Why I Love Religion and Love Jesus

            There is a famous video roaming around Youtube now that is watched by more than 19 million people (and still counting) across the globe. The title of the video was "Why I hate religion but love Jesus". The young man in the video who identified as Jefferson Bethke was indeed now a star because of his 4-minute poem-video clip. His poem talks about the difference (as what he thought) between religion and Jesus. It aims to present to the people that religion is condemned by Jesus Himself and that He never planned to establish one because He clearly abolished it. Jeff intentionally unnamed what particular religion is that but it is very clear to whom he was referring to. He wanted to "open the eyes" of his viewer on the "REAL THING". He wanted people to condemn religion too and be focused only on Jesus and the result have shown that he was successful. This shows that many, many people today adhered to the "modern Protestantism" or this hating-religion-loving Jesus doctrine which attacks religion and the religious in a more "beautiful and appealing way" and still claimed themselves as Jesus lovers. This lowered the understanding of many on what is TRUTH all about: for them, the truth is what an individual thought about it regardless if it is illogical and unhistorical, as long as he/she follows what in is his/her heart and he/she hurt no one. They are rightfully called credulous.

           It may be rational for us to judge them as that and though this video is anti-biblical, anti-catholic, anti-religion and anti-Jesus, it nevertheless gone viral and spawned massive likes. We may sound right and they are not, the number is uncontrollable; they gone wild. It may seem wholesome and truthful for others especially those who called themselves "non-denominational" and to the other nominal Catholics, the truth and the very truth remains the same: JESUS LOVES RELIGION. HE EVEN BUILT ONE. And that is what we are going to present here.

But before we go deeper in answering the claims of this video and before they can call us brood vipers uttering stultiloquence and idle words, it is more desirable to show first the video together with its script.

Script:

What if I told you, Jesus came to abolish religion?
What if I told you getting you to vote republican, really wasn’t his mission?
Because republican doesn’t automatically mean Christian,
And just because you call some people blind, doesn’t automatically give you vision.
If religion is so great, why has it started so many wars?
Why does it build huge churches, but fails to feed the poor?
Tells single moms God doesn’t love them if they’ve ever been divorced
Yet God in the Old Testament actually calls the religious people whores
Religion preaches grace, but another thing they practice,
Tend to ridicule Gods people, they did it to John the Baptist,
Cant fix their problems, so they try to mask it,
Not realizing that’s just like spraying perfume on a casket
Because the problem with religion is that it never gets to the core,
It’s just behavior modification, like a long list of chores.
Let’s dress up the outside, make things look nice and neat,
Its funny that’s what they do to mummies, while the corpse rots underneath,
Now I ain’t judging I’m just saying be careful of putting on a fake look,
Because there’s a problem if people only know that you’re a Christian by that little section on your Facebook
In every other aspect of life you know that logics unworthy
Its like saying you play for the Lakers just because you bought a jersey
But see I played this game too; no one seemed to be on to me,
I was acting like church kid, while addicted to pornography.
I’d go to church on Sunday, but on Saturday getting faded,
Acting as if I was simply created to have sex and get wasted.
Spend my whole life putting on this façade of neatness,
But now that I know Jesus, I boast in my weakness.
If grace is water, then the church should be an ocean,
Cuz its not a museum for good people, it’s a hospital for the broken
I no longer have to hide my failures I don’t have to hide my sin,
Because my salvation doesn’t depend on me, it depends on him.
because when I was Gods enemy and certainly not a fan,
God looked down on me and said, “I want that man!”
Which is so different from religious people, and why Jesus called em fools
Don’t you see he’s so much better than just following some rules?
Now let me clarify, I love the church, I love the bible, and I believe in sin
But my question, is if Jesus were here today, would your church let Him in?
Remember He was called a drunkard and a glutton by “religious men”
The Son of God not supported self-righteousness, not now, not then.

Now back to the topic, one thing I think is vital to mention,
How Jesus and religion are on opposite spectrums,
One is the work of God one is a man made invention,
One is the cure and one is the infection.
Because Religion says do, Jesus says done.
Religion says slave, Jesus says son,
Religion puts you in shackles but Jesus sets you free.
Religion makes you blind, but Jesus lets you see.

This is what makes religion and Jesus two different clans,
Religion is man searching for God, but Christianity is God searching for man.
Which is why salvation is freely mine, forgiveness is my own,
Not based on my efforts, but Christ’s obedience alone.
Because he took the crown of thorns, and blood that dripped down his face
He took what we all deserved, that’s why we call it grace.
While being murdered he yelled “father forgive them, they know not what they do”,
Because when he was dangling on that cross, he was thinking of you
He paid for all your sin, and then buried it in the tomb,
Which is why im kneeling at the cross now saying come on there’s room
So know I hate religion, in fact I literally resent it,
Because when Jesus cried It is finished, I believe He meant it.

           Well, the words and meanings may sound okay for you, but the video lies with so much contradictions and unfounded claims. Much of it were product of hate against religion and the quotient of odd perceptions totaled by wrong interpretations of the bible. Now let us proceed to the refutation video made by Fr. Pontifex and the gang to the video of Jeff which resembles the style to the latter.  Fr. Pontifex video response to Jeff is entitled "Why I Love Religion and Love Jesus", there is no more clearer opposition than that. Instead of the frame "Jesus > Religion" which Jeff used, Fr. Pontifex's video frame reads: Jesus <3 Religion which is very conspicuous to mean "Jesus loves Religion". Below the video is the script that reads similarly to Jeff's poem.

Script:

What if I told you that Jesus loves religion
And that by his coming as man he brought his religion to fruition
See this had to be addressed, the use of illogical terms and definitions
You clearly have a heart for Jesus but its fueling atheistic opinions
See what makes his religion great is not errors of wars and inquisitions
It's that broken men and women to participate in his mission
Clearly Jesus says I have not come to abolish
I came to fulfill the law and I came to fulfill the prophets (Matthew 5:17)
And lines about building big churches and tending to the poor
Sounds a bit like Judas when the perfume was being poured (John 12:5)
See His religion is the largest worldwide source of relief
For the poor, the hungry, the sick and repentant thief
Oceans of compassion, opening wide the doors
For single mothers, widows and orphans, married and divorced (James 1:27)
We all detest hypocrisy, and empty show is just the worst
But blaming religion for contradiction
Is like staring at death, and blaming the hearse.
See the teacher will teach when the students are ready to listen
But those that choose to sit in the pews and refuse the good news
Is not the fault of religion.
And If I have the Jersey and I'm playing for the Bulls
There's going to be some boundaries, regulations and some rules.
You can't have Christ without his Church; you can't have the King without his Kingdom   

Sins of the Body and internal treason will never ever make me leave him
And that Jesus said it is done, is absolutely true
But he also gave us a mission with many things to DO.
Jesus says if you love me, you will Do what I command. (JN 15:14)
Go and Baptize in the name of the Father, Son & Spirit in Every Land. (MT 28:19)
And on the night he was betrayed he took his men in the Upper Room
Take and eat this is my body take and drink my blood for you.
A New covenant you see, an act connected to the tree,
Do this time and time again in Memory of Me. (Mt 26:26-28)
And at last with crown of thorns beaten beyond comprehension
His eyes were looking for yours and mine; it was divine, no human invention.
So as for religion I love it, I have one because Jesus rose from the dead and won.
I believe When Jesus said IT IS FINISHED, His religion had just begun.

Check out other comments made by Catholic faithful to the video at Youtube. 

You can also watch the video of the response of Fr. Barron here.

OTHER WRITTEN RESPONSES

There are various scholarly replies made by our Catholic friends in relation to the famous video. But due to lack of space, I can only suggest one and that is the Phat Catholic Apologetics by Nicholas Hardesty,   his line by line refutation on the script of Jeff is a great apologetic resource. Here's an excerpt:

"Religion might preach grace, but another thing they practice
Tend to ridicule God's people, they did it to John The Baptist

I'm thinking more and more that when Bethke says "religion" he really means "the pharisees" or pharisaic people. The scribes and the pharisees ridiculed and punished many of God's holy prophets, and many irreligionists understand Jesus' many rebukes of the scribes and pharisees as a general rebuke of religion. But, the scribes and pharisees represent religion gone wrong, not authentic religion. They are the ones who "preach but do not practice" (Mt 23:3), who "bind heavy burdens" (vs. 4) and "do all their deeds to be seen by men" (vs. 5), who "shut the kingdom of heaven against men" (vs. 13), who are "blind fools" (vs. 17) who "strain out a gnat and swallow a camel" (vs. 24). They are the "hypocrites" and "whitewashed tombs" (vs. 27), not religion itself. Religion -- or at least, the religion established by Christ -- is meant to preserve us from that! Jesus, by preaching against those things, was establishing the nature of true religion, which is what Christians strive to follow today.

At any rate, the scribes and pharisees did not ridicule John the Baptist. They asked him many questions, in order to determine who he was (cf. Jn 1:19-27), but I'm not sure this can be counted as ridicule.


They can't fix their problems, and so they just mask it
Not realizing religions like spraying perfume on a casket

This again calls to mind what Jesus said to the pharisees in Mt 23. Religion is not like spraying perfume on a casket, or like whitewashing a tomb. Hypocrisy is. Religion is believing, and worshiping, and serving God rightly. This entire poem is largely the tearing down of a straw man."

  

To see more of his refutation, visit his blog at: http://phatcatholic.blogspot.com/2012/01/response-to-why-i-hate-religion-but.html

The Young Catholic Crusaders Response

          We believe that it is our moral obligation as Catholics to respond to the attacks to the Church whether implicitly or not, whether they mean or not, whether they intend it or not through plausible thinking, Scripture and history.

Here is our line by line response to Jeff's famous video and why we called it anti-biblical, anti-catholic, anti-religion and anti-Jesus. Let us go first to the title itself: 

"Why I Hate Religion, but Love Jesus"

The title itself flaws because it connotes that he really hate the word "religion"  but if we based to his comments on his video, he only mean 'false religion".
He states: 

A poem I wrote to highlight the difference between Jesus and false religion. In the scriptures Jesus received the most opposition from the most religious people of his day. At it's core Jesus' gospel and the good news of the Cross is in pure opposition to self-righteousness/self-justification.

—Jefferson Bethke, Crosswalk.com (2012) as cited by Wikipedia

Why he did not title his video as "Why I hate false religion but love Jesus"? Although he mean it to be false religion, his statement below implies that all religions are false. 
Quoting from the same source:

           Religion is man centered, Jesus is God-centered. This poem highlights my journey to discover this truth. Religion either ends in pride or despair. Pride because you make a list and   can do it and act better than everyone, or despair because you can't do your own list of rules and feel not good enough for God. With Jesus though you have humble confident joy because He represents you, you don't represent yourself and His sacrifice is perfect putting us in perfect standing with God! —Jefferson Bethke, Crosswalk.com (2012) as cited by Wikipedia

So whether we understood it as false religion, it does not matter anymore. He really hates religion, may it be false or not! He even emphasized that "religion is man-centered, Jesus is God-centered". Well, if he mean religion as all the religions in the world, he should think that twice because most of the religions in the world are God-centered. Their praises and styles of worship, may it be in a false religion or not, all directs to the "God" they believed in. By generalizing religion as defined as man-centered is very, very illogical.  You cannot say that all Pharisees are hypocrites because that would include Paul the Apostle!

Natural law will tell us that there is an absolute truth. This truth is not based on individual but on the revelation of God through the natural order of things. This absolute truth or the universal truth is unalterable, permanent and inflexible. It does not depend on circumstances nor prone to change. One example of the absolute truth is: No man lives without a head and brain. To argue contrary to that means arguing against the truth. Even the statement "there is no absolute truth" is an absolute statement thus absolute truth is nothing but an absolute truth. All things have an absolute truth. if an intellect grasps universals that have an objective reality, then there must be a universal or absolute truth.

(Continuation will be seen in the next article)

 

 

 

The Purpose-Driven Life Gives Bad Directions By Ronald J. Rychlak and Kyle Duncan

The Purpose-Driven Life has sold over 7 million copies and was named Christian "Book of the Year" in 2003. "Purpose-Driven" is now a registered trademark, and "Purpose-Driven" programs have been offered everywhere from schools and prisons to corporate headquarters, including Coca Cola, Sparrow Records, NASCAR, the LPGA, and the Oakland Raiders.

The book’s promise for those who follow its forty-day journey is that "you will know God’s purpose for your life." The book is being promoted and studied in some Catholic parishes, especially as a Lenten exercise, so it is worth examining whether it can deliver on its exaggerated promise.

The book’s author, Rick Warren, was labeled as "America’s most influential pastor" by Christianity Today. He is the pastor of Saddleback Church, which is situated on a 120-acre campus in southern California that was designed by theme park experts. Every weekend nearly 20,000 people attend services at one of nine "venues," including a 3,000-seat main sanctuary, a religious coffee bar, and a "beach hut" for high school students. Sculpted into the landscape are settings for forty Bible reenactments, including a stream that can part like the Red Sea.

Saddleback is associated with the Southern Baptist Convention, but Warren’s teachings have spread widely. Thousands of pastors from more than 100 countries have attended Warren’s Purpose-Driven seminars and subscribe to his free weekly e-mail newsletter, Ministry Toolbox. Warren’s web site claims that he is starting a new Reformation. That claim alone should put Catholics on guard about the "Purpose-Driven" approach to Christian faith. Yet Warren is no anti-Catholic bigot. He accepts that Catholics are true believers, and he cites monks and nuns (including Mother Teresa) as Christian examples.

Warren is also doing praiseworthy work in Rwanda. After he and his wife observed the poverty and AIDS epidemic ravaging that nation, they set up foundations to distribute 90 percent of the proceeds from Warren’s book to alleviate poverty and combat AIDS in that country. Unlike so many other programs, Warren’s seems to be focused on abstinence and monogamy rather than simple condom distribution. Of course, because of this morality-based approach, Warren has already been severely criticized in the secular press. It also means, though, that his program might have a real impact.

Nevertheless, Catholics should be aware that there are dangers on the Purpose-Driven road.

Purpose-Driven Scripture

Adhering to the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, Warren writes that the Bible is "our Owner’s Manual, explaining why we are alive, how life works, what to avoid, and what to expect in the future. It explains what no self-help or philosophy book could know." Thus, The Purpose-Driven Life begins from the premise that we can reliably discern God’s purposes for our lives from the text of written Scripture alone.

But Scripture is not a catechism. Rather, it is the inspired written testimony to the faith that had already been given to a living community, the Church. In a striking passage, John Henry Newman described this "self-evident" proposition:

The sacred text was never intended to teach doctrine but only to prove it and that, if we would learn doctrine, we must have recourse to the formularies of the Church, for instance, to the Catechism and to the Creeds (Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 1).

Sola scriptura, on the other hand, abstracts Christian doctrine—and Scripture itself—from 2,000 years of the Church’s faith, worship, and life, effectively cutting off the Christian from "the living memory" of the Church, the Holy Spirit.

No faithful Catholic can accept the "Purpose-Driven" approach to Scripture. Catholics already possess "the full and living gospel" (Catechism of the Catholic Church 77; see also CCC 76–83). To begin with, at every Mass, Catholics hear the living, authoritative, and complete word of God proclaimed by Christ’s body, the Church. With access to the inseparable triad of Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the Church’s magisterium, the faithful Catholic stands firmly on the full gospel—all that Christ wanted us to believe and do—and escapes being blown around by private interpretations of Scripture, politically correct doctrines, and theological fads.

Purpose-Driven Salvation

Warren assures his readers that "God won’t ask about your religious background or doctrinal views. The only thing that will matter is, did you accept what Jesus did for you and did you learn to love and trust him?" For salvation, "all you need to do is receive and believe." He encourages his audiences to join God’s family as follows: "I invite you to bow your head and quietly whisper the prayer that will change your eternity, ‘Jesus, I believe in you and I receive you.’" Then, "if you sincerely meant that prayer congratulations! Welcome to the family of God!"

Entry into eternal life? "If you learn to love and trust God’s Son, Jesus, you will be invited to spend the rest of eternity with him. On the other hand, if you reject his love, forgiveness, and salvation, you will spend eternity apart from God forever."

All of this can sound plausible to a Catholic who doesn’t have a firm g.asp of the faith. Surely God doesn’t care about "religious background or doctrinal views"! But Warren’s assertions are themselves "doctrinal views," unstated and undefended. More urgently, is Warren talking about the same "eternal life" as Jesus did, the Jesus who taught that "the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few" (Matt. 7:14)?

Warren is right that we must love and trust Jesus, but Jesus himself told us what that really meant. For starters, Jesus said: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel" (Mark 1:15). He also said, "Not every one who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven" (Matt. 7:21). And to those who say "Lord, Lord," Jesus warned that God may reply, "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels" (Matt. 25:41). But Warren makes little if any mention of sin, damnation, repentance, or the cross.

Purpose-Driven Liturgy

Warren proclaims: "There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to worship and friendship with God. God wants you to be yourself." In Warren’s view, all that matters is what the individual believer brings to worship—not the objective reality of worship itself. This is not the historical Christianity given to us by the apostles.

When Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well, he promises her that "true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth" (John 4:23). Warren interprets this verse as Jesus’ condemnation of "external" or "ritual" worship. But Jesus was referring to the pure worship that he would inaugurate at the Last Supper (see John 4:8–9; Luke 22:14–20). In John 4, Jesus is looking forward to the Eucharist.

Compare Warren’s views about worship to those of Pope Benedict XIV, who as a cardinal wrote:

Liturgy presupposes . . . that the heavens have been opened. . . . If the heavens are not open, then whatever liturgy was is reduced to role playing and, in the end, to a trivial pursuit of congregational self-fulfillment in which nothing really happens" (Joseph Ratzinger, In the Presence of the Angels I Will Sing Your Praise [www.adoremus.org/10-12-96-Ratzi.html]).

Warren says, "There is no such thing as ‘Christian’ music; there are only Christian lyrics. It is the words that make a song sacred, not the tune. There are no spiritual tunes." Warren derives the following conclusion about God’s musical preferences from the Bible:

God loves all kinds of music because he invented it all—fast and slow, loud and soft, old and new. You probably don’t like it all, but God does! If it is offered to God in spirit and truth, it is an act of worship. . . . There is no biblical style!

Warren describes his church as "the flock that likes to rock." Some songs are performed with a nightclub effect, complete with swirling lights and dancing background singers. Unfortunately, we have seen the effects of this kind of approach to music in Catholic liturgies. Nevertheless, the Church has always made a distinction between sacred and profane music. Quoting Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Catechism says:

"The musical tradition of the universal Church is a treasure of inestimable value, greater even than that of any other art. The main reason for this pre-eminence is that, as a combination of sacred music and words, it forms a necessary or integral part of solemn liturgy." The composition and singing of inspired psalms, often accompanied by musical instruments, were already closely linked to the liturgical celebrations of the Old Covenant. The Church continues and develops this tradition (CCC 1156; cf. SC 112).

Purpose-Driven Sacraments

While Warren affirms that baptism "is not an optional ritual, to be delayed or postponed," he goes on to say that it "signifies" and "symbolizes" but doesn’t actually do anything. As he says, "Baptism doesn’t make you a member of God’s family; only faith in Christ does that. Baptism shows you are part of God’s family." That assertion directly contradicts Church teaching.

• "The sacraments of the New Covenant are necessary for salvation" (CCC 1129, emphasis in original) because they are instituted by Christ himself (CCC 1114).
• "Holy Baptism is the basis of the whole Christian life, the gateway to life in the Spirit" (CCC 1213). "By following the gestures and words of this celebration with attentive participation, the faithful are initiated into the riches this sacrament signifies and actually brings about in each newly baptized person" (CCC 1234, emphasis added).
• "The Lord himself affirms that baptism is necessary for salvation. . . . The Church does not know of any means other than baptism that assures entry in eternal beatitude" (CCC 1257).

The Catechism faithfully reflects what Jesus taught in John’s Gospel: "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God" (John 3:5). Warren is not teaching what Jesus taught.

Purpose-Driven Ecclesiology

Not surprisingly, Warren’s understanding of ecclesiology does not go beyond the local congregation:

Except for a few important instances referring to all believers throughout history, almost every time the word church is used in the Bible it refers to a local visible congregation. . . . It is your job to protect the unity of your church. Unity in the church is so important that the New Testament gives more attention to it than to either heaven or hell.

Unity is crucial, but the unity Jesus calls us to is considerably more challenging than what Warren is calling for here. His call is not to unity within "your" church or "my" church, but unity in his body, the Catholic Church.

Don’t Go There

Whatever helpful personal encouragement Warren’s teaching might offer, the use of his books in any catechetical setting is a serious mistake. They are misleading and potentially profoundly confusing to poorly catechized Catholics. Moreover, while seeming to be ecumenical in approach, they actually undermine true ecumenism because they gloss over serious theological problems. The Second Vatican Council taught:

Nothing is so foreign to the spirit of ecumenism as a false irenicism, in which the purity of Catholic doctrine suffers loss and its genuine and certain meaning is clouded (Unitatis Redintegratio 11).

The idea of all Christians joining together in harmony is a hopeful one, and we as Catholics must take the lead in pursuing it. But unity must be based on truth. Rather than Catholic truth, Warren is purveying spiritualized pop-psychology. The "Purpose-Driven" church looks less like the one mystical body of Christ than a loose conglomeration of inspirational social clubs. That is why Catholics who follow the Purpose-Driven template are driving blind, and the road they follow is more likely to lead away from the Church than to a deeper practice of their faith.

DICTATORSHIP OF RELATIVISM Pope Benedict XVI A conversation with Peter Seewald

In his futuristic novel Brave New World, the British author Aldous Huxley had predicted in 1932 that falsification would be the decisive element of modernity. In a false reality with its false truth – or the absence of truth altogether – nothing, in the final analysis, is important any more.There is no truth, there is no standpoint. Today, in fact, truth is regarded as far too subjective a concept for us to find therein a universally valid standard. The distinction between genuine and fake seems to have been abolished. Everything is to some extent negotiable. Is that the relativism against which you were warning so urgently?

It is obvious that the concept of truth has become suspect. Of course it is correct that it has been much abused. Intolerance and cruelty have occurred in the name of truth. To that extent people are afraid when someone says, "This is the truth", or even "I have the truth." We never have it; at best it has us. No one will dispute that one must be careful and cautious in claiming the truth. But simply to dismiss it as unattainable is really destructive.

A large proportion of contemporary philosophies, in fact, consist of saying that man is not capable of truth. But viewed in that way, man would not be capable of ethical values, either. Then he would have no standards. Then he would only have to consider how he arranged things reasonably for himself, and then at any rate the opinion of the majority would be the only criterion that counted. History, however, has sufficiently demonstrated how destructive majorities can be, for instance, in systems such as Nazism and Marxism, all of which also stood against truth in particular.
 

"We are building a dictatorship of relativism", you declared in your homily at the opening of the conclave [in 2005], "that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate standard consists solely of one's own ego and desires."

That is why we must have the courage to dare to say: Yes, man must seek the truth; he is capable of truth. It goes without saying that truth requires criteria for verification and falsification. It must always be accompanied by tolerance, also. But then truth also points out to us those constant values which have made mankind great. That is why the humility to recognize the truth and to accept it as a standard has to be relearned and practiced again.

The truth comes to rule, not through violence, but rather through its own power; this is the central theme of John's Gospel: When brought before Pilate, Jesus professes that he himself is The Truth and the witness to the truth. He does not defend the truth with legions but rather makes it visible through his Passion and thereby also implements it.
 

In a world that has become relativistic, a new paganism has gained more and more dominion over people's thoughts and actions. It has long since become clear not only that there is a blank space, a vacuum, alongside the Church, but also that something like an anti-church has been established. The Pope in Rome, one German newspaper wrote, should be condemned for the sole reason that by his positions he has "transgressed against the religion" that today "is valid in this country", namely, the "civil religion". Has a new Kulturkampf started here, as Marcello Pera has analyzed it? The former president of the Italian Senate speaks about a "large-scale battle of secularism against Christianity".

A new intolerance is spreading, that is quite obvious. There are well-established standards of thinking that are supposed to be imposed on everyone. These are then announced in terms of so-called "negative tolerance". For instance, when people say that for the sake of negative tolerance [i.e. "not offending anyone"] there must be no crucifix in public buildings. With that we are basically experiencing the abolition of tolerance, for it means, after all, that religion, that the Christian faith is no longer allowed to express itself visibly.

When, for example, in the name of non-discrimination, people try to force the Catholic Church to change her position on homosexuality or the ordination of women, then that means that she is no longer allowed to live out her own identity and that, instead, an abstract, negative religion is being made into a tyrannical standard that everyone must follow. That is then seemingly freedom – for the sole reason that it is liberation from the previous situation.

In reality, however, this development increasingly leads to an intolerant claim of a new religion, which pretends to be generally valid because it is reasonable, indeed, because it is reason itself, which knows all and, therefore, defines the frame of reference that is now supposed to apply to everyone.

In the name of tolerance, tolerance is being abolished; this is a real threat we face. The danger is that reason – so-called Western reason – claims that it has now really recognized what is right and thus makes a claim to totality that is inimical to freedom. I believe that we must very emphatically delineate this danger. No one is forced to be a Christian. But no one should be forced to live according to the "new religion" as though it alone were definitive and obligatory for all mankind.


The aggressiveness with which this new religion appears was described by the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel as a "crusade of the atheists". It is a crusade that mocks Christianity as the "God delusion" and classifies religion as a curse that is also to blame for all wars. You yourself have already spoken about a "subtle or even not so subtle aggression against the Church". Even without a totalitarian regime, you say that there is pressure today to think the way everybody thinks, that attacks against the Church show "how this conformity can really be a genuine dictatorship". Harsh words.

But the reality is in fact such that certain forms of behavior and thinking are being presented as the only reasonable ones and, therefore, as the only appropriately human ones. Christianity finds itself exposed now to an intolerant pressure that at first ridicules it – as belonging to a perverse, false way of thinking – and then tries to deprive it of breathing space in the name of an ostensible rationality.

It is very important for us to oppose such a claim of absoluteness conceived as a certain sort of "rationality". Indeed, this is not pure reason itself but rather the restriction of reason to what can be known scientifically – and at the same time the exclusion of all that goes beyond it. Of course it is true that historically there have been wars because of religion, too, that religion has also led to violence. . . .

 
 

From: Pope Benedict XVI, Light of the World: The Pope, The Church and The Signs Of The Times. A Conversation with Peter Seewald (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010), 50-54.

http://www.lst.edu/academics/landas-archives/373-dictatorship-of-relativism