Within this, you unwittingly cast a even less known very dark light upon the Church (but still related to the OP) - an even more concerning question and situation involving all of Mankind. But that is of a different game on a different day.
I am confident that this seemingly dark light can be shown to be bright when dealt with, assuming it has something to do with the Church’s Truth Claims and Catholicism as a religion, as I am confident there is no darkness in the Faith itself as properly understood. Might it have something to do with the following?
But as far as that “catch-22”, suppose someone actually yielded exactly how to resolve that in a manner certainly compliant with Jesus’ teachings yet seemingly required alteration in Church structure (so as to remove the “catch”), how resistant to such an “upgrade” would the Church actually be?
I suspect that they would be very resistant to let go of their traditional management methods regardless of the promised reward.
Yet this is exactly the case and exactly the issue addressed in Luke 14:25-27.
It is so that to gain Heaven and save Humankind, the Church must hate (loathe) her current life and associations for all of the exact same reasons revealed in that very passage.
The context seems to be clearly speaking of what is expected of individual disciples “If any
one…” “discip
le”… There is no reason, unless I am overlooking something, to believe that Jesus’ words were meant to be taken out of their context of affirming the requirements of individual discipleship and applied to the Church structure as a whole. The Church as an entity is not human, does not have emotional attachments in the human sense. In fact, Her complex structure has been developed precisely to
serve most efficiently the greatest amount of people with the Gospel message, which is (as established earlier) what “hating” one’s family (according to Ancient Israelite standards) would have freed up an
individual to do. So it is that, what is required of an individual to meet this goal with zeal and efficiency is not required of an Organizational structure, and in fact may even take such a structure further away from that goal even as it would bring an individual closer.
Or such seems a sound conclusion to me…intuitive differences between us may cause you to find it less sound than I.
As for would the Church leaders be resistant to
legitimate changes in the Church structure (and for such change to be legitimate is possible, insofar as it does not contradict the Catholic
religion, including belief in the authority of the papacy, bishops or magisterium–meaning of course that they alone, as mortals go, would have the authority to make those changes, which would probably involve Canon Law, certainly not Dogma), there would be the likely unanswerable (except in hindsight) question of whether or not this would be due to the leaders’ lack of wisdom (since such a change or resistance thereto is not a dogmatic matter but a
pragmatic one, infallibility has nothing to do with it and would not be wounded by such lack of wisdom) or the whether or not the person proposing it had in fact made an unconvincing case that genuinely didn’t satisfy the leaders as to the wisdom of his own proposal. I suspect that any one human, or even group, who might propose such a change must not be so confident in his own logic as being superior to the Church’s that he would conclude that it was the
Church lacking wisdom if they refused to make those changes. After all,
everyone finds his own conclusions somehow more sound than, or at least equally sound to, the conclusions of others, and so in a great many cases it would, I think, be presumptuous for any of us to think we were truly “more objectively clever and rational” than our opponents as opposed to the case simply being that very human phenomenon playing out within us, especially if we believe the opponent in question to be the governing body of a Divinely Instituted Church–as anyone who cared enough to make such a proposal as more than just a theory probably would concede.
In short, the above paragraph is establishing that: 1) It is difficult to make the accusation, and be confident one is demonstrably right, that the Church’s leaders are not doing all they can to live up to Christ’s Gospel message, and 2) Even if that is demonstrable, due to the Pragmatic vs. Dogmatic nature, it demonstrates no weakness with Catholic
ism, nor with the concept of the Church being the infallible source of Dogmatic Truth.
Of course, it is possible that I have missed your point somewhere in the mix, in which case I apologize and will try to address it when it is clarified, insofar as I have the talent.
Yes, I certainly would like that if you would be so inclined. Thank you.
Done (but I accidentally e-mailed it instead of sending a PM
I guess the site automatically sent it to whatever your login email is).
Blessings in Christ,
KindredSoul
It is important to observe the probability that, after breaking the attachments to their families and transforming their world view (but only after, thus the strong wording was still necessary) many might have realized “Well, this isn’t exactly hatred after all,” but until they were first willing, for the sake of following the Gospel, to commit what they thought to be hatred, as you rightly observe, they would not have been able to even consider doing what Jesus preached.
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