Now online: Juan Sara, Secular Institutes According to Hans Urs von Balthasar (2002)
From the text:
What Balthasar is proposing with the secular institutes, then, is the possibility of embracing “from below” within the obedience of love the negative tendency operating in the West since the late Middle Ages, its visceral “No” to being assumed in Christ — thanks to the qualitative decisions of those called to an exclusive consecration of this obedience of love in representation of all. What is at stake is thus more than a mere critique from a distance: it is nothing less than a real, patient entrance into the other in order to participate in the substitutionary event of the decision of Christ himself. By the same token, the ultimate goal of the secular institutes is, in Balthasar’s conception, to foster an existential, eucharistic echo in present history of that original dialogue between the triune God and Mary that we saw above. This dialogue is nothing other than the growth of the world in total gift to God, authentic worldly profession in Christian consecration, the flowering of the logos in the divine Logos, the fruitfulness of God in man. (full text)
Published in Communio: International Catholic Review 29, no. 2 (Summer 2002).
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