Is Tolerance Love?

“So you must realize that the LORD, your God, disciplines you even as a man disciplines his son.” [Deuteronomy 8:5]

“for whom the Lord loves, he disciplines; he scourges every son he acknowledges.” [Hebrews 12:6]

I just read in an article about Dion DiMucci, some of you remember, Dion and The Belmonts, “The Wanderer” & “Run Around Sue”, about him coming home to God in The Catholic Church.

I quote the article and Dion;

“The story of DiMucci’s rise and fall, conversion and return to the Catholic Church is rare in American popular culture in that on the way back he didn’t stop at the celebrity church of tolerance.

Some of these people worship at the altar of tolerance. They say that means you love people. But it’s not love. To me, the grown-ups tell you what’s wrong. Real grown-ups will disapprove of something their kid does but loves him totally,” DiMucci said.”

(end from article in “The Catholic World Report” March 2008)

People will say on hearing the Scripture; “for whom the Lord loves, he disciplines”, “I want the love but not the discipline”. However, they are mistaken the love is the discipline… they are one and the same… inseparable.

Discipline leads to “obedience”.

I hear all the time how people have a “problem with the Catholic Church”, they claim that their problem isn’t with God, because The Church gives them God’s Laws in easy and not-so-easy to digest sound bites. I hear this from those within The Church and those outside equally.

St. Paul would disagree, when he uses the term in his Letter to the Romans chapters 1 & 16, “obedience of faith”. He starts his Letter with this term and to make sure his children do not forget ends his teaching with it. [Romans 1:5 & 16:26]

Faith in God means that we believe He loves us and it means that we are disciplined.

By the way, thank you for reading my blog and web site and I would like to wish everyone a