Benedict notes that when a society sees religion as personal and chooses to live in a despair which degraded human dignity, people refuse to rise up to the challenge of greatness to which each person is called.
The agnostic society flees from God and contradicts human nature, writes Benedict. This is my point in the perfection series when I have written that without purification and humility, no real great deeds can be accomplished. Work, as the Pope Emeritus states, is a substitute for the interior life, and even work in the Church, as I have noted over and over, is useless unless grown in the soil of holiness, of purity of heart.
Benedict accuses those in the Church of laziness and cowardice because such people have not contradicted this culture of death, this seeking of darkness in despair and agnosticism.
The Church cannot be a light on the hill in the world without the realization that the darkness is encroaching on freedoms.
Humility is key. Read this amazing line from, perhaps, the holiest pope we have had in the past century:
"Because one no longer dares to do the great things that are proper to one id forces all the more to live out of the past. But the feeling remains and continually grows that one is doing too little."
Wow! What a humble man is our Pope Emeritus....
Purgation is the key to all of this.........even to turning against despair, realizing that one's sins deserve suffering and death.
to be continued...