Saturday, February 9, 2019

Immigrant Catholicism and affronts to modernity...

"[C]urrent revisionist theology is concerned with the 'retrieval' rather than the exploration of the doctrinal tradition, with political therapy rather than redemption [cf. Bergoglio], and the eschatology in view is invariably monist, a ritual flight from the hazards of the historical order to the immobilist security of the ideal. Uniformly, the sexual symbolism expressed in sacramental marriage is discovered to be radically incompatible with this ancient fear of historical responsibility, and the symbolism which marriage underwrites is everywhere under attack by those who recognize in it the fundamental barrier to a renewed gnosticism—whose dévots [irony alert!] proclaim the demise of that 'immigrant Catholicism' characterized by its commitment to such affronts to modernity as the reservation of priestly orders to me, clerical celibacy, virginity outside of marriage and life-long fidelity within it, as well as by a clear eye for the distinction between the criminal homicide which is abortion and the lawful homicide which vindicates the symbols of public order by the execution of salient offense against the public decencies."

— Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology, p. 276, n. 21.

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