Per Christum

Spe Salvum… in reading it, I have but one comment come to the fore… “Duh!”

It is a charge to maintain Faith as part of Hope, and as part of Justice, and as part of Life.

It is a call to be socially active so that the system does not fall to evil.

If one reads the Gospels and the Epistles, one should be able to see that call clearly therein. This encyclical is a codification, and a reminder… not anything really new.

If anything, it feels like a Dominican’s sermon. Not that that’s a bad thing.

Life brings us many chances to go forth and LIVE the gospel message, to be that spark that gets people to examine faith and hope, and to find Chist and his Church. Now, as the Pope calls, we need to rise to this challenge, and go beyond just living a good life, to seeing to it that such a life is allowed to be lived, and stays allowed to be lived.

One of the dangers in modern society is the rejection of majority values. Christianity suffers now for being the majority. Catholicism suffers for being the largest organization within Christianity. Answer the call, brethren, and keep it safe to be unabashedly Catholic. For, at the moment, that is in peril. People clamor for allowing sin to be legitimized, and those who decry it to be arrested. This is a small part of the modernism Pope Benedict is warning against, but one that could rapidly deplete our priests if the agenda progresses.

I can’t even put a blame towards any one party or group. We, as a society,need to decide to be a Christian society that, while not intolerant of dissent nor difference, does not tolerate immorality, and does not legislate required acceptance of same: gay “marriage”, abortion, extramarital sex, rampant sexuality, euthanasia, bigotry.

I want to touch on the last of these: Bigotry. Affirmative action is bigotry. Calling Barak Obama “Not Black Enough” is bigotry. Calling for special priveleges because your ancestors were oppressed is bigotry. Forcing employers to hire less qualified individuals due to special statuses is bigotry. We have institutionalized it. It served a short term purpose; now, affirmative actionserves to keep us divided. In Christ, all are one people, no matter their heritage or ethnicity. We should be genuinely blind to ethnicity. But our society is not. Time to take up our crosses, and use them to rebuild the system to be blind to ethnicity.