Wednesday, June 13, 2012

The Jesuit Of Christian Anarchism

Fr. Daniel Berrigan, S.J. has embraced what has been called “Christian anarchism, because of its persistent alienation and hostility to all forms of power, is the most effective form of resistance. And it is the clearest expression of the Christian Gospel. Berrigan has been arrested numerous times—“I don’t waste time counting,” he told me—for also protesting American intervention in Central America and the first Gulf War, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has demonstrated against the death penalty, in support of LGBT rights and against abortion. And even in his 90s he is not finished. “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal,” he said to me, quoting Emma Goldman. He added his brother Phil’s reminder that “if enough Christians follow the Gospel, they can bring any state to its knees.” “Some people today argue that equanimity achieved through inner spiritual work is a necessary condition for sustaining one’s ethical and political commitments,” Berrigan writes. “But to the prophets of the Bible, this would have been an absolutely foreign language and a foreign view of the human. The notion that one has to achieve peace of mind before stretching out one’s hand to one’s neighbor is a distortion of our human experience, and ultimately a dodge of our responsibility. Life is a rollercoaster, and one had better buckle one’s belt and take the trip. This focus on equanimity is actually a narrow-minded, selfish approach to reality dressed up within the language of spirituality.
Link (here) to read the full piece at Truth Out

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dan who? That hippie generation will soon pass away. Not soon enough!

Anonymous said...

To be replaced with whom?

BTW, wishing people a speedy death doesn't sound very Christian.

Maria said...

It is a new approach to theology, and its leaders urge a reinterpretation of the Christian faith to concentrate on the main task of the Church today, to deliver people everywhere from the inhumanity to which they are being subjected, especially by those in political power. Accordingly all the main doctrines of historic Christianity are to be reassessed and, if need be, revised. Christ becomes an inspired human deliverer of the weak and oppressed; God's kingdom centers on this world, and not on the next; sin is essentially social evil and not an offense against God; the Church's mission is mainly sociopolitical and not eschatological; and objective divine revelation is subordinated to personal experience.

Aware of both the potential and risks of liberation theology, Pope John Paul II addressed himself mainly to this subject on his visit to Mexico in early 1979. He told the bishops of Latin America, met at Puebla for their General Conference: "The Church feels the duty to proclaim the liberation of millions of human beings, the duty to help this liberation become firmly established." At the same time, ". . . she also feels the corresponding duty to proclaim liberation in its integral and profound meaning, as Jesus proclaimed and realized it." Then, drawing on Pope Paul VI's teaching, he declared that it is "ABOVE ALL, LIBERATION FROM SIN AND THE EVIL ONE, IN THE JOY OF KNOWING GOD AND BEING KNOWN BY HIM"

Modern Catholic Dictionary

Good to know, huh?

Anonymous said...

JPII sounds like her endorsed LT! Good for him!

Maria said...

I think you need to re-read the post ;)

Anonymous said...

Pope John Paul II wrote to the bishops of Brazil: “As long as all this is observed [fidelity to the teachings of the Gospel and the Church’s living Tradition and the ongoing Magisterium of the Church], we are convinced, we and you, that the theology of liberation is not only timely but useful and necessary.” [Ad Limina Letter to the Brazilian bishops, April 9, 1986]

INTEGRAL LIBERATION from "Evangelization in the Modern World" by Pope Paul VI
"As the kernel and center of His Good News, Christ proclaims salvation, this great gift of God which is liberation from everything that oppresses people but which is above all liberation from sin and the Evil One, in the joy of knowing God and being known by Him, of seeing him, and of being given over to Him. All of this is begun during the life of Christ and definitively accomplished by His death and resurrection. But it must be patiently carried on during the course of history, in order to be realized fully on the day of the final coming of Christ, whose date is known to no one except the Father."[#9]

Maria said...

The words of Paul VI in his "Profession of Faith", express with full clarity the faith of the Church, from which one cannot deviate without provoking, besides spiritual disaser, new miseries and new types of slavery. "We profess our faith that the Kingdom of God, begun here below in the Church of Christ, is not of this world, whose form is passing away, and that its own growth cannot be confused with the progress of civilization, of science, and of human technology, but that it consists in knowing ever more deeply the unfathomable riches of Christ, to hope ever more strongly in things eternal, to respond ever more ardently to the love of God, to spread ever more widely grace and holiness among men. But it is this very same love which makes the Church constantly concerned for the true temporal good of mankind as well. Never ceasing to recall to her children that they have no lasting dwelling here on earth, she urges them also to contribute, each according to his own vocation and means, to the welfare of their earthly city, to promote justice, peace and brotherhood among men, to lavish their assistance on their brothers, especially on the poor and the most dispirited. The intense concern of the Church, the bride of Christ, for the needs of mankind, their joys and their hopes, their pains and their struggles, is nothing other than the graet desire to be present to them in order to enlighten them with the light of Christ, and join them all to Him, their only Savior. It can never mean that the Church is conforming to the things of this world, nor that she is lessening the earnestness with which she awaits her Lord and the eternal Kingdom." [35]

This instruction was adopted at an Ordinary Meeting of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and was approved at an audience granted to the undersigned Cardinal Prefect by his Holiness Pope John Paul II, who ordered its publication.

Given at Rome, at the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, on August 6, 1984, the Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Prefect

Anonymous said...

she urges them also to contribute, each according to his own vocation and means, to the welfare of their earthly city, to promote justice, peace and brotherhood among men, to lavish their assistance on their brothers, especially on the poor and the most dispirited.

Cool.