Indeed there is a right time for everything. Just as no mention of Gods mercy is defective and an abuse, so is no mention of the consequences of sin just as defective, abusive and terribly dangerous…
You do recall just how often Jesus spoke about Hell do you not? He must have thought it fairly important that people were aware of its existance and just how easy it is to get there. From what I have seen, that particular truth has been practically banished in these enlightened and progressive times.
My point, which you mocked, was:
What is needed is more discipline, not a return to the fire-and-brimstone Church of parents which crushed hope, made us all feel depraved and built walls around our community.
Just as Jesus did speak of hell, so to did he eat with sinners, absolve an adulteress and a thief on a cross. When I was a kid, and in my parents time, we never heard much about this. We heard that we’d go to hell for just setting foot in a Protestant church; we heard that we’d go to hell if we didn’t produce a baby a year, we learned, in fact, that it was a pretty sure bet that we’d go to hell. What we didn’t get much of was genuine love and charity.
And what did Saint Paul say about faith without charity?
I have no interest in going back to those Jansenist days. I suspect many folk in Ireland (which had many similarities) feel the same way.
I didn’t learn to transform my life through rote recitation of the Catechism, nor through fire-and-brimstone sermons. I learned, through the monastery I’m affiliated with, the immediate salutary nature of conversatio morum, stability, obedience, and giving my life over to God.
I also learned through my parents’ mixed marriage (Catholic mother, Anglican father, I was brought up Catholic), the value of building inter-community bridges rather than building walls. Ironically, the walls of the Benedictine enclosure, while they serve to maintain a monk’s separation from the world, have this funny habit of welcoming all who show up within them as if Christ Himself walked through the door (see the Rule of St. Benedict). This is regardless of whether the person is Catholic or Protestant, saint or sinner, believer or non-believer. Those walls serve to draw in people of all walks, not exclude those who don’t think like we do. The monastery attracts with honey, not with vinegar. Those who dare enter, get a small foretaste of heaven. Does far much more for the soul than being told we’re depraved sinners bound to hell no matter what we do. Many have entered those walls as a very ill addict (alcoholics, drug addicts, sex addicts, criminals, you name it) and have exited on the beginning of a transformational and healing journey. There’s a great YouTube (in French) of one of the monks’ long-standing spiritual relationship with an incarcerated criminal.
All this serves me well as I too am married to an Anglican. I also work with observant Muslims, and very secularized Quebecers who have rejected the Church and mock her. I get much more respect, and have much more in common, with the Muslims than with the secular ex-Catholics.
It’s funny too that the monks rarely mention hell in their homilies. Oddly enough they have taught me to turn away from sin because I
love God, not because I fear hell.
Turning away from sin for the
love of God rather than the fear of hell, is called
perfect contrition. Something I think was lost on the Jansenists, because they never taught us how to
love God. The monastery, with nary a mention of hell, did just that.
Most traddie Catholics do acknowledge that it is a valid liturgy.
