The big conflict in the Church today, some would have it, is between the Conservative Catholics and the Progressive Catholics. These are horrible labels, which convey almost nothing of value; and every person who hears them will add his own spin to them. Few of the labels are flattering, because the folks who see themselves as being on one side too often deprecate those on the other side as being so deficient in some area as to not be real Catholics. (Though Some Pigs, I suppose, are More Deficient than Others.)

But there’s more to it than that. A large bit of it is what I was getting at in my recent posts about Misdiagnosing Your Neighbor. It’s not that I’m a Good Catholic and you’re a Bad Catholic; truth be told, neither of us is as good as we should be. Often it’s that you’re focussed on one thing and I’m focussed on another, and what we have in common is not obvious.

In Salt of the Earth, his first interview with Peter Seewald, then Cardinal Ratzinger nails it. He says,

There is a well-known saying of Karl Rahner: “The Christian of tomorrow will be a mystic, or he will not be at all.” I would not ask for so much, because people are always the same. We always remain just as weak as ever, which means that we will not all become mystics. But Rahner is correct in that Christianity will be doomed to suffocation if we don’t learn something of interiorization, in which faith sinks personally into the depth of one’s own life and in that depth sustains and illuminates. Mere action and mere intellectual construction are not enough. it’s very important that we recall simplicity and interiority and the extra- and supra-rational forms of perceiving reality.

(Emphasis mine.) Where my intellectual understanding of my faith and my physical action for Christ must come together is deep within, in my interior life. If I understand God but do not act on what I understand out of love for Him, I’m nothing. If I have no understanding or love for God, but act for other reasons, I’m equally nothing. Rather, my action must flow from my love of God, as best as I understand Him.

But that inner life is precisely what we can’t see. I can’t even see mine all that well, let alone yours. And yet it is so essential; and it feeds on both contemplation and action.

And that’s why I keep harking back to it. A holy interior life puts your understanding and your actions in right relation with each other. And that’s why we must seek Him first and other goods second.