11. A Letter to Diognetus

0.     All quotations from the Letter to Diognetus are taken from Early Christian Fathers, edited and translated by Cyril C. Richardson (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 205–24.

0.     Robert Louis Wilken, “The Church as Culture,” First Things, April 2004.

0.     Hans Urs von Balthasar, Truth Is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism, translated by Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 100.

0.     Quotations and narrative taken from Mark Woods, “Brother of Slain Coptic Christians Thanks ISIS for Including Their Words of Faith in Murder Video,” Christianity Today, February 18, 2015.

0.     Henri de Lubac, S.J., Paradoxes of Faith (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 145. Or, as Richard John Neuhaus put it: “[T]hink of it this way: If the culture of the Church—her teachings, practices, and habits of thought—is the culture that comprehends all reality, then it is not a matter of the Church’s being countercultural but of the world’s being countercultural in challenging the meta-culture of which it is a part. This is an audacious, some would say outrageously audacious, way of putting things. But it is an audacity that is inescapably implicit in saying that Jesus Christ is Lord, and he is Lord of all or he is Lord not at all. The totus Christus is Christ and his body the Church, and therefore our audacious claim for Christ necessarily entails an audacious claim for his Church.” Richard John Neuhaus, Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 170.

0.     George Weigel, “Diognetus Revisited, or, What the Church Asks of the World,” in Against the Grain: Christianity and Democracy, War and Peace (New York: Crossroad, 2008), 68.

0.     Ibid., 70.

0.     Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, 832.

0.     Robert Jenson, “How the World Lost Its Story,” First Things, March 2010.

0.   Benedict XVI, Light of the World, 157–58.

0.   Neuhaus, Catholic Matters, 154–55.

0.   As Benedict XVI put it, “Then I feel it is helpful to reaffirm that the Church does not impose but rather freely proposes the Catholic faith, well aware that conversion is the mysterious fruit of the Holy Spirit’s action.” From “Church Does Not Impose but Freely Proposes the Faith,” ad limina address to the Ordinaries of Central Asia, October 2, 2008.

0.   Weigel, Against the Grain, 71.

0.   Rod Dreher, “Christian and Countercultural,” First Things, February 2015.

0.   “In order to achieve their task directed to the Christian animation of the temporal order, in the sense of serving persons and society, the lay faithful are never to relinquish their participation in ‘public life,’ that is, in the many different economic, social, legislative, administrative and cultural areas, which are intended to promote organically and institutionally the common good. The Synod Fathers have repeatedly affirmed that every person has a right and duty to participate in public life, albeit in a diversity and complementarity of forms, levels, tasks and responsibilities. Charges of careerism, idolatry of power, egoism and corruption that are oftentimes directed at persons in government, parliaments, the ruling classes, or political parties, as well as the common opinion that participating in politics is an absolute moral danger, do not in the least justify either skepticism or an absence on the part of Christians in public life.” Christifideles Laici, no. 42.

0.   In his 2008 address to the cultural elite of France, Benedict XVI noted that this was how monks created European culture: “First and foremost, it must be frankly admitted straight away that it was not their intention to create a culture nor even to preserve a culture from the past. Their motivation was much more basic. Their goal was: quaerere Deum. Amid the confusion of the times, in which nothing seemed permanent, they wanted to do the essential—to make an effort to find what was perennially valid and lasting, life itself. They were searching for God. They wanted to go from the inessential to the essential, to the only truly important and reliable thing there is. It is sometimes said that they were ‘eschatologically’ oriented. But this is not to be understood in a temporal sense, as if they were looking ahead to the end of the world or to their own death, but in an existential sense: they were seeking the definitive behind the provisional … What gave Europe’s culture its foundation—the search for God and the readiness to listen to him—remains today the basis of any genuine culture.” Benedict XVI, Meeting with Representatives from the World of Culture, Collège des Bernardins, September 12, 2008.

0.   Wilken, “The Church as Culture.”

0.   Neuhaus, Catholic Matters, 169–70.