Those mysterious things within Thoughts are part of us, accompanying us, advising us, but also disturbing us, discouraging us. Some people are so tormented by them that they cannot find peace, are unable to get rid of them and thus are prevented from leading a peaceful, active life. This is certainly not a new problem; Christian spirituality has long dealt with it. St. Ignatius, thinking back to the decisive episode in his life that led him to work out the...
INTRODUCTION TO PERSPECTIVES 01: EMBRACING OUR HUMANITY God’s embrace of creation and humanity was from the first moment of Creation, as the two Creation stories in Genesis 1 & 2 attest. God looked at Creation, including the creation of a man and a woman and said “it was good.” God’s embrace of humanity was “summed up” when the Word became Flesh (Jn. 1:14), as Justin Martyr and St Ireneas teach us. It was a “recapitulation” of God’s engagement with us...
Reading newspapers or surfing the web in the days after a recent intervention by Pope Francis on end-of-life issues, one would have found it difficult to get a clear idea of the actual content of his message. The various headlines, often on the front page, spanned a wide range from “Living Will, the Change of Francis”[1] to “Euthanasia, No Change by the Pope”[2] with many more formulations in between. Readers who went beyond the headlines would certainly have been able...
The first spiritual work of mercy Counseling the doubtful is a spiritual work of mercy widely attested to since the origin of Christianity.[1] It demonstrates the intellectual and wisdom dimension of the discipleship of Jesus and of the works of charity, a charity exercised in the service of truth, as recalled by Pope Benedict XVI in the encyclical Caritas in veritate. Humans thirst for truth and cannot live without it; anyone who does not find truth has a life not...
Miserando atque eligendo is the motto chosen by Jorge Mario Bergoglio for his episcopal crest, and he has kept it as pope. It refers not only to the mercy of God but also to the fact that God chooses Bergoglio – just as each one of us – in a singular, personalized and personalizing way. It is the merciful love of the Father with which God loves his Son – in the terminology of Romano Guardini – as “the concrete-living...
An emblematic term for our era Doubt can be considered a watchword for people today. It is the premise for the construction of any solid, critical and complete thought based on reason alone without any recourse to authority or tradition that would penalize liberty or autonomy. The key philosopher of doubt is of course Descartes. According to him it is most useful because “doubt frees us from any sort of prejudice; it prepares for us an easy pathway to habituate...
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