29.1
WITHOUT God man is insufficient for his own life. Life cannot be lived intelligently or vitally without a knowledge of its meaning and purpose, the stimulation of hope and the grasp of the laws, which will bring life to its goal. Man can man provide none of these himself, if he omits God. Man cannot discover something already there, only awaiting discovery. It is hard to persuade him or anyone, that an authorless story can have a plot; nor can they arbitrarily invent a meaning and purpose, to impose on life. Too much has already occurred to condition mankind, including the would-be author of the new design, and that no man ever knows what is going to happen next.
A secular hope is equally impossible. If each man has no future, but must ultimately reemerge in the general mass of reality, from which he has temporarily emerged for no known reason, it is idle offering him hope. One may invent the brightest future for the race of man, but for each individual in it, there is only transience and extinction of personality. Men, in their urgency, have not been concerned in providing a secular meaning for life and a secular hope. They have been forced to provide a sort of ethics; since without general agreement on what conduct is, society would fall to pieces at once. The effort has not been very energetic. In our world, we still tend to live by the remains of the Christian ethic. But with no clear grasp of its foundation, and concessions to human weakness, it is pretty tattered. Little is said of actual efforts to frame a strictly secular ethic. They must fail because the man who would frame a secular ethic cannot prove to himself that there is no God and no next life. Though feeling sure of both negations, he cannot think that he knows either.
The most convinced atheist, does not succeed in proving that there is no God, or even try to prove it. He tries to find a theory to account for how the universe might exist without God? He attacks the various arguments that have led men to believe in the existence of God, trying to show that they are not conclusive. He stresses elements in the universe, e.g. suffering, which ought not occur if God exists. The equivalent to saying that if he was God, it would have been different. However well he conceives them, they still do not disprove the existence of God.
God, and the next life, are vast things to be unsure about. If either exists, it must wreck any system of human conduct that ignores it. The effect of ignoring the next life might be less obvious. If one is to invent a secular ethic, a system of laws of conduct for men, it must be aimed at something. Almost certainly, it will be aimed at gaining the maximum happiness for men, however differently conceived by different lawmakers. How can man know that a conduct would produce happiness for mankind, but not knowing if the whole span of human life is available for inspection? A next life must be part of the evidence, with no way of bringing it into the evidence. Any secular ethic must fail by its inability to discover the effect of our actions on the next life, and in proving that there is no next life. No one has been able to persuade any large section of men to adopt any system of secular ethics. The secular philosopher's contempt for the moral law is as nothing, as the world's total ignoring of his secular ethic. Secular ethics are only in books.
29.2
Hope and law remain as needs, and man cannot supply them for himself. Religion is the only answer. Every religion, to the extent of the truth in it and its power to help men to a living awareness of God, can give some part of the answer. For the whole answer, we must come to the Church God founded. We consider it from the point of view of man's need. A non-infallible and non-dogmatic answer would leave man's needs much where they were. To the best of our knowledge there is the possibility of fullness of life with God in Heaven, is a non-dogmatic hope and nonsense, and what could be less stimulating? Let us have the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection. Anything short of complete certainty is uncertainty. Consider the morality of a non-dogmatic ethic, it seems to us, that God does not like remarriage after divorce or sexual experience outside marriage. This is too frail a barrier to set for passion; with a kind of cruelty, adding a possibility to worry the mind, instead of truth to sustain it.
We can see how in the Church man's need for happiness is met at every point. Where there is spiritual energy unused, men cannot be happy. So much energy in man is meant for God and is not adequate for use on any lesser object. If not used on God, it must turn on man and torment him. This is what St. Augustine meant by saying that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. We need contact with God at every point of our being, more still in the higher part, the soul, and above all in the soul's highest faculties of intellect and will. In the Church, we may have the intellect to know, the will to love and the whole being of man may be in contact with God, with the reality of God and no half-reality to the limit of every man's capacity for union. There is no merging and absorption of human personality in the Absolute, but a total union between man and God, in which man remains himself, as truly as God remains Himself.
Against the devitalization of life, there is the life of grace. Against the diseases of human society, there is in the Mystical Body, a relation of every man with every other man. This relation, even not clear, could remake the natural relationship for all the secondary unities men depend on for their health. Catholicism meets the complexity of man. In its simplicity, it is as complex as man. The Church meets every need of man's nature; not simply every need of man's nature, but every man's nature. The Church, as God, will not let man lose his personality. This Church, more rigid than any in dogma and law, is the home of all human beings. In the Church man is fully himself.
29.3
All men don’t see it, because they have lost the very notion of the gifts. The gifts of Life and Truth given by Christ and through the Church. Having lost this notion of the gifts, the Church's reason for existence, they cannot see that reason for existence. They test the Church by the notions they do have. They test and dismiss Her by lines of inquiry, that would be irrelevant; if they had any awareness of the things which constitute Her purpose.
The most common criticism is in the character of Catholics. People observe that a pope was immoral, a bishop worldly, a priest lazy and a layman a corrupt politician, or an unjust employer. Catholics can be found in all these categories. Even if as unpleasing, as the Church's severest critic thinks, the criterion would still be wrong. It is through this assortment of human beings, that Christ Our Lord gives the gifts of Truth and Life. No one, knowing his need of those gifts, would be kept away by the character of the human means that Christ has chosen for them to have. A man, hungry for bread, would not be denied due to doubts about the moral state of the baker.
Another criticism is that the Church is failing to take part in the improvement of the social order. They are not producing or working in support of plans for the organization of the nations, or social reforms within the nation. Man, says the critic, is striving for a better life on earth, and the Church stands aside from the strife. It could be said with truth, that the Church has done more for the betterment of life on this earth, than all other institutions in total. With equal truth, the popes have thought and written, most profoundly and constructively on the earthly life of man. Not unjustifiably, it can also be said, that the civil order is the affair of the citizen. When things go well, it is his and the Church should be kept out. Only when there is a complete mess, does he suddenly whine that the Church is neglectful. There are areas where the Church seems to have acquiesced in, if not encouraged, great social evils. There are many considerations, but we cannot rule out the part that sloth has played in the lives of churchmen. The sloth of the intellect, accepting the customary, without seeing the evil it is. The sloth of the will, which finds it easier to take things as they are, than to raise the devil by trying to put them right.
Even when the Church, in a given place, is doing the least for the social betterment of men's lives, in comparison with the Truth and the Life which God is giving through Her, these other things, by their absence, are clearly not a reduction of the Church's function. There is no sanity in forgoing the vaster thing which the Church is giving, because of any lesser thing She is not giving. What the world wants, and what the Church is actually offering, are plainly not comparable, provided one realizes what the gifts of God are. The soul's needs are the Church's business. If you are not interested in souls, then She will seem to have no business at all.
Preoccupation with the defects of Catholics, and impatience that the Church holds secondary what others hold primary, stand between men and the realization that the Church is their true home. We must try to help men see those gifts of God through the Church, which make human defects and earthly reforms of secondary importance. The greatest difficulty in showing men these gifts, even those knowing something of the gifts, is they are not always attracted to them, and may even avoid them. Often, their first reaction is not having the muscles to take hold of them, nor any taste or likelihood of happiness from them. To grasp the vision of reality, takes mental muscles, that have never used. The moral law, the law of reality, threatens the loss of the pleasures, by leaving our deeper hungers unfed. The world of spirit seems so thin and remote, and our world, so solid and close, that in finding reality we feel as if we are losing reality. Our poor hearts cling to worldly things in a desperate fear, that by losing them they will lose all. We must have something to cling to. We cling to things as empty as ourselves, shadows certainly, but lovely things these shadows be. Men are not likely to give up shadows, so lovely, except for the seen loveliness of reality, seen to be greater.
Our Lord's cry "Ah, if thou couldst understand the ways that can bring thee peace" states the deepest trouble of men. To know the things for our peace, involves knowing about ourselves, about things, about a life of grace and about the landscape of reality, Truth opens to our gaze.