Book excerpt

“The Church of Christ’s primary, essential, irreplaceable mission is to remind us constantly, opportune, importune, of our divine supernatural vocation and to communicate to us through her sacred ministry the seed, still fragile and hidden, yet real and living, of our divine life. This seed must not remain sterile. The revelation of our divine vocation, along with all that flows from it, ordinarily produces its first results not only in the depths of people’s hearts but likewise on the outside, in the affairs of time and of history. But in this area the supernatural impulse will afford good results only if it couples itself with all the resources of human knowledge, experience and wisdom; and experience has shown us often enough that it is very often choked, or at least slowed down, by the contrary forces. On the other hand, the role of the Church, especially in the person of her ministers, cannot be reduced to such a task; however urgent this may appear in certain cases it is never anything more than a secondary end — even when in the temporal order it may have to be put first, here or there, so as to open up a path to the Gospel. Otherwise the Church would be unfaithful to Christ, who did not preach the Kingdom of God [in the word of George Hourdin] ‘in order to provoke a general liberation of his people and to vanquish the Romans once for all.’ She would succumb to that ‘temporal heresy’ which as Péguy observed (Péguy, who understood so well the value of the temporal) consists in proposing that the temporal should end up by ‘absorbing the eternal’. Thus losing her own soul, she would be reduced to a mere human organization, and a totally ineffective one at that. She would only be a parasite, duplicating or trying to duplicate — without having either the qualified personnel or the necessary means — the institutions that men can freely create for themselves. At that stage, she should simply disappear. And this is precisely what those whose minds are totally closed against the supernatural have been demanding for a long time. This is also — what a paradox! — just what in practice some of her misguided children are clamoring for today, when they talk about wanting a ‘new Church’. A Church secularized, naturalized, which would willingly give up her ‘cult’ and replace it with ‘culture’, seeking her ‘lights’ not in the Gospels (even if lip service were still paid to them), but in the world; a Church which would pretend to be born today from some kind of radical ‘mutation’’ which would no longer concern herself, even with disinterested zeal, with anything but the organization of life on this earth — such a Church would have no right to exist any more in the society of men, and would not be long in meeting dissolution.”

— from Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace (Ignatius Press, 1980)

Related reading and listening

Links to posts and programs featuring Oliver O'Donovan:

Links to posts and programs featuring Adam K. Webb:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Bauerlein:

Links to posts and programs featuring Felicia Wu Song:

Links to posts and programs featuring Joseph E. Davis:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thaddeus Kozinski:

Links to posts and programs featuring Craig M. Gay:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark T. Mitchell:

Links to posts and programs featuring Karen Dieleman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Tim Clydesdale:

Links to posts and programs featuring J. Mark Bertrand:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mathew Levering:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark G. Malvasi:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kirk Farney:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bradley J. Birzer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Ralph C. Wood:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Heintzman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Gil Bailie:

Links to posts and programs featuring Zygmunt Bauman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew Lee Anderson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mike Aquilina:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bishop Robert Barron:

Links to posts and programs featuring Frederick Buechner:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jeffrey Bilbro:

Links to posts and programs featuring James A. Herrick:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Wilson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Susan Cain:

Links to posts and programs featuring Marilyn McEntyre:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Spencer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Albert Borgmann:

Links to posts and programs featuring Catherine Prescott:

Links to posts and programs featuring Maggie M. Jackson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Garret Keizer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andy Crouch:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kyle Hughes:

Links to posts and programs featuring Philip G. Ryken:

Links to posts and programs featuring Eric Miller:

Links to posts and programs featuring Landon Loftin:

Links to posts and programs featuring Barry Hankins:

Links to posts and programs featuring Quentin Schultze:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Walker:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason Peters:

Links to posts and programs featuring Alexander Lingas:

Links to posts and programs featuring Fr. Damian Ference:

Links to lectures and commentary by Ken Myers:

Links to posts and programs featuring David Cayley: