Aug 5 Tue
What is Christian culture?
The CHURCH is both Bride and Body of Christ, the beloved one whom God Himself has chosen; she is also the Mother of all who have been redeemed in Christ.
Followed by the Church is the FAMILY, which, by hallowed and repeated usage, forms the domestic Church, whose actions are meant to model the life of the Holy Family.
And, finally, there is the INDIVIDUAL, whose features have been shaped by Jesus Christ. But this is not the isolated individual, uprooted from the sources that nourish and give life, living apart from others in a state of enmity and opposition to anything that tries to thwart its appetites and desires.
Here, then, are the two contrasting styles which contend for mastery in public life. On the one hand, there is the one who lives for himself alone, whose appetite for pleasure must not be trifled with by appeals to altruism or the common good.
On the other hand, there is the selfless man, who lives entirely for God and neighbor and whose highest civic ambition is to assist in the creation of a genuinely Christian culture.
One aims to absolutize oneself, standing in isolation from God, in defiance of God, while constantly disdaining the company of others.
The selfless man bows down before the true and everlasting Absolute and, thus, serves others because they bear His image. He alone understands that before God or neighbor, the same truth applies: that to be oneself, one must remain always in relation to another.
In the predominantly relativistic North American ethic, the center is the individual; in Catholic morals, on the other hand, the true protagonist is the family. Or, to give it a spin, while in the Philippines life is hard and everyone is Catholic and cheerful, in the United States, which is Protestant and optimistic, everyone is depressed.
God is Himself a ‘Holy Family’, the Blessed Trinity, and thus the ultimate ground and model for a culture rooted in the family.
And what is the State? Christopher Dawson insists that men should seek to integrate the two, Faith and State, calling it Christendom, the City of God: “A gathering of reasonable men united by the things for which they have a shared love.”
Catholic culture is, first and foremost, a society built upon the family whose identity draws from the Holy Family. Someone put an example: “The Cross does not need Europe; Europe needs the Cross.” For Europe to recover its soul, the meaning and purpose of its existence as a people, it would need to first rediscover its roots in the Christian religion.
Well, suppose the evangelization imperative can be compared to one hungry beggar telling another where the bread is. In that case, the cultural imperative becomes that of building a world where there are plenty of bakeries to be found. So, then, what exactly is Christian Culture? It is nothing less than the maintenance of the Mass so that the acceptable Sacrifice may go on and on, so that those hungry for God may regularly, and without impediment, feed on the Bread of Life.
Some excerpts from Regis Martin