From the Holy Father’s last General Audience:
Overcoming the temptation to place God in submission to oneself and one’s own interests or to put Him in a corner and converting oneself to the proper order of priorities, giving God the first place, is a journey that every Christian must undergo. “Conversion”, an invitation that we will hear many times in Lent, means following Jesus in so that his Gospel is a real life guide, it means allowing God transform us, no longer thinking that we are the only protagonists of our existence, recognizing that we are creatures who depend on God, His love, and that only by “losing” our life in Him can we truly have it.
Pope Benedict mentioned three individuals in today’s address. Who were they?
The Russian Orthodox Pavel Florensky.
The American Catholic Dorothy Day.
I love him on Etty Hillesum…love him, love him. What I would call the far trad Catholic would point to Florence’s Council and say she didn’t return explicitly to the Catholic Church. But she implicitly did without knowing it and that is not simply Rahner’s “anonymous Christian” because Rahner is really simply a longwinded version of St. Justin Martyr, chap.46,1st apology:
“We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them…. So that even they who lived before Christ, and lived without reason, were wicked and hostile to Christ, and slew those who lived reasonably.”
And Justin Martyr is a long winded version of my favorite…John 4:7
” Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.”
Benedict celebrated Justin Martyr on Mar.21,2007 in an audience that contained a Shinto delegation from that intelligent nation with the least Christian converts, Japan. Did Benedict pick Justin Martyr for that day because he knew the Shintos were scheduled? I wouldn’t put it past him.