Jesus Found Guilty of Hate Speech
These days the Jesuits’ America magazine is really pushing the envelope. We are now habituated to picking up the most recent issue and wondering how it will manage to top the bizarre utterances of previous issues. Well, the July 30-August 6 issue has come up with a real doozy that even future issues will be hard put to beat.
In the “Of Many Things” column, Associate Editor David S. Toolan, S.J., in extolling tolerance and bellyaching about how Catholicism has historically expelled, in his words, “heretical Christians” from its midst, says: “The fact is that from the very beginning, the language of hate, exclusion and excision had coexisted in Christianity with the language of forbearance and love of enemies. Think of…. the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, which just after the injunction to love one’s enemies issues a withering attack on false insiders who say ‘Lord, Lord’ and will be cast out as ‘evil-doers’ (Mt. 7:21-23).”
You May Also Enjoy
Can someone who has ignored every proscription of the Catholic faith be described as being on a "faith journey"?
Author’s Note: The following was recently presented as an informal lecture to the Theology Forum…
A political understanding of the power of the Exodus story is eviscerated if its religious meaning is obscured.