Sunday Homily: Faith, Reason, and Regensburg

I meant to post this excellent homily given by my pastor, Fr. Stephen B. Reynolds, last Sunday at St. Theresa's in Sugar Land. It is posted on our parish website here. The MP3 is about 17 minutes long, but it is a thorough treating of the whole affair.

Effectively, the homily treats the true subject of the Holy Father's lecture and notes how well the reaction from both some Muslims and secularists fit into it, all resulting from those who have tried to separate reason from faith (or faith from reason). I understand a hard copy will be available soon. The Catholic Church treats faith and reason as being perfectly complimentary, as Fr. Reynolds notes at the end and as I have quoted before on this blog, the opening line from Pope John Paul II's encyclical Fides et Ratio:

Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth -- in a word, to know himself -- so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.

We believe God is reasonable, that is, he can be known by way of His creation, His revelation, and also because we know that God always acts in accord with His very nature -- He is not capricious. The pope's point concerning Islam involves their belief in the utter transcendence of God -- that He cannot be known by reason, and any revelation on his part or assertion of rationality diminishes, in their view, His transcendence. This allows for God to act in a way that contradicts His own word -- it doesn't have to make sense to human beings because His ways cannot be known.