THERE IS STILL TIME

 

 

Paolo Cugini

 

Perhaps one of the greatest errors committed in Christianity was to make people believe that God was present exclusively in the Catholic Church. After all, the famous phrase attributed to Saint Cyprian in the third century AD, "extra ecclesiam nulla salus," says it all. Parishes were structured around this statement, becoming, over time, bastions of defense of the correct doctrine of God. Outside was the world, the devil. Salvation was found only within the Church. And where was God?

Then came the Crusades, the Holy Inquisition, and the witch hunts: all part of the control of the supposed truth by the ecclesiastical institution, which, the further it distanced itself from the Gospel, the more rigidly it tightened its doctrine, to the detriment of the authentic evangelical truth and, above all, of the many people tortured and killed. Then there was the Pope with his army, and no one asked whether it made sense for a Pope, Christ's representative on earth, to have an army. How many pages of false history have been written to justify all this filth.

Exercising control over the truth was the West's great mistake. It is a sin of presumption, which has led to the extermination of other peoples, cultures, and religions. Every time the Christian West encountered culturally and religiously diverse peoples, it did not apply Jesus' teaching of mutual love, but rather the principle of extermination, implemented by Joshua when he entered the fateful promised land. He who sows violence reaps hatred. He who seeks to impose his own truth at all costs becomes a liar, because truth is not found in hatred and war, but in peace and love.

And yet, it took very little. All it took was to listen, instead of squawking about one's own supposed truth. Presumed, because what the Christian West tried so hard to defend, even through the extermination of peoples and cultures, was not the Gospel it claimed to defend, but something else entirely: a system of power that had nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus, an inquisitorial and oppressive system that had nothing to do with the dialogical style of the Master of Nazareth.

If only they had listened! They would have discovered that the Spirit blows where it wills and that no one in the world can claim the right to control it. They would have grasped the presence of the Mystery in the history of the men and women of the peoples, cultures, and religions scattered throughout the world. They would have understood that the Spirit is love and that he inspires love in all who welcome him. They would have perceived that the Holy Spirit blows within and without us to build bridges of communion and not to raise walls of separation. If the presumptuous men of the Church had listened to those they encountered, they would have discovered that the Holy Spirit was already present and had entered into the path of that culture, that people, that religion.

If the attitude of listening to others, as Jesus embodied, had existed from the beginning, and his dialogical and welcoming style had been put into practice, perhaps the world would not be as it is. All is not lost. There is still time to set out and listen to the presence of the Mystery in all that lives, abandoning the pretense of pigeonholing it into a single source of rational categories. Because the Mystery is much more than a rational framework. Now that we have understood the lesson, we can live Jesus' message differently. There is still time to allow the Spirit to act within our lives, to make room for him. There is still time.

Source: https://regiron.blogspot.com/2025/07/ce-ancora-tempo.html