Word: mysterium
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...issue a document that contained apologies to victims of sexual abuse by members of the clergy. And last week the Pope issued a 21-page letter saying that the church "shows her concern for the victims" of priests who have succumbed "even to the most grievous forms of the mysterium iniquitatis [mysterious evil] at work in the world...
Evil means, first of all, a mystery, the mysterium iniquitatis. We cannot know evil systematically or scientifically. It is brutal or elusive, by turns vivid and vague, horrible and subtle. We can know it poetically, symbolically, historically, emotionally. We can know it by its works. But evil is sly and bizarre. Hitler was a vegetarian. The Marquis de Sade opposed capital punishment...
There is further evidence for the opinion that Paul's theological touch is a little uncertain. While no theologian questions Paul's defense of the Eucharistic real presence in Mysterium Fidei some argue that the Pope's incidental defense of such practices as adoration t the blessed sacrament and Benediction runs counter to the theology of the council's liturgical constitution, which emphasizes that the central place of the Eucharist is only in the communal meal that is the Mass. Even more questionable to some theologians is the encyclical's assumption that the language in which a church dogma...
What does he see on Cordelia's lips? We don't know. For us, as for John Henry Newman, "Omnia exeunt in mysterium." But for Lear, the ultimate question is answered, and the answer comes as a sudden flash of enlightenment analogous to the Buddhists' satorl. This ecstatic discovery is what Lear should convey to us in his last two lines...
...religion, as when man uses God merely for his peace of mind, or abstracts Him in complicated logical systems, or regards Him as so large and overpowering that He is out of reach. Buber refuses to see God as the "wholly Other" of Swiss Theologian Karl Barth or the "Mysterium Tremendum" of German Theologian Rudolph Otto. "Of course God is the 'wholly Other,' " Buber writes, "but He is also the wholly Same, the wholly Present. Of course He is the Mysterium Tremendum that appears and overthrows, but He is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer...
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