John Pacheco and Bob Sungenis are going at it for another round, this time over the topic of Religious Liberty and the Ecumenical Gatherings at Assisi. John offers a number of choice comments here, of which my favorite is the following:
If you are really interested in winning souls for Jesus Christ, you preach love, forgiveness, peace, mercy and the rest of the things the Pope preached. You do this because the world already knows all about damnation. We are damning each other to hell every day. The world needs to hear about God’s MERCY too and not just about judgement. That’s why we have a feast of Divine Mercy. We are talking about a tactical way of winning converts to the faith. The over bearing hermeneutic of damnation that you operate under is not as effective today as it once was.
This debate is fascinating for a number of reasons, one of which is the great familiarity of each principle party with the other. Throughout the years, many Catholic apologists have passed through CAI. Yet Sungenis and Pacheco were probably the two mainstays, as President and Vice-President of CAI respectively. When John made the difficult decision last Autumn to leave CAI and found Catholic-Legate.com, most of CAI-Canada followed him over. I hate to sound melodramatic, but in reading this dialogue there is a Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader feeling about it, in that John respects Bob as one of his mentors in the apologetics world and is now trying to rescue him from the dark side of radtradism.
Meenwhile, the Lidless-Eye Inquisition also has a number of great threads going on as usual.
Additionally, one of my favorite blogs, namely, Against the Grain from the Ratzinger Fan Club also has an excellent entry in response to various radtrad attacks that explains The Meaning of the Word Subsists.
The Pope’s messages of welcome and conclusion at Assisi make the necessary points that Bob S. overlooks:
(welcome:)
“2. The fact that we have come here does not imply any intention of seeking a religious consensus among ourselves or of negotiating our faith convictions. Neither does it mean that religions can be reconciled at the level of a common commitment in an earthly project which would surpass them all. Nor is it a concession to relativism in religious beliefs, because every human being must sincerely follow his or her upright conscience with the intention of seeking and obeying the truth.
“Our meeting attests only – and this is its real significance for the people of our time – that in the great battle for peace, humanity, in its very diversity, must draw from its deepest and most vivifying sources where its conscience is formed and upon which is founded the moral action of all people.”
“4. Religions are many and varied, and they reflect the desire of men and women down through the ages to enter into a relationship with the Absolute Being.
“Prayer entails conversion of heart on our part. It means deepening our sense of the ultimate Reality. This is the very reason for our coming together in this place.”
(conclusion)
“3. Yes, there is the dimension of prayer, which in the very real diversity of religions tries to express communication with a Power above all our human forces.
Peace depends basically on this Power, which we call God, and as Christians believe has revealed himself in Christ.
This is the meaning of this World Day of Prayer.”
nevertheless, all the talk about love, compassion and mercy overlooks the fact that Christ spoke about damnation far more frequently than he did about mercy and goodness