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Post by Admin on Apr 19, 2018 12:03:41 GMT
Charity forces us to hate and fight sin
Epistle of St. James, 5.20:
My brethren, know it: He who brings a sinner back from the path he went astray will save his soul from death and have forgiveness for a mass of sins. Saint Pius X - Our Apostolic Charge - 1910:
If Jesus was good for the lost and the sinners, He did not respect their erroneous convictions, some sincere that they appeared; he loved them all to instruct, convert and save them.
Jean Daujat - The grace and us Christians:It must be affirmed, against widespread errors, that charity can in no way involve complacency or tolerance for sin or error; charity compels us, on the contrary, to hate and fight the sin and the error which are the greatest evil of our brothers whom we love. The more we love sinners and those who are wrong - and we must love them to the point of giving our lives for them if they are - the more we hate and fight their sin and their error. St. Thomas Aquinas, Theological Summa IIa, IIae, Q.136If to endure insults that only reach us is an act of virtue, to endure those who reach God is the height of impiety.
Translated from the original here. |
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Post by Admin on Apr 19, 2018 14:15:34 GMT
The best way to love your enemies? To fight them!  Once, conversing with a general, I inadvertently used the words "our enemies " and I heard this deferent remark: "Professor, I prefer the term adversaries." I was dismayed. If priests and soldiers no longer know what an "enemy" is, who will know? For the two institutions that must, in truth, have the strongest perception of this reality, are indeed the Church and the Army! (...) I imagine that, having reached this point, my reader is stirring up the ideas he has learned about charity, the Gospel, forgiveness and other great notions drawn from the bosom of the Church. If he is studious, he must remember that the Council of Trent gives us this pithy definition: However, my reader also remembers a word of Christ: "But I tell you to love your enemies ... ". My God! How to reconcile so many seemingly opposed ideas? How could I love if I have to fight? Christ answered by saying: Exactly! By fighting! This is the best form of charity to which the enemy is entitled. Incredible as it may seem, it is the pacifists who sin against charity, when they want everyone to unite and blend in the same indifference to truth and goodness. In fact, against charity, there is no sin more odious than the complaisant condescension with which we allow others to remain in error and in evil, and collaborate in this lamentable situation. To refuse to inconvenience, to fight, to draw someone from the tranquility where error and evil have placed him, is to make one of the privileged works of the devil. Gustavo Curçao - Excerpt from O Globo , July 25, 1974 |
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Post by Admin on Apr 19, 2018 14:37:53 GMT
Truth is necessarily intolerant!  Cardinal Pie Our century shouts: Tolerance! tolerance! It is agreed that a priest must be tolerant, that religion must be tolerant. My brothers, in all things nothing equals frankness; and I come to tell you plainly that there is only one society in the world that possesses the truth, and that this society must necessarily be intolerant. But, before going into matters, to hear us well, distinguish things, agree on the meaning of words and do not confuse anything. (...) 1. The religion that comes from heaven is truth, and it is intolerant of doctrines. 2. The religion that comes from heaven is charity, and it is full of tolerance towards people. It is the essence of all truth not to tolerate the contradictory principle. The affirmation of a thing excludes the negation of that same thing, just as light excludes darkness. Where nothing is certain, where nothing is defined, feelings can be shared, opinions can vary. I understand and ask for freedom in dubious things: In dubiis libertas. But as soon as the truth presents itself with the certain characteristics which distinguish it, by the very fact that it is truth, it is positive, it is necessary, and, consequently, it is one and intolerant : In necessariis unitas. To condemn the truth to tolerance is to force it to suicide. The affirmation is silent if it doubts itself; and she doubts herself, if she lets the negation indifferently rest next to her. For the truth, intolerance is the care of conservation, it is the legitimate exercise of the right of property. When one possesses, one must defend, otherwise one will soon be completely stripped. Also, my brothers, by the very necessity of things, intolerance is everywhere, because everywhere there is good and evil, true and false, order and disorder; everywhere the true does not support the false, the good excludes the evil, the order fights the disorder. What more intolerant, for example, that this proposal: 2 and 2 are 4? If you come to tell me that 2 and 2 are 3, or 2 and 2 are 5, I answer you that 2 and 2 are 4. And if you tell me that you do not dispute my way of counting, but that you keep the yours, and pray to me to be as indulgent to you as you are to me; while remaining convinced that I am right and that you are wrong, at the most I may be silent because, after all, it matters little to me that there is on earth a man for whom 2 and 2 are 3 or 5. On a number of questions, where the truth would be less absolute, where the consequences would be less serious, I will be able to deal with you to a certain extent. I will be conciliatory, if you speak to me of literature, politics, art, pleasant sciences, because in all these things there is not a single and determined type. There, beauty and truth are, more or less, conventions; and, besides, heresy in this matter incurs other anathemas than those of common sense and good taste. But if it is religious truth, taught or revealed by God himself; if there is going to be your eternal future and the salvation of my soul, then more transaction possible. You will find me unshakable, and I will have to be. It is the condition of all truth to be intolerant; but religious truth being the most absolute and the most important of all truths, is consequently also the most intolerant and the most exclusive.Cardinal Pie - On doctrinal intolerance (1841) |
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Post by Admin on Apr 19, 2018 14:42:04 GMT
All religions are not equal! " It is here that we must address all our proud rationalists, who claim that all religions are equally good, and ask them a categorical answer to the following question: Here is a religion that says to a father, to a mother: Here is another religion that says:"Be careful about sacrificing your child. Watch on the contrary on his life, as on the apple of your eyes. It is a sacred deposit which God will ask you for." Do these two religions seem to you equally good? If they are not equally good , they are not equally true; if they are not equally true, they are not equally divine. It is therefore not indifferent to practice one or practice the other.Bishop Gaume - Death to Clericalism (1877) |
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Post by Admin on Apr 19, 2018 14:50:57 GMT
The Church and tolerance
We usually confuse two essentially distinct things: intolerance in fact of doctrine and intolerance in fact of people; and, having mixed everything up, one makes indignation, one shouts hardness, barbarism! If the Church taught what it claims to teach, yes, it would be hard and cruel, and it would be hard to believe. But it is not so. The Church is intolerant only in the just, true, necessary measure. Full of mercy for the people, it is intolerant only for the doctrines. It is like GOD, who in us hates sin and loves the sinner. Doctrinal intolerance is the essential character of true religion. The TRUTH, in fact, which she is instructed to teach, is absolute, is immutable. Everyone has to adapt to it; she must not bow to anyone. Whoever does not possess it, is mistaken. There are no possible transactions with her; it's all or nothing. Out of her, there is only the error. The Catholic Church alone has always had this inflexibility in her teaching. This is perhaps the most striking proof of his truth, of the divine mission of his Pastors. Indulgent for weaknesses, she has never been, she will never be for mistakes. "If anyone does not believe what I teach," she says in the rules of faith formulated by her councils, "let him be anathema!". That is to say, cut off from Christian society. Truth alone speaks with this power. People who accuse the Church of cruelty of intolerance, have they read in the Social Contract of Rousseau, the great apostle of tolerance, this touching maxim: What tolerance! ! ! It must be confessed that the Church can do better than those who want to show her. Adapted and translated from: Bishop de Segur - Short and familiar answers to the most widespread objections to religion (1850) |
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