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“I am a Christian and I pray to Christ, but I don’t want to have anything to do with the priests and the Church.” This phrase is said and you hear very often at the grass-roots level. At another level, to the more elite “progressive,” what is says is, “work for the Kingdom” – that is to say, for social justice, even using any means – and what is much less important, or not even important, is the relationship that you have with Christ. |
| In one way or another, Christ is always at the center of the debate. For some, He is still valid, attractive, but they separate Him more or less radically from the work that He founded: the Church. For others, on the contrary, Christ has now receded into the background, and the important thing is a part of their message, what has been called “the kingdom.”
The first group – the largest – does not make a criticism of the person of Christ, not even His message such as has been passed on to us in the Gospels. In part because they don’t know and partly because their relationship with the Lord is especially sentimental, emotional. What it doesn’t want is to “support” the demands of Christian morality and who reminds them and keeps them up to date of these demands is the hierarchy of the Church; they are stirred against her and reject her. However, it does not reject Jesus Christ, in part because they admire Him and sincerely like Him as a person – an example is a good part of the Brothers Andalusian- and in part because they do not support the intellectual solitude of atheism. You need to believe in something. You need to cling to a faith that speaks of a life after death and that offers the possibility of a divine help in moments of special pain in this life. But you don’t want that same faith to complicate your life with its demands. Therefore, they revolt against His representatives: the Pope, the bishops, some curates. They utilize to do this, in the first place, the errors of the same ones that they attack – for example, the sexual abuse scandals of American priests. No one is interested in knowing the truth of what happened and not be so stupid as to not be able to realize that these errors originate from an unrepresentative minority. Probably they are aware of all of this, but in their fight against the Hierarchy they use all the artillery that they can use which is effective and devastating. Also, they employ another argument: that the Church should be up to date in attracting more of the faithful. It is the philosophy of the rebates: sell cheaper to have more customers and to make more money. You probably know or at least intuitively that the hierarchy is unable to do so because it would cease to be faithful to its founder, Jesus Christ, and because the cases in which it has been done – and the Protestant Churches have traveled that road for many years – have not been able to achieve the expected but have lost almost all of their “clients.” But, even knowing it, they insist on it in the hope that the hierarchy dims its moral discourse and allows them to do what they want to do with a clear conscience. There is no shortage, within the structure of the church, those who support this speech. There are many theologians – and, above all, their opinions are aired by the media – who believe the same as those “light Christians” or “sociological” Christians. For them, Christ was a liberator of all oppression and if morality has become for the man of today a burden and even in a matter of turning away from Christ, what you need to do is reduce the burden as much as possible. The other group has made a criticism of the person of Christ and even of His message. The groups have come together in the various streams and for different reasons. The rationalist critique of the 19th century, with Bultman to the head, approached Christ with the aim “to demystify Him,” by eliminating the person and his teachings, everything will sound as supernatural. Although Bultman’s own disciples turned against their master and showed how inconsistent their theories are, the seed that he planted has not ceased to bear fruit. It is very common to find among the clergy and not a few theologians – and, therefore, between that part of the laity superficially learned in theological knowledge – the kind that not everything that appears in the Gospels comes from Christ himself, but that would have been introduced subsequently to justify certain moral or political criteria of the hierarchy of the Church. Others come to question the fundamental aspects of the life of Christ, as his birth from the Virgin Mary or his resurrection. And even there are some people who will openly accuse of being no more than a Jewish leader subjected to the cultural conditions of his time, due to which, for example, prevented the access of women to the priesthood. These attacks against Christ, of course, were directed against the Church, which was really hurtful. If the founder lost prestige or immersed himself in the nebula of the legend by abandoning the firm ground of history, then the Church would have lost influence and normative capacity of their faithful. And, above all, would have ceased to be uncomfortable for governments. I am convinced that Freemasonry had a lot to do with the dissemination of these types of ideas. In this context emerged the hurricane of the Marxist revolution. Under the banner of the struggle for social justice and an end to the oppression of the workers at the hands of the capitalists, this idea enlisted not a few Christians from all sectors, including the good part of the leadership of the Church: Bishops, clergy, Religious men and women. Jesus was presented as a pioneer of Marxism and insisted that socialism and Christianity had much in common and that if Christ were alive today He would be the first communist. While this is said, thousands of priests were sent to concentration camps or were assassinated. To complete this work of absorption of Christianity, and to put at the service of the communist party the still great influence of the Church, they developed a theology that only later and in part was known as “liberation.” There was where the development of the concept of “Kingdom,” to which was quickly suppressed the tagline of “Of God.” It also abolished the treatment of “King” dedicated to Jesus Christ. Many of the members of the ecclesiastical elite began to work “for the Kingdom” and not for Christ the King. This “kingdom” was very similar to the classless society that Marxism preached, to the point of being easily comparable. In addition, if in the case of Christ was clear that violence could not be used because He explicitly rejected it; in the case of the “Kingdom” it was not so clear. So you can cross the ethical barrier that “the end does not justify the means,” to justify the use of violence, both the revolutionary as much as the terrorist, in order to accelerate the triumph of justice, of the Marxist “paradise.” Christ had passed to a second place to go back to posts even more distant. As a “worker of the Kingdom,” there was no need to pray, since they didn’t follow Christ, but for “the cause” and for “the cause” is not to pray. Neither were the sacraments valued and, of course, priestly celibacy and the vow of chastity ceased to have any value. What mattered were the works for the interest of justice, to the point that charity was seen as evil, because in a good Marxist analysis, the worse things are going better for the revolution, because then people will not be able to hold out any longer and will explode. In spite of everything, Christ has survived all these attacks. And His Mystical Body, the Church, has survived. Although not all of these hoaxes are unmasked and are still doing a lot of damage, more and more people realize that a Christian means to be a follower of Christ and that the true Christ is found only in his Church. |
