Sound thinking
Eternal seeds, temporal fruit
by Ken Myers
“The Church of Christ’s primary, essential, irreplaceable mission is to remind us constantly, opportune, importune, of our divine supernatural vocation and to communicate to us through her sacred ministry the seed, still fragile and hidden, yet real and living, of our divine life. This seed must not remain sterile. The revelation of our divine vocation, along with all that flows from it, ordinarily produces its first results not only in the depths of people’s hearts but likewise on the outside, in the affairs of time and of history. But in this area the supernatural impulse will afford good results only if it couples itself with all the resources of human knowledge, experience and wisdom; and experience has shown us often enough that it is very often choked, or at least slowed down, by the contrary forces. On the other hand, the role of the Church, especially in the person of her ministers, cannot be reduced to such a task; however urgent this may appear in certain cases it is never anything more than a secondary end — even when in the temporal order it may have to be put first, here or there, so as to open up a path to the Gospel. Otherwise the Church would be unfaithful to Christ, who did not preach the Kingdom of God [in the word of George Hourdin] ‘in order to provoke a general liberation of his people and to vanquish the Romans once for all.’ She would succumb to that ‘temporal heresy’ which as Péguy observed (Péguy, who understood so well the value of the temporal) consists in proposing that the temporal should end up by ‘absorbing the eternal’. Thus losing her own soul, she would be reduced to a mere human organization, and a totally ineffective one at that. She would only be a parasite, duplicating or trying to duplicate — without having either the qualified personnel or the necessary means — the institutions that men can freely create for themselves. At that stage, she should simply disappear. And this is precisely what those whose minds are totally closed against the supernatural have been demanding for a long time. This is also — what a paradox! — just what in practice some of her misguided children are clamoring for today, when they talk about wanting a ‘new Church’. A Church secularized, naturalized, which would willingly give up her ‘cult’ and replace it with ‘culture’, seeking her ‘lights’ not in the Gospels (even if lip service were still paid to them), but in the world; a Church which would pretend to be born today from some kind of radical ‘mutation’' which would no longer concern herself, even with disinterested zeal, with anything but the organization of life on this earth — such a Church would have no right to exist any more in the society of men, and would not be long in meeting dissolution.”
— from Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace (Ignatius Press, 1980)
