The E-catechism: March 2000

After Death

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Each month the team working on this catechism presents you with two texts, and we hope that with your help and cooperation they will improve. Any suggestions you may have would be most welcome, as would ideas on subject matter.
We look forward to hearing from you.


After Death

At certain time and even recently, a relatively dominant spirituality among Catholics was to have contempt for present life because the most important was to acquire merits for the next world, "to earn one's place in heaven"! Today fortunately giving evangelical meaning and value to their present life mostly concern them. What is happening for the next world? And after death? Questions at the heart of Christian hope.
The tie to life is so intense and so deeply rooted in ourselves that we seek to prolong our life in the next world, the believer perceives it as participation to the life of God. It is also because all the links of friendships we have established on earth lead us to the very "Other One", the God of the Alliance and we cannot believe they will come to an end. Equally so because present life, the real life, as miserable as it may be, is maintained by the hope of alleviation and by waiting for happiness coming at last for us and the others. We cannot accept that so many lives, prematurely interrupted or having had only suffering and injustices, can never reach happiness, love and desire of this Kingdom of heaven that Jesus has announced and foreshadowed.
Why our imaginings do not help to support and invest our waiting, knowing however that they are inadequate compared with the transcendence towards which we aspire to and we are going to?
In the past, colorful descriptions of the delights of the next world were flourishing and they were imitating all insufficiently fulfilled desires on earth but also representations of tortures in the purgatory and in hell were common. Breugel, Jerome Bosch and many others have let go their imagination. Today representations of the next world are much more sparing of words. Whatever is our faith, we don't know who is God. How then can we imagine what will happen to us after our death?
This fundamental unknown can be fortunately liberated from a paralyzing terror. The image of a forgiving and just God who knows how complex and difficult human condition is, replaces more and more the image of a pitiless God, whose severity was necessary, it was thought, to maintain human beings in the right way. More and more we find out that compassionate and welcome attitudes, the confidence of Jesus in every body whatever his misery is, are much more stimulating than threat and terror of the Last Judgement and of hell.
The longing for the next world, emerging from the wealth of our friendships but also from the tragedies of our existence, can it be a way to escape or is it the mark of a dimension of eternity at the heart of a human being?
Like in Jesus' time, what is cripple, paralyzed, blind, sinful in us and in others needs to hear, to discover that we are loved, that we are worth to God, that the Kingdom of God is already among us. We are destined for preparing its complete accomplishment.
The hope for a next world in God's love is rooted most profoundly in humans by immersing ourselves more and more intensely in daily life, with all daily miracles of love but also the increased awareness of the drama that life is made of.

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The Church

The word means "call together", "convened assembly" The first Christians chose this Greek word to name their communities because they were aware of being assembled together not only through their will but also from the call of God. The Church keeps these two aspects, a human society and an answer to a call coming from somewhere else.
The Church belongs to history and to society, it is its visible aspect. In the mean time it goes beyond this history and this society. We cannot erase this spiritual reality to consider only the functional aspect of the Church. This functional aspect is related to a human organization subjected to hazards, it took its model of government from the Roman culture, feudal or monarchial. However the Church is also the field cultivated by God, Its construction made of living stones, Its family: the people of God, to take another image, the house of the Holy Spirit. Church authority comes from Christ not from humans. Salvation is given to her but not necessarily accomplished or conquered by her. It is a free gift received from the Father through the Son. By confining the Church to its functional and visible aspect, by confining the priests to be permanent civil servants, the Church would give up its mystery, its spiritual part, its reason d'être would be cut down, it is a matter of faith and not only a sociological reality.

Nonetheless, it is through the visible part of the Church that one can see its spiritual part. Surely the Church is not a human construction only, however mankind have the responsibility to make its visible aspect in agreement with its spiritual aspect.

Too often the word "Church" evokes the permanent ministers of the institution, the hierarchy, the authority and not any more the faithful who assemble together. For historical reason the people of God have been divided into clerics and lay persons, the first having the power to teach, to govern and to sanctify through the sacraments, the others having only a passive and obedient role.

Jesus has not founded the Church with the organization we know. He announced the Kingdom. His death had symbolically tear apart the veil of the Temple which was separating the sacred from the secular, the pure from the impure, and the man from the woman in the logic of the time; although unfortunately it still exists today. Within not much more than four centuries this veil was completely restored.
The present time makes us close to the early beginning of the Church, before it became the religion of the State. It has become plural, not any more a majority. It has to become more modest. It makes up in quality what it lacks in quantity. The authenticity of engagement and the serious of the faith replace the sociological association to the Church. The decrease of the number of priests is a providential opportunity to revise the dominant role of the ministers of the Church. Under the push to the needs of the communities, lay persons, men and women, proposed to help and then finding back the true sense of the minister. Their presence changes the face of the Church, which looks closer, less dominant and less moralizing. Today all of us have to give back to the people of the Faith their full dimension. The division of the Church into two casts does not any more correspond to our democratic practices, but more so it is not conformed to the Gospel: "Do not call any body Master because there is only one master."(Mt 23,8). And we know that this "master" has used his authority on the mode of a service and a gift of himself, washing the feet of his friends and letting himself been tortured on a cross. It is up to the Christian people in its whole to install in the organization of the Church, the practice of sharing responsibilities, the establishment of collegial decisions, parity and associations to accomplish better the mission towards the poor. Only then, it will show that it is really the Church of Christ and it will become credible to the present-day people.

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