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10 GEORGIA BULLETIN, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 1968
‘God Is Dead’ Claim
Answered By Pope
VATICAN CITY—Pope Paul VI has answered those who claim
“God is dead.”
“It is not the Sun that has been extinguished, it is the eye of man
that is clouded over,” he said at his weekly general audience (Nov.
13).
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Speaking to thousands
gathered in St. Peter’s basilica,
Pope Paul approached the “death
of God” controversy from
objective and subjective aspects.
Regarding its objective
significance, he said: “There is no
more violent and sacrilegious
contradiction than the one which
erupts between the two terms,
God and death.”
He said this equates “Being
and non-being, Life
and
its
negation, the
Absolute and
the
absurd, Necessity
and
the
inconsistent,
Truth
and
its
annulment,
Happi
ness
and
despair.”
dlut, the
Pope
said,
the
concept of the death of God as
used by modern men is a
subjective concept, “that is to
say, the thought of man who no
longer knows how to give a sense,
a* value"To the ineffable name of
God. God is said to be dead in
the mentality of man. It is not
the Sun that has been
extinguished, it is the eye of man
that is clouded over.”
The Pope analyzed the current
thought behind the God-is-dead
concept.
‘‘Religious indifference is
fashionable,” he said.
“Secularization is admitted- by
many as a process of thought
which finds in itself and in a
knowledge of things an
autonomy which dispenses from
reference (o a higher and
transcendent principle, which is
called God.
“Metaphysics, it is said, is-
finished. Atheism uses science as
a shield to assert itself, as a
liberator, a conquest. Knowledge
of God, it is maintained, is
impossible and, in addition, is
useless and indeed harmful.
Modern man no longer seems able
to. think of God and thinks he
can better organize his own life
and the life of society by
neglecting, by ignoring and by
denying the name of God.”
The Church, on the contrary,
Pope Paul said, “affirms today as
in the past that Christ is not dead
and that the Church continues
fearlessly and happily to bear
witness to, to proclaim together
with Peter, Christ the Son of the
living God, and to celebrate with
blessed 'certainty The glory of
God.”
The Pope stressed that
“modern man has more need and
more capacity than man in the
past to come into contact with
the mystery of God, but it is less
easy for him to face up lo and to
admit the necessity of this
inescapable mystery, because he
has widened his sphere of study
and observation...and has
immensely extended the field of
his sensible experience.
“He is therefore tempted to
be content with what he knows
scientifically and sensibly,” the
Pope said. He added that man has
an “anxiety and yearning for a
supreme knowledge and supreme
experience, which is in vain
soothed by the sophisticated
sedatives of philosophical, moral
and literary skepticism.”
There is an irreducible clash
between the doctrines of atheism
and of revealed and rational
belief, the Pope concluded.
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