Dear St. Rita Parishioners,
A common phrase, it seems, in our time – and one echoed by Pope Leo XIV – is that the world must become more human. The Pope’s words are of “the pressing duty to remain profoundly human” (MH 15). This phraseology may strike the believer wrongly, and it may be used by others in a way contrary to our Faith, and so it is important to have a proper Catholic understanding of “being human.”
We begin, then, with the beginning of humanity, when “God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27). It is an oft repeated truth, that you and I are made in God’s image, and in this context we remember “the grandeur of humanity” (MH 15) because of its reflection of the Creator Himself. It is an amazing thing to be human! In contrast with the lower creatures of this universe, you and I have an intellect by which we reason about the nature of things and about what is good, and we have a will – a free will – by which we can choose things that our intellect apprehends as good. No other physical being has these faculties, which is why only humans have conquered the world.
In comparison to the angels, of course, our human abilities are weak and puny. And, while they are also made in the image of God, we do not speak of making the world more angelic, since that would be contrary to our nature. Our bodies, too, then, are somehow very important to our humanity, and for this reason we emphasize that truth of our Faith, the Resurrection of the Body at the end of time. So, our bodies will be with us, whether end up in Heaven or Hell.
Our human nature, however, has been profoundly wounded because of sin. Original sin, first, committed by the heads of our race, affected every one of their descendants. Before that sin, they had what we call the preternatural gifts of bodily immortality, infused knowledge, and integrity (ordered passions/desires, in submission to the intellect). “Preternatural” here does not mean “demonic” like in popular culture and is not intended to be spooky language. The word “preternatural” itself is to be distinguished from “supernatural”, which means “above our nature.” “Preternatural” technically means “beyond our nature,” meaning those gifts were unattainable to us apart from the Gift of God, but they fall into the category of perfections of our human nature instead of participations in the Divine Nature.
When Adam and Eve sinned, they lost these gifts for themselves and for all of their descendants. This loss means things that we all know as common to our human experience: first, we die bodily (cf. Gen 2:16-17). Second, it is harder for us know the nature of things and in particular to know what is good. Third, we experience concupiscence, the “tinder of sin”. My passions are disordered and need to be re-ordered, and so even when I know what is good and right, it is harder for me to do it. As I do good and avoid evil (or vice versa), I either participate in the re-ordering of my passions and desires, or I participate in staying or becoming more disordered.
In addition to all of this, we cannot forget Christ, and, given the Christian dispensation of Grace, we have to ask what Christ’s Grace does for us in the midst of our fallen nature. Because, let’s be honest, if Baptism, which takes away Original Sin, were to restore the preternatural gifts, then by this point everyone would be Catholic. Immediately, all of our moral weaknesses would disappear, and the whole living forever thing would be pretty attractive to many (at least for a while. I don’t think I’d want to live forever in this life). Interestingly, however, Baptism does not restore those gifts: we have to fight hard to know the truth and to avoid sin, and we still die bodily! This is partly because the Lord is giving us Grace not just to be better humans, and we don’t have to just try harder to stop being evil. We are called live the life of Grace, which is Supernatural Life. The Lord gives us Grace to live His own Divine Life.
So then, what is the sense in which we want to make the world more human? And what is the sense in which we want to “remain profoundly human”? It is certainly not that we want to go back to the Garden of Eden and form some idyllic paradise here on earth. That way is blocked by a Cherubim with a flaming sword (cf. Gen 3:24). Nor is it some ideal of world peace where everyone forgets their beliefs and somehow just “gets along.” Our Lord says in the Gospel, “Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division” (Lk 12:51). Christ Himself will be the flash point for that division, since belief (or not) in Him will be precisely the point over which division occurs. Even less is it a world in which we simply give in to the “fact” that we are sinners and nothing more. That is a recipe for failure, and more sin.
When we as Catholics use the language of being “more human”, we are striving to use language that the world will understand and to which it will respond. God Himself became human, in order to bridge that same gap. And what we discovered in God-become-man was Divine Charity, Charity that walked with us, healed us, forgave us, died for us, all in great humility. It was astounding to us that Divine Grace could operate in and through a human nature without destroying that nature. Destruction of that human nature came through the hands of humanity, not Divinity.
All of this is still true now. God operates in and through your humanity and mine, by means of Grace. It is truly you who do divine things when you act according to Grace, to love God and your neighbor. It is likewise Christ who lives in you (cf. Gal 2:20), and you do all things in Christ who strengthens you (cf. Phil 4:13). In other words, although the call to be more human stems from our horror at man’s ability to be inhuman and inhumane, the path to humanity is paradoxically found in the path to divinity, since it is only divinity that can enable us to live as we were truly meant to live – in God’s image and conformed to His likeness.
Man’s efforts to make himself God – like via the Tower of Babel – always end in inhumanity. Recall the words of Chesterton, “Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural.” This is because the natural – that which is solely human – is broken because of sin. Therefore, we need Grace as the only effective response to sin. Making the world more human is tantamount to making the world more divine, by bringing Christ – the perfect man – to all who are horrified by man’s cruelty and inhumanity. Christ alone is truly human, and we become so by becoming members of His Body, which is also His Bride, which is also the New Jerusalem (cf. Rev 21:2). Those walls were rebuilt definitively by Christ at His Resurrection, but you and I either make present on this earth that City and those Walls by our response to Grace (cf. Neh 2-6) or we build another Tower of Babel, which in its inhumanity and rejection of God’s sovereignty is destined to fall, and great will be its ruin (cf. Mt 7:27)!
In Christ,
Fr. Christensen