/blog-gone

People have been stopping by my cubicle to tell me that there's a new Pope. Interesting.

Here's an excerpt from his recent homily that has everyone talking...

How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking... The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves - thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. Every day new sects are created and what Saint Paul says about human trickery comes true, with cunning which tries to draw those into error (cf Eph 4, 14). Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and "swept along by every wind of teaching," looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today's standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires.

Heavy stuff, indeed.

A Catholic coworker said she was hoping for someone a bit more progressive. When I defended orthodoxy, she laughed and said, "Hey, I'm the one who has to live with this guy!"

And she's right. Because I'm not Catholic and most of us Protestants don't have to respond to the faith's strict standards. Heck, I'm not very good at living up to basic Evangelical Christianity, much less Orthodox living. And I'm not always convinced what the right answer is. I just believe that it exists.

But that's kind of the point of the whole thing, isn't it. As hard or weak as we try, we are all far from good. And that is OK, because He who actually lived a perfect life, is here to help us every step of the way.