Tuesday, 9/23/14
The proverbs in the First Reading are clever and thought provoking,
and there was a time when good women stitched such proverbs into samplers they
hung on our walls, but we don’t see much of that anymore.
I have found that instead of the old proverbs, it is
the statements in the documents of
Vatican II that are more frequently on my lips. The Council published sixteen
documents, but they classified the ones on Liturgy, on the Church itself, on
Divine Revelation, and on the Church in the Modern World as Constitutions. In place
of Proverbs, let me quote a key sentence from each of those.
A key sentence in the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy
states, “He is present in the sacraments
so that when anybody baptizes it is really Christ himself who baptizes.”
A key sentence in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church
states, “The Church subsists in the
Catholic Church . . . Nevertheless, many elements of sanctification and of
truth are found outside its visible limits.”
A key sentence in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine
Revelation states, “In determining the
intention of the sacred writers attention must be paid to literary forms, for
the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various
types of historical writings, in prophetic and poetical texts.”
The opening sentence in the Pastoral Constitution on the
Church in the Modern World states, “The
joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the men of our time, especially of those
who are poor or afflicted in any way, are the joy and hope, the grief and
anguish of the followers of Christ as well. Nothing that is genuinely human
fails to find an echo in their hearts.”
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