Message from Brentwood's Vicar General for this Sunday

From the Parish website of Our Lady of Lourdes & St Joseph, Leigh-on-Sea a message from Mgsr Kevin Hale, Vicar General of Brentwood Diocese:

Dear friends in Christ

The Gospel of this Sixth Sunday of the Year comes from the teachings of Jesus that form the heart of our Christian ethics. However, Christianity is not simply a way of living well on earth; everything is directed to the higher goal of the supernatural life and our eternal destiny. Without this dimension Christianity would simply be a moral code—a high one indeed—but nothing more than a philosophy of life. To live the demands of what Jesus taught in His Sermon on the Mount—especially the Beatitudes—we need the assistance of grace.

St Augustine once remarked that: Love without knowledge goes astray; knowledge without love puffs up; knowledge with love builds up. We live in a world, we coexist with others, who have their own unique and individualistic codes for living. Most people who might describe themselves as spiritual rather than religious would say that they lived by the rule of: be a nice person and do good to others. That would be a very insipid version of Christianity. Jesus asks us to: be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect. There is all the difference in the world between those two approaches. If we live according to that former philosophy, then we will want to accept as valid any life-choice that others make. To live according to the latter—the way of the Gospel—we will only be content with what is authentic, and not with what the world tells us. Many today—also inside the Church—have so imbibed the prevailing trends of the world, especially secularism and relativism, that they are no longer able to easily distinguish truth from error, revelation from falsehood. We are all called to live the demands of charity. This does not mean we are being asked to tolerate and promote ways of living that are at variance with revelation, Catholic teaching or the natural divine law. In an attempt to be accepted and inclusive, we can see how those words of St Paul written to Timothy are just as true today: For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions (2:4:3) Have we perhaps, in an attempt to be charitable and tolerant, become reticent when it comes to calling-out these errors?

Indeed, the final words of Our Lord in the Gospel of this Sunday should ring in our ears as a potential reproach: Alas for you when the world speaks well of you! This was the way their ancestors treated the false prophets.

God bless you!

Msgr Kevin Hale