"Standing In-Between"

"Standing In-Between"

Thanks be to God, the Catholic Church has produced more martyrs in the last twenty years than we did in the first two hundred years of the Church. Wherever I go on this earth, there are the Catholic missionaries, standing between left and right, standing between communism and capitalism, simply trying to be faithful to Jesus and the gospel. They spill their blood, invariably, because both the right and the left hate them. They’re not playing either side’s games. They are building bridges, but you can’t build a bridge from the middle. You have to start on one side, and for Christians that starting place is on the side of the poor and powerless. That pleases no one, really – not even liberals. That’s the position we’re in today. I call it the naked position of the gospel: where you don’t please the liberals or conservatives, you simply are faithful to the gospel. It is asking more of our minds and our hearts than any of us are prepared for.

Richard Rohr form Letting go: A Spirituality of Subtraction