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with a disembodied Jesus who demands nothing
of us with regard to others. Unless these people
find in the Church a spirituality which can offer
healing and liberation, and fill them with life and
peace, while at the same time summoning them
to fraternal communion and missionary fruitful-
ness, they will end up by being taken in by solu-
tions which neither make life truly human nor
give glory to God.
90.âGenuine forms of popular religiosity are
incarnate, since they are born of the incarna-
tion of Christian faith in popular culture. For
this reason they entail a personal relationship,
not with vague spiritual energies or powers, but
with God, with Christ, with Mary, with the saints.
These devotions are fleshy, they have a face.
They are capable of fostering relationships and
not just enabling escapism. In other parts of our
society, we see the growing attraction to various
forms of a âspirituality of well-beingâ divorced
from any community life, or to a âtheology of
prosperityâ detached from responsibility for our
brothers and sisters, or to depersonalized expe-
riences which are nothing more than a form of
self-centredness.
91.âOne important challenge is to show that
the solution will never be found in fleeing from
a personal and committed relationship with God
which at the same time commits us to serving
others. This happens frequently nowadays, as
believers seek to hide or keep apart from others,
