Post-Comfortable Christianity and the Election of 2012

By Rev. George W. Rutler 

 

Shortly before he died in Oxford in 1988, the Jesuit retreat master and raconteur, Bernard Bassett, in good spirits after a double leg amputation, told me that the great lights of his theological formation had been Ignatius Loyola and John Henry Newman, but if he “had to do it all over,” he’d only read Paul.  “Everything is there.”  There is a temptation to think that God gave us the Apostle to the Gentiles in order to have second readings at Sunday Mass, usually unrelated to the first reading and the Gospel.  But everything truly is there.  Paul was one of the most important figures in human history, and a great character to boot.  That is, a character in the happiest sense of the word.  “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain” (1 Cor 15:10).

Read the rest of this entry at Crisis Magazine >>