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For even if a man changes religion, it is usually because he finds the one he accepts as offering him “more help”—not more truth.
A Christian is a “man-for-the other.” He shares completely and unconditionally in human life within a perspective conveyed to him by the story of Jesus of Nazareth.
secularism—precisely because of its Christian “origin,” because of the indelible Christian seal on it—is a tragedy and a sin.
A Christian is the one who, wherever he looks, finds Christ and rejoices in Him.
Secularism, I said, is above all a negation of worship.
by denying the world its natural “sacramentality” and radically opposing the “natural” to the “supernatural,” make the world grace-proof, and ultimately lead to secularism.
their term of reference is not the dichotomy of the sacred and the profane, but the “sacramental” potentiality of creation in its totality,
Christians, more than any others today, defend secularism and adjust to it their very faith?
My conclusions are simple. No, we do not need any new worship that would somehow be more adequate to our new secular world. What we need is a rediscovery of the true meaning and power of worship, and this means of its cosmic, ecclesiological, and eschatological dimensions and content.
In the words of Christ, “do this in remembrance of me,” the this (meal, thanksgiving, breaking of bread) is already “sacramental.”10 The institution means that by being referred to Christ, “filled” with Christ, the symbol is fulfilled and becomes sacrament.
The symbol is means of knowledge of that which cannot be known otherwise, for knowledge here depends on participation—the living encounter with and entrance into that “epiphany” of reality which the symbol is.
In this sense the doctrine of transubstantiation, in its Tridentine form, is truly the collapse, or rather the suicide, of sacramental theology.
For it shows that if Christianity fails to fulfill its symbolic function—to be that “unitive principle”—it is because “symbol” was broken, at first, by Christians themselves. As a result of this breakdown Christianity has come to look today, in the eyes of the world at least, like, on the one hand, a mere intellectual doctrine which moreover “cracks” under the pressure of an entirely different intellectual context, or, on the other hand, a mere religious institution which also “cracks” under the pressure of its own institutionalism.
