According to one of our visitors, religions try to update themselves to maintain advantages and power

Hello Father,

I write to you because sometimes I have various doubts and I believe that doubts and perplexities must always be clarified, especially in the religious sphere, because although faith is a gift or a vocation, it is also a way to put at bay all the fears that have always accompanied man and humanity since the dawn of time and which concern man’s attachment to life, affections or simple material attachments, the fear of death but above all the fear of suffering and getting sick, of losing loved ones, but also of falling into the suffering of the soul and not receiving help, all things that man has suffered in the history of his existence on this tiny, but beautiful and fascinating planet so much so that if it were not for the suffering and all the forms of pollution that man has caused, endangering himself and the health of the planet, it would already be HEAVEN…

Science and knowledge have gradually resolved many doubts and false beliefs that have limited the way of conceiving human and historical reality and that have made us dependent on religious doctrines that have stubbornly interpreted almost literally and without immersing themselves in the historical, cultural and ethnic period of those times, the texts, the sacred scriptures, the dogmas of the church which despite having been partially revisited, even today are used to the advantage of those who profess them to maintain order and power, especially by the churches and become the pretext to give rise to new religious movements which in turn fall into fanaticism and ignorance, instead of making us reflect that many things from sins, to sexual orientations, to the conception of life, to marriage to holiness and to the same transcendental phenomena that man has witnessed in ancient times such as the coming of the messiah or messiahs (based on their religion), and of their miracles which have amazed the masses and which still occur today, although it now seems difficult to understand their origins whether divine or more strictly human, they must be investigated with the knowledge and wisdom that we have now acquired, and which concerns all fields and all cultures and peoples even those that seem to live in an eternal socio-cultural and religious past and therefore also the church even if it fears “rightly” losing its authority and becoming excessively libertine, even if then, as we discover within it, everything is or was unfortunately permitted, trying to bring clarity of purpose and knowledge and of a faith that is based on works of goodness and love to much more concrete things that human beings often do with their actions and perhaps do not necessarily have to be attributed to the intercession of a God … but why must we see the divine outside of ourselves and not as a simple capacity of man??

Because the divine and diabolical nature of man must always be attributed to supernatural powers that do not belong to us, in the sense that we always trace them back to good and evil as representations of forces that we still try to depict with non-earthly appearances.

(…)

…Peace and knowledge…but in all forms….

Response from the priest

Dearest,

1. Much of what you wrote does not correspond to reality.

It’s a reconstruction of yours. You think religions are an invention of man.

As times change, you think religions do what they can to adapt to maintain their power.

With great frankness, I tell you that this does not correspond to reality and it is also an offense to people who believe and who perhaps have put their whole lives at the service of God.

This applies not only to the Christian faith, but also to other religions.

Don’t believe there is a secret machination in Islam not to lose power.

This is neither in Islam, nor in Hinduism, nor in Buddhism, much less in Christianity.

Yes, political and philanthropic parties or movements do these machinations. It is natural because these are things that are today and are no longer tomorrow.

But this is not the case for religion, which is a permanent aspect of man.

2. I don’t know if you will be able to free yourself from this preconception, the result of your own distorted reconstruction of reality.

Rather, ask yourself why there is a religious longing in man, what religion responds to, where it wants to take .

Even recently, there have been political regimes marked by certain ideologies of various kinds that have intended to annihilate religion, but there has been nothing to do.

Those regimes, I emphasize of various kinds, have collapsed, while religious demand has remained intact.

3. Any person who has a religious experience does not recognize himself in what you have written. He would be ready to say: this is a mystification of reality.

It is the same feeling experienced by Rudolf Otto, lived between the 19th and 20th centuries.

He felt that what was said about religion did not touch his inner life in the slightest. They were rambling chatter from people unaware of the religious experience because they had never had it.

He set out to travel the world to see what religious experience is, regardless of his being a Christian.

He summarized his experience and beliefs in a text that marked the history of thought, entitled “The Sacred” (der heilige).

At the beginning of this writing he invites “the reader to recall a moment of religious and possibly specific emotion. Those who cannot do so or those who have never had such moments are asked not to read ahead again. Because it is difficult to speak of religious knowledge to one who can remember his first feelings of the pubescent age, his own digestive disorders, or, perhaps his social feelings, but not already his distinctly religious feelings” (R. Otto, The Sacred, p. 19).

4. If we talk about the Christian religion, things are even more different.

From what you write to me I get the impression not only of atheism, of the absence of God, but also of a lack of knowledge of Jesus Christ.

Yes, of Jesus Christ. Because the Christian religion is nothing more than this: Jesus Christ welcomed into our lives.

Jesus Christ is the object of Christian faith and experience.

Jesus Christ is its center.

Jesus Christ is its end.

The Christian life is nothing but the life of Christ in us.

And it is because He is known, loved, imitated and possessed by us.

5. I ask you to do one thing: everything Jesus Christ said, taught, and did, try to pass it on to the critique of your reason. Try to dispute it.

Of course, to challenge it you must first know it.

From your long email, it emerges that you probably know nothing about Jesus Christ: he is never named, never a hint of his identity and mission.

So go and read it and compare the Gospel with what you have written to me.

6. You will also realize that the Christian religion does not need any reform, no need to be adopted at the time.

The only need  is to welcome Jesus Christ, his living and working person in our hearts through grace.

7. Those who live outside the Church may think that the reforms made by the Holy See or the dioceses for the life of the Church (so to speak: the reforms that the newspapers talk about), are the essence of Christianity.

Without realizing it, they fall into the error of someone who thought that a person’s life essentially consists of the clothes he wears depending on the season, completely abstracting from his bodily organism, his perfect functioning, his thoughts, his desires, his plans for the future and above all his affections.

You yourself would say that you can’t reduce a person to the dress he wears.

But when you think of Christianity as an operation carried out by some to retain power (who knows which?) you show that you understood nothing about Jesus Christ and the Gospel.

The reason is that the object of the Christian faith is not made up of abstract principles, but of a Person (God) who comes towards us, who urges conversion and a change of life, who reveals the deepest sense of our being here and also of our eternity: dwelling in us to be introduced into his holy life, which is fullness of life.

8. I make one final observation about a question of yours: “why must we see the divine outside of ourselves and not as a simple capacity of man?”.

I beg to ask you: what is the divine aspect of your life? Are you omniscient, omnipotent, creator, immortal, eternal?

But you evidently give the divine another meaning, the one you want to give.

And so you do the same thing you did with religion when you fantasized about it and concluded that it boils down to the machination of some to exercise power over others.

But this is not the experience that believers do. It is not why they are inside the Church.

I wish you peace and knowledge too!

I bless you and remember you in prayer so that Jesus Christ may also dwell within your heart.

Father Angelo

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