May 29, 2006

In the radiance of the Feast of the Ascension, the Church will celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit, who leads us into all truth, on Pentecost Sunday, June 4, and then the truth of the Triune God on the Feast of the Holy Trinity the following Sunday.

Truth is not an option, nor is it a matter of opinion. And so we reject the modish neo-Gnostic notion that faith is self-justifying wishful thinking which enables us to “create our own reality.” We can be grateful that the teachers in our parish do their best to teach the children and the adults the richness of the Faith of the Apostles.

In Rome on Good Friday of this year, preaching to the Holy Father, the Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa remarked the constant human fascination with exotic fantasy over fact. Father Cantalamessa said:

“Christ is being sold again, no longer to the leaders of the Sanhedrin for thirty denarii, but to editors and booksellers for billions of denarii. No one will succeed in halting this speculative wave, which instead will flare up with the imminent release of a certain film, but being concerned for years with the history of Ancient Christianity, I feel the duty to call attention to a huge misunderstanding which is at the bottom of all this pseudo-historical literature. The apocryphal gospels on which they lean are texts that have always been known, in whole or in part, but with which not even the most critical and hostile historians of Christianity ever thought, before today, that history could be made. It would be as if within two centuries an attempt were made to reconstruct a present-day history based on novels written in our age. The huge misunderstanding is the fact that they use these writings to make them say exactly the opposite of what they intended. They are part of the Gnostic literature of the second and third centuries. The Gnostic vision—a mixture of Platonic dualism and Eastern doctrines, cloaked in biblical ideas—holds that the material world is an illusion, the work of the God of the Old Testament, who is an evil god, or at least inferior; Christ did not die on the cross, because he never assumed, except in appearance, a human body, the latter being unworthy of God (Docetism). . . .

“We cannot allow the silence of believers to be mistaken for embarrassment and that the good faith (or foolishness?) of millions of people be crassly manipulated by the media, without raising a cry of protest, not only in the name of the faith, but also of common sense and healthy reason. It is the moment, I believe, to hear again the admonishment of Dante Alighieri: ‘Christians, be serious in taking action: Do not be like a feather to every wind. . . . Be men, do not be senseless sheep.’”