The Holy Spirit Always Has His Work Cut Out For Him
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
The Holy Spirit is the perfect love Who is a sovereign Person Who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
How could any one want less than perfection?
There is a certain kind of Catholic that refuses to see the difference between “to lead” and “to be led”. The Holy Spirit always leads; the dumb asses running the Church do not always follow.
Precisely!
When Christ calls himself “The Good Shepherd,” remember, sheep aren’t so bright. It’s pretty clear that he usually lets us get into trouble before rescuing us.
I would rephrase Sue Poulin’s comment as: The real question isn’t whether we can trust the Holy Spirit. The question is can the Holy Spirit trust us to listen to and to faithfully follow His directions? Everything in the Garden of Eden were the things that are God’s. The sin of Adam and Eve proved that they couldn’t be trusted to honor the things that are God’s. They took their spiritual direction from the serpent. The Serpent Synod. God gave Cain counsel that he ignored and went off and killed Abel. The building of the Tower of Babel and the golden calf were very synodal. In the case of the golden calf Israel violated their solemn blood covenant. They broke their promise to God and were not true to their word. King Solomon entered into an ecumenical dialog with his foreign wives and they turned his heart away from God. The Bible is full of the lived experience of people being untrustworthy promise breakers who where unfaithful to God, where their word was not their bond.
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In the New Testament the Parable of the Wicked Tenants is really a retelling of the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man. Everything in vineyard was put there by the householder. The wicked tenants proved that that they could not be trusted with the things that were the householder’s.
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The question that the post-Vatican II Church needs to answer is is the Church honoring Christ’s New and Everlasting Covenant on which the Church was founded? Is it faithfully living out the Great Commission? Is the Deposit of the Faith being faithfully transmitted to the next generation? The clerical abuse scandal was a betrayal of the Church that was entrusted to the ordained hierarchy of the Church. A real kiss of Judas. The Church funds that should have been used for Godly purposes were turned into a slush fund to bail out the faithless clergy, no better than the wicked sons of Eli who treated the offerings to God with contempt. We are seeing in real time exactly who can be trusted with the things that are God’s. Sadly, many are living examples of Psalm 36.