WELCOME OUR NEW BISHOP OF ORANGE KEVIN VANN

WELCOME OUR NEW BISHOP OF ORANGE KEVIN VANN
In pursuit of the truth - cinops be gone - Sunday, Sept. 23, 2012
Marywood Pastoral Center, E. Villa Real Dr., PO Box 14195, Orange, Ca. 92863-1595

Your Excellency,
May I share with you excerpts from Pope Benedict XVI’s book, Co-Workers Of The Truth.

September 22: - “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations… ’’ (Mt 28:19) But the dynamism of this mission, this openness and breadth of the Gospel, cannot be revised to read: “Go into the world and become the world yourselves! Go into the world and confirm it in its secularity!” The opposite is true.

The holy mystery of God, the mustard seed of the Gospel, cannot be identified with the world. That is why we must find again the courage to embrace what is sacred, the courage to distinguish what is Christian - not in order to segregate it, but in order to transform it…

In an interview in 1975, Eugene Ionesco, one of the founders of the theatre of the absurd, expressed this with all the passion of seeking and searching that characterizes the person of our age. I quote here a few sentences from that interview:

“The Church does not want to lose her present clientele; but she does want to gain new members. The result is a kind of secularization that is truly pitiful. The world is losing its way; the Church is losing herself in the world…. I once heard a priest say in church: Let us be happy; let us shake hands…. Jesus is pleased to wish you a pleasant ‘good day’! Before long they will be setting up a bar in church for the Communion of bread and wine and offering sandwiches and Beaujolais…. Nothing is left to us; nothing solid. Everything is in flux. But what we need is a rock.”

It seems to me that if we listen to the voices of our age, of people who are consciously living, suffering, and loving in the world today, we will realize that we cannot serve this world with a kind of banal officiousness. It has no need of confirmation but rather of transformation, of the radicalism of the Gospel.

September 23: A favorite complaint against Christianity is that, in two thousand years, it has not succeeded in changing the world… Heinrich Boll, on the other hand, declared that he preferred even the worst of Christianity to any non-Christian one: … Today, when the return of a world without Christ seems imminent, the declaration that Christ has not changed the world is enough to make one shiver…. Heisenberg foresaw when he said that concentration camps would be but the prelude to far greater horrors if the light of the Christian Faith were actually to be extinguished. The Christian Faith has changed the world. Granted it has not made it a paradise in which the burden of being human has already been removed…

Respectfully yours,

George H. Kubeck,

I believe there are lessons to be learned from the experiences of our Pope Benedict XVI in Germany in the 1930’s. As a voice crying in the wilderness, I will mail to you about 14 letters containing the previous three days, all prior to Nov. 6th. Why?

I am horrified with the consequences of the reelection of our President. It will cause great division and anger within the Church and nation. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Before October 23rd, I hope you will register as declined to state or independent , and all religious will do likewise. Each parishioner must be asked to register to vote. This should happen in each U.S.A. Diocese. May the Holy Spirit be with you in Faith and Wisdom.