Some men come to the Church...

Some men come to the Church hoping to find in Christ a champion of their own particular causes and ideologies. God becomes a way to validate their obsessions, perhaps even idolatrous obsessions, with abstract ideas like human equality, justice, liberty, all these things that sound good, and are good, but are rather absurd when considered as ends in themselves.

Christianity is not an abstract moral system. It is not the patron of the radical right, or of deluded utopian socialism. Nor is it the protector of traditional western European culture, her history, her arts, her dead gods. Rome has fallen to fickle time. Christianity must be more, it must transcend -- no -- transfigure time, and culture, and morality.

Some men come to the Church looking for an "aesthetic Christianity," in the worst sense of the term. And they ignore the interior life, the life of prayer and of fasting, the labours which mark true Christianity.

But let these men come, for they may still be saved, but as through fire.