Being the Church. . .

According to Pope Leo, being the Church means recognizing that truth is not possessed, but sought together, allowing ourselves to be guided by a restless heart in love with Love.  It sounds nice.  It certainly expresses the commonly held convictions of the day that the pursuit of truth is bigger and better than possession of it.  It reflects the sort of gobbledygook that has pervaded Rome since Francis.  It does not sound like the carefully nuanced words of Scripture or the confession of the faithful down through the ages.  Indeed, it begs the question.  Do we possess the Divine Revelation of God's Word or not or is that Word somehow either incomplete or insufficient for the day?  I guess Leo and folks like me will simply have to agree to disagree.  It is precisely this kind of talk that gets us all in trouble.

What good is a church made up of people seeking unless there is something to be sought and known?  That seems to be the issue.  Either we have the truth in God's Word and this is the ground of being for the Church or else we don't and are left with one big guesstimate.  So either the Church is a group of blind people feeling their way along or we are those whose eyes have been opened and on whom the light has shown.  It has to be one or the other.  For that matter, either the Spirit has been given to us merely as a companion on our common journey or the Spirit actually guides the Church into all truth.  I mean, really, we are two millennia away from Christ's death and resurrection and, according to Leo, we are still far from the truth.  Now, of course, we would all agree that we are not there yet in the sense of the perfect consummation of all things but as possessor of the truth, why else is there a Church?  The Scriptures?  The Spirit?  The Church has the illumination of Scripture and the Spirit along with the catholic witness down through the ages and possesses the fullness of the truth within the bounds of our human frailty.  

What is the Church the guardian of except the truth?  Indeed, while it fits with the modern idea of an evolving and changing truth in which the seeking is even more significant than the truth itself, it does not accord with the promise of Christ, the gift of the Spirit, and what the Scriptures claim of themselves.  Jesus did not claim to be a companion with us along the way but the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  He is not a means to an end but the end.  To know Him is to know the truth in all its fullness.  These words of Leo do not even accord with customary Roman teaching regarding the pontiff and the teaching magisterium of Rome.  So what is it?  Is this merely an unfortunate example of the kind of imprecise language used by the advocates of change or is it the sign that Leo has joined Francis, against Benedict and JPII and others in seeing the role of the faithful in discerning where God wants them to go instead of proclaiming what God has done in Christ on behalf of the whole world?  If it is the latter, then the Gospel is reduced to a mere marker along the journey or a principle for the path instead of the eternal Gospel of Revelation meant for the all people.  If that is the case, Leo and those who think like him will have transformed Rome into a fully contemporary Protestant church -- something for which Luther did not aim nor should he be blamed.