John Paul II and Benedict XVI Religion EthicsAustralian Broadcasting Corporation

canadian goose jacket Just prior to his opening of the final session of the Second canada goose outlet new york city Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI, in his encyclical Ecclesiam Suam, complained of a rising tide of secularism within the Church and he was critical of those who thought that the “reform of the Church should consist principally in adapting its way of thinking and canada goose outlet store montreal acting to the customs and temper of the modern secular world.” canadian goose jacket

Canada Goose Jackets He observed that this “craving for uniformity” is observable even in the realm of philosophy and especially in ethics and he reiterated the Gospel counsel to be “in the world but not of it.” Canada Goose Jackets

Canada Goose Parka A decade later in 1975, in his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi, he acknowledged that the modern world seems to be “fore ever immersed in what [Henri de Lubac] has termed ‘the drama of atheistic humanism’.” He concluded that “the split between canada goose outlet vancouver the Gospel and culture is undoubtedly the tragedy of our time” and “that a faith that does not affect a canada goose outlet store calgary person’s culture is a faith goose outlet canada not fully embraced, not entirely thought out, not faithfully lived.” Canada Goose Parka

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The split between the Gospel and culture becomes, in the papacy of John Paul II, the conflict between “the civilisation of love” and the “culture of death.” This culture of death is not something that can be defined in the breadth of one sentence. canada goose outlet in toronto It has become canada goose outlet germany a polite, short hand expression for the abortion industry; but at a deeper level, it is connected to certain dispositions toward the meaning of life and love and it has far ranging consequences that extend beyond beginning and end of life issues.

It includes a preference for power and self sufficiency over love and over the danger of personal vulnerability. It is stoic in the sense of giving priority to the head over the heart. It is pragmatic rather than idealistic. It is a disenchanted culture wherein concepts like grace and sacraments and mystery have no place. It sees human life and relationships as mere accidents of biology and history. Its social relations are instrumentalised and regulated by the norms of contract law. The canada goose outlet in montreal key ethical concepts become consent and consideration rather than goodness, integrity or virtue.

canada goose coats on sale As John Paul II explained in a speech delivered to the professors of Lublin University, the view of the human person derived from eighteenth century philosophies ushers in not only Nietzsche’s issue of the death of God, but the prospects of the death canada goose outlet seattle of man, who in such a materialistic vision of reality does not canada goose outlet canada in the final eschatological canada goose outlet miami sense have any possibilities other than those objects canada goose outlet real of the visible order. In short, in the culture of death the human person canada goose shop uk becomes a commodity. canada goose coats on sale

Alternatively, for John Paul II, the civilisation of love canada goose outlet needed to be built on the recognition that “Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of Man, is the centre and purpose of human history.” This principle was enunciated in the first sentence canada goose outlet montreal of his first encyclical Redemptor Hominis and it was widely regarded as his shot across the bows of the Marxists for whom the first sentence of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto offered the theory that the dynamic of world history is class struggle.

John Paul II’s intensely Christocentric understanding of history is evident in his frequent references to paragraph 22 of Gaudium et spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, which begins with the following statement:

Canada Goose Outlet “The truth is that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by canada goose outlet toronto location the revelation of the mystery of the Father, and His Love, fully reveals man to man himself canada goose outlet official and makes his supreme canada goose outlet niagara falls calling clear. It is not surprising then, that in Him all the aforementioned truths find their root and attain their crown.” Canada Goose Outlet

This theme was reiterated in John Paul’s encyclical on God canada goose coats uk the Father (Dives in Misericordia) and on God the Holy Spirit (Dominum et vivificantem). These three encyclicals: Redemptor Hominis, Dives in Misericordia and Dominum et vivificantem formed a triptych each one focused on a different person of the Trinity and that particular Divine Person’s mission in the lives of human persons. In Dominum et vivificantem he wrote:

“The Incarnation of God the Son signifies the taking up into unity with God not only of human nature, but in this human nature, in a sense, of everything that is ‘flesh’: the whole of humanity, the entire visible world and material world.”

However, in the same encyclical, he also observed that:

“. the resistance to the Holy Spirit which Saint Paul emphasises in the interior and subjective dimension as tension, struggle and rebellion taking place in the human heart finds in every period of history, and especially in the modern era, its external canada goose outlet new york dimension, which takes concrete form as the content of culture and civilisation, as a philosophical system, an ideology, a programme for action and for shaping human behaviour.”

canada goose black friday sale Thus, while cultures have the potential to be epiphanies of God’s glory, the philosophical and theological principles which give them form can make them inept or even hostile to any attempt of the Church to mediate the grace of https://www.pick-canadagoose.com the Incarnation to the world. An International Theological Commission (ITC) document drafted when Cardinal Ratzinger was the ITC Chairman expressed the problem in the following way: canada goose black friday sale

canada goose clearance sale “In the last times inaugurated at Pentecost, the risen Christ, Alpha and Omega, enters into the history of peoples: from that moment, the sense of history and thus of culture is unsealed and the Holy Spirit reveals it by actualising and communicating it to all. The Church is the sacrament of this revelation and its communication. It recentres every culture into which Christ is received, placing it in the axis of the ‘world which is coming’ and restores the union canada goose outlet legit broken by the “Prince of this world’. Culture is thus eschatologically situated; it tends towards its completion in Christ, but it cannot be saved except by associating itself with the repudiation of evil.” canada goose clearance sale

Canada Goose sale The culture of death is thus one whose foundational principles resist this centring on Christ and the world which is to come, and instead, like the Prince of this world, it prefers the goods of the tree of knowledge of good and evil to those of the tree of life. Canada Goose sale

buy canada goose jacket Proponents of the principles which undergird the culture of death usually agree with Friedrich Nietzsche that Christianity is a crime against life itself. They regard Christianity as a religion built upon the resentment of the weak who nurture their resentment by fettering the freedoms, especially the sexual freedom, of the strong and talented. In 1888 Nietzsche wrote that up until the present: buy canada goose jacket

Canada Goose online “the assault against Christianity has not only been fainthearted, it has been wide of canada goose outlet orlando the mark. So long as Christian Ethics are not felt to be a capital crime against life, their defenders will have the game in their hands. The problem of the ‘truth’ of Christianity. is in itself a very subsidiary problem so long as the value of Christian ethics goes unquestioned.” Canada Goose online

Some eighty years later, the notion that Christian ethics are “a crime against life itself” was widely promoted by the intellectual elite of the generation of 1968. The social influence of this elite has been of such a magnitude that sociologists have coined the expression the soixante huiters to canada goose outlet location refer to them.

Many of the canada goose outlet paypal encyclicals of the pontificate of John Paul II, but particularly Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae, offered critiques of the alternative moral frameworks of the generation of 1968. These frameworks included economism (the idea of subordinating all ethical decisions to the tribunal of economic growth and efficiency), consequentialism (the denial that human actions have any inherent moral qualities aside from their possible consequences or secondary effects) and utilitarianism (the notion that the best moral actions are those that have a favourable outcome for the majority of people affected by them).

Each of these critiques related to both the infrastructural principles of Western culture understood as a civilisation, and to particular practices within institutions. For example, a hospital run on economist and utilitarian principles is vastly different in its ethos from a hospital run on the Christian principles that every life holds the same value as every other life, that there are higher canada goose clothing uk goods than economic efficiency, and that sick people are patients to be treated as if they were Christ Himself, not clients consuming a product.

canada goose Of all the institutions at risk of being subsumed by the culture of death, the one that was highest on the pope’s list of concern canada goose outlet black friday was that of the family. He regarded the family as the primary battlefield in which the war for the soul of western culture was taking place. In many of his homilies he referred to the family as the “Domestic Church.” It is within the intimacy of family life that a spiritual disposition in favour of life and love over power and pragmatism is best fostered. canada goose

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cheap Canada Goose Whereas canada goose vest outlet Karol Wojtyla spent the early years of his priesthood fighting the Old Left, hard core Stalinists and the like who were true believers canada goose victoria parka outlet in dialectical materialism and obsessed with the class struggle, Joseph Ratzinger returned from the Second Vatican Council in 1965 to encounter the New Left in the German Universities. The New Left was more interested in human emotions than dialectics, and more interested in sex than the class struggle. cheap Canada Goose

canada goose deals As a Professor at the University of Tubingen, the young Ratzinger found himself close to the epicentre of the cultural revolution of 1968. While some of his fellow priests handed out communion to Marxist students manning the picket lines around the Sorbonne, Ratzinger’s response was to regard the revolution as just another in a series of secular humanist attempts to find meaning in the world without God. He therefore stood canada goose outlet ontario opposed to the pastoral strategies of many of his colleagues to effect a reconciliation between the Church and the spirit of the 1960s. canada goose deals

As it is generally known, in the mid to late 1960s Ratzinger was a member of the editorial board of the theology journal Concilium to which many of his fellow periti from the Second Vatican Council contributed. However, at the Concilium Conference held in Brussels in 1970, it was quite clear that there was no common interpretation of the documents of the Second Vatican Council held by the former periti. Quite significant intellectual divisions had developed within the group. Ratzinger left the board of Concilium and in 1972 he co founded an alternative journal named Communio, with the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar and the French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac.

In short hand terms, it is said that Concilium became the flagship for interpretations of the Second Vatican Council which used a hermeneutic of rupture, and Communio became the flagship canada goose outlet uk for interpretations based on a hermeneutic of continuity. For the Communio theologians, 1965 was not a theological Year Zero.

canada goose coats So, proponents of the hermeneutic of rupture approach to the Second Vatican Council were often those who take the view that the central meaning of the Council was the inauguration of a general openness to philosophical currents in the world at large. The position of Ratzinger and his Communio colleagues was that this was not the central message of Vatican II and that in any case, any such openness must always be accompanied by a critical reading of new philosophical movements with reference to Revelation canada goose coats.