Cardinal Müller: “A commentator in the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung [a German newspaper] writes that this manifesto is a premodern thing, whereas Frankfurt Jesuits’ declarations on homosexuality, the abolition of [priestly] celibacy, and the ordination of women as priests all represent the modern. According to this writer, whoever speaks of Jesus as Son of God over-exalts him; the modern man can understand him only as a moral preacher on environmental protection—not on sexual morality, of course.
“Already in the third century, [the Church rejected] Paul of Somosata’s theory of Jesus as mere man. Those theories of liberal theology since the eighteenth century that acknowledge Jesus only as a special man of fervor or of fuzzy kitsch, coupled with a duty-based morality à la Immanuel Kant—they might preserve a leftover of bourgeois Christianity for [our] secularized contemporaries, but they have nothing to do with the original testimony of the apostolic Church regarding Jesus, the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Faith is not a question of the circumstances of the times or the intellectual-historical epoch, but of the truth.
“Jesus is either the Son of the Father or he is not. We either believe in him or, being no longer Christians, stop declaring ourselves Christians. What good is a bottle of wine with a label promising “excellent quality” if this bottle is empty?”
seamasodalaigh 