Jesus Found Guilty of Hate Speech
These days the Jesuits’ America magazine is really pushing the envelope. We are now habituated to picking up the most recent issue and wondering how it will manage to top the bizarre utterances of previous issues. Well, the July 30-August 6 issue has come up with a real doozy that even future issues will be hard put to beat.
In the “Of Many Things” column, Associate Editor David S. Toolan, S.J., in extolling tolerance and bellyaching about how Catholicism has historically expelled, in his words, “heretical Christians” from its midst, says: “The fact is that from the very beginning, the language of hate, exclusion and excision had coexisted in Christianity with the language of forbearance and love of enemies. Think of…. the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, which just after the injunction to love one’s enemies issues a withering attack on false insiders who say ‘Lord, Lord’ and will be cast out as ‘evil-doers’ (Mt. 7:21-23).”
You May Also Enjoy
Just as historians crank out “revisionist” history, theologians remake the image of Jesus in order to reshape everything from doctrine to architecture.
Through our pain, we are capable of actually participating in the salvific economy of Christ. This spiritual power is all the more acute at death.
From the Patristic era to the 18th century, the consensus of Christianity was that speaking in tongues is a spiritual gift and is vanishingly rare in history.