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Tuesday, June 10, 2014

"charity à la carte”

.. is not the response to the gospel, to God's love, that He is looking for. He who is Love, whose love was so self-sacrificing that it took him to the passion and death on the cross, gave first, loved first, that a greater response is proper. When The Joy of the Gospel goes into the social dimensions of evangelization, Pope Francis reminds us, it seems to me, that the salvation of the world is not the aggregation of the individual salvation. Such a model seems to lose that crucial social aspect that enriches the individual through the societal family.

(Trust, too, that reading an excerpt, as I did, likewise does injustice to the whole text:)

Pope Francis also cites the small gestures of charity, which I also fall into, and that makes sense if you consider that human beings, if we truly consider them as family, are worth more than cursory gestures. This goes into the heart of charity, at the core of the gospel: God's love for us, no mere gesture but a total self-giving, to which our response should largely involve self-giving to others. It's very challenging, even if I only consider my actual family. But gestures alone would make me a rather deficient husband and father, I think.

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