The trouble with intellectual faith

BY PAUL MODUPE

The kingdom of heaven will be taken from you and given to the people who will produce its fruit, it says in Matthew 21:43. Today the ethos of our Catholic Church has tremendously changed. It’s really irrelevant now for many clergy to be called by their own titles. However, it’s relevant for them to be called intellectuals.

Why? Because, nowadays many religious and clergy are highly intellectual, even to the point of being “self-appointed popes”.

Highly intellectual beyond faith. The creating creatures. The transforming transformers. Particularly, the uniformity that the Catholic Church used to have has been rapidly relegated to diversity which brought confusion.

Nowadays, each parish has its own catechism, liturgical rites and so on. The so-called spiritual intellectuals of faith bring changes whenever their intellect drives them to do so.

Moreover, each priest in his parish expects things to be done according to his own way, confusing his parishioners.

The new uniformity in the Catholic Church is intellectual diversity.

On the other hand, our Holy Mother Church has dusted herself with trying to be relevant and reading the signs of times. She thought that by being relevant and reading the signs of times of this world she needed to convert herself to secularity, instead of converting secularity to spiritual well-being.

The Catholic Church has lost its spiritual well-being. She aborted all her children and adopted the secularised, and these secularised children have made her secularised, not spiritual.

These intellectuals have learned the methodology of presentations that you must be specific and straight to the point. At Mass they are always in a hurry, specific and straight to the point. This has been adopted by the lay ministers and they even apply it at holy services.

Much time is spent during announcements where money is concerned.

According to Fr Don Bohé OMI, “leadership without discernment is a garden with dry fading flowers”. In my own understanding, good leadership is decorated by discernment, reflection and meditation.

Thomas Merton put it like this: “Leadership requires distance from the people you are leading so that you will have more time for self-introspection, and a great leader is someone who works towards the unconsciousness of the people he is serving, not to manipulate them but to bring them to self-consciousness of their unconsciousness.”

And Fr John Joyce SPS: “Intelligence and being educated requires humility.” However, some have swapped their spiritual humility with pride. What matters more to them is the theology they have, what they have learnt and what they have been taught. They have swallowed all these intellectual teachings without discernment but with pride.

“When the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants? When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard Jesus’ parables, they knew he was talking about them” (Mt21:46).

Paul Modupe writes from Bloemfontein.