World News
'Holiness business' is what Catholic Church is all about, speaker says
Published: October 1, 2012
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The Catholic Church is suffering from too much busyness and is lacking an emphasis on praise and worship, a theologian at The Catholic University of America said Sept. 28. "The result has been a church of Marthas worrying about many things rather than a church of Marys mindful of the most important thing," said Christopher Ruddy, an associate professor of historical and systematic theology at the university. "The church is in the holiness business," Ruddy said in a talk on the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church at Catholic University's conference on "Reform and Renewal: Vatican II After 50 Years. Everything the church does is oriented toward leading us human creatures and human communities to a sharing in God's own Trinitarian life, that is, holiness," he said. The church has failed to receive the riches of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, also known as "Lumen Gentium," Ruddy said, quoting the Jesuit historian Father John O'Malley, who has remarked that no other church council emphasized the church's role in promoting holiness more than Vatican II. Ruddy called holiness "the inner reason of the church. It is decisively important to grasp this primacy of holiness." All of the church's institutions, activities and its hierarchy exist to serve the final goal of holiness, he said. "The church evangelizes, not as an end in itself, but to arouse, awaken and sustain the conversion that leads to true, eternal life with God."
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