The Gospel lives in conversation with culture, and if the Church holds back from the culture, the Gospel itself falls silent. Therefore, we must be fearless in crossing the threshold of the communication and information revolution now taking place.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of engaging with culture for the Gospel's message to remain relevant and heard.
In this quote, Pope John Paul II highlights the necessity for the Church to actively participate in cultural conversations. He argues that when the Church distances itself from contemporary culture, the message of the Gospel becomes muted and ineffective. The call to be fearless suggests that the Church must embrace the changes brought by the communication and information revolution, ensuring that its messages resonate in the modern world.
In practice
This quote could be used during a sermon to encourage church members to engage more with their communities.
True freedom is not advanced in the permissive society, which confuses freedom with license to do anything whatever and which in the name of freedom proclaims a kind of general amorality. It is a caricature of freedom to claim that people are free to organize their lives with no reference to moral values, and to say that society does not have to ensure the protection and advancement of ethical values. Such an attitude is destructive of freedom and peace.
Like so many pilgrims before us, we kneel in wonder and adoration before the ineffable mystery which. was accomplished here... In This Child - the Son who is given to us - we find rest for our souls and the true bread that never fails - the Eucharistic Bread foreshadowed even in the name of this town: Bethlehem, the house of bread. God lies hidden in the Child; divinity lies hidden in the Bread of Life
And everything else will then turn out to be unimportant and inessential except this: father, child, and love. And then, looking at the simplest things, we will all say, Could we have not learned this long ago? Has this not always been embedded in everything that is?
Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.
Man matures through work which inspires him to difficult good.
United with the angels and saints of the heavenly Church, let us adore the most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist. Prostrate, we adore this great mystery that contains God's new and definitive covenant with humankind in Christ.
The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.
This is the humbling truth that lies at the heart of Christianity. We love to be our own saviors. Our hearts love to manufacture glory for themselves. So we find messages of self-salvation extremely attractive, whether they are religious (Keep these rules and you earn eternal blessing) or secular (Grab hold of these things and you’ll experience blessing now).
Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes. THAT is cyberpunk.
Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.
Imagination is a danger thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination to keep on conjouring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.
Hell, in my opinion, is never finding your true self and never living your own life or knowing who you are.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.