.- In
a letter marking Seminary Day in Spain, which was celebrated on March
19, Archbishop Francisco Martinez Fernandez of Granada said the
challenge of secularism in today’s society demands that priests be
particularly holy.
In noting the
close relationship between the Christian people and priestly vocations,
the archbishop underscored that the need for “priests, holy priests, is
greater in ‘difficult times,’ when the Church, because of our weakness
of faith or the difficulties of the persecution promised by the Lord,
or for both reasons, travels through history in the midst of storms.”
“In these
circumstances, the Lord calls us to return to the center of the faith,
to purify ourselves, to bear witness to the essential: the love
of the Father, the grace of Christ and the communion of the Holy
Spirit, lived in the Church. Those storms should not scandalize
us; rather, they are part of the normal life of the Church. Thus
the Lord warned us in a thousand ways,” the archbishop noted in his
letter.
“Times are
difficult,” he continued, “because a dogmatic, despotic, fundamentalist
and intolerant secularism, at the same time the fruit of relativism and
the worship of a freedom that has no sense or purpose, has the Church,
in her people and her works, as its only point of resistance against
its complete dominance over consciences and customs, that is, over the
entire life of mankind.”
This kind of
secularism, the archbishop warned, borders on the tyrannical because
“it finds itself before a Church that is almost without a body and is
profoundly debilitated in her faith, her communion and discipline.”
Today’s priests
carry out their ministries “in a nihilist world,” Archbishop Martinez
continued. As a consequence, the Church must live her life from a
cultural and human perspective that goes beyond the criticism that
modernity makes of religion in general, and Christianity and the Church
in particular.
In the
archbishop’s mind, to “go beyond” this criticism means to “absolutely
take seriously all of the aspects of truth that might be present in
it.” It means rejecting, for example, a Christianity that is
“bourgeois, fragmentary and hypocritical” or “the profound deformation
of the priestly ministry represented by clericalism.”
“It means
acknowledging the pain that, all too often, the life of the Church has
been used as an instrument for sustaining someone in power or an unjust
social order, or simply to cover up purely material and worldly
interests,” the archbishop said.
Challenge of secularism demands priests be holy, says Spanish bishop
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