Lent has caught the Church in a state of prayer for the health of a Pope whose tone of voice, heard last Friday, transmits passion of life and suffering. It had been a while since, in this liturgical time that began last Wednesday of … Ash, the Basque bishops, with that of Pamplona, did not publish their joint pastoral letter of Lent. A text that there for the eighties and nineties of the last century was long as controversial.
In this jubilee year they have returned with a suggestive document, ‘the patient contrast. Rethinking the Church-world relationship ‘, in which, how could it be otherwise, there is much of Pope Francis, but also of Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI. In the brief diagnosis that make the situation, it would emphasize that “we are facing a true cultural tsunami that has become strange and scarcely attractive many essential elements of Christian anthropology and worldview: the essential value of the community, the meaning of sacrifice and commitment, the importance of fidelity, of delivery, of the renunciations, the unavoidable reference to the corporeity and humans ».
What do bishops propose? Following one of the books about older Christianity, I have read in recent years, ‘patience. The surprising ferment of Christianity in the Roman Empire ‘, by Alain Kreider, recalls that “the testimony of lives of exemplary believers, a reflection of a patient and loving god, constituted the most convincing evidence of the value of the Christian faith.” This resulted in the cult, that is, the liturgy of celebration of the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, and personal and community prayer, were the natural space for configuration of the Christian identity. Identity that became viable in convulsive society through community life, the testimony of charity and the offer of meaning, liberation, happiness, which we would say today. As Kreider points out, the significant of this expansion of Christianity were not so much massive conversions, but the gradual process of individual accessions that were transmitted through family and friendship networks.
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