Universalis, your very own breviary in pixels...

Saturday 6 February 2016

How Could That Be an Act of God? It's Not the Way That I Would Have Done It, If I Were God

The oddest blog, from December, from an outlet that bills itself as an "international Catholic weekly newspaper."
The author, a "religious journalist," according to a note in Wiki, is apparently a convert to the Faith, but seemingly not one who buys into all that religious claptrap, that Catholic mumbo-jumbo, that Papist palaver. Not "Catholic" but "Catholish"?

Intercessory prayer?
Whatever for?
One might think it would be better to cut out the middle man or woman
Miracles? But it would be,
a very small God who can be manipulated and used to send signals to the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints, about who is and who is not in heaven.
The Lord still working wonders to increase someones faith, you know, the way He did in the Gospels? Like Mary McCarthy and the election of Nixon, he has his doubts-
Has this miracle helped to persuade a single person who previously doubted it
Apparently not anyone he knows, so that's that.
But, not very originally, what it finally gets down to is that whole, existential, why would God do something nice for one measly little person, when He, you know, permits evil?
One only has to think of the millions of desperate prayers for deliverance offered up by the terrified victims of the Nazis, not just by six million murdered Jews but by as many as two million Polish Catholics and others who shared the same ghastly fate. A God who does miracles in answer to prayers just to let us know that Mother Teresa is in heaven, but who leaves all those other prayers unanswered with so much suffering unrelieved, is a very strange God indeed.
So it's not Catholic practice he has a problem with, or Christianity, or even Monotheism - it's belief in a God who intervenes in human existence, period.

It's God.

I can't help him there.

But he seems just about right for the Tablet.

No comments: