This
item speaks to something that we all need to pay attention to.
Fundamental ideas regarding man and man's relation to God now have
global reach and are been informed by fresh revelation and organizing
ideas.
What
Karol Wojtyla does for us here is clearly spell out the most general
intellectual framework to approach this developing challenge. There
is the Church holding out the ideal and promoting its attainment as
our human birthright against secular, religious and ideological
opposition that succumbs easily to following an anti Church
sophistry.
Because
these currents have become global and have become naturally
persuasive, the scope for random mob action is increasing and must be
considered serious.
There
is now enough empirical information developing regarding the reality
of the afterlife to easily inform a suddenly rising consensus. At
some time, this will go viral and we can expect a huge resurgence in
religiosity. The rapidly developing science around Near Death
Experiences is one good example. When does the population actually
accept the reality outright?
Right
now the whole Anti Church paradigm depends completely on pure denial.
This is actually the equivalent to the anti Bigfoot position in the
face of literally 10,000 individual observations.
The
Final Confrontation will be between acceptance of the Human Ideal for
a Human Life versus its outright denial for mostly selfish reasons.
It is a strange perception to have
The
Final Confrontation
MONDAY,
JUNE 02, 2014
BY SPERO NEWS
"We
are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation
humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of
American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize
this fully. We
are now facing the final confrontation between the Church
and the anti-Church,
of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel."
"We
must be prepared to undergo great trials in the not-too-distant
future; trials that will require us to be ready to give up even our
lives, and a total gift of self to Christ and for Christ. Through
your prayers and mine, it is possible to alleviate this tribulation,
but it is no longer possible to avert it... How many times has the
renewal of the Church been brought about in blood! It will not be
different this time."
-
attributed to the future Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła,
speaking to theEucharistic Congress in Philadelphia, 1976.
Messenger
of Truth. Narrated by Martin Sheen. Director: Tom Haines.
Producer/Writer: Paul Hensler
As
someone who has written a good deal about Alinskyian organizing,
I am often confronted with one of two errors. The first is that
“social justice” means something bad – or, at the very least,
that the Church has no business involved with it. The second is
that Alinskyian organizing is just like – oh, say – the
Solidarity movement in Poland of which the Church was pivotally
supportive.
The
documentary Messenger
of Truth,
which
follows the work of Blessed Father JerzyPopieluszko in
support of Solidarity, the non-government-sanctioned union led
by LechWałęsa that was instrumental in breaking Communist
control of Poland, brilliantly clarifies these issues. Not only
is the Church rightly concerned with the welfare – in all its many
aspects – of a society but it is most effective when being itself.
To
be piously Catholic, in other words, is an intrinsic challenge to
unjust social structures.
Nothing more is required.
Pious
Catholicism isn’t static and it isn’t safe. It stands in
diametrical contradiction to modern ideas about social order: “It
is the essence of the Communist regime – it is a totalitarian
regime – because it wants to control all aspects of a person’s
life, including your thoughts, your ideas,” says Grazyna Sikorska,
author of A Martyr for Truth, a biography of Father Popieluszko.
“You rely on the State for everything in your life.”
The
Catholic’s thoughts and ideas, by contrast, are directed toward
God, relying on Him alone. From
Roman Caesars demanding an offering of incense to contemporary
governments demanding silence about their moral abuses, the existence
of a believing Christian
is an act of contradiction.
Explaining
why there are so many Christian martyrs.
Father Popieluszko was
ordained a priest in Communist Poland. In summer of 1980, while
serving the parish church of St. Stanislaw Kostka in
Warsaw, the striking workers of the Lenin Shipyards in Gdańsk, some
250 miles north, begged to be sent a priest to say Mass for them.
When the priest chosen for the task was unable to go,
Father Popieluszko volunteered.
The
first priest to pass through the gate of the steelworks, his
presence there was understood symbolically – a victory for “the
Church, which had been patiently knocking at the gates of Polish
factories for thirty long years,”
in Father’s words. He began to celebrate Mass for the
striking workers weekly, in his Warsaw parish church, and organized a
monthly Workmen Fellowship for prayer, preaching, and a lecture
series on a broad range of subjects, including Polish literature,
history, the Church’s teaching about social science, law,
economics, and even negotiation techniques.
Needless
to say, Solidarity’s support among the Polish people and its
relationship to the Church, were a cause of tremendous concern to the
Communists. It imposed martial law to stop the “virus” of
Solidarity and arrested about 5000 key Solidarity workers, leaving
their families without livelihood.
Father Popieluszko urged
non-violence and countered by organizing relief services for the
affected families. A monthly “Mass for the Homeland”
drew crowds of thousands to St. Stanislaw Kostka where
they listened to sermons that were taped and disseminated throughout
Poland with the help of Radio Free Europe. The
military police called these masses “séances of hate,”
harassing and threatening Father at first and then later arresting
and interrogating him, but refraining from assassination until 1984.
“Love
has a price,” Father wrote for the sermon he was unable to deliver,
as he had been beaten to death and his body thrown into
the Vistula Water Reservoir. “Lies are for little
people. Truth is immortal. Lies die a quick death.”
And
in another recording, he said: “It seems to me that in the history
of the Church, in the history of Christianity, there are many
examples showing to what extent you have to go to defend the truth.
You have to defend it to the end. Jesus Christ sacrificed
his life in order to announce his divine truth. Likewise, the
apostles sacrificed their lives. Therefore the role of the
priest is to proclaim the truth and suffer for the truth…if
necessary, even to die for the truth.”
So
how does the Solidarity movement, supported in practical ways by the
Church, differ from Alinskyian“faith-based” organizing?
Don’t they both concern an organized people? Aren’t
they both concerned about fighting – non-violently – for social
justice?
The
answer is that Solidarity wasn’t using the Church to give it
validity. The Church supported it because the members of
Solidarity were enslaved by a State operating under the spell of an
intrinsically evil ideology.
Manipulating Catholics to (say) support a given piece of
educational reform – one, ironically, that is in the service of the
same ideology Solidarity opposed – is the mirror opposite of the
Church’s efforts to support fundamental human freedoms.
The
Workers Fellowships weren’t designed to school its participants in
“self interest” and socialist politics – re-educating them in a
new set of values; they were designed to elevate the soul’s
spiritual and intellectual life, drawing it more deeply into
authentic Catholicism.
Messenger
of Truth couldn’t be a timelier reminder that this battle
isn’t over. Blessed Father Jerzy Popieluszko, pray for
us.
Spero columnist
Stephanie Block is the author of the four-volume 'Change
Agents: Alinskyian Organizing Among Religious Bodies', available
at Amazon.
No comments:
Post a Comment