Tuesday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
Every now and then God’s grace and my weak human effort combine towards the accomplishment of that perennial goal of mine: to clean, sort, and toss. Some do cleaning, I do domestic archeology. Yesterday afternoon I was compliant with the Divine Will and started to go through a few boxes. One box contained by mother’s old College textbooks. And they really were textbooks. Unlike many college texts today, the one book that held my interest had only a few graphs and no illustrations. One other aspect of the book caught my attention. It was a textbook on Sociology, but the introduction made it quite clear that it was Sociology viewed through the lens of Catholic teaching. I am quite certain that the author of the text would have been more than capable of defending his perspective against the criticism of those that may have held such a view that was prejudiced or partial. The very phrase “from a Catholic world view” now seems somewhat quaint and outdated. Few scholars and fewer texts would advocate such a position today. And yet, isn’t such a world view called for when we hear in the gospel reading that we are to be salt for the earth? The Catholic world view holds much that current society desires yet falters on how to express these desires and means to attain them. Catholic Social teaching provides both the goals for a better society buttressed by a sound philosophy and theology. In our desire to be “salt for the earth,” perhaps some light summer reading could include material from the Compendium of the Church’s Social Teaching:
So often we scurry around looking for an articulate expression of how we should act and instead we should look at what we have that can provide us with ample insights to become salt for the earth.