Exhaling

“Chesterton was right when he said that the world is full of Christian ideas gone mad. The Gospel and the Church are plundered like a fruit tree, but the fruits, once separated from the tree, go rotten and are no longer fruitful. The ‘ideas’ of Christ cannot be separated from Him, and so they are of no use to the world unless they are fought for by Christians who believe in Christ, or at least by men who are inwardly, though unconsciously, open to Him and governed by Him. Radiance is only possible when the radiant center is permanently active and alive. There can be no shining from stars long dead.”
~Balthasar, Das Ganze im Fragment

I think this is also true of those who argue WITHIN the Church, or who set themselves above the Magisterium with their endless arguments over liturgical correctness or moral relativism or whatever. Even if they have not separated themselves from Christ, or formally broken from the Church - they have separated themselves from His Church and picked the glorious fruits of the Church and tried to use these singular specimens independent of the Tree. The part can only live and be healthy when it is part of the whole. When we accept that the Church - though it is filled with sinners - possesses the Truth and teaches with the authority of Christ, then we are freed from all that might enslave our reason and drag us away to something that seems righter than the Church. We cannot know everything, and the arguments of our own minds, the lies of the world and the devil, the arguments of the well-meaning can lead us down paths we need not waste time travelling.