rap.

Untitled from John Hollowell on Vimeo.

I love the "cue Gregorian chant" bit.

From the Unapologist.

"Spiritual but not religious."

A phrase that gives me a toothache.

Patrick O'Hannigan on "Does God Hate Religion?"

Obviously the problem, when there is one, lies not in religion as such but in the unconverted hearts of people who make religious observance a burden for others. Jesus never railed against faith (which is nurtured by religion), but always railed against hypocrisy (which taints religion as much as anything else in our lives). You can make the case that Jesus called the Pharisees "whitewashed sepulchers" and "vipers" not because being professionally religious is a bad thing, but because it entails living to a higher standard than, for instance, your average tax collector.

If God hated religion, would Jesus have been angry with the moneylenders who defiled the temple by turning it into a bazaar? Would he have asked his cousin John to baptize him in the Jordan River, assuring that wild man that the overtly religious act of baptism was necessary so that the two of them could together "fulfill all righteousness"?

Would Jesus have told Peter that the "gates of Hell" would not prevail against his church if he had no use for churches?

It is also worth noting that after curing a leper, Jesus instructed him to show himself to the priests (Lk. 5:14) and to "offer for your cleansing what Moses prescribed."

Finally, it seems doubtful that a God who hated religion would inspire the author of the First Letter to Timothy to identify the church as "the pillar and foundation of truth."

It is religion, not relationship, that describes Jesus as the Messiah and the "Lamb of God." Neither of those titles makes any sense except in a religious context. Moreover, as a devout Jew, Jesus said the Shema prayer ("Hear O Israel, the LORD is our G-d, the LORD is one") daily. He observed Passover and other religious feasts with his disciples. When speaking to crowds, he took for granted that they were religious, too, and demonstrated it ("You have heard it said . . .") by introducing quotations from the Torah before offering his definitive re-interpretation of them

Certainly there were religious authorities who conspired against Jesus, but there were also some on his side (here's looking at you, Joseph of Arimathea, member of the Sanhedrin). Moreover, had religion as such been tainted for all time by the actions of the priests who bullied the Romans into crucifying Jesus, had the violent death of an innocent man been the inevitable result of taking religion too seriously, then this serious drawback would have been recognized as such by Jesus, who was recognized as "teaching with authority, and not like the scribes." Instead, Jesus prayed, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."


There is, in other words, a mountain of evidence to suggest that God blesses "that old-time religion," properly understood, as an aid to union with him. We need religion to focus our minds and remind us of the stakes involved in our sojourn through this vale of tears.

Does God hate religion? On the contrary, he perfected it.