A story with lights and shadows

Throughout more than twenty centuries, the history of the Church has lights and shadows and that boat that left Bethlehem has remained standing in the face of often very strong harassment. Today the first Christian martyrs are celebrated and yesterday the two columns of faith, Saint Peter and Saint Paul. In the eleventh century, Christians are divided into two due to differences in culture, language, dispute over pre-eminence, prestige of the Papacy and the way of conceiving Church-Empire relations. In the 16th century, the churches of the Protestant Reformation broke off from the trunk of Rome; in the age of the Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries) the aristocrats of intelligence abandoned the faith, and in the 19th the working masses were lost. It is not surprising that, responding to the desire for spirituality at the end of the 20th century, the Church wants to reach the people, bringing her message closer each day to the demands and problems of modern times.

It begins with the domestic Church, in which charity and love is the hallmark of the first Christians: “Look how they love each other. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of Christians” (Tertullian). And persecution arose in the face of the danger that the Empire saw in Christianity, which, as a consequence, made Christians seclude themselves in the catacombs: a place of prayer, meeting and even burial until Constantine promulgated the Edict of Milan (313), the Constantinian peace and freedom of worship. Constantine, who was not a Christian until his deathbed, gives freedom of worship to his subjects. And the Edict of Thessaloniki (380) by Theodosius the Great makes Christianity the official religion of the Empire. From freedom to the confessional of the State.

Later (1054) comes the Eastern Schism and the split of Christianity in two: Rome and Byzantium, Catholics and Orthodox. Mutual excommunication between Miguel de Cerulario and Leo IX until Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras, in 1964, mutually lifted the excommunication.

The Church of the Middle Ages appears differentiated between clerics and laity. In the Renaissance the external facade of the Church is cultivated with concern for man and all his values: art, science, culture. The Western Schism also arose (Avignon 1305-1378), from Clement V to Martin V, who resolved it (1417-1431). In October 1517, Luther published his theses at the Wittenberg gate and Protestantism and the Catholic Counter-Reformation arrived, with the establishment of the doctrine in Trent: the feeling of community and assembly, the resurgence of the laity and the awareness that we are all living members of the Church.

In the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Restoration, the Church is considered as an institution and society in which Christ is the Universal Teacher of Humanity. The cult of the goddess reason appears and one is the spirit of the world and the other of Christ, with the separation of civil society from the ecclesiastical one.

The Church of Vatican I is considered as a hierarchical Mystical Body, as a perfect community and with a visible head (infallibility of the pope in matters of morals, dogma and customs). Later, Romano Guardini’s Church of the Awakening of Souls, and the new spirituality. The Church of the “aggiornamento” as the People of God, more pastoral, incarnated in the people, of Vatican II and Ecumenism with the meetings of John Paul II and Patriarch Dimitrios (1987) and with the Syrian Patriarch Mark Dinja IV in November 1994 and other Francis meetings and Assisi meetings.

Pluralism, co-responsibility and unity emerge in the variety of different forms of spirituality. With the Dialogue (“Ecclesiam Suam”, by Paul VI) and the Church of the “Redemptor Hominis”, by John Paul II, which highlights hope, joy and the conviction that in the face of secularizing materialism there is still a whole God made man who is the only liberator through a return to the spirituality and the values ​​of always and to Christ, the only liberator.

Benedict XVI (2005-2013) is the pope of great theological contents and Francis, the one of the poor, the peripheries, openness, closeness and simplicity and change.

A story with lights and shadows