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Hahn Interviews Card. George

by Michael Sean Winters

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September 26, 2011

Over at RealClearReligion, they have an interview with Cardinal Francis George on the occasion of the publication of his new book "Gos in Action." The interviewer, Nicholas Hahn, does a good job getting the cardinal to flesh out his ideas.

My favorite quote:

You've got to have met God. Religion doesn't start with a set of laws or rules and it doesn't start with a set of ideas. It starts with an encounter, with the living God and in our case, Christ risen from the dead. In that encounter you meet someone you can trust. That's faith: trust in truth. But then you've got the obligation to keep searching for the truth of the faith so that your life is oriented in a way that is consistent with the faith. The trust is a matter of love and faith is a matter of truth. The two together give you the guidance that you look for.

Nobody has a letter from God saying: do this. But we have a sense that God is provident, that He protects us and wants to save us. You can trust Him if you look for indications of where He is at work. You have some indication from the 10 Commandments, but also when you look at your own life and your own history and you see how God has created good out of the evil that you've done. Only God can do that: take something evil and make something good out of it. It's not like we have some sort of blueprint. Though we do believe at the end of time, He'll return and judge the living and the dead and you'll see how it all works together. But, right now no one knows how it all works together. You continue to search and you do that within a community of faith.

Christ didn't leave us a book of instructions; He left us a body, a family -- a Church. If it were perfectly clear, there wouldn't be any freedom.

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