Church is effective in its work when it works to persuade and reconcile, as Jesus did. At the opening of the Second Vatican Council, the grandfatherly Pope John XXIII instructed the gathered fathers to think of mercy as the right remedy to cultural misdirection rather than severity. (Maureen Sullivan, Review of book, “VATICAN II: Did Anything Happen?”, AMERICA, March 3, 2008, pg 26)
Grandfatherly Pope Benedict XVI now seems determined to advance Vatican II by his proactive affirmation of the necessary and continuing work of correlating Faith and Reason, as did Pope John Paul II in his “Fides et Ratio”. The ongoing correlation of Faith and Reason in social/ personal living accomplishes in fact the updating “aggiornamento” theme of the Second Vatican Council.
The integrity of truth, sustainable health and personal/ social rationality rely on trust, that is, on the trustful mutuality of faith and reason. This is true whether as to personal emotional/ rational intelligence or to interpersonal relationships, especially in the man/ woman, husband/ wife and family relationships.
The neural network of the senses is an omni-directional causeway linking the whole body system to the cortical brain as information-processor and instructor of mind/ body holism. The information-exchange systems of all bodies link to the energetic cosmos. Everything is perpetually energized in the wave/ energy processing of the electromagnetic cosmos. We belong in soul and body to the Divine Intelligence that informs the energetic cosmos. We are linked to each other by and in divinity, and we are harmonized in the intentional work of the cosmos, what is the Work of Providential participation — EUCHARIST in the holistic, cosmic sense.
If individual life and group systems are to function holistically, rationally, systemically, within the cosmic system, consciousness must intend trust as its foundation and means of working for common wellbeing.
If we as individuals fail to preserve in our own consciousness the integral trust relationship between emotional and rational intelligence, then our own intelligence and our personal lives will be defective and disordered. If as individuals we fail in inter-relational trust, then our social selves and our social living become disordered.
Trust begins in personal conscience, in our intentional efforts to understand right relationships and to conform our personal actions to wellbeing and right living. The processes of right order, reason and social evolution are by way of communication, consciousness and conscience, the trimorphic processes of resonance.
The challenge this awareness imposes on us is personal right ordering of faith and reason, that is, the intentional ordering of life to a higher level of trust than that to which we are religiously/ culturally accustomed at the present time. Our present habits of religion and culture are destroying us. Fidelity to conscience, to trust, demands change in thinking, change in doing. Both grandfatherly Popes, John XXIII and Benedict XVI challenge us to live and think, and to be Church in the Modern World, to seek communal remedies found in mercy, not in severity.