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Kurien Kunnumpuram Quotes
1931–2018 India
Kurien Kunnumpuram (8 July 1931 - 23 October 2018 ) was a Roman Catholic theologian and Jesuit priest of India. He was the editor of AUC: Asian Journal for Religious Studies, contributed substantially towards the formation of an Indian Church, wrote numerous books and taught for more than fifty years.
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Transcendence is the way God is immanent. God is present in every created reality, without being identified with it. This is the meaning of God’s transcendence.
The Church in India needs to take more seriously the option for the poor and take concrete steps to alleviate poverty and misery in India.
Uniformity is the death of life. Wherever there is life, there is diversity.
The Church has consistently taught that justice and charity are the foundations of peace. It may be right to think of “charity as the soul and justice as the substance of international peace”.
The Church of God becomes concrete and visible only in a community of people who have experienced the presence of God and responded to his saving activity.
Mission of the Church is to collaborate with God in his work for the wholeness of the human person, the human community and the cosmos according to the pattern revealed in Jesus Christ.
The one mission of the Church receives its specification from the actual context in which it is exercised in the concrete situations in which it is fulfilled.
Peace is the gift of God who through the death and resurrection of Christ, reconciled humans with himself and with one another. However, peace is also a human achievement since it is to be ushered in through the practice of love and justice.
The poor are becoming increasingly aware of the injustice of the system that condemns them to a life of indigence and misery. And they are opposing the system courageously, sometimes even violently. This leads to a situation of conflict.
It [Vatican II] does not look upon the ‘religious’ as one dimension among other dimensions of human existence. The religious dimension intersects with other dimensions. That is why the Council could speak of ‘the supremely human character’ of the Church’s religious mission.
Christian hope asks us to regard every stage in the growth of a person and every phase in the development of the Church as merely provisional. It has to be transcended. We are still on our way to the final Kingdom.
Freedom is for love and service. Our ability to give ourselves away in love and service is the true measure of our freedom. After having declared: “For you were called to freedom”, Paul adds: “Through love become slaves to one another”.
If the world had a finite reality as its goal, then it has only a limited possibility of growth. But when the world has the Infinite God as its goal, it has endless possibilities of growth and development.
It is our Christian task to make ourselves increasingly more free. As one of the beautiful hymns has it: “It is a long road to freedom”. There is a great danger that we will give in to external force or internal compulsion, thus jeopardizing our freedom.
To follow Christ is also to identify ourselves with the poor and powerless as he did. The Incarnation is the symbol of this identification. Through his incarnation he inserted himself into the human family and became one with us. As Soares-Prabhu observes, “Jesus ‘declasses’ himself and adopts the life of an itinerant preacher without a home or means of subsistence.”
Pope John Paul II is a tireless champion of peace who has dealt with the theme of peace often and at some length. Like his predecessors, John Paul II sees a close connection between justice and peace. John Paul II believes that justice is rooted in love and “finds its most significant expression in mercy”. Hence, justice, “if separated from merciful love, becomes cold and cutting.”
The Church in India has to join hands with all subaltern groups – the Dalits, the tribal people and women – in their struggle for liberation and justice. For centuries, the Dalits have been victims of oppression. In recent years violence against them has grown. The tribal people, too, are subjected to various forms of injustice.
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