Father Roger Charles Lenaers (85), at a lecture in Vienna according to a report of the Linz commerce website, 'kath.net'. The old man is active in the parish of Vorderhornbach in the Diocese of Innsbruck. Religion consists in a thin flow of experience for the Jesuit that the human intellect can't grasp entirely and is hidden behind an experiential "something": "Because of this I am a deeply religious atheist."
Link (here) to The Eponymous Flower
Link (here) to the original German article
7 comments:
sounds like someone would profit from doing the Spiritual Exercises again.
He is clearly doing what Jesuits are best at: using language to help us to think more deeply about our own faith - or lack of it.
So I take it the criterion by which we are to judge him is what he says, and not what he does.
Someone - I forget who - once said that it was by the fruits that we are to know people.
It would be interesting to know what people who have long had dealings with him think of him.
Sorry, you shouldn't link to kreuz.net, it's a website that regularly attacks Church, Pope and Episcopate and is horribly antisemitic.
You should link to kath.net
http://kath.net/detail.php?id=29261
The fruit of Liberation Theology
Say what you will, the man isn't a suck-up.
There are many aspects to “God” that we are incapable of understanding.
For example, it is often true that there are things for which you have no responsibility, yet you will be held responsible for their consequences anyway. This spiritual responsibility (“punishment”, “lessons”, “movement toward perfection”, “karma”) may seem immoral to some, but the intention is that you should have tried, or be trying, to get responsibility for those things. For one example, poverty may sometimes be a “spiritual gift” to those who did nothing to create poverty but did not take sufficient action, either collectively or individually, to become responsible for poverty. (And I hope no one sees this as justifying current worldly poverty. We are talking about complex lessons, and this is just one example. Specifically, this truth does not justify any non-omniscient “blame” of others for their poverty.)
Just as trade-offs exist for “intrinsic evils” (trade-offs that can convert an intrinsic “lesser evil” into a good in a particular context), similar trade-offs must be considered for values we classify as “good”. As a result, there are values and judgments more important than “fairness” and “honesty”. Those “greater good” values have the effect of converting “fairness” and “honesty” into evil in comparison.
We are talking about advanced understandings. All these understandings involve judgment. We don’t have God’s judgment, and we should not be trying to imitate His techniques. We should, however, be trying to cultivate the humility, willingness for self-sacrifice, and emotional “detachment” to successfully practice a dedication to our neighbor’s values.
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