Month: April 2018

Sisters Lea and Consilia

God’s Holy Refugees, Driven by the Search for Real

What of the Religious Refugees… fleeing theologies
… theologies that clang against the consciousness
 of this age’s sins and (w)holy wisdom?

To the Nones and Dones and those most nearly done,
the silence of the Holy One is deafeningly loud
…in theologies describing 
 a god so praise-starved and power-hungry
…that it demands our constant adulation and servile obedience
…in theologies describing an all knowing Big Father/Brother in the sky
 speaking scriptural words of love between the narcissistic lines.

What consciousness is this…
that drives us from the comfort of a sacred family
…wrapped in the solace of sweet hymns and select scriptures
so we not see and question those Words and stories
…strewn with images of such an ignoble and inglorious God?

Bereft of temple, church, synagogue or mosque,
where do we go to find a home?
Or is there even such a place?

Religious refugees driven far from safe homes we knew so long ago,
…the hymns we sang, the Scripture read, so comforting,
now crash as awkward phrases against what we “Now Know”.
“Now Know” not so stately as the holy architecture of theologies 
so long held bosom-close for comfort.

O Saints before us, who lost your faith in such Go(o)d nonsense…
Is there not something…anything, 
 other than the loss we know today?

Or is all search for the comfort of meaning and certainty 
 a useless Sisyphus task of rolling boulder uphill 
 …until it rolls back crushing us
…worn weak and weary in the futility of it all?

We go down into the pit of despair
…
 with you, O Saints who went there before us.
We have still the wisdom of your love and your courage
 to live in the not knowing,
…in the shatter-scatter pace of life’s ever-changing face 
 that re-assembles its appearance from
 …horror to grief to love and back again
…in cycles too quick to ponder or assimilate,
 …sometimes barraged in unremitting painful questions:
Why them? Why me? 
 …Why even ask why?

We refugees of theologies 
that answer questions of the past
 with answers from the further past..
 …some wisdom there buried
 under all the dust and shite, for certain.

Yet there is this tingling sense that
 wisdom buried under ages having passed, 
 yet still is with us now
…
for every change of time from one epoch to another
 had its pain of cracking through, 
 like a babe breaking out its mother’s womb…
all tender and powerless, 
 …in need of succor and protection, 
 so like our new consciousness adapting…to its new place and time.

Let us have faith meanwhile, in each other,
 …in the everyday uncanonized saints of today and yesterday.
Not idolatrous faith, of course,
 but rather faith that nurtures love as it re-news life,
…as it makes life NEW again…
 Creation ongoing, ever-challenging us
…to go on loving…as best we can.

WHERE is the theology that can lead us
…in the way of this ever-adapting gypsy-like home-making faith?
WHERE is the theology sustaining
…a dynamic back-and-forth movement
 between the wisdom of the past
…and the present moment
…now challenging our consciousness 
 …to RISE UP and BE COUNTED.
*    *    *

Painting “God’s Holy Refugees” by Consilia Karli, SFCC

Poem by Sister Lea, SFCC with Consilia Karli
https://RiteBeyondRome.com

 

 

 

 

 

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Sisters Lea and Consilia

Divine Mercy Sunday: Pope Francis, HAVE MERCY on the Vatican II Church!

The Vatican II Church has documents but no canonical visibility,
no prelature or Church/Rite status out of which to establish 
its unique identity and authority to
interpret theology, governance and liturgy from a different perspective.

The Vatican II Church has no canonical status or authority.
Opus Dei and the Eastern Churches/rites in union with Rome
have both canonical status and authority in their efforts
to preserve Catholicism as they see it.
Does the Conciliar Vatican II Church have no such rights?
*   *   *   *

Does Pope Francis believe the “Reform of the Reform Church” would be a Vatican II Church if it just represented Church laws and doctrines from a more open and pastoral mindset?

Vatican II theologian Massimo Faggioli seems to differ with pastoral approach as being an adequate response.   He writes with alarm about “the growing one-way consensus of ‘doing theology’.  He further claims that “the politics of funding theological initiatives on Catholic campuses…has even distorted the way of doing theology…whereby “various entities offer not only different but obviously incompatible understandings of Catholicism.”

international.la-croix.com/news/polarization-in-the-church-and-the-crisis-of-the-catholic-mind/6444
 Have our expectations of Pope Francis been somewhat naive in our insistence that the “Reform of the Reform” Church is just some fringe minority and not a global Catholic phenomenon well-structured, well-strategized and well-resourced?  Check out the metadata collected by National Catholic Reporter:

Conservative donors aim to shape Catholic narrative for the wider culture

“NCR looks at the growing number of “Catholic nonprofits” that depend upon donations from foundations or wealthy individual Catholics — and make up a web of organizations deeply engaged in advancing a conservative political/religious agenda.”

Excerpts from above article:

•  “The annual Napa Institute gatherings held at one of Busch’s California resorts regularly attracts leading conservative archbishops and cardinals from the U.S. and the Vatican. It is a gathering for those at the upper end of the economic spectrum…”
•  “In addition to Acton, the Becket Fund and the Federalist Society, [another high-profile conservative funder] lists as affiliations on his company’s website the following: the American Enterprise Institute; Catholic Leadership Institute; EWTN; Ethics and Public Policy Center; FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students); and the Napa Institute.”
• “Timothy Busch, speaker at the ‘Good Profits’ conference for high-profile conservative funders at Catholic University, noted “that big money and the right economic philosophy can bridge deep ideological and theological divides.”
 
• “A former director of Catholic University’s Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies perceives this surge in growth of Catholic nonprofits like the Napa Institute seeing themselves as “the real evangelizing corps in the church” as providing an alternative structure to the church.”
 
*   *   *   *
The Vatican II Church has documents but no canonical visibility,
no prelature or Church/Rite status out of which to establish 
its unique identity and authority to
interpret theology, governance and liturgy from a different perspective…

no canonical status or authority as Opus Dei
and the Eastern Churches/rites in union with Rome have
in their efforts to preserve Catholicism as they see it.

*    *    *

Remember when Francis told us to act and not worry about the consequences?
On the feast of Divine Mercy, April 8, 2018, shouldn’t we be challenging Pope Francis to act and not worry about the consequences, instead of continuing to allow the Church to fall into a monolithic consensus of “Reform of the Reform” Catholicism?  Polarization or Stifling Consensus: The Only Choices?