Truth is Symphonic by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Author:Hans Urs von Balthasar [Hans Urs von Balthasar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898701418
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 1987-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

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Thus, every aspect of the Catholica that is visible and structural, seen in its proper perspective, is in the service of ecclesial love. The purpose of this love is to provide the exclusive model in which the world can recognize its own unity, a unity for which it strives but that it never succeeds in finding. If this were the Church’s image, there would not need to be so much talk about changing its structures and about its (poor) prospects in the present and the future. But if new life is to flow into the members, it is not primarily a question of changing structures. They only need to be understood in their proper function, and then they will be able once more to minister to love. For love alone is the shape that is meant to strike the world: “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn 13:35). It is a love that has no self-promoting form; it does not arise like an artistic masterpiece before the eyes of spectators. It is the artless, spontaneous result of selflessness on the part of many. In this way it prefigures that formlessness in which the Church, crucified in the world, is to lay down its life.

The way in which Christians are to emerge from the love that surrounds them in the Church, stepping out into the world in order to bear witness in their lives to the love of Christ, is not something that can he reduced to a simple formula. It exhibits a whole spectrum, reaching from the hidden holocaust of a Carmelite nun, who gives her life for the salvation of the world and the care of the most abandoned, to aggressive involvement in public life, in economics and politics on behalf of human rights and human dignity. Testimony to the Church’s love can be borne by the individual, who seeks to spread to those around him the communio that is lived in the Church, and also by groups that collaborate to try to make its reality take root in the world. It is part of the approach of Catholic apostolic action to want to work together with non-Catholics, non-Christians and atheists in all things that promote the unification of mankind. Witness to the Spirit who inhabits the Church can be given through collaboration in cool, deliberate, expert planning in all departments of secular life just as much as through the unpredictable eruption of prophetical energies, bursting forth from the hidden regions where man communes with God.

Prophets should never be lacking in a Church that prays and is joined to its Lord in the Holy Spirit. It is not true that we cannot get saints by praying and practicing penance for them. What is true is that such prayer and penance must be characterized by holiness, a holiness that may perhaps be completely hidden. Furthermore, it is true that there is nothing more fruitful and more reformative in the Church than the presence of genuine holiness and prophesy.

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