Article written by P. Innocensio Colosio,. It appeared in an Italian review 'Rassegna di Ascetica e Mistica, s. Caterina da Siena' , July-Sept 1975
Reprinted in Sisi nono, Reprint by The Angelus May 1997 8 page edition.
I wish I would have read this 20 years ago...how the bad world portrays a saint. The beginning is a touch strange, but most of this excerpt is true to life. Re: Good Pope John.
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"...It is precisely these good and conciliatory people who become dangerous when placed in positions of authority, because they are easily manipulated by those who are stronger and more deceitful than they are. However, that is not exactly Nietzsche's perspective when he says that the good are harmful. To understand his paradoxical affirmations, one must place them within the concepts of the "super-man" and of the "will to dominate." Obviously, we do not subscribe to them, except in the curtailed sense of the popular saying:
‘The compassionate doctor, that is to say the "good-natured" doctor, allows the wound to become gangrenous.’
Here is how Ernest Hello describes the kindly doctor (who is, naturally, anything but a good doctor):
"What should we say of a doctor who, guided by a sentiment of kindliness, makes use of circuмspection towards his client's illness? Picture this personage so full of consideration!
He would say to the sick man; "After all, my friend, one must be charitable. The cancer which consumes you is perhaps of good faith. Let's see for a little while. Be gentle, and try to develop a little friendship with it. One must not be intractable. Assist it in its nature. Perhaps there is in this cancer a little animal who nourishes itself with your flesh and blood. Would you have the heart to refuse him that which he needs? The poor little one would die of hunger! Besides, I am prepared to think that the cancer is of good faith and, I believe, performs a mission of charity in your service"
(L'Homme, Florence, 1928, p. 70)
Hello, himself, in this context, makes allusion to the danger of compromise in the matter of teaching. He had in fact written a bit before:
"...He who compromises with error does not comprehend love in its fullness and its superlative power. Apparent peace, bought and paid for by compliance, is contrary as much to charity as to justice, because it creates an abyss where previously there had been only a ditch. Charity always desires the light, and the light does not tolerate even the shadow of a compromise."
There is in the same work an amazing passage in which he describes the type of saint that the world would desire; and, on the matter of saints, it is the author of 'Physionomies de Saints' whose voice is heard here. This passage throws a beam of light on the universal sympathy that Pope Roncalli evoked even among men of the world, although, let it be well understood, his moral character only coincided in a very reduced proportion with that of the model described by Hello:
"Try to picture a saint who would not hate sin!—The very idea of such a saint is ridiculous. And nevertheless that is the way the world pictures the Christian that it should canonize. The true saint has charity, but it is a terrible charity which burns and devours, a charity which detests evil because it wishes to heal. The saint which the world fancies would have a sweet charity, which would bless anyone and anything, in no matter what circuмstance. The saint that the world pictures would smile at error, smile at sin, smile at everyone, smile at everything. He would be without indignation, without profundity, without eminence, without regard for the unfathomable mysteries. He would be benign, benevolent, overly mawkish to the sick and indulgent of the sickness. If you want to be this saint, the world will love you, and it will say that you make Christianity loved. The world, which has the instincts of the enemy, never asks that you abandon the thing that you believe; it asks only that you compromise with that which is opposed to it. And then it declares that you make it love the Religion, which is to say that you become acceptable to it by ceasing to be a reproach to it.
It affirms then that you resemble Jesus Christ, who pardoned sinners. Among all the confusion that the world cherishes, here is the one that it most greatly cherishes: it confuses pardon with approbation. Because Jesus Christ pardoned many sinners, the world wants to infer that Jesus Christ did not greatly detest sin (E. Hello, L 'Homme II, Les Alliances Spirituelles, Montreal, pp.197 ff)."
We come at last to the end of these bitter disputes and harsh considerations, (imposed by suffering in face of the decay which devastates the Church in the domains of the faith, of practices and of discipline); in the presence of the frightful crisis of vocations, of the numerous defections of priests and religious, of the advance of atheistic communism—all of which evils derive, at least in part, from the lack of firmness and clear-sightedness in the pontifical governance of John XXIII. I can easily imagine what a wave of indignation is going to arise from those who are unreserved admirers of Pope Roncalli. In my partial exoneration, I will say that while the now-deceased Pope, "in order to please everyone," did not always brutally speak the truth, or, more correctly, that which he thought, the undersigned, on the contrary, by temperament and conviction, judges it expedient to manifest his thought harshly, even at the price of displeasing many, while however remaining prompt to retract if it is shown to him that he is wrong, since no one is infallible, especially in matters of history and the more so when it is a matter of very recent events.
P. Innocenzo Colosio, O.P.
Convent of the Dominican Fathers
56027 S.Miniato (Pisa)
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Pray for our Holy Father Leo XIV, that he may condemn so many errors in society.
Topic: Novus Ordo Indicators (Read 1669 times)