1.16.2011

Stop shoring up the Imperium!

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue:
A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve – often not recognizing fully what they were doing – was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point.
The New Evangelization: building these new local communities, islands and oases, with no division (but distinction!) between faith and culture, the spiritual and the political life, the individual, family, and local community, or the Church and the world. As the Fathers of the Extraordinary Synod in 1985 said (II.D-6):
The salvific mission of the Church in relation to the world must be understood as an integral whole. Though it is spiritual, the mission of the Church involves human promotion even in its temporal aspects. For this reason the mission of the Church cannot be reduced to a monism, no matter how the latter is understood. In this mission there is certainly a clear distinction—but not a separation—between the natural and supernatural aspects. This duality is not a dualism. It is thus necessary to put aside the false and useless oppositions between, for example, the Church’s spiritual mission and the diaconia for the world.

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