Order In The Midst Of Chaos? George Weigel remains hopeful.

The title of this post was going to be 'Out of Order Chaos', or 'Order Out of Chaos'. In latin, Ordo Ab Chao. An online search produced too many links to freemason websites. Stop right there. The title of this post refers to an article about the state of the Church.

Deborah Gyapong has the following interview with George Weigel at the Catholic Register.

Edited for Length

Click on the Article Title to read the entire article.

Debate on Pope's views on marriage and family will unify Church, says Weigel by Deborah Gyapong, Canadian Catholic News

May 2, 2018

Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love) has provoked both praise and criticism from inside and outside the Church since its release in 2016, but George Weigel is confident a unified moral vision will prevail.

“Pope Francis has said that the grand strategy of his pontificate is the New Evangelization, as he wrote in Evangelii Gaudium,” said Weigel, the American author of more than 20 books, including a biography on Pope John Paul II and a look at Church reform in the 21st century.

“We have to hope that the debate over Amoris Laetitia doesn’t become an impediment to pursuing that strategy.”

[...]

“There’s really no such thing as local-option Catholicism because what is mortal sin in Poland can’t be a source of grace two kilometres across the border in Germany,” said Weigel, in an interview with Canadian Catholic News.

“This will sort itself out in due course and the Church will be more unified in both doctrine and practice, precisely because the living parts of the Church are those that have embraced the magisterium of John Paul II and Benedict XVI as the authentic interpretation of Vatican II,” he said.

[...]

“This is a privileged moment to be living in,” Weigel told the summit audience, a moment he described as “exhilarating,” but also “a little turbulent” and “a little disorienting.”

“We’re being called to be part of the birth of the Church of the New Evangelization, which of course is the Church of the Apostles.”

He expressed hope “missionary discipleship” and converting others to friendship with Jesus Christ would give our countries a “new birth of freedom” that could impact the rest of the world.

Though the Catholic faith remains the same, it has taken on new expressions “in order to meet the challenges” that the “pilgrim people of God” encounter in the world, Weigel said.

Anyone over 50 grew up in the Church of the Counter-Reformation, he said.

“When we were growing up in it, it seemed that was the way the Catholic Church had always been, and that was how it always would be,” he said. “We all know that is not true.”

The transition began in 1878 with the papacy of Pope Leo XIII who decided “not to retreat from the modern world, but to engage it,” Weigel said. Eighty years after Leo’s papacy, Pope John XXIII launched the Second Vatican Council that was intended “to be a great missionary council.”

While the earlier ecumenical councils had produced creeds, defined dogmas, condemned heresies, produced new canons or catechism, Vatican II did none of these, he said. It produced 16 documents, but “no keys, no thread to tie those 16 documents together in a coherent tapestry.”

Pope John Paul II, with his lieutenant Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, “made the Second Vatican Council his project.”

A synod of bishops in 1985 “came up with the thread that allows us to sew those 16 pieces of cloth into a single beautiful cloth,” Weigel said. “The thread was to describe the Church as a communion of disciples in mission.”

Discipleship begins with “friendship with the Lord Jesus,” but in a Catholic understanding it is “not just me and Jesus” but also meeting Jesus’ other friends and “to be incorporated into the mystical Body of Christ,” Weigel said.

In 1990, Pope John Paul II, issued Mission of the Redeemer, where he said the Church “does not have a mission, but the Church is mission,” he said.

[...]

The Ordinariate offers a way forward between and beyond the polarities of cafeteria (c)atholicism on the one hand and fortress (Counter Reformation) Catholicism on the other. An hyphenated Catholicism—i.e., Ordinariate Catholic, Extraordinary Form Catholic, Novus Ordo Catholic, etc.—is not desirable. However, legitimate diversity must be distinguished from the counterfeit, and that process of verification can and does take time and considerable effort. Prefix modifiers can, for a time, help distinguish between the heterodox and the orthodox, which is useful for protecting the faithful from errant teaching and for helping Catholics avoid sectarianism. Thanks be to God for preserving His Church in the midst of chaos!

The gates of hell will not prevail because the Church is storming those gates. With a recovery of the sense that the "Church is mission", the Church must employ her rich vocabulary, indicative of her divinely informed literacy, that should not exclude a warrior's lexicon.

Ephesians 6:11-18

Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the equipment of the gospel of peace; above all taking the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints(.)

Yes, we seek to invite people to friendship with Jesus and His Church. But, let us not be naive. There are forces at work that seek to deny the faithful and people of goodwill their very lives. We are utterly dependent upon God for protection as we live our lives in this world so marred by sin.

The mission is, of course, to save souls for Christ; this we cannot do alone. We need the grace of God to inform our thoughts and actions.

Duc in altum.

The first members of the Ordinariate were Anglicans seeking refuge, a home wherein they could live the Gospel and retain the best of the Anglican patrimony, its hospitality, its music, its liturgical flavour and spirituality. They were a people of faith made vulnerable by remaining obedient to the Gospel, while being subject to ridicule for defending what the Church has believed alway. They were made resilient by suffering for the Gospel. They were a faithful remnant surviving in the chaos of their former home. Realizing their former home was/is rife with heresy, and no sign of recovery from the wayward drift could/can be imagined, they petitioned the Roman Pontiff for inclusion in the Church that Jesus founded. They were accepted into the Church, and the beauty, truth and goodness they had for centuries preserved was returned to communion with the Church. News of those gifts brought back to the Church is still spreading. The sooner the news of 'the Patrimony' spreads to the farthest reaches of the globe and finds ears among the faithful, the sooner Catholics will more fully recover a sense of direction firmly founded upon the knowledge that the Church is mission.

The prized concept of diversity in unity is real and substantial in the Ordinariate. The liturgical integrity proposed by the Second Vatican Council, too, is realized in the Ordinariate Mass, i.e., Divine Worship. Visit an Ordinariate community and fulfill your Sunday obligation there in the midst of a pilgrim people whose mission is the Church.