Monday Musings - Stomach, Sex and Money

[What follows pretty well describes our current culture. This clear thinking and prophetic Bishop saw this coming more than 30 years ago. Yet, the majority of his brethren remained silent over the ensuing decades. Even now, some have still not found their voices.]

 “…contemporary paganism is characterized by the search for material well-being at any I cost, and by the corresponding disregard- or to put it more accurately, fear and genuine terror – of anything that could cause suffering.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

 With this outlook, words such as God, sin, Cross, mortification, eternal life…become incomprehensible to a great number of people, who are ignorant of their meaning and content. You have witnessed the incredible fact that many people began by putting God in parentheses, in some aspects of their professional lives. But then, as God demands, loves and asks, they end up throwing Him out - like an intruder - from their civil laws and from the lives of their nations. With a ridiculous and presumptuous pride, they want to lift up in his place the poor human creature who has lost his supernatural and human dignity, and has become reduced – it is not exaggeration, one can see it everywhere – to a stomach, sex and money.

(From Pastoral Letter of December 25, 1985 by Blessed Alvaro del Pontillo)