Temptations Against the Church

Extract

The Church of Christ is our mother: the true mother of the living. It is through her that we have life, it is she who nourishes life within us, it is she who gives us access to the living God. None the less, concerning this Mother for whom we should have only love, how many temptations beset us! Some of them are fierce, yet recognisable others are obscure, hence more insidious. Some temptations are perennial and others are peculiar to our age. They are too many-faced, indeed, even mutually contradictory, to allow any of us to feel safe from their threat.

There will always be some individuals who perfectly identify their own cause with that of the Church and end by subordinating, in good faith, the Church's cause to their own. In their desire to serve the Church they actually put her to work for themselves: ‘a dialectical turn about', which changes friend into foe, and takes place with as much ease as subtlety. For them the Church is, in fact, a certain familiar social order to which they belong.