The following comes from the Anchoress:
I think Pope Francis has set a confrontation in motion, and it’s not the one we’re all looking at.
We cannot see it because we are utterly enthralled to a strange creation of our time that is part-theology, part-ideology and thrives on our age’s eagerness to take offense at every possible thing, every single day.
The confrontation that Francis has called forth is not meant to be between “left” and “right” or “progressive” and “conservative”, though. I think it’s meant to be between things visible and invisible, Love and Hate, Light and Dark.
In pronouncing the upcoming Year of Mercy, Francis has directly called the whole Church into a year of prayerful discernment on the very thing Satan most hates, the one lie that most effectively destroys us: that we are nothing but the sum of our sins; that there is no mercy for us, and therefore nothing in which to hope.
Satan hates mercy because it is the means by which we are reconciled to God, and now, we’re going to have a whole year of focus on mercy, talks on mercy, works of mercy, pleas to seek God’s mercy.
Of course Old Scratch won’t like it, of course he is going to set us against each other, and he’s going to do it in the diabolically disorienting way he always does, by putting our perspective into a funhouse mirror of exaggeration, so we become convinced that our outsized hatreds are really “love” that our “love” is really for God and Church and not for our own sense of rightness, our positions, and that pride and ego have nothing at all to do with our fervently staked out and intractable positions.
It’s all a cunning illusion, and everyone is buying into it.
What’s the best way to keep Mercy from finding a home in our hearts, minds and souls? Get all of us separated, and distrustful and so convinced that we possess All-Rightness that we end up saying, “here I stand; I can do no other…”
Like a famous heretic who said it first.
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