From San Marino information (by Don Luca Bernardi*) – What remains of the West without its Foundation?
One evening in mid-August I found myself having a chat with a childhood friend here in San Marino, a friend lost and then rediscovered due to the many events that life allows.
Finding ourselves together after a long time, many conversations come out and when we talk to a priest, spiritual and supernatural conversations always emerge. Now, this friend defines himself as an atheist, even though I find in him a frightening sense of the sacred. Speaking with him, a reflection arose that I could not help but share in this newspaper because it concerns our entire society, San Marino and Italian.
We are in a society that tends to be de-Christianized, where what is important is something other than God Jesus Christ. Not only have secularization and atheism had great successes, but they have led to the heart of man becoming disinterested in faith and in supernatural discourse.
However, the interesting thing that can be seen in this society is that although we have moved so far in the social panorama from everything that was built by Christian society, something has remained or, to put it better, an operation has been carried out such that some of those elements that Christ and the Church have made known to humanity remain impregnated within men but emptied of their hearts and their reasons.
Since the French Revolution which proclaimed Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité, that is, equality, freedom and fraternity: didn’t the freedom proclaimed by Christ with the destruction of sin exist? Weren’t we all already made equal thanks to the awareness of being children of God? We were brothers in Christ who elevated us to a unique dignity, that of chosen ones and children. It took centuries for the seed of freedom to penetrate European souls, but the Church with its documents and Saint Paul had already tried to eradicate this plague of slavery.
Well, Enlightenment thought carried out a split: it removed the foundation of these great revealed truths and wanted to erect them as universal values as an end in themselves. But not even five years had passed since the outbreak of the Revolution that was supposed to free the men of France and Europe from superstition and from the ancient despotic regime that the Terror was unleashed, a year where the slightest suspicion was enough to be killed, where men were guillotined without any mercy in the thousands, it is estimated that in one year 40,000 men were killed.
This is what this split created, removing the foundation that generated Western society, which however was unfortunately betrayed even previously, but it was completely different: if before criminal acts were carried out it was due to the pride and wickedness of man, not because this was taught by the Christian faith, now instead it was precisely to defend and eliminate every obstacle that those who thought differently had to be killed.
So the question must be asked: are these Western values still valid when we see the human person being treated like this?
Now, more than two centuries have passed since the French Revolution, yet the work she began has had great success and men today are “free” from superstition and fanaticism (even if real fanaticisms of another type have emerged). What started with the Enlightenment in the 18th century is now in an advanced stage, which is why I would like to give some examples: we no longer believe in eternal life, we have locked everything up within this material life, but we have made the perception of this eternal life, as if we shouldn’t all reach that moment which is common to all men, it has been introjected, eternal life now, I don’t have to worry about what comes after. Marx had theorized it: a paradise on earth to be achieved thanks to his materialism.
Not all of these considerations came up with my friend, but he had to agree with me on this point. I went much further in my reasoning, but in general that evening we came to agree on many analyzes of the contemporary world.
Again, what could we say about love: ours seems to want to be the society of love, love for all, no more hatred must be widespread, but on the one hand we notice powerfully how hatred towards those who don’t think like me is growing frighteningly, given that there is no longer anyone to judge, since God doesn’t care about it; on the other hand, I fear that the love we fill our mouths with is often just wasted and empty words, we confuse it with feeling, passion, drive, instinct, falling in love and much more. I am the only comparison of good and right. But since we have forgotten the One who loved us first and showed us how serious love is, today kids think they love each other because they simply like each other, an initial feeling of pleasure is enough for them to immediately call each other “I love”. This point is surprising: it is obvious that love exists at all ages, proportionate to the growth, to the humanity of each one, but here as soon as two get together they love here and love there, as if nothing had happened. Is the need for love so emergent that it has been made so easy?
So here is this great part of man reduced and belittled. Of course, Christ wasn’t needed centuries ago to understand it, but no one in history has revealed how He revealed it anymore. I could also continue with charity, with friendship, with trust in others, but one above all must be mentioned: idolatry.
We have removed the true God from our affairs to insert others: from the most obvious and banal ones, such as success, power, sex, to get to those that are very popular today, such as a certain idea of science or medicine, to get to those that take both ancient and new forms: real new religions or sects, social media themselves, our person, in reality everything can become an idol, this depends on what type of relationship I have with it. God has been eliminated, but since the desire for Him cannot disappear because, as the great Augustine said, “you have made us for You, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You”, nothing can truly fill the heart of man except Him alone.
*Don Luca Bernardi, parish priest of Faetano
