Was reading for my sacramental theology course today. Here is a quote: “Resistance to a morality that has been one-sidedly developed as a morality of guilt and places Christians constantly under indictment is in harmony with the liberating, forward-looking message of Jesus. The statements found in the New Testament and the tradition about sin that leads to eternal death make it doubtful that such deadly sins occur frequently in the life of an average Christian…..attention has shifted from the microstructure of individual faults to the macrostructure, in which we encounter the truly burdensome facts of dehumanization, oppression, seduction, and exploitation, and the destruction of the human and natural world.” (Vorgrimler, H.; Sacramental Theology)
Vorgrimler is a German theologian, professor, and dean in Munster Germany. His comment reminds me of what Fr. Josef Fuchs, SJ taught us in Fundamental Moral Theology at the Gregorian University in Rome back in the late 1970s. He basically said that baptism is such a radical turning from sin and toward God that its power is not easily diminished in day to day life. Can the graces of baptism be easily lost? What is the place of the Sacrament of Reconciliation in our lives today?
