Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Sr. Joan & Jesus' Awareness of his nature and mission

CatholicCourier.com has posted an article reporting on Sister Joan Sobala's July 28 Theology on Tap presentation.  Her topic was "Jesus and the In Between Times: Finding Jesus During Times of Transition."

According to the article,

[Sister Sobala] said we can instead model our transitions on Jesus, who throughout his life grew in awareness of who he was and what he was to do.

"The life of Jesus was a series of transitions," Sister Sobala remarked.

Sometimes transitions were not of his own making, Sister Sobala noted, including the time when a Phoenician woman from Syria, who asked for a miracle for her daughter, taught him to serve Gentiles as well as Jews. In another instance of a transformation, she said Jesus learned from Mary, his mother, to be accepting and flexible after Mary called on him to perform a miracle at the wedding at Cana.

In other instances, Jesus played the main role in transforming his life and the lives of others. Sister Sobala said one example of this was when he directed his Apostles to feed the multitudes with the few loaves and fishes that they had.

She said Jesus knew by the end of his life that he was loved by God, and he was able to share that love even as he was tormented. She said young adults should take away the lesson from Scripture that they are loved by God, no matter what happens.

Paragraphs 473 and 474 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church deal with Jesus' awareness of his divine nature.  It is interesting to contrast the highlighted quotes above with this authentic Church teaching:

473 But at the same time, this truly human knowledge of God's Son expressed the divine life of his person. "The human nature of God's Son, not by itself but by its union with the Word, knew and showed forth in itself everything that pertains to God." Such is first of all the case with the intimate and immediate knowledge that the Son of God made man has of his Father. The Son in his human knowledge also showed the divine penetration he had into the secret thoughts of human hearts.

474 By its union to the divine wisdom in the person of the Word incarnate, Christ enjoyed in his human knowledge the fullness of understanding of the eternal plans he had come to reveal. What he admitted to not knowing in this area, he elsewhere declared himself not sent to reveal.

It would seem that Sister Joan has strayed more than a bit from Church teaching in this area and has passed on those errors to the young adult Catholics involved in Theology on Tap.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Dave said...

I think the talk was on the weaker side, anyways.

Mike Shea said...

You know, Dave, I really cannot recall all that many strong talks among all those ToT programs I attended as the EG/C PPNM rep.

I do remember a couple of others where the presenter actually asserted error as truth. Fr. Lee Chase down in Charlotte a couple of years back comes to mind. Do you remember right at the end of his program when he said that the Church has never changed a dogmatic teaching, except for the one time when it first said there was no salvation outside the Church and then later reversed itself?

Sometimes I have to wonder where these people got their formation.

Dave said...

Hi Mike,

Topics are usually pretty good, but the material/presentation is sometimes lacking.

Re: Salvation outside of the Church - I think I'd be okay if he prefaced that it is "harder" to attain salvation outside of the Church. See CCC 846 as an example.

Laslty, if I may add, I felt that the session on voting was lacking as well. I'd really like to see some one stand up and explain why Abortion (see CCC 2272-2274, 2322) and the Death Penalty (CCC 2267) are not on an equal "moral plain."