I’ve proposed that the Body of Christ, the real and not nominal or virtual, community into which the friends of God will be integrated is a civilization with the Christian Church as His central organ. In this proposed understanding, the Church isn’t the entirety of the Body; after all, I think that all that is good and proper in human nature will be completed and perfected in those resurrected to live with the Son of God for time without end. Our lives in the world of the resurrected, including the life of Jesus Christ, will be full and rich human lives which aren’t lived in only the Heavenly Church pews where we sing and worship.
Sandro Magister has posted an article by Roberto Pertici who is “a professor of contemporary history at the university of Bergamo and has focused his studies on Italian culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to relations between Church and state.” See Bergoglio’s Reform Was Written Before. By Martin Luther for the article, THE END OF “ROMAN CATHOLICISM?” by Professor Pertici.
I was going to write an essay with the title: I’ve Got No Horse in This Race Between Those Catholics With Leaking Brains and Those With Hardened Brains. Pope Francis and his boys—and girls?—have mostly leaked out their brains and some might have dropped those organs on the sidewalk as one gloppy mess. On the other side are those who have brains made of concrete cured as hard as those 2000 year-old Roman aqueducts.
So, the folks with no brains know something has changed in the world and know something should be done and… From there on, it’s worse than politicians making sausage and butchers making laws.
The folks with concrete brains think that ideas borrowed from Hellenistic philosophers and forms of organization borrowed from Imperial Rome make up some sort of manifested truth as absolute as the Creedal beliefs of Christianity and the Bible from which they came. “If we’ve discovered that God had the bad judgment to run the world by way of evolutionary and developmental processes, then that’s His problem. Special creation starring Adam and Eve is good enough. And, besides, my brain isn’t flexible enough to admit such a new idea.”
We need to respond to the empirical truths which we’ve discovered in the modern era, such as those regarding human origins, and we need to respond to new empirical truths which are being created as human being itself is enriched and complexified, such as new forms of political organization not found in the modern world. We need to so respond while remembering that we are still human beings with a specific history which dictates most aspects of our individual and communal human being. There are a lot of cultural variations between, say Maasai and Eskimos—see Dualism: The Split Between the Practical and the Ideal, but they and nearly all human ethnic types who have survived are much alike in, for example, forming marriages of a type more like traditional Christian marriage than not.