Pope Benedict XVI, in October 2012, began a Year of Faith to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council. This Year of Faith comes to an end in a week or so when we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King.
The purpose of the Year of Faith has been two-fold: to challenge us to examine how well we listen to and respond to God’s word, not only on Sundays but at home, in school, in the marketplace, in the workplace, in academia and in the professions, Monday through Saturday; and to challenge us to study our faith, to speak up for our faith at home and in the public square so as to help ourselves and to give to others the reasons for the hope that faith gives to us.
The Apostolic Letter which announced this Year of Faith bears the title “Porta Fidei”, the Door of Faith. This expression – the door of faith – is taken from the Acts of the Apostles where St. Luke describes the completion of the first mission of Saints Paul and Barnabas who at the end of their mission journey called the Church together and reported what God had done with them and how He had opened the door of faith for the Gentiles. This door is always open to us today ushering us into the life of communion with God and offering to us entry into his Church. To enter through this door which begins at Baptism is to set out on a journey that lasts a lifetime, in fact it will last for eternity.
The Second Vatican Council was the first ecumenical council to address officially the question of unbelief. Pope Benedict XVI expressed his views about this question of unbelief. “In our day,” he writes, “when in vast areas of the world, the faith is in danger of dying out like a flame which no longer has fuel, our overriding priority is to make God present in this world and to show men and women the way to God – not just any god but the God who spoke on Mount Sinai, to that God whose face we recognize as love in Jesus Christ, who presses on to the end in Jesus Christ crucified and risen. The real problem at this moment in our history is that God is disappearing from the human horizon, and, with the dimming of the light that shines from God, humanity is losing its bearing with increasingly destructive effect.”
Four centuries ago, unbelief involved a small segment of the academic world seeking to explain the world without God. In this one-dimensional world of ours, in this secularist world of ours, unbelief has become a massive phenomenon all over the globe. There is the unbelief of the marketplace – How to make a living without reference to God; the unbelief of the theatre – How to celebrate the meaning of life without reference to God; the unbelief of the revolution – How to change the world without reference to God. Strange things are happening these days. Polemical atheists are waging vigorous campaigns for the revising of civil laws which are favorable to religious groups. They are placing ads in busses and streetcars denouncing religion as useless and delusionary. In Great Britain today and in the Province of Quebec in Canada today, the governments are being asked to disallow any religious teaching and instruction. To be Christian is considered harmful to society and not to be tolerated in our enlightened times.
Faith is knowledge of what God has done for us in Christ and in the Spirit; faith is trust in what God has said to us in faith and in the Spirit; faith is obedience to God who calls us to himself in Christ and in the Holy Spirit; faith is union with God in the little vision we have through faith, hope and love until we arrive at the big vision which we call heaven. Faith is born when one who does not know begins to share in the knowledge of one who does know. If there is no one who knows, there can be no one who believes. If the one who knows is human, then we have human faith; if the one who knows is divine, then we have divine faith. To believe then is to regard something as true on the testimony of someone else, which we do one hundred times each day. Two elements are involved: 1) the content (what is believed) cannot be verified or proven, yet 2) the content is unreservedly accepted as real and true. Just think of what we say when we say our Act of Faith: we mention the Trinity, the Incarnation, we mention all the elements of our Creed, and then we add – “I believe all these truths, not because I can prove them, not because I can fully understand them; but because you have revealed them, my God, and you cannot deceive or be deceived”.
So far we have been talking about faith. Now we should turn our attention to something else, something always allied with faith in the best of the Catholic tradition, that is, right reason. God is the God of grace, so he gives us the gift of faith. God is also the God of nature, of creation, so he gives us the gift of right reason. Faith always needs the light that comes to us from right reason. Right reason always stands in need of those many lights that can only come to us from faith. Listen carefully, I would suggest, to what Pope John Paul II had to say in his remarkable letter on faith and reason: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth – in a word, to know himself – so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.” The apostles in the Gospel prayed – “Lord, increase our faith.” They could well have continued their prayer by saying – Increase within us also the good gift of right reason.
The faith-reason question at the heart of our centuries-long Catholic tradition is so important for our world today. In historic Westminster Hall Pope Benedict XVI asked the political leaders of Great Britain – Where do we find the ethical foundations for our political choices? He responded that the Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to right reason – prescinding even from the content of Divine Revelation. This means that the role of religion in political debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they could not be known by non-believers, still less to propose concrete political solutions, something altogether outside the competence of religion; the role of religion rather is to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles. Thus, religion has a corrective role to play vis-à-vis right reason. Right reason has a corrective role to play vis-à-vis faith, because distorted forms of religion can create such problems as we see in countries all over the world. Religion is not a problem for legislators to solve but a vital contributor to national and international conversations. This is why our Holy Father has been suggesting that the world of reason and the world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into profound and ongoing dialogue for the good of civilization. The work of the Gospel is two-fold – it must be at work both in evangelizing and in humanizing the world. Humanizing is a most important moment within evangelizing. Only when faith and right reason work together can the people of the 21st Century seek to create a civilization of love, and the civilization of love this side of the grave is a sort of sign and sacrament of what awaits us in the world to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment