Recently I read that fewer than half of Italy’s Catholics believe life is eternal, that is that there is ‘life after death’. How many of us in our country who identify ourselves as Christians are of like mind? What, if any, are our thoughts on the Second Coming, the Parousia, the Eschaton? Or indeed on Salvation. If Jesus Christ is our Savior, what is he saving us from or for? For many, it seems, belief in life eternal has been relegated to the dusty annals of myth.
What consequences does this loss of belief portend? The eternal implications remain to be experienced. One temporal consequence, however, is disturbingly evident. The denial of eternal life spawns the denial of the existence of God and therefore the denial of immutable Truth. In such a system of unbelief truth is subjective and becomes whatever we determine it to be. Truth is ‘fluid’.
Responsibility is our ability to respond to something (or Someone). If that to which (or to Whom) we respond is “fluid” our response itself will be fluid and therefore because of its inconsistency less meaningful or even meaningless. Our ‘responsibility to be responsible’ is weakened and, eventually, abandoned. Ineluctably, the diminishment of responsibility diminishes our sense of purpose, and purpose is what engenders dignity.
Be they cause or consequence, in our so-called developed world contemporaneous with this trend are the rise of an unprecedented material prosperity and the pervasion of an epicurean carelessness about life eternal. As a result the anguish of “in hac lacrimarum valle” and its concomitant aspiration for “post hoc exsilium” are recognized as leftovers from a more challenging and less enlightened past.
Underpinning this triple reality of a diminished sense of responsibility, unprecedented prosperity, and eschatological indifference is the mixed blessing of leisure. How will we spend our free time? The question offers much for sociologists to ponder. Does it depend on how we respond to our perception of Truth? To escape pointlessness do expend our creative energies on sterile distractions and vitiating passions? Or, do we seek and find higher, dignifying purposes for which we can employ them?
For the latter minded the Second Vatican II document ‘Gaudium et Spes’ offers encouragement: “Man gains such dignity when, ridding himself of all slavery to the passions, he presses forward towards his goal by freely choosing what is good…..Before the judgment seat of God an account of his own life will be rendered to each one according as he has done either good or evil” (17)
Philanthropy is one way those who care to do so can embrace the goal of ‘freely choosing what is good’. For the past twenty-four years the National Catholic Community Foundation has existed to accommodate and facilitate this desire. During these decades we have come to know many impressive individuals and organizations
Because it is celebrating its own twentieth anniversary one organization in particular is featured in the Voice from the Vineyard column below. As its name indicates Cross Catholic Outreach (www.crosscatholic.org) offers a two-way bridge between committed donors in this country and laborers in the Church’s vineyards in developing nations. This bridge is more than a conduit of information and financial support. More important, it is a means towards the solidarity to which the Gospel calls all of us.
Congratulations, Cross Catholic. You brighten this valley of tears and presage the end of our exile.