‘For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing’. (Luke 12:23)

by

 Damien F. Mackey

 

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“We have had enough of ­immorality and the mockery of ethics, goodness, faith and honesty …. There can be no renewal of our relationship with nature without a renewal of humanity itself,” the Pope writes.

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Introduction

 

A superficial reading of the Pope’s latest Encyclical Letter, Laudato Si’ (“Praise be to you” - On Care For Our Common Home), has led many to jump to the conclusion that this letter, addressed to all the people on earth, is entirely about the topical matter of climate change. But those who have read it more closely have appreciated that Laudato Si’ is only partially about that. Stephen P. White, for instance, a fellow in the Catholic studies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC., has observed that it is more about something else (http://www.vox.com/2015/6/24/8834413/pope-climate-change-encyclical):

 

Given the media coverage since its release, and the political implications of the pope throwing his moral weight behind one side in a high-stakes debate about climate policy, one could be forgiven for thinking that Pope Francis’s new encyclical is mostly about climate change and what we need to do to combat it.

Except it is and it isn’t. In fact, mostly it isn’t.

What makes this encyclical controversial is its reading of contested questions of science, economics, and politics. What makes it radical — in the sense of going to the root — is the pope’s reading of the profound human crisis that he sees underlying our modern world. Abuse of our environment isn’t the only problem facing humanity. In fact, Pope Francis sees the ecological crisis as a symptom of a deeper crisis — a human crisis.

These two problems are related and interdependent. And the solution is not simply to eliminate fossil fuels or rethink carbon credits. The pope is calling on the world to rediscover what it means to be human — and as a result, to reject the cult of economic growth and material accumulation.

Reading the encyclical, one quickly realizes that the “pope fights climate change” narrative is far from the whole story. In fact, that line leaves out the most fundamental themes of the encyclical: the limits of technology and the need for what he calls an “integral ecology,” which “transcend[s] the language of mathematics and biology, and take[s] us to the heart of what it is to be human.”

[End of quote]

 

And Miranda Devine, a columnist with The Daily Telegraph (Sydney), depicts the Pope somewhat as a cagey fisherman, luring the Greens with a bait, before giving it a sharp twist. (“Thought Pope Francis was a warmist? Think again” (http://blogs.news.com.au/dailyteleg). Firstly, the lure is presented:

 

CLIMATE alarmists are cock-a-whoop over Pope Francis’s much-anticipated call to action on global warming.

Yes, the leader of the world’s 1.8 billion Catholics, agrees with Kevin Rudd. The planet is in crisis, and climate change is one of the greatest moral challenges, the Pope has written in his first solo encyclical. Man is to blame and fossil fuels are bad.

It couldn’t be a more political document, designed to ­influence the upcoming UN ­climate summit in Paris later this year. Christiana Figueres, the UN’s climate change head, has called it a “clarion call to guide the world”.

Looks like everyone’s a papist now.

Alarmists are revelling in what they hope is the discomfort of the climate sceptic, or agnostic faithful, especially the Prime Minister.

“Hopefully this is Tony Abbott’s come to Jesus moment on climate change,” Greens leader Richard Di Natale said.

“If Tony Abbott won’t listen to the science, I only hope he will listen to the leader of his church and see the light on climate change,” said independent MP Andrew Wilkie.

The same people who have flayed Abbott for taking orders from Rome, supposedly, when it comes to women’s ovaries or same-sex marriage are now ­demanding he obey the Pope and start spraying windmills across the landscape.

 

But now for that sharp twist of the lure. Devine continues:

 

But, as a Catholic and an ­optimist, I suspect the Pope is engaging in Jesuitical trickery.

When you read the encyclical, you see that climate change is a minor player, despite the media hype.

In 44,000 words, the word “climate” appears just 18 times. This is illustrated in a word cloud by the Catholic News Service, in which the size of a word correlates with the frequency of its use: “climate” is not visible. “Human” is the largest word, followed by “God”.

That is the cleverness of this popular, enigmatic Pope. He has used climate change as the “bait” to lure the chattering classes, the godless and the Gaia worshippers.

He gives them a bit of climate sustenance, then whacks them with a full-frontal attack on moral relativism.

“We have had enough of ­immorality and the mockery of ethics, goodness, faith and honesty … There can be no renewal of our relationship with nature without a renewal of humanity itself,” the Pope writes.

He is down on abortion, contraception, embryonic research, sex changes and digital media, which gives “rise to a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and displays than with other people and with nature”.

He is all for the family, which he calls “the heart of the culture of life”.

So now that the Pope has the ears of the world, he’s relentlessly hammering us with unabashed Catholic teaching, sugar-coated with populist ­environmentalism.

Genius bait and switch.

[End of quote]

 

 

Restoring Human Dignity

 

“I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,

because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned,

and revealed them to little children.

(Luke 10:21)

 

The Pope recently chose an audience of ‘little children’, and not the ‘wise and learned’, to speak of war and to reveal a dark secret (http://rt.com/news/257545-pope-francis-war-arms/): “Many powerful people don't want peace because they live off war," the Pontiff said as he met with pupils from Rome’s primary schools in the Nervi Audience Hall.

 

 

Talking to children during the audience organized by the Peace Factory Foundation, he explained that every war has the arms industry behind it.

"This is serious. Some powerful people make their living with the production of arms and sell them to one country for them to use against another country”. ….  

The head of the Catholic Church labeled the arms trade “the industry of death, the greed that harms us all, the desire to have more money."

“The economic system orbits around money and not men, women,” he told 7,000 kids present at the audience.

Despite the fact that wars “lose lives, health, education,” they are being waged to defend money and make even more profit, the Pope said.

“The devil enters through greed and this is why they don't want peace," 78-year-old Francis said.

But why tell this to children?

And why did Our Lady of the Rosary, at Fatima (Portugal) on July 13, 1917, also speak of war and reveal a dark secret to three shepherd children (Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco), and not to adults?

 

 

After showing them the terrifying vision of Hell - {Lucia: “That vision only lasted for a moment, thanks to our good Heavenly Mother, Who at the first apparition [May 13] had promised to take us to Heaven. Without that, I think that we would have died of terror and fear”} - the Lady told them:

 

‘You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The War is going to end; but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the pontificate of Pius XI. When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father’.

 

Well, did not Jesus himself reply to those who had asked him: ‘Do you hear what these children are saying?’ ‘Yes’ … have you never read, ‘From the lips of children and infants you, Lord, have called forth your praise’?’ (Matthew 21:16)?

Now, Pope Francis is a teacher who has modelled himself on Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ was one who had, directly against the customs of his time, exalted little children. This is how G. K. Chesterton told of it back in 1925, in his chapter “The Strangest Story in the World” (The Everlasting Man:  http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/chesterton/everlasting/conten):

 

The exaltation of childhood is something which we do really understand; but it was by no means a thing that was then in that sense understood. If we wanted an example of the originality of the Gospel, we could hardly take a stronger or more startling one. Nearly two thousand years afterwards we happen to find ourselves in a mood that does really feel the mystical charm of the child; we express it in romances and regrets about childhood, in Peter Pan or The Child's Garden of Verses. And we can say of the words of Christ with so angry an anti-Christian as Swinburne:

 

'No sign that ever was given To faithful or faithless eyes

Showed ever beyond clouds riven

So clear a paradise.

Earth's creeds may be seventy times seven

And blood have defiled each creed

But if such be the kingdom of heaven

It must be heaven indeed.'

 

But that paradise was not clear until Christianity had gradually cleared it. The pagan world, as such, would not have understood any such thing as a serious suggestion that a child is higher or holier than a man. It would have seemed like the suggestion that a tadpole is higher or holier than a frog. To the merely rationalistic mind, it would sound like saying that bud must be more beautiful than a flower or that an unripe apple must be better than a ripe one. In other words, this modern feeling is an entirely mystical feeling. It is quite as mystical as the cult of virginity; in fact it is the cult Of virginity. But pagan antiquity had much more idea of the holiness of the virgin than of the holiness of the child. For various reasons we have come nowadays to venerate children; perhaps partly because we envy children for still doing what men used to do; such as play simple games and enjoy fairy-tales. Over and above this, however, there is a great deal of real and subtle psychology in our appreciation of childhood; but if we turn it into a modern discovery, we must once more admit that the historical Jesus of Nazareth had already discovered it two thousand years too soon. There was certainly nothing in the world around him to help him to the discovery. Here Christ was indeed human; but more human than a human being was then likely to be. Peter Pan does not belong to the world of Pan but the world of Peter.

[End of quote]

 

Francis, like the popes before him - and John Paul II particularly comes to mind here - is all about restoring ‘the dignity of the human person’, in the face of global exploitation and the indifference of the rich. This is a pontificate that has put the poor again front and centre, recalling the Gospel’s mantra of preferential option for the poor.

It is a re-telling of the parable of ‘Dives and Lazarus’.

Stephen White well sums it up when he writes:   

 

Pope Francis sees the ecological crisis as a symptom of a deeper crisis — a human crisis
As for who is responsible for all this, he places the burden at the feet of the developed world: “Many of those who possess more resources and economic or political power seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms, simply making efforts to reduce some of the negative impacts of climate change.”

Francis warns especially of the damage that our “culture of waste” does to the poor. He dismisses attempts at population control while leveling broadsides against financial markets, inequality, and the indifference of the rich. Moreover, he sees all these disturbing trends as interconnected. A casual attitude toward material goods leads to a casual attitude toward people. A willingness to exploit creation is deeply connected to a willingness to exploit human beings.

[End of quote]

 

Such is the harsh reality of the modern, industrialised world, whose protagonists do not seem to care about - or sometimes even notice - its uglification of what was formerly beautiful. “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” the Pope writes. On climate change: “A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system.” He goes on to warn: “If present trends continue, this century may well witness extraordinary climate change and an unprecedented destruction of ecosystems, with serious consequences for all of us.”

Some nine decades ago, G. K. Chesterton was uttering similar sentiments, when writing of (http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/chesterton/everlasting/content.htm):

 

… the wage-slaves of our morbid modern industrialism, which by its hideousness and in-humanity has really forced the economic issue to the front. ….

…. The human unity with which I deal here is not to be confounded with this modern industrial monotony and herding, which is rather a congestion than a communion. …. for that is characteristic of everything belonging to that ancient land of liberty that lies before and around the servile industrial town. Industrialism actually boasts that its products are all of one pattern; that men in Jamaica or Japan can break the same seal and drink the same bad whiskey, that a man at the North Pole and another at the South might recognise the same optimistic level on the same dubious tinned salmon. But wine, the gift of gods to men, can vary with every valley and every vineyard, can turn into a hundred wines without any wine once reminding us of whiskey; and cheeses can change from county to county without forgetting the difference between chalk and cheese.

 

[End of quote]

 

For those driven by the spirit of mammon, rather than by the Spirit of Charity (Luke 16:13), financial expediency, or ‘the bottom line’, is the only thing that matters – not truth, or beauty, or goodness, or kindness, or humanity. Chesterton, again, puts it better, telling of the alienating effect between neighbours (http://www.chesterton.org/lecture-5/):

 

Modern commerce, says Chesterton again, is about savagery of the rich, the hunger of the satisfied, and the sudden madness of the mills of the world. You cannot serve God and Mammon because — obviously — loving Mammon keeps you from loving God, thus breaking the first Great Commandment of Christ, but you neither can you love your neighbor if you are a slave of that blind and bogus god of money and materialism. Your neighbor becomes your competitor in that system, and your enemy.

[End of quote]

 

Obviously, this is not a state of affairs that a kindly pope such as Francis can support. And so: “There can be no ecology,” he writes, “without an adequate anthropology.” Chesterton, writing in less scientific and more paradoxical terms, contrasted “the flat creatures living only on a plane” with the multi-dimensional ideal of the Gospels pertaining to ‘the lilies of the field’ (http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/chesterton/everlasting/content.htm):

 

There is perhaps nothing so perfect in all language or literature as the use of these three degrees in the parable of the lilies of the field; in which [Jesus] seems first to take one small flower in his hand and note its simplicity and even its impotence; then suddenly expands it in flamboyant colors into all the palaces and pavilions full of a great name in national legend and national glory; and then, by yet a third overturn, shrivels it to nothing once more with a gesture as if flinging it away ' . . . and if God so clothes the grass that today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven-how much more. . . .' It is like the building of a good Babel tower by white magic in a moment and in the movement of a hand; a tower heaved suddenly up to heaven on the top of which can be seen afar off, higher than we had fancied possible, the figure of man; lifted by three infinities above all other things, on a starry ladder of light logic and swift imagination. Merely in a literary sense it would be more of a masterpiece than most of the masterpieces in the libraries; yet it seems to have been uttered almost at random while a man might pull a flower. But merely in a literary sense also, this use of the comparative in several degrees has about it a quality which seems to me to hint of much higher things than the modern suggestion of the simple teaching of pastoral or communal ethics. There is nothing that really indicates a subtle and in the true sense a superior mind so much as this power of comparing a lower thing with a higher and yet that higher with a higher still; of thinking on three planes at once. There is nothing that wants the rarest sort of wisdom so much as to see, let us say, that the citizen is higher than the slave and yet that the soul is infinitely higher than the citizen or the city. It is not by any means a faculty that commonly belongs to these simplifiers of the Gospel; those who insist on what they call a simple morality and others call a sentimental morality. It is not at all covered by those who are content to tell everybody to remain at peace. On the contrary, there is a very striking example of it in the apparent inconsistency between Christ's sayings about peace and about a sword. It is precisely this power which perceives that while a good peace is better than a good war, even a good war is better than a bad peace. These far-flung comparisons are nowhere so common as in the Gospels; and to me they suggest something very vast. So a thing solitary and solid, with the added dimension of depth or height, might tower over the flat creatures living only on a plane.

[End of quote]

 

We are still in the Gospel realm of Luke 12 that titles this article.

Human industry cannot replicate the beauty of God’s nature (v. 27): ‘Consider how the wild flowers [or ‘lilies of the field’] grow. They do not labour or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of these’. Sadly, were he to appear today, the fabulously wise and wealthy Solomon, instead of being clothed, perhaps, like his queen, “in gold of Ophir” (Psalm 45:9) and the like, would probably be wearing labels titled

and

 

 

For it seems that even the more artistic or beautiful aspects of life (e.g. fashion, clothing, architecture) have become, so to speak, ‘industrialised’.

Earlier in Luke 12, in vv. 13-21, Jesus gave a disturbing parable most relevant to all of this:

 

The Parable of the Rich Fool

 

Someone in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.’

Jesus replied, ‘Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?’ Then he said to them, ‘Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.’

And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’

Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’

But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’

This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”

 

Here the Gospel labels the Mammonite a ‘fool’.  

Now just as Jesus was, in this parable, urging a simpler life, one free from excess worry and anxiety, so today pope Francis seems to be calling for a return to simplicity. As White puts it: “We need to take up an ancient lesson, found in different religious traditions and also in the Bible. It is the conviction that “less is more”.”

And Chesterton was of the same mind-set, here (The Everlasting Man) echoing Luke 12:

 

But there is a deeper fallacy besides this obvious fact; that men need not live for food merely because they cannot live without food. The truth is that the thing most present to the mind of man is not the economic machinery necessary to his existence; but rather that existence itself; the world which he sees when he wakes every morning and the nature of his general position in it. There is something that is nearer to him than livelihood, and that is life. For once that he remembers exactly what work produces his wages and exactly what wages produce his meals, he reflects ten times that it is a fine day or it is a queer world, or wonders whether life is worth living, or wonders whether marriage is a failure, or is pleased and puzzled with his own children, or remembers his own youth, or in any such fashion vaguely reviews the mysterious lot of man. This is true of the majority even of the wage-slaves of our morbid modern industrialism, which by its hideousness and in-humanity has really forced the economic issue to the front. It is immeasurably more true of the multitude of peasants or hunters or fishers who make up the real mass of mankind.

[End of quote]

 

Quality Over Quantity

 

What appeals to me personally about the pope’s Laudato Si’ encyclical letter is the resonance I find in parts of it with my favourite book on the philosophy of science, Dr. Gavin Ardley’s Aquinas and Kant: The Foundations of the Modern Sciences (1950). The book can be read at:

http://brightmorningstar.blog.com/2008/10/21/gavin-ardleys-book-aquinas-and-kant/

Whereas the ancient sciences (scientiae) involved a study of actual reality, the more abstract modern sciences (e.g. theoretical physics), involve, as Immanuel Kant had rightly discerned, an active imposition of a priori concepts upon reality. In other words, these ‘sciences’ are largely artificial (or ‘categorial’) - their purpose being generally utilitarian.

Ardley tells of it (Ch. VI: Immanuel Kant):

 

Kant’s great contribution was to point out the revolution in natural science effected by Galileo and Bacon and their successors. This stands in principle even though all the rest of his philosophy wither away. Prior to Galileo people had been concerned with reading laws in Nature. After Galileo they read laws into Nature. His clear recognition of this fact makes Kant the fundamental philosopher of the modern world. It is the greatest contribution to the philosophia perennis since St. Thomas. But this has to be dug patiently out of Kant. Kant himself so overlaid and obscured his discovery that is has ever since gone well nigh unrecognised.

We may, in fact we must, refrain from following Kant in his doctrine of metaphysics. The modelling of metaphysics on physics was his great experiment. The experiment is manifestly a failure, in pursuit of what he mistakenly believed to be the best interests of metaphysics.

But, putting the metaphysical experiment aside, the principle on which it was founded abides, the principle of our categorial activity. Later, in Ch. XVIII, we will see in more detail how this principle is essential to the modern development of the philosophia perennis.

Kant was truly the philosopher of the modern world when we look judiciously at his work. As a motto for the Kritik Kant actually quotes a passage from Francis Bacon in which is laid down the programme for the pursuit of human utility and power. [Footnote: The passage is quoted again in this work on [Ardley’s] p. 47.] As we saw in Ch. IV, it was Bacon above all who gave articulate expression to the spirit behind the new science. Now we see that it was Kant who, for the first time, divined the nature of the new science. If Bacon was the politician of the new régime, Kant was its philosopher although a vastly over-ambitious one.

 

It appears to be this very sort of Baconian “régime” that pope Francis is currently challenging, at least, according to Stephen White’s estimation:  

 

While much has been said about the pope’s embrace of the scientific evidence of climate change and the dangers it poses, the irony is that he addresses this crisis in a way that calls into question some of the oldest and most basic assumptions of the scientific paradigm.

Francis Bacon and René Descartes — two fathers of modern science in particular — would have shuddered at this encyclical. Bacon was a man of many talents — jurist, philosopher, essayist, lord chancellor of England — but he’s mostly remembered today as the father of the scientific method. He is also remembered for suggesting that nature ought to be “bound into service, hounded in her wanderings and put on the rack and tortured for her secrets.” Descartes, for his part, hoped that the new science he and men like Bacon were developing would make us, in his words, “masters and possessors of nature.”

At the very outset of the encyclical, before any mention of climate change or global warming, Pope Francis issues a challenge to the Baconian and Cartesian view, which sees the world as so much raw material to be used as we please. Neither Descartes nor Bacon is mentioned by name, but the reference is unmistakable. Pope Francis insists that humanity’s “irresponsible use and abuse” of creation has come about because we “have come to see ourselves as [the Earth’s] lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will.”

 

Not truth, but power lust, will be the prime motivation of these, the Earth’s “lords and masters”, or, as Ardley has put it, “not to know the world but to control it”:

 

What was needed was for someone to point out clearly the ‘otherness’ of post-Galilean physical science, i.e. the fact that it is, in a sense, cut off from the rest of the world, and is the creation of man himself. The new science has no metaphysical foundations and no metaphysical implications. Kant had the clue to this ‘otherness’ in the categorial theory, but he took the rest of the world with him in the course of the revolution and hence only succeeded in the end in missing the point.

Most people since then, rightly sceptical about Kant’s wholesale revolution, have been quite hostile to the Kantian system in general. Others, perhaps without realising it, have rewritten the revolution in their own terms, and thus have perpetuated Kant’s principal errors (as e.g. Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus).

A thorough sifting out of Kant has long been required in order to separate the gold from the dross.

…. Kant’s mistake was to think that the world had to be transformed to know it. The truth is that the world may be transformed, if we so dictate, and then it is not to know the world but to control it. ….

[End of quote]

 

From what follows, I wonder if the pope - or at least White in his comments - may have read Ardley’s book. Dr. Ardley had (on p. 5) pointed out that there are two ways of going about the process of analyzing or dissecting something, depending on one’s purpose. And he well illustrated his point by comparing the practices of the anatomist and the butcher. When an anatomist dissects an animal, he traces out the real structure of the animal; he lays bare the veins, the nerves, the muscles, the organs, and so on. “He reveals the actual structure which is there before him waiting to be made manifest”. The butcher, on the other hand, is not concerned about the natural structure of the animal as he chops it up; he wants to cut up the carcass into joints suitable for domestic purposes. In his activities the butcher ruthlessly cleaves across the real structure laid bare so patiently by the anatomist. “The anatomist finds his structure, the butcher makes his”.

Thus White: “Put another way, Pope Francis insists that the material world isn’t just mere stuff to be dissected, studied, manipulated, and then packaged off to be sold into service of human wants and needs”. And again: “The utilitarian mindset that treats creation as so much “raw material to be hammered into useful shape” inevitably leads us to see human beings through the same distorted lens”.

White continues:

 

The pope repeatedly warns against the presumption that technological advances, in themselves, constitute real human progress. In a typical passage, he writes, “There is a growing awareness that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere.” The pope writes critically of “irrational confidence in progress and human abilities.” He writes hopefully of a time when “we can finally leave behind the modern myth of unlimited material progress.”

 

Nevertheless:

 

This isn’t to say that Pope Francis is anti-technology or even, as some have suggested, anti-modern, but he is deeply critical of both our technological mindset and modernity’s utilitarian propensities. While he acknowledges with gratitude the benefits humanity has derived from modern technology, which has “remedied countless evils which used to harm and limit human beings,” he also calls into question — forcefully — the idea that utility is the proper measure of our interaction with creation.

[End of quote]

 

There may be a better way of doing things in the pursuit of what pope Francis calls an “integral ecology [which] transcend[s] the language of mathematics and biology, and take[s] us to the heart of what it is to be human”. A too rigid mathematics can make for a cruel master.

Stephen White well sums up the Pope’s outlook:

 

An integral, human ecology

 “Everything is connected” is a constant refrain in this encyclical, and it serves to underscore the way Pope Francis understands the vocation — the calling — of the whole human race. We were made by God and for God. His gift of creation is also part of that vocation and comes with responsibility for its care and development. We’re part of creation, but also is custodians. Creation’s greatest beauty is in its ability to reflect the glory of its maker.

Christians believe in a God who entered into his own creation in order to redeem it Most religions understand that reality is not limited to physical existence; there are also spiritual realities. But Christians, and Catholics in particular, have always insisted that while the spiritual and physical are distinct, they aren’t so easily separated. Even material reality is more than just material.

Many Christians, and certainly Catholics, take a sacramental view of reality: a view in which mere things are never just mere things. All that exists is shot through with meaning, since it bears the fingerprints of the one who made it. Pope Francis quotes Scripture to this effect: “Through the greatness and the beauty of creatures one comes to know by analogy their maker” (Wisdom 13:5).

Moreover, Christians believe in a God who took on human flesh — entered into his own creation — in order to redeem it. “For Christians,” Pope Francis writes, “all the creatures of the material universe find their true meaning in the incarnate Word, for the Son of God has incorporated in his person part of the material world, planting in it a seed of definitive transformation.”

This sacramental view of the world changes the way Catholics estimate the worth and value of things, which have their own intrinsic worth and meaning apart from any utility they might hold for us. Because creation is the gift of a loving God, entrusted to us all for its care and maintenance, we are not free to simply do with it as we please. For Pope Francis, the world is most definitely not what we make of it; it’s much more.

 

 

Homer's Iliad Explained

This book makes real sense of The Iliad

 

From the flyleaf of Homer’s Secret Iliad, by Florence and Kenneth Wood, which was deservingly awarded Book of the Year when first released in 1999.

During the 1930s the young daughter of a Kansas farmer spent night after night watching the stars and planets wheel across the vast prairie sky. Later, as a teacher in England , she combined her devotion to astronomy with a passion for Homer. This led her to a discovery which would lie buried until her daughter, Florence Wood, inherited her papers in 1991.

Her years of study, it became clear, had revealed Homer’s great epic to be also the world’s oldest book of astronomy.

[AMAIC comment: The dating of the Iliad, and whether it really belonged to the presumed time of Homer, is actually a challenging issue of its own; one with which the AMAIC hopes to come to grips elsewhere].

The changing configuration of the stars, so important for navigation and the measurement of time, had a fascination for the ancient world that it has lost today. In the Iliad, battles between Greeks and Trojans mirror the movements of stars and constellations as they appear to fight for ascendancy in the sky. The timescale of Homeric astronomy is breathtaking; elements can be dated to the ninth millennium BC [sic], long before the recorded astronomy of Mesopotamia and Egypt . Geography is also represented, since the shapes of constellations were used as ‘skymaps’ to direct ancient travellers throughout Greece and Asia Minor .

 

 

Homer was probably the last and most accomplished of a long line of bards who wove such knowledge into the epics they memorized and declaimed. After his lifetime the Greek alphabet preserved his works in writing, and the study of the skies changed too, moving away from pure observation to a science that applied mathematics and geometry. The astronomical content of the Iliad was gradually forgotten.

This unique and fascinating book unlocks its hidden meaning once again. It documents one of the most important discoveries this century about the ancient Greek world.

The Sheer Silliness of Pere Teilhard de Chardin

(This article was originally written in February, 1996)

Although the French Jesuit, Fr. Teilhard de Chardin, died in 1955, his influence is obviously still being felt today. This is evidenced by the fact that two major educational programs in Sydney, Australia, in recent years - that of the Discalced Carmelites and the Northern Deanery's "Religious Education II: Theory and Practice for Parents and Teachers" in 1994 - have both included talks on Fr. Teilhard de Chardin.

The questions to be posed here are: "Why does de Chardin still exert an influence on the modern mind?" And: "What sort of an influence is it?"

De Chardin's Broad Reach

The writings of Pere Teilhard de Chardin have embraced a wide range of disciplines. Thus today we can read books that try to analyse the Jesuit's so-called scientific views; or his anthropological and sociological beliefs; or his metaphysico-philosophical arguments; or even his theosophical, religious and mystical doctrines.
In the minds of some, Fr. de Chardin is actually considered to be a Saint; equal (if not greater) in the loftiness of his thought to St. Thomas Aquinas. Others regard him as a mystic, for whom only the exalted medium of poetry was sufficient for him to express his seraphic aspirations.
For others, however, he is nothing but a scientific fraud; one who had willingly participated in the Piltdown Man hoax. Or an incompetent in philosophy, his reasoning contradicting the most basic laws of human thinking.
More damning still is the following view of him that was expressed by a writer in "TRIUMPH" magazine, after his having read through de Chardin's paper, "The Human Sense":
As the reader goes through this longish essay, he will be struck by Teilhard's boorishness. Where he is not outrageous, he is insufferably silly. Whether he assumes the garb of the sociologist, the theologian or the historian of ideas, the result is always the same: the garb hangs in bulky and comic surplus around the shoulders of a midget.
In only one pose is Teilhard really, in a perverse way, convincing: that of the anti-Christian prophet. He says that mankind, possessed by the utopian-secularist vision that he lauds as the "human sense", will ever more despise the Christ of papal teaching. We agree. And so it has transpired. The only difference lies in the side that one chooses". ["The Teilhard Papers II", Dec. 1971, 28. Emphasis added].
Strong words from that writer. Are they true or not? Was de Chardin really a bit of an ignoramus, whose only genuine - though dubious - claim to 'fame' was as an "anti-Christian prophet"? A Hitler-type in Jesuit's garb, if you like, in the sense that he was able to get away with the most absurd anthropological and sociological views (compare Hitler's Mein Kampf), be-cause he bore a message that for some mysterious reason had stirred the imaginations of his contemporaries.
In regard to this comparison with Hitler, recent writings have shown rather plausibly that de Chardin shared the same Weltanschauung as the Nazis; both having common roots in the occult Theosophical Society of the mid-nineteenth century. Most particularly, their views have been traced back to the school of Madame Blavatsky and her colleagues.
In other words, de Chardin's 'metaphysics' owes more to theosophy than it does to philosophy.
Now, one extremely nasty feature that both de Chardin and the Nazis apparently inherited from this Theosophical Society was its xenophobia: a contempt for what were perceived to be the 'inferior' races (in de Chardin's case, the Chinese and the Negroid peoples).
Most relevant to the request of the Secular Carmelites, however (more than de Chardin's purported racist views, or his 'philosophical' quirks) are his opinions pertaining to Catholic Faith.

What Was de Chardin's Aim?

We do not need to rack our brains too hard to try to discern what de Chardin was bent upon achieving, because he himself has stated in quite unequivocal terms what that was. In 1936 he explained that his dominant interest was to create a "new religion", and to spread it:
What increasingly dominates my interest is the effort to establish within myself and to diffuse around me a new religion in which the personal God is no longer the great neolithic landowner of times gone by, but the soul of the world, as the cultural and religious stage we have reached now demands. [26th January, 1936; quoted in "Letters to L. Zanta", 114. Emphasis added].
The advent of this "new religion" - a movement that de Chardin believed would be "much more profound" even than the Protestant Reformation - would be achieved only by a complete re-interpretation of Catholic dogma. Thus he wrote only two years before he died:
I have come to the conclusion that, in order to pay for a drastic valorization and amortization of the substance of things, a whole series of re-shaping of certain representations or attitudes, which seem to us definitely fixed by Catholic dogma, has become necessary, if we sincerely want to Christify evolution. Seen thus, and because of an ineluctable necessity, one could say that a hitherto unknown form of religion is gradually germinating in the heart of modern man in the furrow opened up by the idea of evolution. ["Stuff of the Universe", 1953. Emphasis added].
Now, not by the wildest stretch of the imagination can Catholicism be properly described by de Chardin's phrase: "... a hitherto unknown form of religion". So - despite what the Jesuit himself tried to maintain - it could not have been Catholicism that he saw as "gradually germinating in the heart of modern man in the furrow opened up by the idea of evolution", but rather de Chardin's "new religion".
How then, we ask, can any Catholic (e.g. a Fr. Ross Collings; or the lecturers employed by the Northern Deanery) claim to be able to use Teilhard de Chardin's writings for the enrichment of Catholic Faith? De Chardin has, by his very own words, admitted to having directed all of his writings and his energies towards establishing a "hitherto unknown form of religion".
The answer is that those who enthusiastically teach de Chardin's doctrines have no interest at all in enhancing Catholic Faith.
Thus Christopher Bounds, the Religious Education Co-ordinator of Mary MacKillop College, who lectured in 1994 to Catholic Parents and Teachers of the Northern Deanery, told those assembled: "If your kids become genuine Buddhists you've succeeded". (The writer was present at the time, with a witness).
In regard to this false presumption that all religions - even the non-Christian ones - are equal with Catholicism, have not certain perceptive commentators on De Chardin observed that he was really the first to make eastern (e.g. Buddhist) mysticism attractive to the scientific western mind?
"Today", observed John Paul II, "we are seeing a certain diffusion of Buddhism in the West". [Crossing the Threshold of Hope p.85]. Was John Paul II pleased about this tendency? Not on your life! "... the Buddhist tradition and the methods deriving from it", he goes on to warn, "have an almost exclusively negative soteriology. The "enlightenment" experienced by Buddha comes down to the conviction that the world is bad, that it is the source of evil and of suffering for man". (Ibid.).
Not that the followers of de Chardin are about to be swayed by the views of the Holy Father, for which they generally show contempt. Mr. Bounds, for instance, seemed determined in class to undermine the authority of Pope John Paul II in whatever way he could; even to the extent of making such ridiculous statements as "John Paul II is not a teacher", because presumably "... he's never been in a classroom situation".
Bounds also stated quite categorically that he was not going to teach his students about "Humanae Vitae", because it was beyond them. Nor would the Catechism of the Catholic Church be used in the classrooms.
Soon we shall discover what de Chardin himself thought about papal encyclicals.

De Chardin's Synthesising Idea

If one were to look for a common, synthesising idea throughout de Chardin's writings it would undoubtedly be that of "evolution". For him, evolution was really everything, godlike. "Evolution", he wrote on one occasion, "is not just hypotheses or theories: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy if they are thinkable and true ...".
We really need to pause here to take in that last statement. Having let de Chardin's words sink in, we can only exclaim: What a statement of breathtaking arrogance! Everything, he claims, every idea, every system of thought, "must bow" to the theory of evolution.
Why?
Because de Chardin says so.
And he means literally everything, even Christ. Yes even Christ - according to de Chardin's jaundiced view - is dependent on the biological (and, may we add, scientifically quite unproven) process of evolution. Thus Teilhard wrote in "Le Christique" (1955), just before he died: "Christ saves, but must we not hasten to add, Christ too is saved by evolution". The Divine Person, Jesus Christ, dependent upon evolution for salvation. Not likely! But for de Chardin, who envisaged God, not as One who pre-existed, and who was really distinct from, His creation (as most Christians believe), but as nothing other than "the soul of the world", then the idea of an evolving "God" was an inevitable conclusion.

De Chardin's Contempt for Papal Thinking

Some decades before De Chardin had begun to write his books and articles, Pope St. Pius X had already - in his now celebrated encyclical, "Pascendi" (1907) - unravelled the complex thought processes of the typical Modernist, showing these to be quite subjectively based. Today, the expression "personal faith experience" is commonly used to describe this particular 'religious' attitude.
What it boils down to is that the individual perceives himself or herself, rather than an external authority (Church), to be the final judge of his or her own private "religious experiences".
Now it is this subjective approach that precisely motivated de Chardin, just as today it motivates those who follow and/or promote his views in the face of numerous warnings, bannings and even condemnations against these by the legitimate Church authorities.
Religious subjectivism is likewise the motivation for the numerous followers of unapproved apparitions. What all of these religious subjectivists have in common is that they themselves want the power to determine their own 'spiritual' path, to map out their own course for 'salvation', according to their own timetable, without any 'obstruction' or 'interference' from the Church.
But the Holy Spirit never ceases to guide the Church and to warn the faithful against the dangers to salvation posed by such attitudes.
Through the writings and warnings of Pope St. Pius X, Modernism was exposed and unmasked at its very inception. For decades this pernicious system, rightly called the "synthesis of all heresies", was forced to go underground. However, with the popularisation of the theory of Evolution the Mod-ernists seemed to gain a second wind. Pope Pius XII rose to tackle this new situation, insofar as it impinged upon Faith. Thus, in 1950, the Holy Father wrote in his encyclical "Humani Generis" words that - as we are going to find - are perfectly applicable to the thinking of de Chardin:
Some will contend that the theory of evolution as it is called - a theory that has not yet been proved beyond contradiction even in the sphere of natural science - applies to the origin of all things whatsoever .... These false evolutionary notions, with their denial of all that is absolute or fixed or abiding in human experience (tradition) have paved the way for a new philosophy of error. [Emphasis added].
Although Pope Pius XII did not specifically mention de Chardin here, the fact that the Holy Father's description could be applied without any forcing to the Jesuit's thinking (e.g. his implication that even God was subject to the evolutionary process) was not lost on de Chardin's colleague, an ex-priest (Dominican) who had rejected Catholicism. Thus the former Dominican, fully aware that "Humani Generis" was condemning the very views that de Chardin held, and himself seeing no hope for fermenting these new ideas within so strong a Church, invited de Chardin by letter to join him in battle to change the Church from the outside.
But de Chardin's schemes were more sophisticated than that.
He was hell bent on changing the Catholic Church "from within". He anticipated, even boasted about, an imminent change within the Catholic Church "much more profound" than the Protestant Reformation (which had eventually gone outside the Church).
Here is de Chardin's reply to his ex-priest friend:
Basically I consider - as you do - that the Church reaches a period of mutation or necessary reformation. To be more precise: I consider that the reformation in question (and much more profound a one than that of the sixteenth century) is no longer a simple matter of institutions and ethics, but of faith. Having stated my views I still cannot see any better means of bringing about what I anticipate than to work towards this re-form from within.
In the course of the last fifty years I have watched the revitalization of Catholic thought and life taking place around me - in spite of the encyclicals - too closely not to have un-bounded confidence in the ability of the old Roman stem to re-vivify itself. Let us then each work in our separate sphere: all upward movements converge.

From the above, it is quite obvious that De Chardin knew exactly what he was doing. He wanted to re-cast the entire Catholic system according to his evolutionary views. This, as he thought, would enable him to do away with dogma and papal teaching. The whole thing was conspiratorial. He would proceed with his new religion "... in spite of the encyclicals".
It therefore comes as no surprise to find that the lecturer from the de Chardin influenced Northern Deanery, Chris Bounds, should have told his class regarding the then current encyclical, "Veritatis Splendor", that (said with approval): "Some of my colleagues call the Pope's encyclical 'Supercilious Veritatis'".

In the light of the above, it would be folly to construe de Chardin's writings as do some, as assuming mere "poetic licence". His were the systematic words and actions of a man who knew exactly what he was about. "To lay the axe at the root itself, that is Faith", is how Pope St. Pius X had (more than forty years earlier) described the intentions of the Modernists.
And judging by that famous post-conciliar remark of Pope Paul VI, that the "smoke of Satan" had begun to seep into the Church through cracks and crevices, the efforts by de Chardin and his colleagues to change the Church from within were by the 1970's having a profound effect.

De Chardin TodayWhat is the great appeal of de Chardin today, now in the Third Millennium?
It is not difficult to ascertain why de Chardin's writings still have a strong appeal today. They offer to human pride the same temptations that were offered to our First Parents in the Garden: to be like God; to be able to determine the course of one's own salvation; to disobey; to wield power.
Messiah-like, De Chardin promises those who will follow him an easy road to salvation. Having done away with, as he believed, the outdated notions of Adam and Eve (for de Chardin was a polygenist), and of Original Sin - even of God as we know Him - and having presumably replaced all of this with a transcendent evolutionary process by means of which all (God "the Soul of the World", ourselves) must inevitably reach perfection (or what de Chardin called "Omega Point") the Jesuit was then able to conclude that there was no need for a Redeeming Christ, because there was no sin. Hence there was no longer any necessity for one to follow the steep and painful way to salvation as marked out by the Gospels. De Chardin was in fact convinced that the world of his time had outgrown its use for the Gospels, with their old-fashioned doctrine of sin and the need for personal salvation. The Gospels, the "Imitation of Christ", he boldly declared in "The Human Sense", needed to be replaced:
A collective optimism, realistic and courageous, must defi-nitely replace the pessimism and individualism, whose over-grown notions of sin and personal salvation have gradually burdened and perverted the Christian spirit. Let us then ac-knowledge the situation honestly: not only the "Imitation of Christ" but also the Gospel itself needs to undergo this correction, and the whole world will make them undergo it.
Despite de Chardin's frenetic attempts to play at once the roles of priest, prophet, evangelist and 'Messiah', and to re-interpret the entire history and pattern of salvation that has been revealed to us through the Scriptures and Tradition, the road to Heaven remains the same as it has always been: the narrow, bloodstained way of the Cross, trodden first by our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, on our behalf. It is a road of suffering and self denial (Matthew 16:24); a narrow door (John 10:7). Christ, and He alone, is the Way to salvation, the Way to the Father, and there is no other (John 14:6). Anyone who tries to force another way is "a thief and a robber" (John 10:1). In so many places does the New Testament recall to mind for us the fact that one needs to work hard at one's salvation. It is not easily obtained, not even by the good. St. Peter, quoting from the Book of Proverbs, made this quite clear when he said that: "If the righteous man is scarcely saved, where will the impious and sinner appear?" (I Peter 4:18).
So despite de Chardin and similar prophets of an anti-Christ mentality, the way of the Cross still remains the only way of salvation. And on this feast-day of Our Lady of Lourdes it is appropriate to recall the words that the Blessed Virgin spoke to St. Bernadette as given at the top of this article: "I do not promise to make you happy in this world, but in the next."

No Cross, no Crown!

French Protest Against Same-Sex Marriage



Paris: Thousands join protest march against same-sex marriage

 

Paris - The anti-same-sex marriage demonstration

The protests came in response to appeals from the Church and from the right wing to speak out against François Hollande's plan to legalise same-sex marriage and adoption by gay couples

alberto mattioliin paris

“Oui, oui, oui au mariage homme-femme!” “Un père, une mère, c’est élémentaire!” and "marriagophile, not homophobe" were just some of the slogans used in the protests. Between 13 and 19 today, Paris yet again becomes the world’s most beautiful stage. “La manif pour tous”, or “the demo for all” opposes the legalisation of same-sex unions and thus “marriage for all”. François Hollande’s bill will go to France’s National Assembly on the 29^th. But today centre stage was occupied by those who believe marriage should only be between a man and a woman. And this side of France took to the streets in great style. It’s too soon to give exact numbers but less biased figures indicate a minimum of 150 thousand participants and a maximum of 500 thousand: in any case numbers are higher than the 60 thousand (according to police) or 150 thousand (according to the demonstration’s organisers) people that marched through Paris on 16 December to defend “égalité ” before the city’s mayor.

Catholic France in particular showed real muscle, though Protestants, Jews and Muslims also oppose the legislation. Colourful characters such as the comedian Frigide Barjot (obviously an artist’s name) gave interviews galore; especially Barjot, since she is a self-proclaimed “spokesman for Jesus” and against same-sex marriage. Catholic associationism has also been hugely active. No bishops have joined the march but the Bishop of Paris, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois turned up at one of the meeting points to “greet” demonstrators.

Even the demonstration is triune. Given participant numbers, three marches have been organised which will all converge into one mega gathering in Champ de Mars Park at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Organisers are being very careful not to show hostility to gay demonstrators. Indeed, Civitas, a far-right Catholic group that sees homosexuality as a sin, staged a along another route. Demonstrators have been discouraged from displaying any form of political slogan.

Right-wing parties are being represented but as usual have split. Centre-right UMP members Jean-François Copé and former Prime Minister François Fillon, two of Sarkozy’s main rivals for the French Presidency, both oppose the bill. Copé who is more right-wing took to the streets to protest whereas the more moderate Fillon stayed at home. So did Front National, a staunch opponent of same-sex marriage. Marine Le Pen was nowhere to be seen. Her niece Marion, a party member is at the forefront of the protest. This is a massive event that is expected to influence public opinion. According to the latest polls, 56% are favour of same-sex marriage but this drops to 45% when it comes to adoption by same-sex couples. 46% are in favour of assisted procreation. The government on the other hand has said it is going ahead with the plans regardless. Lord Chancellor, Chriatiane Taubira, has informed that the content of the bill will remain as it is and that a referendum is out of the question.

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Taken from: http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/world-news/detail/articolo/nozze-gay-gay-marriage-matrimonio-gay-adozioni-adoptions-adopciones-21324/

Letter on the urgent task of educating young people: Pope Benedict XVI



By Pope Benedict XVI



LETTER OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI

TO THE FAITHFUL OF THE DIOCESE AND CITY OF ROME

ON THE URGENT TASK OF EDUCATING YOUNG PEOPLE



Dear Faithful of Rome,

I thought of addressing this Letter to you in order to speak to you about a problem of which you yourselves are aware and to which the various members of our Church are applying themselves: the problem of education. We all have at heart the good of the people we love, especially our children, adolescents and young people. Indeed, we know that it is on them that the future of our City depends. Therefore, it is impossible not to be concerned about the formation of the new generations, about their ability to give their lives a direction and to discern good from evil, and about their health, not only physical but also moral.

Educating, however, has never been an easy task and today seems to be becoming ever more difficult. Parents, teachers, priests and everyone who has direct educational responsibilities are well aware of this. Hence, there is talk of a great "educational emergency", confirmed by the failures we encounter all too often in our efforts to form sound people who can cooperate with others and give their own lives meaning. Thus, it is natural to think of laying the blame on the new generations, as though children born today were different from those born in the past. There is also talk of a "generation gap" which certainly exists and is making itself felt, but is the effect rather than the cause of the failure to transmit certainties and values.

Must we therefore blame today's adults for no longer being able to educate? There is certainly a strong temptation among both parents and teachers as well as educators in general to give up, since they run the risk of not even understanding what their role or rather the mission entrusted to them is.

In fact, it is not only the personal responsibilities of adults or young people, which nonetheless exist and must not be concealed, that are called into question but also a widespread atmosphere, a mindset and form of culture which induce one to have doubt about the value of the human person, about the very meaning of truth and good, and ultimately about the goodness of life. It then becomes difficult to pass on from one generation to the next something that is valid and certain, rules of conduct, credible objectives around which to build life itself.

Dear brothers and sisters of Rome, at this point I would like to say some very simple words to you: Do not be afraid! In fact, none of these difficulties is insurmountable. They are, as it were, the other side of the coin of that great and precious gift which is our freedom, with the responsibility that rightly goes with it. As opposed to what happens in the technical or financial fields, where today's advances can be added to those of the past, no similar accumulation is possible in the area of people's formation and moral growth, because the person's freedom is ever new. As a result, each person and each generation must make his own decision anew, alone. Not even the greatest values of the past can be simply inherited; they must be claimed by us and renewed through an often anguishing personal option.

When the foundations are shaken, however, and essential certainties are lacking, the impelling need for those values once again makes itself felt: thus today, the request for an education which is truly such is in fact increasing. Parents, anxious and often anguished about the future of their children, are asking for it; a great many teachers going through the sorrowful experience of their schools' deterioration are asking for it; society overall, seeing doubts cast on the very foundations of coexistence, is asking for it; children and young people themselves who do not want to be left to face life's challenges on their own are also asking for it in their inmost being. Those who believe in Jesus Christ, moreover, have a further and stronger reason for not being afraid: they know in fact that God does not abandon us, that his love reaches us wherever we are and just as we are, in our wretchedness and weakness, in order to offer us a new possibility of good.

Dear brothers and sisters, to make my considerations more meaningful, it might be useful to identify several common requirements of an authentic education. It needs first of all that closeness and trust which are born from love: I am thinking of the first and fundamental experience of love which children have, or at least should have, from their parents. Yet every true teacher knows that if he is to educate he must give a part of himself, and that it is only in this way that he can help his pupils overcome selfishness and become in their turn capable of authentic love.

In a small child there is already a strong desire to know and to understand, which is expressed in his stream of questions and constant demands for explanations. Therefore, an education would be most impoverished if it were limited to providing notions and information and neglected the important question about the truth, especially that truth which can be a guide in life.

Suffering is also part of the truth of our life. So, by seeking to shield the youngest from every difficulty and experience of suffering, we risk raising brittle and ungenerous people, despite our good intentions: indeed, the capacity for loving corresponds to the capacity for suffering and for suffering together.

We thus arrive, dear friends of Rome, at what is perhaps the most delicate point in the task of education: finding the right balance between freedom and discipline. If no standard of behaviour and rule of life is applied even in small daily matters, the character is not formed and the person will not be ready to face the trials that will come in the future. The educational relationship, however, is first of all the encounter of two kinds of freedom, and successful education means teaching the correct use of freedom. As the child gradually grows up, he becomes an adolescent and then a young person; we must therefore accept the risk of freedom and be constantly attentive in order to help him to correct wrong ideas and choices. However, what we must never do is to support him when he errs, to pretend we do not see the errors or worse, that we share them as if they were the new boundaries of human progress.

Education cannot, therefore, dispense with that authoritativeness which makes the exercise of authority possible. It is the fruit of experience and competence, but is acquired above all with the coherence of one's own life and personal involvement, an expression of true love. The educator is thus a witness of truth and goodness. He too, of course, is fragile and can be mistaken, but he will constantly endeavour to be in tune with his mission.

Dear faithful of Rome, from these simple observations it becomes clear that in education a sense of responsibility is crucial: the responsibility of the educator, of course, but also, as he grows up, the responsibility of the child, the student, the young person who enters the world of work. Those who can measure up to themselves and to others are responsible. Those who believe seek further; indeed, they seek to respond to God who loved them first.

Responsibility is in the first place personal, but there is also a responsibility which we share as citizens in the same city and of one nation, as members of the human family and, if we are believers, as children of the one God and members of the Church. Indeed, ideas, lifestyles, laws, the orientations in general of the society in which we live and the image it has of itself through the mass media exercise a great influence on the formation of the new generations, for good but often also for evil. However, society is not an abstraction; in the end we are ourselves all together, with the orientations, rules and representatives we give one another, although the roles and responsibilities of each person are different. Thus, the contribution of each one of us, of each person, family or social group, is necessary if society, starting with our City of Rome, is to become a more favourable context for education.

Lastly, I would like to offer you a thought which I developed in my recent Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi on Christian hope: the soul of education, as of the whole of life, can only be a dependable hope. Today, our hope is threatened on many sides and we even risk becoming, like the ancient pagans, people "having no hope and without God in the world", as the Apostle Paul wrote to the Christians of Ephesus (Eph 2: 12). What may be the deepest difficulty for a true educational endeavour consists precisely in this: the fact that at the root of the crisis of education lies a crisis of trust in life.

I cannot finish this Letter, therefore, without a warm invitation to place our hope in God. He alone is the hope that withstands every disappointment; his love alone cannot be destroyed by death; his justice and mercy alone can heal injustices and recompense the suffering experienced. Hope that is addressed to God is never hope for oneself alone, it is always also hope for others; it does not isolate us but renders us supportive in goodness and encourages us to educate one another in truth and in love.

I express my affection for you and assure you of my special remembrance in prayer, as I impart my Blessing to you all.

From the Vatican, 21 January 2008

BENEDICTUS PP. XVI

© Copyright 2008 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana

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Taken from: http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/document.php?n=1035