Beauty puts a legitimate thumb on the scales

      "The encounter with beauty can become the wound of the arrow that strikes the soul and thus makes it see clearly, so that henceforth it has criteria, based on what it has experienced, and can now weigh the arguments correctly."

     Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, "Wounded by the arrow of beauty:  the cross and the new 'aesthetics' of faith," chap. 2 of On the way to Jesus Christ (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 2005 [2004]), 37, italics mine.  As with a Bach cantata:  "'Anyone who has heard this knows that the faith is true.'"  "Arguments so often have no effect, because too many contradictory arguments compete with one another in our world, so that one cannot help thinking of the remark of the medieval theologians that reason has a wax nose:  in other words, it can be turned around in any direction, if one is clever enough.  It is all so clever, so evident—whom should we trust?"
     Ratzinger opens with the "Two antiphons [to Ps 45 that] stand . . . side by side [in the Liturgy of the hours], one for the season of Lent, the other for Holy Week":  "'the fairest of the children of men'" "'had neither beauty nor majesty, nothing to attract our eyes'" (32-33).

"That's not how my Aana taught me to read the Bible."

"the first epistle of John. . . .  was composed at a time when the emergence of a new group of intellectuals, the so-called Gnostics, raised problems that are not unlike those we are facing today.  They interpreted the Christianity of the Church as a Christianity of the naive in comparison with the 'real' Christianity, in which the letter of faith, which Christians had thus far accepted, could be manipulated by sophisticated methods of interpretation to accord with one's own views.  Simple Christians felt themselves deceived and, at the same time, more or less helplessly victimized by the intellectual superiority of the Gnostics and their inventions.  In his response (1 Jn 2:18-27), John says:  You have all received the anointing that instructed you; you have no need of further instruction.  The Apostle opposed to the arrogance of an intellectual elite the unsurpassability of simple faith and of the insight it bestows. . . .  This common knowledge, which comes from baptism, is not subject to a higher interpretation; it is itself the measure of every interpretation.  It is the source of life for the Church, which, in the sacrament and in the catechesis that is part of the sacrament, is the real bearer of the word.

     "We come thus to understand the duty of bishops as representatives of the Church with regard to theology.  Their obligation as bishops is not to seek to play an instrument in the concert of specialists but, rather, to embody the voice of simple faith and its simple primitive instincts, which precede science and threaten to disappear where science makes itself absolute.  In this sense, they serve, in fact, a completely democratic function that rests, not on statistics, but on the common gift of baptism. . . .  The common ground of baptismal faith, which the Magisterium must protect, does not fetter a theology that properly understands itself but rather issues to it that challenge that has proved fruitful again and again throughout the centuries.  The model of enlightened reason cannot assimilate the structure of faith. . . .  But faith, for its part, is comprehensive enough to assimilate the intellectual offer of the Enlightenment and give it a task that is meaningful also for faith."

     Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, "The Church and scientific theology" (1978), in Principles of Catholic theology:  building stones for a fundamental theology, trans. Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 1987), 330-331 (322-331) =Theologische Prinzipienlehre (Munich:  Erich Wewel Verlag, 1987) ="The Church and scientific theology," Communio:  international Catholic review 7 (1980):  332-342 ="Kirche und wissenschaftliche Theologie," in W. Sandfuchs, ed., Die Kirche (Würzburg, 1978), 83-95.  "The shepherds of the Church not only find themselves exposed today to the [supposedly Enlightened] accusation that they still hold fast to the methods of the Inquisition and try to strangle the Spirit by the repressive power of their office; they are, at the same time, attacked by the voice of the faithful, who accuse them more and more loudly of being mute and cowardly watchdogs that stand idly by under the pressure of liberal publicity while the faith is being sold piecemeal for the dish of pottage of being recognized as 'modern'" (324).  "Under this new aspect, the shepherd of the Church is offered the opportunity of giving his teaching ministry a democratic form:  of becoming the advocate of the faithful, of the people, against the elitist power of the intellectuals" (324).  "To that extent, we are correct in seeing in the function of the ecclesial Magisterium a democratic element that derives from its Christian origin" (325).  For "Faith is not to be placed in opposition to reason, but neither must it fall under the absolute power of enlightened reason and its methods" (325), which often set themselves up in opposition to the intrinsic logic of the Christian faith (which, unlike the religions of the East, is, in fact, a logos, and not a mythos (327)).
     The headline I stole from my dear friend and sister Esther Smith.

A church in the heart of which heathenism is alive and well

"The appearance of the church in the modern era is determined by this, that in a completely new way it has become a church of heathens, and continues to become so more and more:  no longer, as it once was, a church made up of heathens who have become Christians, but a church of heathens, who still call themselves Christians, but have really become heathens.  Heathenism sits today in the church itself, and precisely this is what characterizes both the church of our day as also [the church] of the new heathenism, that it is a question of a heathenism in the church and of a church in the heart of which heathenism lives."

"Das Erscheinungsbild der Kirche der Neuzeit ist wesentlich davon bestimmt, dass sie auf eine ganz neue Weise Kirche der Heiden geworden ist und noch immer mehr wird: nicht wie einst, Kirche aus den Heiden, die zu Christen geworden sind, sondern Kirche von Heiden, die sich noch Christen nennen, aber in Wahrheit zu Heiden wurden. Das Heidentum sitzt heute in der Kirche selbst, und gerade das ist das Kennzeichnende sowohl der Kirche unserer Tage wie auch des neuen Heidentums, dass es sich um ein Heidentum in der Kirche handelt und um eine Kirche, in deren Herzen das Heidentum lebt."

     Joseph Ratzinger, "Die neuen Heiden und die Kirche," Hochland 51, no. 1 (Oktober 1958):  1-11, as encountered in Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI:  a life, vol. 1, youth in Nazi Germany to the Second Vatican Council, 1927-1965, trans. Dinah Livingstone (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2020), 296, but modified and corrected by me.  German from gloria.tv and elsewhere, i.e. not yet the article in Hochland itself.  What is more, I have not read the whole thing, just this one fragment.

"'This is why her God will be my God.'"

"During this period, since Daphrose [Rugamba] was a Christian, she prayed and cared for her husband.  Cyprien told me:  'After everything I did to her, she didn’t leave me, even when I got sick.  Instead, she took care of me.  This is why her God will be my God.'"

     Xaverine Kabihogo, in the film J’entrerai au ciel en dansant =Nzinjira mu ijuru mpamiriz, by François Lespes (2018), 14:24.  According to the film, Cyprien was struck, in the early 1980s, by "a mysterious illness" that affected not just his appetite, but "all . . . his senses":  touch, hearing, sight, etc.

"joint heirs of the grace of life"

     1 Pet 3:7 RSV.  Photo is of Servants of God Cyprian and Daphrose Rugamba (m. 7 April 1994).

Exorcism "is beginning to acquire again today that urgency which it had at the dawn of Christianity."

      "What does this [first] standard signify for our question?  Anyone who applies it comes upon an amazing result.  Whereas just now, in the question about creation and in the question about the Law, we found that the New Testament, as compared to the Old, contracts the matter into a simple central truth, exactly the opposite happens here, in a movement of expansion.  The notion of demonic powers enters only hesitantly into the Old Testament, whereas in the life of Jesus it acquires unprecedented weight, which is undiminished in Paul's letters and continues into the latest New Testament writings, the captivity letters and the Gospel of John.  This process of amplification from the Old Testament into the New, along with the extreme crystallization of the demonic precisely in contrast to the figure of Jesus and the persistence of the theme throughout the New Testament witness, is telling."

     Joseph Ratzinger, "Farewell to the devil?" (Spring 1973), trans. Michael J. Miller, in Dogma and preaching:  applying Christian doctrine to daily life, trans. Michael J. Miller and Matthew J. O'Connell (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 2011 [4th ed. of Dogma und Verkündigung, 2005]), 200 (197-205).  "Only after the belief in the one God, with all its consequences, had become the unshakable possession of Israel could the view be widened to include powers that overrun the world of man, without letting them challenge God's uniqueness" (201).  Ratzinger goes on to name three additional standards or "aids to judgment" that can "keep the  faith from being truncated for the sake of modernity" (199), and it is under no. 3 the following occurs (203):

the more visible and powerful holiness becomes, the less the devil can conceal himself.  In this respect, one could even say that the disappearance of demons that supposedly leaves the world without danger goes hand in hand with the disappearance of holiness.

"Gradually we have stopped laughing"

     "Did we not also have, in the ten years after Gaudium et spes, experiences that, despite the differences of level, were not entirely unlike those that lay behind the metaphorphosis of Don Quixote?  We started out boldly and full of confidence in ourselves; there may have been, in thought and, perhaps, also in reality, many an auto-da-fé of scholarly books that seemed to us to be foolish novels of chivalry that led us only into the land of dreams and made us see dangerous giants in the beneficial effects of technology, in the vanes of its windmills.  Boldly and certain of victory, we barricaded the door of a time that was past and proclaimed the abrogation and annihilation of all that lay behind it.  In conciliar and postconciliar literature, there is abundant evidence of the ridicule with which, like pupils ready for graduation, we bade farewell to our outmoded schoolbooks.  In the meantime, however, our ears and our souls have been pierced by a different kind of ridicule that mocks more than we had wanted or wished.  Gradually we have stopped laughing; gradually we have become aware that behind the closed doors are concealed those things that we must not lose if we do not want to lose our souls as well.  Certainly we cannot return to the past, nor have we any desire to do so.  But we must be ready to reflect anew on that which, in the lapse of time, has remained the one constant.  To seek it without distraction and to dare to accept, with joyful heart and without diminution, the foolishness of truth—this, I think, is the task for today and for tomorrow:  the true nucleus of the Church's service to the world, her answer to 'the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the men of our time' (Gaudium et spes, 903)."

     Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic theology:  building stones for a fundamental theology, trans. Sister Mary Frances McCarthy (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 1987 [1982]), 393 ="Der Weltdienst der Kirche:  Auswirkungen von 'Gaudium et spes' in letzten Jahrzehnt," Internationale katholischen Zeitschrift Communio 4 (1974):  454.