If everything is grace, then grace is no more

I was cleaning up a bunch of old loose papers today (what a mess!) and found a small pink piece of paper with the picture of an angel in the top left corner. It was a grocery list that was left in a shopping cart at Von's several years ago. I had been depressed, going through some difficulties then, and saw the quote next to the angel: "Everything is grace." --St. Thérèse de Lisieux

I took it home, needing to hold onto that thought at the time. Well, before I threw it out today, I decided to look up this quote and see what I could find. This grabbed my attention (you'll see why):

"The thing that seems most useful to me is the ability to distinguish,proper to the whole Thomist tradition. The refusal to distinguish what is distinct leads to confusion and denies maybe what one wanted to defend in the first place. If everything is grace, then grace is no more." --An interview with Cardinal Georges Cottier, the Pope’s theologian on April 14, 2005.

Apparently, not everything involving The Church is sancrosanct! Just like life, things are sometimes more complicated than they may first appear.

However, I did find some politically and historically interesting comments by the Caridnal...here are several excerpts regarding Marxism and Atheism. (I have omitted the questions):

When I had finished my ecclesiastical studies, my superiors asked me to do a thesis at the University of Geneva, where they had opened one of our Dominican monasteries. Many of my student friends had been gripped by communism. Now it’s not even possible to imagine the fascination of communism from after the war onwards. And then I was interested in grasping the relationship between Marxism and atheism. I centered my studies on that.

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I saw that the root of Marx’s atheism was all in Hegel. As Karl Lowith has said, the philosophy of Hegel is a massive «Gnostic christology». Precisely when Hegel is lauding to the skies the cultural importance of Christianity for the progress of civilization, he is denying the faith of the apostles in Jesus. Christ is interesting only as idea in his view, as divine model. Of Jesus as historical figure, perceptible, he doesn’t know what to do. Kierkegaard, who for me is one of the greats, understood all this.

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I’ve never felt the seductive powers of Marxism. A friend in the French diplomatic corps, who was in Russia at the time of the war, told me of the terrible realities of communism, and that inoculated me against it for ever.

This is an interesting point about Christianity that I hadn't thought of before:

We are not born Christians. One is born a Jew, one is born a Moslem. One becomes Christian, with baptism and the faith. Hence Christianity is unarmed. It is a divine helplessness. Because Christians are not manufactured, as those belonging to other religions can become so simply by being brought into the world. Every child must take its own step, nobody can do it in its place. Surroundings, catechesis, can help it. But no sociological condition can replace the attraction that is gift of the grace, that makes personal liberty assent.

(30Days, March 2004)
Georges Marie Martin Cardinal Cottier, O.P.
Cardinal Deacon of Sts. Dominic and Sixtus
Theologian of the Papal Household