Coversion

The pope is shaking things up.  He is not attempting to change doctrine. On all the core Catholic teachings, he is a absolutely straight-down-the-line orthodox Catholic. But he is also an evangelizer and a missionary.


What's missing from the picture, he says, is the merciful face of Christ. The church that heals the wounds, that raises people up, that nurtures them, that forgives them. And so what he's trying to do is to say, "Actually, that's the face of the church that needs to be presented."


Now, this isn't a PR exercise. What he's actually saying is people need to experience that before they are ready to accept the rest of it.


So what is conversion? Conversion is when somebody first experiences the love and mercy and forgiveness of God, and then, having assimilated that, then, as it were, chooses the Christian life, chooses the moral life, and so on. But you can't go to the second without the first.


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