August 23, 2013

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Build solidarity by being informed, formed and transformed by God’s revelation, reader says

The key to building solidarity among humans is being informed, formed and transformed by the social doctrine of the Catholic Church. The equality of men rests essentially on their dignity as persons and the rights that flow from it:

“Every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God’s design” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, #1935, “Gaudium et Spes,” #29).

The race card and class card are parts of a cultural defective brain washing perpetrated by groupings of people who wish to continue the division between the solidarity of all human beings.

Consequently, they arouse strong reactions that perpetuate division based on defective, decadent deception. Those being duped by this ideology are doing exactly what they are combating.

Jesus told us that “what we do to the least we do to him” (Mt 25:40). Looking at all humans as if they were the image and likeness of God voids the reality of suspicion. “Since something of the glory of God shines on the face of every person, the dignity of every person before God is the basis of the dignity of man before other men. … Only the recognition of human dignity can make possible the common and personal growth of everyone” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, #144-145).

All human being growing up in America are offered the informing of Vatican II’s “Gaudium et Spes,” which presents the face of a Church that cherishes a feeling of deep solidarity with the human race and its history, that travels the same journey as all mankind and shares the same earthly lot with the world, but which at the same time is to be a leaven and, as it were, the soul of human society in its renewal by Christ and transformation into the family of God.

Building solidarity among humans exists innately in all. The challenge is being informed by the light of faith.

Yet in speaking of the light of faith, we can almost hear the objections of many of our contemporaries. In modernity, that light might have been considered sufficient for societies of old, but was felt to be of no use for new times, for a humanity come of age, proud of its rationality and anxious to explore the future in novel ways. Faith thus appeared to some as an illusory light, preventing mankind from boldly setting out in quest of human solidarity.

When any of us are asked if we are ignorant of the teaching of the Church, myself included, we had all better raise our hand and admit we are duped by the deceptive ideology of man and lacking in our informing of faith to one degree or another.

One key to building solidarity among humans is being informed, formed and transformed by God’s revelation and not man’s relativism.

- Gary Taylor | Salem

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