"We are at the threshold of a new era...that must engage the globalization of human suffering for the first time, not with the tired tools of Enlightenment activism but with the twin Catholic principles of communion and transcendent desire." [Yikes!]
"You and I are a part of a worldwide religious life movement that has recognized the failures of the economic and philosophical models that have monopolized our imaginations for decades now." [OMGosh!]
"The problems of religious life have been largely misdiagnosed." [Land sakes alive!]
"Our religious life culture, once informed and defined almost exclusively by the sacramental discourse of Christendom, has been reinvested in the secular and political discourse of the Enlightenment that drains the transcendent out of our every desire, leaving only material want in the place where the desire for God once beckoned." [Double Yikes!]
"We in the West inherit the persuasions of the Enlightenment, its framework of scarcity and competition." "We need to reinvest in a theology of abundance and a discourse about God, life and church that is relational." [Holy Cow!]
"It is the traditional Catholic belief in abundance, the theological recognition that God is good, all good, supremely good, all the time and to everyone.
That which stands behind the moon and the stars and the other planets is not some unfeeling force or anonymous isolate but a God who is undeniably social and calls each of us into relationship, into the intricate network of interdependence and mutual compassion." [Kazowee!]
"The good news is--and I know it has been a long time in coming--that religious are becoming newly aware of their deepest desires, increasingly disillusioned and dissatisfied by the desires fabricated by modern American life. We have experienced firsthand what the prophet Amos calls a 'famine for the Word of God' (Amos 8:11)." [Phew!]
"It doesn't matter how small we get; it is our international character that gives us strength and influence in the world today. What diminishes us is diminishment thinking." [Bam!]
--Father Couturier, OFM Cap.
(italics, bold, and bracketed commentary and sound effects are mine)
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