Deacon Keith Fournier has written another insightful article on Catholic Online. If Sadie stays asleep longer I'd like to do a post of the article itself, but this quote jumped out at me and I thought that it definitely deserved it's own post. It sums up many of the challenges of our current culture perfectly. We live in a time when many people think that absolutely everything is relative. Any crime can be justified. A woman murders over a dozen of her unborn children and gets a book deal instead of jail time. Every religion is to protected and respected in the overly politically correct climate, except for Christianity. Many in our culture would believe that actions are neither right or wrong, but fall on a scale somewhere in between.
That is why the then Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict the XVI's) words are so fitting for the trials of our present times:
“How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking... The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves - thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. Every day new sects are created and what Saint Paul says about human trickery comes true, with cunning which tries to draw those into error (cf Eph 4, 14). Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and "swept along by every wind of teaching," looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” (emphasis mine)
-The then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger at the concluding conclave where he was chosen to fill St. Peter's Chair
Hi Cam, I saw the link to your blog on the NFP group on facebook a while back.
ReplyDeleteThis post is extremely relevant to today's world; every time I tell someone that the birth control they're on is abortificacient (the pill, iud, shots, patches, etc)they want to call me a "fundamentalist", which makes no sense to me, considering the Bible says "Thou shall not murder"... People now only hear want they want to hear, and people don't want to follow true Christianity, because it's inconvenient to them.