50th ANNIVERSARY OF A COUNCIL GOING BROKE…

TITANIC-CHURCH AND NEW EVANGELIZATION

Dear Church, you are not Peter’s boat any longer but a dilapidated vessel of the arrogant and now defunct White Star Line. Full of your past glories, you think that you are unsinkable, since you are saying: « I am infallible! »…Open your eyes. The ice shelf is near you, there, on the right.   

Give your boat a strong stroke towards the left, if not, you will go down like the Titanic, you, the queen of the seas, you, the new Tyre… (Ezekiel 27: 25-36). The duty of conversion, it is also for you, you know that very well.       

It is true that on the left there are many risks, but nowadays that is where there are lots of fish.     

It is on the left that reside dreams, the heart, utopia, the intuition of that Kingdom for which Jesus gave his life.  Either you resolutely head for those lands that are still badly cleared and need you, or either you go down at the bottom of the ocean.

Since Marshall McLuhan, everybody knows that « the message is in the medium », or if you prefer, « the message is in the messenger ». By dint of not living in accordance with all that he tries to transmit, the messenger ends up by losing all credibility; very often, people turn abruptly against him and even go to the extent of taking a strong dislike to his message.  

Nowadays many people laugh at God or do not pay any more attention to the Gospel, simply because the Church who presents herself to them as being the authentic messenger has lost all credibility in their eyes.

I am talking here about the great Church in her imperial reality with her structures, her attitudes, her way of doing, her morals, her discourses and her paraphernalia of dead eras.  I do not in any way refer myself to those groups of faithful who with generous hearts still succeed in remaining standing all over the place in the world, despite the fact that they do not count for much in the eyes of the great Church or that they most of the time see themselves forced to live on the margin.   

Just now, you who identify yourself so “humbly”… as the true and unique Church of Christ, you intend to firmly re-evangelize that part of the world which you have lost. Nothing more normal than that, since you have been invented for that purpose. Yet, to reach that point, there is only one means: that you yourself become Gospel from head to foot, in your heart, in your vertebrae, in your bones, that is, in your mentality, your organization, in your life style, in your words and in your spirit. 

The great obstacle to evangelization, you see, is yourself. Look at yourself in the mirror and tell me if Jesus would recognize himself in you.  Could the Gospel of Jesus be easily read on the lines of the image that you see? I bet that the answer is no. That would be like asking an illiterate person to decipher the Maya hieroglyphics or the Chinese ideograms. In any case, I myself cannot make such a reading, even if I have some basic knowledge in Chinese…

I beg of you, please stop mistaking the Good News of Jesus with your indecent and ridicule alignment with the majestic riff-raff which cheats and abuses the world.            

Renounce your sickly obsession with sex; it has succeeded in taking within you the entire place which yet belongs, exclusively and by divine right, to the joyful proclamation of the Good News to the poor and to the oppressed.     

Stop seeing enemies everywhere while your worst enemy is yourself.

Moreover, instead of continually feeling that you are being persecuted by the whole world, start to put an end to your own persecutions towards those who, happily to say, do not always think like you.             

If it is too much for you to preach the whole truth of Jesus in front of the crimes against humanity with which the people keep on drinking from, you should at least keep silent, because by going on adjusting the Gospel to your class interests, you have rendered it sterile and more harmful than lying.

If, at the end, you yourself imagine that there are within you things which cannot nor must be changed, that will be the ultimate proof that you are taking yourself for God and that there is nothing else to be expected from you (Ezekiel 28: 1-19).  

But I know that you can avoid the ice bank, if you want to.

                                        

                                                                         Eloy Roy, sinner

Translated from the French by Jacques Bourdages