Oct 26 Thu
“In Opus Dei, my beloved daughters and sons, we always try in all things to be of one mind with our Mother the Church: corporately we don't hold any other doctrine than that taught by the Magisterium of the Holy See. We accept everything the Magisterium accepts, and we reject everything it rejects.” St. Josemaría
Fidelity to the Magisterium is fidelity to our Lord Jesus Christ himself. “Truth is perennial: Christ's word never changes. The Christian must be faithful to that truth, even though it might be uncomfortable, even if at times it can be the cause of friction and misunderstanding.”
We have to overcome the temptation to falsify the truth. “Some unscrupulous individuals don't hesitate – without admitting it – to bend the truth as it suits them. Not only can one try to ‘adapt’ the truth, one can even go so far as to ‘create’ it.
I once heard a story (I don't guarantee that it is true) about how in a certain country a writer proposed to resurrect a forgotten literary figure of bygone days. He began to write newspaper and magazine articles about this unjustly-neglected man of letters: other writers, he said, have noble monuments in our city, but this great literary giant doesn't have even the smallest statue to commemorate him. Public opinion became outraged, money was raised, and eventually a design was commissioned. When everything was ready, the promoter of the forgotten writer announced that it would be impossible to make the statue, because... that great literary genius had never existed.”
“Modifying the truth, ‘creating the truth’,… subjectively, can be easy; the difficult thing is to defend it charitably. Even in human affairs, there is something disgusting and repulsive about a person who is not prepared to be faithful to his convictions. On the other hand, a person who, though mistaken, works in good faith, always deserves affection and respect. Anyone who, though possessing the truth, hides it through cowardice, incurs the severe censure pronounced by Pope Paul the Sixth: ‘One of our most painful sorrows is the infidelity of some good people who forget the beauty and gravity of the commitment that binds them to the Church. This is a phenomenon which the evolution of modern life painfully accentuates, both in the sphere of doctrine and in moral behavior. How much weakness, how much opportunism, how much conformity, how much vileness!’”
We want to be faithful to the deposit of faith protected and promulgated by the Church's Magisterium; we want to preserve it in all its purity, integrity and genuine meaning, because otherwise’ “it would not be a wealth of divine truths, but something human, which neither saves nor redeems: it would be salt that had lost its taste.”
Video: