Dear Reverend Cardy:I can't tell you that the Lord isn't present in "progressive Christian" churches such as this St. Matthew's Church in Auckland, New Zealand. I don't pressume to tell the Lord where and where not to go. No one is ever far from His grace. But I also say that, judging from this disgusting display, the demonic infestation afflicting St. Matthew's makes for a very crowded congregation. Matthew himself must be pretty busy interceding for the shepperds and so many people who have so mangled the Gospel he once wrote to preserve the soft, gentle memory of faith of God's transcendent intervention in human history, through the humble vessel of a poor, Spirit-filled Nazarene virgin.
I've just read a news report published in the BBC website about your billboard distorting the meaning of Christ's virginal conception and mangling the marriage and family life of Joseph and Mary.
From half a hemisphere away I wish to register my hurt and my disgust at this blatant publicity stunt. I can't begin to fathom what you wanted to achieve with it.
Your stated justification to the effect that the billboard was meant to "challenge stereotypes of Christianity" is lame and disingenous, and an insult to the intelligence of millions of devoted, and yes, intellectually aware believers worldwide, not to speak of those of simple, childlike faith who will precede you and me in the Kingdom of Heaven whom have scandalized.
There are other ways to communicate messages challenging what Christmas has become in this materialist,secularized age. Yet, you have chosen to do so by means of a lurid portrait, a distortion of the biblical record, and a cheap shot at a love you have no business intruding, much less defacing in such a public fashion.
You have taken the low road. You have brought great shame and dishonor to yourself, your congregation and your denomination. May God, who we both agree is slow to anger and rich in mercy, forgive you.
Yours in Christ,
-T
Archbishop Lefevbre and hermeneutics
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As a young student in Rome, coping with continental philosophy after the
ruthlessly positivistic atmosphere of Oxford, talk of "heremeutics" used to
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7 comments:
Teófilo--
Thank you for posting this. I could hardly be more offended and I hope many more people follow suit and complain to the pastor and his anglican bishop. May God, and the Holy Family, forgive him and all those involved in this scandal.
An Archdeacon with an unformed conscience?
Appears that he knows "about" his subject but doesn't "know" his Subject.
Showing his ignorance by advertising it on a billboard may be a call for help from this Archdeacon's inner soul.
May God open Glynn Cardy's heart and soul and mind to the Truth of the Scriptures and may he develop a deep love for the Blessed Virgin Mary, her Most Chaste Spouse, and God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Folks, I understand humor, satire, caricature, and the like. I also know that humor is in the eye of the beholder. What is a joke to some may be an insult to others.
When the Simpsons ran a satire of Dan Brown and Lisa became a nun in a local Springfield convent to "break the code" and the front door of the convent had a sticker of a screaming Virgin Mary saying "scram," I laughed. When South Park took aim at her menses I didn't.
When I read the joke with the punch line "God is a hard act to follow" I also laughed and thought that, as written and as intended, it DOES make a sane, healthy, and correct doctrinal point. But when the punch line was scribbled over a picture of Our Lady in bed looking flustered and Joseph looking frustrated, I didn't laugh for one second.
What's the difference?
You see, in this day and age when exhibitionism and voyeurism is the order of the day, and everything is sexualized, we lose sight of the fact that sex, to a Christian, is a sacred act. Yet, the Master himself stated that the most excellent way is to refrain from marriage for the sake of the Kingdom.
We Catholics believe, and think that Scripture does support, the notion that Mary and Joseph decided for elected chastity and virginity without losing sight of the excellence of marital relations. They just moved beyond them. Their sexual abstinence has nothing do with sexual repression, but with love, albeit another kind of love, possible only by God's grace. And God's grace is given quietly, in silence, and intimately, in a way that the pruriently curious will never understand or accept.
Elected virginity is also a escathological sign, that is, it points to the Parousia, the End of Time. It's a mark of a people who underwent one Advent season and then fell in the throes of another, definitive Advent for which this ongoing season is just but a preparation and a reminder. We are a people of the First and Second Advents and many await them by sacrificing their procreative powers for the sake of that Kingdom that is both to come and within us.
This billboard was a fragrant attempt to pry into the mystery of this grace; it turned the marital bed of Mary and Joseph into a circus freak act; it aimed to destroy the very mystery present in a unique marriage in the history of man. It was also an attempt to destroy the mystery by soiling it in such away as to make perversely disgusting the mere thought that there is such a thing, such a vocation, such a grace as elected virginity.
I, in turn, find the blatant inversion of values perpetrated by this "church" despicable and disgusting in itself. Their point about the true meaning of Christmas could have been made a thousand different ways without bringing the God of Israel to the level of Zeus and without stressing the biological so much in order to make the Incarnation and its consequences - to Mary, Joseph, to the rest of us - trivial and unimportant.
This is why I find this thing so offensive, hurtful, and degrading, not only for Those portrayed, but also for the rest of us who have to suffer it. Shame on them. May the Lord forgive them; and may the Lord grant me the grace to forgive them now, at this very moment.
-Theo
Glynn Cardy has no obligation to ensure that you or I are not offended.
Boz: According to the Gospel, he does. I've come to expect garbage like this from "bright" atheists, not from Christian Ministers.
so, does the gospel require glynn cardy to avoid offending only christians, or all humans?
Boz: The moral core of the Gospel is found here, here, and here. The answer to your question is contained therein. I provide you with the "raw" data so that you can judge for yourself.
-Theo
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