Those who attack the Church by presenting it as a undesirable structure and contrasting it with spiritual authenticity Some Christians do not realize how this spirituality can only flourish under its protection. The Church, ugly at times like a greenhouse, houses in its bosom the most delicate flowers.
Similarly, an apparently imperfect and hostile political structure, as long as it is respectful of the common good, is surely what can best support the emergence of living and fertile cultural communities. The mandate we have received -both for the divine and for the human- is not to build a perfect world but to raise institutions that favor perfectionIt is not the same.
To be scandalized because the Church generates uncomfortable structures or because the temporal realities of Christianity have been so imperfect is extremely naive. External imperfection facilitates internal perfection. In the world of natural law and common sense, defensive barriers, shells, and walls usually respond to the most immediate concern and lifting them is not work for goldsmiths.
On the contrary, heresies or modern ideologies preach the construction of perfect structures that are, ultimately, nothing but great, perfect and hygienic garbage containers. They are the tombs, whitewashed on the outside and full of rottenness, which he denounced Jesus Christ. The happy and transhuman world of modernity craves the construction of a perfect machinery imposed by the wise. We know that perfection is only possible in the smallin what arises from the bottom up, in what comes out of the interior of the heart.
Those naive say: “Let’s be spiritual, let’s dispense with religion.” As if you could be truly spiritual out in the open. As if the religious vacuum existed. Don’t they know that the religious sense is as natural to man as the sense of orientation? They should know that when the true religionwhere the Church does not arrive with its rites, its structures and its parishes arise false religions who deify various idols. The “spiritualities” that they shelter are then, in the best of cases, navelists like the Tibetan sages, always at risk of falling the dark side of spiritualityan abyss that attracts due to its mystery and that threatens to return humanity to the times of the pagan little gods and their cruel demons.
On the other hand, in temporal things the drift is evident, in the absence of living communities that they build their things in freedom, the cold beauty of the dictatorial structureswith its suffocating rules, its informers and its childish rationalism.
The question is: now what do we do? Do we follow thebenedictine option»? Do we encourage the creation of small spiritual and temporal communities, nuclei of resistance and reconquest? It’s not a bad plan. But I’m afraid the thing will be incomplete without a «constantine option», without the concurrence of a Pope and an emperor. We forget that Christianity, now dying, grew and bore fruit thanks to the fact that these two figures, rulers of imperfect structureshad been consecrated for protect perfection with his life -holiness- that tends to live in the small and hidden.
Now that kings and emperors have been wiped out, only the papacy remains. An institution subjected to increasing tension that, harassed by the powerful to adopt the decorative role of new order censerit is not easy at all.
However – and I’m done – one thing is that we don’t have what we need and another is that we stop yearning for it. Don’t we have those imperfect and beneficial structures that we need? Let’s ask for them, let’s look for them. Only then can they return. Perhaps this advice transmitted by Saint Matthew (6, 33): «Above all seek the kingdom of God and his justice; the rest will be given to you in addition.”
Published in Now Information.
Be perfect… in an imperfect world (on the “constant option”)