Bulletin column from March 27, 2022

Dear Friends at Saint Frances Cabrini Parish and Saint Mary’s Immaculate Conception Parish:

Praised be Jesus Christ! In our post-Christian Western world, it is easy to lose perspective on the problems that constantly confront us. Most of us raised in our era of boundless faith in progress, science, medicine, data, and processes do not realize how deeply we have internalized the mindset that every problem is fixable. Most of us do indeed believe that all problems can be overcome with enough money, time, legislation, policies, education, and technology.   To borrow from old Christian terminology, we really do believe that we can create heaven on earth. “Salvation” to the modern mind is simply what will occur after enough collective human endeavors across the generations have finally eliminated whatever diminishes life.

As time passes, and the continual onslaught of new problems never ceases, a widespread attitude of frustration, fear, and even despair creeps across globe. This is what comes of the shaking of our faith in our own know-how, and the faltering of what we once thought was the inevitable march of “progress.”   Recent years have brought into clear focus the extreme limits of our faith in “progress,” provided that one is willing to pay attention and to allow one’s faith in human know-how to be shattered.

For all of our medical might, the world was slammed by a pandemic that (let’s be honest now) has defied all of our efforts to stop it. If it is at all diminished in parts of the world it is because it burned itself out like a wildfire that finally ran out of fuel to consume. After decades of government programs to eliminate hunger, poverty, and human misery it is clear that we have not done so. Perhaps more people are being fed, but the most recent twist in that storyline is that we are simply feeding the poor on junk food that is ruining their health. After years and years of alarm ringing about climate change, we would be wise to recognize that there is not much we can do to stop it. After decades of a post-World War II international bureaucratic network of alliances and globalization, thinking really big wars were now behind us, the last month has shown us that war is never, ever going to go away. It would seem our modern project to eradicate misery has failed. If one is willing to be honest.   Such honesty comes hard because it represents the toppling of an entire cultural quasi-religious set of dogmatic notions, with its roots going back several centuries into the so-called Enlightenment Era, by which we taught ourselves the myth that man is the amazing master of his own destiny.

One must exercise some caution with the above critique, it is true.   There is nothing at all wrong with striving for health, for peace, for a cleaner environment, and for the feeding of the multitudes. All of that is good, and all of it is charity. Certainly we do benefit from so many of the human efforts to improve ourselves and our world in ways that are noteworthy and praiseworthy. No one should be upset about the ability to drink cleaner water or breathe cleaner air, for example.

The crux of the modern problem is that we have de-coupled all of our attempts at improvement from the core tenets of revealed Christian faith, and when one does that it ushers in serious consequences. A Christian does the best he or she can to alleviate the sufferings and the problems of the world, but we do so knowing that the world is fallen. It is not going to be perfect until the Second Coming. Short of that, a believer should not have such hubris as to think we can eliminate social ills. They are not going to get eliminated. Jesus himself said so: “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me” (Matthew 26:11). If one knows that, then one works toward improvement in ways that do not cross the boundaries of the moral law and do not attack the human person. One does so without losing faith, hope, or charity because one always has perspective on the limits of our abilities.

A Christian knows that only in heaven are all problems solved, and that no one goes there without taking the outstretched hand of Jesus Christ. Only he can solve every ill, and he is not going to solve them now. We do take our stabs at betterment through the works of mercy and cultural conversion, but ultimately in this life we know that we will suffer inevitably.   Christ suffers with us and makes it a pathway to him, but he does not take it away. Our merely human attempts to eradicate suffering have unfortunately only produced different types of suffering. We do not have the power to take it away. That is what heaven is for.

As one reads more headlines about dire predictions for the climate, for pandemics (current or future), for poverty, for war, etc, one is confronted with the startling reality that even though these are all real problems, the current cultural discourse offers no solutions to them.   Yes, there is much talk of policies and technological fixes, but a cursory glance around the wreckage of the modern world leaves one with the sinking sensation that these are not real fixes.   Which means the modern cultural language offers no real hope for the future. Which explains everyone’s sour mood these days.

A Christian culture, on the other hand, seeks to carefully balance the need to strive in charity to confront these problems with the God-given talents that we have, along with the need to understand that we are still going to die, that there is heaven, that Christ is with us, and that when our attempts at fixing inevitably fail, God is still going to be there to help us. He will be there even if the seas rise and flood our coasts. Which means we do not panic and despair about our problems.

All of us who are believers need to hang on tight to our doctrines as we live now through the necessary collapse of the post-Christian, Enlightenment-era tower of Babel that we have in our cultural DNA. It is collapsing under the weight of the truth of Revelation that we cannot escape. As its collapse and failure becomes complete, Christianity will be there to help the world try again, reminding the world that God is still there to help us, and that he has been there all along.