✣ Highlights from the week online
Pro-lifers must beware how they wield truth Alexi Sargeant of First Things identified a “danger” for the pro-life movement: being too economical with the truth. For instance, pro-lifers sometimes overstate “the statistical connection between abortion and clinical depression – rather than simply share stories of real women experiencing post-abortion grief, they exaggerate the pervasiveness of the condition.” We must also speak the truth “without self-righteousness, and with compassion,” he wrote. In the end, the truth isn’t something we possess, so much as it possesses us. “The truth is not a weapon we use. Instead, it is we who should be the weapons Truth wields.” Autism and the discovery of God At americamagazine.org magazine, Gus Hardy, who works with the homeless in Montana, described what it was like to have a non-verbal learning disorder, or high-functioning autism. “I am obsessed with my own interests to the point of blind stubbornness. I do not naturally understand social cues. I have fallen victim to an assortment of nervous tics. By default, I am not a good listener.” But Hardy’s discovery of God, and his subsequent immersion in Ignatian spirituality, made him realise that “the hyper-rational worldview imposed by my disorder” could not entirely explain God, his life, or the world. So he began to struggle against his limitations, to work with people. “I no longer walk into rooms talking loudly, ram myself into others for attention or spit food into a trashcan at a party … just because I do not like the taste. “People from Montana to the Philippines have bared their life stories to me as I sat before them, doing all I could to resist interjecting, and have told me afterwards what a great listener I am.” Hardy says he can’t define himself by his disorder. “To do so would be dishonest to myself and dishonest to the God I believe in.” The Catholic schism that lies beneath The Catholic Church is in schism, said Fr Dwight Longenecker at patheos.com – “but it is an internal schism, hidden to most people”. Not between conservatives and liberals, but “between those who believe that Jesus Christ is the Virgin-born Son of God and that as the second person of the Holy and undivided Trinity established His Church on earth, supernaturally filled with the Holy Spirit, which would stand firm until the end of time, and those who believe otherwise”. This second group are “modernists”, Fr Longenecker wrote, who see the Church as a “human construct”. Or, put differently: “Is the Church a divinely appointed institution established for the eternal salvation of souls or is it a social construct which sincere people have put together to make the world a better place?” There was a “chasm”, Fr Longenecker said – and individual Catholics have to choose which side of it they are on.
