2019

The France that was built over the course of the thirteenth century was, as the popes referred to it, a “most Christian kingdom.” This does not mean that it had a Christian ideology or that Christianity provided the language and imagery through which the “nation” or the “State” was built.

If we have become increasingly abstracted from nature, both in our daily screen-saturated life and in the very science of biology, then it would seem very likely that we’ve become similarly abstracted from human nature. Immersed in our virtual world, we have lost our own nature and have thereby become increasingly dehumanized.

Our economy and culture have become based upon screens. This takes its toll on our health. Because we’ve shifted to a screen-based culture, more and more of us make our living sitting for long, long hours staring bleary-eyed at screens. The result: chronic headaches, backaches, obesity, and worse.

Anyone who claims that they are “spiritual, but not religious” is like the one who claims to be hungry but never eats. Eating is the natural activity that satisfies the hungry; religion is the natural activity that satisfies the spiritual. If you are truly immune from any religious practices, then you may have a remarkably imaginative interior life, but you are not spiritual.

A great part of our problem today—for both the Left and the Right—is that we are in a strange condition of being abstracted from nature (including human nature itself) by science and technology. Generally speaking, the Left is abstracted from human nature, and the Right is abstracted from nature. As a result, we have created a culture that keeps us from discovering nature, a culture that deforms human nature from its very earliest stages.

I will leave to the statisticians an exact inventory, but by my reckoning there are ninety-two references to creation in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), only six of which are less than glowing. And these few, testifying as they do to the disorders into which we have fallen, remind us of a good thing gone bad, that the evil we do is not the fault of anything God made, rather our willful and perverse misuse of it.

The first two chapters of Luke’s Gospel are widely cherished among Bible readers. They narrate the stories of John the Baptist’s conception and birth, the Annunciation to Mary and, of course, the Nativity and early childhood of Jesus. Situated in the midst of these profound events, however, is the humble occasion of Mary’s Visitation to Elizabeth (Luke 1:39–56).