http://www.americamagazine.org/pope-interview

What is your reaction to Pope Francis interview? What stands out the most for you?

For me, it is this:

Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’ a historical faith. God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths."

"So I ask the pope if this also applies, and how, to an important cultural frontier which is that of the anthropological challenge. The anthropology to which the Church has traditionally referred and the language with which it has expressed it remain a solid point of reference, the fruit of age-old wisdom and experience. Nonetheless, the man to whom the Church addresses itself no longer seems to understand it or consider it sufficient. I begin to reason on the fact that man is interpreting himself in a manner different from that of the past, with different categories. And this also because of the great changes in society and a broader study of himself.

"At this point he gets up and goes to get the breviary from his desk. It is in Latin, now worn from use. He opens to the Office of Readings for Friday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time and reads me a passage from the Commonitorium Primum of St. Vincent of Lerins: 'Ita etiam christianae religionis dogma sequatur has decet profectuum leges, ut annis scilicet consolidetur, dilatetur tempore, sublimetur aetate.' (Even the dogma of the Christian religion must follow these laws, consolidating over the years, developing over time, deepening with age)."

"St. Vincent of Lerins makes a comparison between the biological development of man and the transmission from one era to another of the deposit of faith, which grows and is strengthened with time. Here, human self-understanding changes with time and so also human consciousness deepens. Let us think of when slavery was accepted or the death penalty was allowed without any problem. So we grow in the understanding of the truth. Exegetes and theologians help the Church to mature in her own judgment.

"Even the other sciences and their development help the Church in its growth in understanding. There are ecclesiastical rules and precepts that were once effective, but now they have lost value or meaning. The view of the Church’s teaching as a monolith to defend without nuance or different understandings is wrong.

“After all, in every age of history, humans try to understand and express themselves better. So human beings in time change the way they perceive themselves. It’s one thing for a man who expresses himself by carving the ‘Winged Victory of Samothrace,’ yet another for Caravaggio, Chagall and yet another still for Dalí. Even the forms for expressing truth can be multiform, and this is indeed necessary for the transmission of the Gospel in its timeless meaning.

"Humans are in search of themselves, and, of course, in this search they can also make mistakes. When does a formulation of thought cease to be valid? When it loses sight of the human or even when it is afraid of the human or deluded about itself. The deceived thought can be depicted as Ulysses encountering the song of the Siren, or as Tannhäuser in an orgy surrounded by satyrs and bacchantes, or as Parsifal, in the second act of Wagner’s opera, in the palace of Klingsor. The thinking of the Church must recover genius and better understand how human beings understand themselves today, in order to develop and deepen the Church’s teaching.”

WOW. Just Wow.

What struck you as your Wow in reading the interview?