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iloveangels
Guest
Again, you’re confusing me with “tradition” and the “Church as it is today.” How are the needs of the Church - the salvation of mankind - any different than they ever were? I will agree that the world is probably more evil than it has ever been, but that just means the needs are even greater, not different.
It’s interesting looking at these two posts one right after another. You both seem to be talking past each other because you’re talking about change in different ways. One way to think of change is long term–what would it mean for the nature of human beings and salvation itself to change…Another way to think of change is in the temporal sense–aka yes we have cars now and cultures are different etc.I come from a much older tradition than you do my friend. I come from tradition that dates back to 1209. I know what I mean when I say stuck in 1962. The Church did not end there. There are many great things that happened after 1962 that deserve our attention and from which we can all learn, as well as many great people. We cannot deny the work and contribution to law of Pope Paul VI. We cannot deny the work and contribution to Catholic philosophy and Catholic pastoral care of Bl. John Paul II. We cannot deny the power of evangelization of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. We cannot deny that the world has changed much since 1962. Those are just a few of the many things.
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Actually, evil is about the same. It’s just a different kind of evil. The world and the Church are very different. The pastoral needs of people have changed, because their circumstances have changed. If we reduce needs to mass and confession, then there is no difference between today and the year when we were founded, April 9, 2009. But there is a lot more to it than that.
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The other contrast is that one of you is talking as a concerned layperson from the viewpoint of a layperson, with a layperson’s assumptions in place; the other is talking solely from inside a religious congregation, so that a completely different set of assumptions in underneath the remarks…
A good example: The exigencies of the Franciscan order don’t have much to do with most laypeople, either in 1209 or in 2012–aka whether St. Francis forbid his friars to ride a horse or own a book and whatnot. The fact of the matter is that laypeople did ride horses on occasion freely and didn’t own books because of cost & scarcity in those days. This was before the invention of the printing press.
The people of the church include both people in religious congregations AND laypeople, as well as clergy. Discussions like this involve all.