Travelling recently, we stopped at a local parish where the walls are draped with a score of banners, encouraging virtues like generosity, toleration, service, and friendliness. My gut-reaction (sadly) was that all those virtues are cheerfully embraced by socialists. The only exception (no surprise) was chastity. The banners’ little blurbs never explained how each virtue is emphatically Christian: no sacrificial suffering, no self-forgetting humility, none of Mother Teresa’s loving until it hurts. Just niceness.

A week later, I collided with Dostoyevsky’s quip in Brothers Karamozov: “Socialism is entirely the atheist issue, atheism today, a Tower of Babel built without God, not to mount from earth to heaven, but to build heaven on earth.” So apparently, there’s an irreconcilable conflict between the Catholic truth of happiness, “life fully alive” in Christ, and our reigning, bureaucratic herd mentality, docile “citizens” grazing blissfully until we arrive at a sterile abattoir (“care facility”).

Can we use all the same words for virtues, while having contradictory visions of their purpose? Real human happiness? That parish had a remarkably reverent liturgies and members. Might its sacramental life be enough to convey and nurture real Catholic virtues, regardless of our culture?

Advertisement

Sacramental graces may suffice for each of us personally, but if the laity is called to evangelize the world, which we are, we need clarity about that irreconcilable contradiction. Otherwise our friends will hear us as suggesting no more than a vague niceness (like many Sunday homilies). 

So, at the level of public apologetics, what’s that difference? G. K. Chesterton insisted the real “Good News” of the Gospel is the revelation of Original Sin, “the only Christian doctrine proven by 2,000 years of human history.” Yet, in our age of Rainbows and Unicorns, Original Sin is surely the one Catholic truth we find most embarrassing and least want to discuss. Why?

Since the 16th century, atheistic pundits have mocked Original Sin as a slur against humanity, the lie of cynical priests, lording it over innocent peasants. Montaigne imagined that Caribbean cannibals, preserved from such priestly nonsense, were entirely free of the fear of death. Two hundred years later, leading a growing chorus, Rousseau idolized the Noble Savage, bathed in a childlike love of life, but corrupted and shamed by oppressive civilization. Later yet, French radicals, pursuing that Original Innocence, slaughtered thousands of their fellow citizens to get it. 

Advertisement

After this last century’s many massacres—100 million unarmed civilians, murdered by socialist governments seeking “heaven on earth”—it’s mind-boggling that we still believe in Original Innocence. We parrot the altruism of bureaucrats, teachers, and medical workers as prodigies of selfless care, though they may be just as selfish as we are. Solzhenitsyn said, “The line between good and evil runs through the middle of every heart,” especially those with government jobs.

Our problem is, after four centuries of socialist propaganda, we’ve simply forgotten why the fact of Original Sin truly is Good News. The ancient pagans knew that life is tragic, a miserable and meaningless charade. The revelation of Original Sin meant that the problem isn’t life itself. It’s us. The universe isn’t our enemy. We are. We do it to ourselves, and what we freely do, we can freely—with grace—redo. Original Innocence pretends we’re victims of our circumstances, our “society.” So it tries to conceal what Original Sin reveals: our inescapable freedom. 

Awash in regulations and social services, we bow to the faux-compassion of a socialist culture, yet nevertheless, we remain free agents. There’s simple proof of this: though we live in the most secure, comfortable, and affluent circumstances in all human history, we’re simply unable to live like contented cattle. We’re fretful, frustrated adolescents, robbed of any mature awareness of our free agency. We’re miserable, panicking over “the state of the world,” because pervasive socialism has obscured our awareness of our real freedom to love, regardless the circumstances.

The Good News of Original Sin is that happiness is not found in our circumstances, but in loving service, turning outward, “willing the good of the other.” Like running or weight-training, this always hurts, because real love always hurts. We must deliberately refuse to turn inward for our comfort, possessions, and ambitions. We must cheerfully sacrifice our time, sweeping the kitchen floor or stopping at the store (exhausted) on the way home. Yet, the more comfortable our circumstances, the touchier we become (more proof) with all these little annoyances, and the more we must happily remind ourselves constantly of who and what we freely love. 

The tragic paradox of our “woke” culture is, we look outward for the cause of our unhappiness and inward to be loved. We need to look inward at our unhappiness, and outward to love. So the next time family or friends are panicking about the world, we might ask if they’re unhappy—“No, really, are you?” We might begin to discover that our circumstances are not the problem. 

Joseph Woodard is a research fellow with the Gregory the Great Institute.

Advertisement