Past Issues

"The eclipse of the idea of authority is an essential characteristic of today’s world; in fact, it is the most immediately observable characteristic” (Del Noce). Yet freedom has not become more luminous in the absence of authority. On the contrary, it has been eclipsed together with authority by ever-more absolute forms of arbitrary power: totalitarianisms which aim precisely at authority. Authority is in the service of freedom; for it is the power to make things grow in accord with the given order to which the authority is first subject. It is best represented by a father who bears witness to that order, received from above, as he hands himself over to the mother and together with her brings a child into being.

What strange creatures we are! We live fully only as creatures indwelt by an infinite desire. Yet, from within this paradox arises the temptation to self-enclosure, an attempt that at once curtails our desire for God and drives us toward the pursuit of unrestrained power. The seduction of modern technology pulls us in both directions. On the one hand, it would pacify us with its comforts and amusements. On the other, it would liberate us from our creaturely limits. We could become something else (transgenderism), or simply replaced by something “infinitely” better (AI). In either case, we settle for simulacra of the “good life.” Against these seductions, stands the invitation to “a joyful simplicity of life” [JPII] that sees in the acceptance of our finitude the living hope of an eternal promise.

Birth. Death. What lies in between? A short span, often punctuated by suffering and loneliness. Each of us must wrestle with the “perennial problem of human finitude” (Ratzinger) and face the question of our life’s meaning. Is it good . . . fundamentally? Does it promise anything? Does it keep its promise? Absent hope in a good answer, we try to escape reality with numbing diversions of various kinds—from screens to drugs. We hang on, barely alive. Instead, when we attend to the glimpses of goodness in our existence, it is possible to engage it fully alive in the hope that our finitude will blossom into the abundance of eternal life.

Christians desire a "happy death," one that is neither sudden nor unforeseen. They want to face death prepared: vigilant, amends made, sins confessed, in the company of their loved ones and the saints, all interceding for them at their appointed hour. But such a death is only possible if one is responding to a call from the One who has vivified their lives all along. Absent that, one can only want to be taken unawares or put to sleep "mercifully," then annihilated with the compost. The unhappy deaths we are witnessing today represent not first a moral crisis, but a crisis of meaning.

One year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that there was no constitutional right to abortion. Americans have good reasons to celebrate the rescinding of such a high-ranking entitlement to the murder of unborn children. Yet the Dobbs Decision provided no reason why such a right does not exist. Indeed, by “sending the question back to the states,” SCOTUS suggested that there might well be one. It is as if, in the wake of the Civil War Amendments, the question about when Black people became human, or human enough to be protected under the law, were subjected to a vote. We recoil at the thought. Because we know there are some things that must simply be recognized as given. Our existence is one of them.