The Third Millennium

by Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.

"The great Jubilee to be celebrated at the end of this Millennium and at the beginning of the next ought to constitute a powerful call to all those who 'worship God in spirit and truth.' It should be for everyone a special occasion for meditating on the mystery of the Triune God, who in himself is wholly transcendent with regard to the world, especially the visible world."

— John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantem, 1986, #54.

I.

When we think of the "coming" Third Millennium, I suppose, we cannot help but recall the apocalyptic overtones that were associated with the coming of the Year One Thousand, let alone those at the coming of Christ Himself, at "the fullness of time", the Year Zero, when the whole world was at peace. Nor can we doubt that a good deal of thought and concern about the End of the World in our time is prevalent, especially among certain more evangelical Protestants. Even among ordinary Catholics, who try to play these things "cool", as they say, we find persistent wonderments about the collapse of Marxism with its purported relationship to Fatima and other Marian appearances, with prayers and penances that we are asked to do and evidently, at least on the scale demanded, do not. At the edges, we sometimes hear of anti-Christ and rumors about the third message of Fatima that, according to some at least, has to do with large-scale apostasy among clergy and especially bishops.

The Holy Father himself affirmed specifically both in Centesimus Annus and in his new book, that he saw the hand of God in this fall of communism. He saw this same hand also in the fact that the attempt on his life took place on May 13, the Anniversary of the Appearances at Fatima, in 1917. When he went to Fatima himself ten years after the attempt on his life, on May 13, 1991, John Paul II did not hesitate to speak quite frankly about the further meaning of these events that happened to him as Pope. "The pilgrimage this year had a particular purpose," John Paul II explained to the Portuguese:

to give thanks for saving the pope's life on May 13, 1981. I certainly consider this entire decade to be a free gift, given to me in a special way by Divine Providence — a special responsibility was given to me that I might continue to serve the Church by exercising the ministry of Peter.... Mary's message at Fatima can be synthesized in three clear, initial words of Christ: "The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the Gospel" [Poenitemini, credite Evangelio]. The events which have taken place on our European continent, particularly in central and eastern Europe, give this Gospel appeal a contemporary meaning on the threshold of the third millennium. These events compel us to think in a special way about Fatima. The heart of the Mother of God is the heart of a Mother who cares not only for individuals, but for entire peoples and nations. This heart is totally dedicated to the saving mission of her Son: Christ, the Redeemer of the world, the Redeemer of man.[1]

The Holy Father in this autobiographical passage has already linked together many of the central themes we are to find in his extensive plans for the Third Millennium and its transcendent meaning.

In further discussing Fatima and the assassination attempt on his life in his book, Crossing the Threshold of Faith, the Holy Father gave these further enlightening reflections:

And what are we to say of the three children from Fatima who suddenly, on the eve of the outbreak of the October Revolution, heard: "Russia will convert" and "In the end, my Heart will triumph"...? They could not have invented those predictions.... Perhaps this is also why the Pope was called from "a faraway country," perhaps this is why it was necessary for the assassination attempt to be made in St. Peter's Square precisely on May 13, 1981, the anniversary of the first apparition at Fatima — so that all could become more transparent and comprehensible, so that the voice of God which speaks in human history through the "signs of the times" could be more easily heard and understood.[2]

Clearly the Holy Father sees our times as momentous because of the specific message that God is communicating to us in various ways about our own lives and the way we live them in comparison to the way we are asked to live them in the Gospels and in the teachings of the Church.

II.

This concern about the "voice of God" in human history being "easily heard and understood" is what lies behind John Paul II's very deliberate preparation for the Third Millennium. Generally, the Holy Father's reaction to the fall of Marxism has been both joyful and tinged with an unsettling and persistent concern about the moral and spiritual condition of the rest of the world. Contrary to what we might at first expect, he thinks that the need for prayer and conversion is not less but greater after this change in Eastern Europe, almost as if to say that the real problem was not centered there in the first place. Thus, the background ideas and thoughts that initially caused Marxism are still largely in place though in a different form in the rest of the world, particularly in Europe and America.

Consequently, if we reflect on his Angelus prayer for the First Sunday of Advent, 1994, when he announced the beginnings of the preparation for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, John Paul II recalls that we are still "pilgrims" and that God "comes to meet us". The primary purpose of this Jubilee is "to live in a spirit of praise and thanksgiving for the great gift of the Incarnation of the Word and the Redemption, and we are invited to rejoice in the grace of being, in the Church, beloved children who have been freed from our sins."[3] The Jubilee of the Year 2000 thus is about the Incarnation and Redemption as the proper way to praise the Trinitarian God. But this emphasis means that we must understand the centrality of sin as the principal disorder, personal sin, not just so-called abstract social or corporate analyses that blame someone else but ourselves.

So important is this concern about personal sin that it is well to recall what John Paul said about this topic in 1984 in his Exhortation on "Reconciliation and Penance." We live in an era that has made most error, evil, and disorder to be the product of some impersonal force, some "ism", or corporate will, something that cannot in fact explain the voluntary origin of what is wrong in the world. Thus, in this sort of intellectual world, neither guilt nor responsibility can be located in something an individual actually did. It is, in fact, a vast triviliaztion of the meaning and reality of human life and action.

"There is one meaning sometimes given to social sin that is not legitimate or acceptable, even though it is very common in certain quarters today," John Paul II observed.

This usage contrasts social sin and personal sin, not without ambiguity, in a way that leads more or less unconsciously to the watering down and almost the abolition of personal sin, with the recognition only of social guilt and responsibilities. According to this usage which can readily be seen to derive from non-Christian ideologies and systems ... practically every sin is a social sin, in the sense that blame for it is to be placed not so much on the moral conscience of an individual but rather on some vague entity or anonymous collectivity, such as the situation, the system, society, structures, or institutions. Whenever the Church speaks of situations of sin, or when she condemns as social sins certain situations or the collective behavior of certain social groups, big or small, or even of whole nations and blocs of nations, she knows and she proclaims that such cases of social sin are the result of the accumulation and concentration of many personal sins. It is a case of the very personal sins of those who cause or support evil or who exploit it....[4]

The Jubilee emphasis the Incarnation and Redemption and the divine reasons for them. These realities underscore our own dignity. They are divine responses to our own personal actions, to our sins. The Jubilee is intended by John Paul II to refocus the world's attention on what, in fact, ultimately causes economic, social, and political disorders, namely our own sins, the justification for which is what lies behind so many modern philosophies and interpretations of theology.

Thus, in this Angelus talk, John Paul II, as if to give increased force to what concerns him, added these sobering words that are intended to remind us that we are dealing here with a matter of the greatest moment: "With eager intensity we are asked to be increasingly aware of the evil that threatens Christians themselves, 'when they depart from the Spirit of Christ and his Gospel'." Christians disloyal to their spiritual lives, those who define sins as something good, who do not practice their faith, seem to be the center of the Holy Father's brief exhortation. There is an "evil" that threatens those who depart from the Gospel, either in rejecting it entirely or in refusing to follow its commandments and guidance, something that results in our social or public disorders. The combination of these words, I think — praise, Redemption, sins, evil — indicates John Paul II's constant effort to insist that we focus our attention on what is really important in our personal, familial, cultural, and political lives. Sin is an indication of, a sign of what we actually do. Modern culture, in some sense, can thus be seen as a conspiracy that would keep our attention focused on everything but what it is that lies at the root of our disorders, namely, our wills when they choose to sin.

This transcendent meaning of our lives and our times, as we emphasized in the beginning passage from Dominum et Vivificantem, centers around the Trinity, about God's inner life, about how we human beings, individually and in our union with others of our kind, relate to this inner life through our Creation in the Word and in our Redemption in the Word made flesh, in the Second Person of this very Trinity. The word, "Trinity", a non-scriptural, philosophical word, has been carefully crafted in tradition to describe, better than any other word we have subsequently managed to come up with, the inner life of God in only we can know it, that is, as it is revealed to us as our proper destiny. The word "Trinity" defines most accurately what the Scripture says about God, one God, three divine persons, who created the world from nothing, for no reason but His own, a reason, however, about which, for own good and salvation, He has given us some precious intimations.

The Holy Father, in other words, intends, on the occasion of the great Jubilee of the Year 2000, nothing less than to teach the world about God as we Christians have known Him during the previous Two Millennia, and as he ought to be known in the next. The coming Millennium, the Holy Father knows, can give rise to legitimate forebodings caused by our repeated failures individually and collectively to heed God's word. We specifically stand in need of repentance that identifies and rejects the evil we choose. But John Paul II also knows that the Third Millennium can be more blessed and more peaceful than any other one we have known, precisely because of what the Church teaches us about God. This hope, no doubt, is why the Holy Father is so insistent that the words that the world most needs to hear are those beginning words of the Gospels themselves, "Repent, and believe in the Gospel." That is to say, we have to understand what it is of which we have to repent. We have to know why the Gospel is addressed to our sins, to the structure of disorder in our lives at all levels, why, if we fail to repent, "evil" increasingly threatens "Christians themselves".

III.

Evidently, then, the Pope, who is by no means a pessimist but a man filled with hope and delight, a man who loves to sing and climb mountains, thinks that, from one point of view, our times are in such dire moral and spiritual condition that the words found early in the Gospel of Mark apply to our era with special force. This dire condition is likewise the theme that Peter Kreeft takes up in his remarkable analysis of C. S. Lewis' book, The Abolition of Man, probably the best brief analysis of modern spiritual and intellectual disorder ever written. Kreeft calls his own book significantly, for our purposes, C. S. Lewis in the Third Millenium. In a brilliant analysis, Kreeft shows just why the principles and practices of what has come to be known as "modernity", themselves backed up with all the force and pride of the modern state and of contemporary culture, are in fact specifically those anti-human principles that were anticipated in thought about end times in our religious and philosophic tradition.

"The most radically new feature of our civilization," Kreeft wrote in words mindful of the description of The Fall in Genesis, "is not technology, its newly powerful means, but the lack of a summum bonum, an end."[5] This lack of a highest good was what Hobbes proposed should be the case at the beginnings of modernity. In this sense, what we witness in our times is the final carrying out in personal lives and in society of what it means not to have an ordering end, a summum bonum. Early modern philosophers on which our times and thought are built argued that disorder in the world was caused, not cured, by faith and virtue, by the knowledge and pursuit of the highest good, happiness, the summum bonum. The disorder that comes from having no order directed to a highest good who is God is something that constantly is before the mind of John Paul II when, in speaking of the coming Third Millennium, he endeavors to place the orders of secular and salvation history in proper relation to each other through explaining our own proper internal order to ourselves and its relation to God.

In this Fatima message of 1991, to recall, the Holy Father mentioned the saving mission of Christ, "The Redeemer of Man." This latter expression, of course, "the Redeemer of Man", was the title of John Paul II's first encyclical, the first of three profound early documents of his Pontificate devoted respectively to the Son (Redemptor Hominis), to the Father (Dives in Misericordia), and to the Spirit (Dominum et Vivificantem). Thus, we are not surprised that in the proximate preparation for the Jubilee of the Year Two Thousand, John Paul II plans to devote 1997 to the Son and Redeemer, 1998, to the Holy Spirit, 1999 to the Father, and 2000 to the Trinity, all in a worldwide act of homage and exact teaching about what our salvation means, about where it is from, about why we need it, and from what it is we are to be saved.[6] Ultimately, what we are to be saved from is from our own purely man-made definitions of what human life is about and from those institutions based on these definitions.

But here I want to note how struck I was by what John Paul II said in his new book about this first encyclical. "You will remember that my first encyclical on the Redeemer of man (Redemptor Hominis), appeared a few months after my election on October 15, 1978," he told Vittorio Messori.

This means that I was actually carrying its contents within me. I had only to "copy" them from memory and experience what I had already been living on the threshold of the papacy.... The Council proposed ... that the mystery of redemption should be seen in light of the great renewal of man and of all that is human. The encyclical aims to be a great hymn of joy for the fact that man has been redeemed through Christ — redeemed in spirit and in body. The redemption of the body subsequently found its own expression in the series of catechesis for the Wednesday Papal audiences: "Male and female He created them." Perhaps it would be better to say: "Male and female He redeemed them."[7]

What struck me particularly about this passage, in light of the Holy Father's later remarks at Fatima, about his being given an extra decade during which to exercise "the ministry of Peter", was his lively sense that he had actually been being "prepared" to be Pope even before he was elected. The redemption of man, male and female, of the body, was much in his consciousness even before he became Pope. This concrete meaning of the Redemption, as clarified by the particular genius and charisma of his own personality and office, is what John Paul II fully intends to make known by every means available to him, himself, as he shows again and again, one of the most skillful, appealing, and dynamic public figures in the history of the world.

Such thoughts about our time, how our times came to be as they are, that is, their relation to history and to God's will for the world, are no doubt sobering, even apocalyptic thoughts. Many would prefer to ignore them as simply "private" revelation, that the facts they record we need not bother ourselves with. But, still, what are we to make of them? We see Charlie Brown staring at the television set. He is watching a golf game during which the announcer explains to a spellbound Charlie Brown that, at the very end of the tournament, the golfer has to go for it; "he can't play it safe." At this very moment little Sally, his sister, comes up behind Charlie but she hears only the announcer's dramatic concluding words, "There's no tomorrow!" Hearing this, to her, horrendous news, Sally freezes, hands on lips, shaking, eyes fixed, "There's no tomorrow?" she asks and repeats traumatically the momentous words out loud.

Such portents incite her further. She dashes out of the house screaming, "There's no tomorrow." She rushes up to Linus who is obviously shocked at the news. She yells, "They just announced on TV that there's no tomorrow." She races to the doghouse to a raised-in-the-air-by-her-vehemence Snoopy, to cry, "There's no tomorrow!! They just announced it on TV." Then she shrieks as loudly as possible, in words of a distinct Scriptural hue, "Panic! Panic! Run! Hide! Flee! Run for the hills! Flee to the valleys! Run to the rooftops!" Finally, we see Sally, Linus, and Snoopy huddled back to back on the roof of the doghouse. Linus mutters, "Somehow I never thought it would end this way!" And Snoopy adds, "I thought Elijah was to come first...."[8]

As I said, not unlike the years leading up to the Year 1000, our own decades do display concerns about end times. This is what concerns and often bothers us even if we do not quite believe in end times or understand what is happening. And, in spite of our reluctance and reservations, maybe they should. Perhaps there is some identifiable relationship between our conduct and our times that is something new in human history, itself no doubt a graphic record of man's own order and disorder. The Holy Father himself, as I have indicated, perhaps somewhat more soberly, but still with a sense of the meaning of time and our times, sees this coming Year 2000 to be of momentous significance for the redemption of mankind. This very significance falls within its realm of choice, if I might use that much abused but noble word, within the realm of that freedom that decides what ultimately we shall be. The Holy Father sees the coming Third Millennium as a time of decision that depends on us. Yet, it is also a time of God's warnings to us about our lives, about what we do and believe, about how we explain ourselves to ourselves, about what we call evil and what we refuse to call evil even when it is.

If Linus "never thought it would end this way," we can recall that Scripture tells us that the end times will utterly surprise those living during them. No one knows the day or the hour. Messori asked the Holy Father about sociological statistics that revealed a relative decline in the number of Catholics throughout the world. Messori wanted to know whether the Pope was concerned about this decrease? In answering this delicate question, the Holy Father does not deny the statistics but he does caution about their implied meaning, namely, that numbers indicate the truth of the decline of Catholicism.[9] That is, the Pope questions whether modern social science as a method can reveal, contrary to its own pretensions about itself, what actually goes on in the world, expecially in the inner relation of man and God to which the Church is ordained. Certainly such science did not indicate it knew what was happening when it came to the sudden demise of Marxism.

Here too, the Holy Father replied to this subject in a most surprising, yet accurate manner:

Statistics are not useful when speaking of values which are not quantifiable. To tell the truth the sociology of religion — although useful in other areas — does not help much here. As a basis for assessment, the criteria of measurement which it provides do not help when considering people's interior attitude. No statistic aiming at quantative measurement of faith (for example, the number of people who participate in religious ceremonies) will get to the heart of the matter.[10]

According to Scripture, as the Pope observes, as the world nears its end, there will be less faith, not more. The decline of numbers, if that is what happens, does not indicate the falsity of Catholicism, but its truth.

This result is a very Augustinian. It means that the methods of modern science do not reveal what is going on in the religious world and can often confuse us about what is happening. Herbert Deane sums up Augustine's similar view in this way:

(Augustine) does not assume that growth in church membership or influence can be equated with an increase in the number of those men who truly love God. Indeed, as history draws to its close thee number of true Christians in the world will decline rather than increase. His words give no support to the hope that the world will gradually be brought to believe in Christ and that the earthly society can be transformed, step by step, into the kingdom of God.[11]

These remarks again point out the relation between Kreeft's thesis about Lewis' "abolition of man" and the presence of God in our time.

What Kreeft has shown is that the intellectual structure of what goes on in the name of science and culture in our civilization is exactly the effort to destroy man as classic philosophy and revelation have known him. This "abolition" of what was created to be what it is would imply that a God who is interested in man's own salvation would, if He has an active providence towards us, be seen to take positive steps, but religious steps, to counteract this man-made effort to "abolish man" and replace him with a man not at all related to what God has created. This is why, I should note here, Kreeft ends his book of intellectual analysis not with an intellectual conclusion, but with a very scriptural plea for sanctity, the theme that seems common in all reports about Marian devotions and in all that which the Holy Father teaches us about our time. And sanctity is something that is least open to sociological analysis and most contrary to the activist, Pelagian nature of our culture that insists on setting our own standards and saving ourselves by our own efforts.

"The twenty-first century will be one of two things," Kreeft concluded in an observation that reflects the themes of Lewis and the Holy Father himself.

Either it will be the best since the thirteenth, or the worst since the twenty-first B.C., before the call of Abraham and the formation Judaism. It depends on which side wins the current war. Either we will build Gothic cathedrals again, from a restored faith, or we will build the Tower of Babel again, from a restored apostasy. Lewis, like all prophets, gave us the road map, the clear choice between the two roads of life or death, and the Mosaic simplicity of the challenge, "choose life." Please do. Please help us save the world. Please be a saint.[12]

Our own times certainly do not want to see that our own conduct, our own deeds and intellectual positions, our own failure to choose life and sanctity, have an ultimate significance that somehow a Pope is privy to and they are not. The fact is, as Paul Johnson and E. Michael Jones have indicated with the Pope in Veritatis Splendor, there is an intimate relation between what we do and what we intellectually maintain, that more often than we want to admit, what we hold is an effort to justify how we live and not the other way around.[13]

IV.

The fact is that the fall of Marxism came as an utter surprise, something not predicted by any social science. Yet, the discourse about the dangers and end of communism was something that rumbled through religious circles since 1917 because of Fatima and the strange events related to it. The Holy Father is both cautions about these events and conscious of their coincidence. Over the years, I have been a fairly diligent reader of the addresses and works of John Paul II. Several years after he began his Pontificate in 1978, I began mentally to note the increasing frequency with which he spoke of the coming Third Millennium. I meant to copy down every reference to the end of the Second or the beginning of the Third Millennium or the relation of the First, Second, and Third Millennia to each other, when I saw one mentioned, but I never got around to it. Still, I was conscious that the coming Third Millennium was a recurrent theme in the works of the Holy Father. At first I thought, he was mentioning it simply because it was a convenient peg on which to speak in varying ways about the human condition in general, rather graphic ways, I thought.

After I read for a second time John Paul II's "Apostolic Letter" on "The Coming Third Millennium" (November 10, 1994), however, I suddenly realized that he has probably been thinking of and planning for this Jubilee ever since he became Pope. Indeed, in "The Coming Third Millennium", he has brought together his thinking on the meaning of our time, on the meaning of all time, the periods of history, our relation to God, both as individuals, as nations, and as the human race as such. He presents these considerations and teachings in the context of celebrating and continuing, if not completing, the work of God in this world. This is the work of Creation and the work of Redemption as, in a unified way, this plan of God for man reaches all the world, even those who choose not to receive it or who do not clearly hear it. The Pope has literally done everything he can to alert the Orthodox and the Protestants, as those closest to Catholicism in doctrine and practice, to the need for unity not just in the abstract but in the concrete. He has been willing to talk systematically with Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, animists, Marxists, and philosophers. He has outlined the relation of the periods of history and their meaning. He has talked to and about every form of science in relation to itself and to revelation. Whenever possible, if it did not previously exist, the Holy Father has set up continuing commissions or fora in which honest and serious efforts to understand and resolve differences in theology, science, philosophy, and culture could be constantly addressed.

While most of us have been going about our pedestrian business with our everyday thoughts, John Paul II, in what by any standard is an extraordinary feat of intelligence, energy, decision, and organization, has been busy re-presenting every facet of Christian practice and teaching. John Paul II has accomplished what is, in fact, one of the most remarkable intellectual efforts in the history of thought and of the Church. In his speeches, encyclicals, and letters, in his Catechism, in the revision of the Codes of Canon Law, in his remarks on Scripture, in his treatment of the social order, in his attention to youth, in his careful and much needed explanation of truth and natural law in Veritatis Splendor, in his constant encounters with world leaders and peoples in his many trips, in his remarkably personal and profound book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, in his crucial role in the fall of Marxism, in his devotion to the Blessed Mother, in his defense of life and in his beautiful understanding of love and marriage, of the family, in just about everything he does, from simple talks to the profoundest philosophical dissertations, this Pope has been light-years ahead of us all in formulating a coherent and complete explanation of God, man, Church, cosmos, and destiny.

As far as I know, except for a few small institutes and colleges, except for a few alert men and women everywhere, no one, including members of the Church, even of its hierarchy, pays careful attention to what this Holy Father has accomplished, no one except perhaps the enemies of the faith itself. No religious order, with the possible exception of Opus Dei, no university, no group of scholars, no members of the media, with again the exception of someone like Paul Johnson, has begun to realize the profundity of what he has accomplished and of how far ahead of us all he really is. On top of all of this, I think, John Paul II intends the Year 2000 to be an occasion in which to gather together systematically all of this teaching in an active effort to confront all of mankind, prayerfully and objectively, with the truth of the Redemption, the meaning of what has been going on for these Two Thousand Years that no one really can account for in any other terms but those in which the Holy Father sets them. These extra years, in which he has even forgiven the man who tried to kill him, have indeed been providential for him to enable him to continue to exercise the "ministry of Peter." If we add to this reflection what might be called its reverse side, we are beginning to realize in some sense the profound disorder of soul that democratic societies in particular have chosen for themselves.

Often, when I am teaching a course on St. Augustine or St. Thomas, I tell the students to take a little time to go over to the library and take a look of the Opera Omnia of either of these amazing men. Knowing that Augustine spent a long and very busy life as a bishop and that Aquinas died before he was fifty after thirty years of constant scholarly work, one cannot help but wonder if they did anything else but write every waking hour of every day of their lives. Few of us, even if we read them every day of our lives, could complete a thorough reading of either of their collected works. I cannot help think that the whole output of John Paul II is already larger than that either of Augustine or of Aquinas, and if not, it soon will be. No doubt both Augustine and Aquinas had secretaries and the Holy Father has a whole staff, but the fact remains that the amount and quality of this work is truly remarkable. Moreover, it is not just explanatory or expository, but it is an original and faithful reexamination of every aspect not only of the Catholic faith but of modern thought in the light of classical philosophy and history.

VI.

"For modernity," Peter Kreeft has observed, "the only sin is to believe in sin."[14] The question is whether we can again believe in sin. The only way to regain this apparently lost perception of reality is to rediscover our moral language, our ability to call things what they really are. We can begin to do this initially by identifying the causal connection between our internal moral failures, in what we choose, and the grave disorders that publicly exist in our lives, in our polities, in failures that cannot be resolved by money or aid unless they are also related to moral purpose.

"The first step to such a moral reformation is the redefinition of the problem," Gertrude Himmelfarb has rightly written.

"Social pathology" is the language of sociology and psychology. "Moral pathology" — the language of theology — more accurately describes the complex of phenomena suggested by that term: welfare dependency, illegitimacy, crime and the like. Most of us by now advanced beyond the old argument that these are purely economic and social problems, the products of poverty, unemployment, racism, discrimination, deprivation. We are beginning to recognize that there is a large moral dimension in them.... In the past few decades we have deliberately divorced poor relief from moral principles, sanctions or incentives. This reflects in part the theory that society is responsible for all social problems and should therefore assume the task of solving them.... The divorce of social policy from moral principles ... also reflects the spirit of relativism that is so prevalent in our time. It is this (relativism) that makes it difficult to pass any moral judgments or impose any moral conditions upon the recipients of relief.[15]

These perceptive remarks naturally arise after the exhaustion of all alternative efforts to solve human problems without recognizing that they are finally also problems of free choice and of sinfulness. The consequences of these choices and sins are measurable and visible. The same choices and sins cannot but continue to cause the same problems until their moral source and meaning are acknowledged and addressed. What Lewis, Kreeft, and John Paul II would suggest, as would Gertrude Himmelfarb, is that the changes that we must make require both virtue and grace, without which we have not and will not find the resources to arrest the decline in which we find ourselves.

The central theme in Kreeft's analysis of C. S. Lewis concerns a statement in Aquinas to the effect that the natural law could not be abolished from the heart of man. Kreeft reluctantly thought, on the evidence of our time, that perhaps Aquinas was wrong here. He thought that Lewis has warned us in The Abolition of Man that modern thought could indeed eradicate any sense of moral purpose from man, that we would produce a generation of men wholly oblivious to the distinction of right and wrong, the distinction that lies at the heart of all ethical considerations. Not only would this abolition happen, but it is what should happen, in the eyes of much modern thought. We want a completely "value-free" personal and public life. The autonomous center of our souls lies in our wills. The will cannot, in Aquinas' view, be touched by external forces. But if this center is once breached so that men are subject to what Lewis called political or economic "conditioners" limited by no natural or divine law, it would be possible to propose the control of society for its own good. This control would be solely by means of pleasure or pain administered by a state that is also in control of police, medicine, education, religion, and media.

Kreeft finally agrees that in all likelihood that the natural law cannot be abolished from the heart of man. The fact is, however, we have come a long way in establishing the principles of public order and private activity the precise opposite of what is forbidden in the commandments and the teachings of the Church. "Our times may be terrible, even apocalyptic," Kreeft wrote,

but that is our normal condition according to Scripture: deadly peril, spiritual warfare, wrestling with principalities and powers in high places on earth and low places in Hell.... Now perhaps you will believe again that the One who alone can save your society is the One who alone can save your soul.[16]

The central theme of saving our societies by saving our souls is, of course, classic. It is in Plato, in Augustine.

This theme is also a central concern in John Paul II and a principal aspect of the Jubilee of the Year 2000. What it seems to come down to is that we will not save our societies until we begin to look at our souls. Speaking of the Third Year of the Jubilee Preparations, 1999, the year devoted to the Father, John Paul II wrote:

In this third year the sense of being on a "journey to the Father" should encourage everyone to undertake, by holding fast to Christ the Redeemer of man, a journey of authentic conversion. This includes both a "negative" aspect, that, of liberation from sin, and a "positive" aspect, that of choosing good, accepting the ethical values expressed in the natural law, which is confirmed and deepened by the Gospel. This is the proper context of a renewed appreciation and more intense celebration of the Sacrament of Penance in its most profound meaning. The call to conversion as the indispensable condition of Christian love is particularly important in contemporary society, where the very foundations of an ethically correct vision of human existence often seem to have been lost (#50).

Such lines express the same concern we find in Lewis and Kreeft about the lost sense of sin, of its centrality and remedies.

John Paul II then has a very realistic insight into what is the nature of our times and the causes of its most fundamental disorders. He likewise has a clear view of the revelational nature both of our own abilities to understand what is wrong and once understood to remedy them. What is perhaps disarming about John Paul II, and at the same time what shows his particular genius in understanding Christianity, is his clear and logical use of reason. But together with this awareness, he knows that the seriousness of sin itself, its reaches and its remedies, are rooted in grace. The orthodox doctrine about original sin, which John Paul II reaffirms often, does not maintain that the human soul is of its very structure and nature corrupted. On the other hand, even though the validity of reason as an instrument of our soul is valid, nevertheless, by ourselves we cannot and will not save ourselves.

Ever since I first read it, I have been struck, in this regard, by the following passage in Centesimus Annus: "We need to repeat that there can be no genuine solution of the 'social question' apart from the Gospel, and that the 'new things' can find in the Gospel the context of their correct understanding and the proper moral perspective for judging them" (#5). The academic "strategy" of Catholicism in the modern world, if I might put it that way, has been to stress the "nature" side of St. Thomas' "grace perfects and builds upon nature." We have thought that by showing ourselves equally, if not more reasonable than what the secular order considered reasonable, we would render modern men more open to revelation. But, as Lewis especially has shown, it does not really work this way in practice. If I might put it that way, the good can be rejected, even hated. If we reexamine the intimate correlation between philosophic or scientific errors in the modern world over against the disordered moral lives of the originators of these ideas, we will begin to suspect that in fact these theories or ideologies have been propounded not as reactions to objective grounds of science but as justifications that would ultimately prevent personal lives from being judged by natural or divine law.

Paul Johnson has shown, in Modern Times, that the major crimes of this concluding century, the end of the Second Millennium, were efforts of politicians who claimed some philosophic pretention. John Paul II extends this disorder to include the often disordered lives of ordinary citizens found in the modern democratic polity. This is rooted in a "liberty" that acknowledges no rule above itself for anyone, ruler or ruled.. This position recalls Aristotle's principle that the only rule of a democracy is that "liberty" that admits no transcendent order to which it is directed. In this context, we see that John Paul II's strategy for the Jubilee is in fact one that re-proposes to our time, in the face of accurate analyses of its condition, the proposition that reason alone, however good, will not be enough. The position that human, autonomous reason is enough is, in fact, the major opposition to John Paul II in particular and revelation in general.

Several writers, notably William Bennett and Gertrude Himmelfarb herself, have held that the return to virtue, to right order, will require, as it has in the past, a return to and support from religion. What is clear in John Paul II, however, in his careful attention to the ecumenical movement, in his dealings with other religions, in his awareness in Veritatis Splendor, of serious intellectual disorders in the intelligentsia and even clerisy of the Church is that just any old religion is not enough, nor is it what he is talking about. The Pope can be blunt when he needs to: "It cannot be denied that, for many Christians," he wrote,

the spiritual life is passing through a time of uncertainty which affects not only their moral life but also their life of prayer and the theological correctness of their faith. Faith, already put to the test by the challenges of our times, is sometimes disoriented by erroneous theological views, the spread of which is abetted by the crisis of obedience vis-a-vis the Church's Magisterium (#36).

A return to religion, then, is not a return to just any old religion but it is a return to precisely the Gospel, to the Church.

The Jubilee of the Year 2000 is not merely a celebration of the accomplishments of mankind but includes a repentance of mankind before God, the Blessed Trinity, in the Godhead of the Father, for the depths of disorder in our very souls, from which alone we are redeemed, by Christ, the Redeemer of Man. The scope of the Holy Father's planning and purpose is, in short, breathtaking and magisterial. What is remarkable about him, called, as he said of himself, "from a faraway place", is his ability to transcend the whole of the modern media and political and academic structure, in his "ministry of Peter." Moreover, he has managed in the planning for the "Coming Third Millennium" to zero in on the essential locus of the personal disorder of sin that lies behind the turmoil of our century, indeed of our modern centuries.

Like Augustine's Eleventh Book of The Confessions, the Jubilee Year 2000 is a meditation on time. The Holy Father manages to bring in the whole history of ancient, medieval, and modern times, before the next Millennium. He includes previous Jubilees and previous arrivals of Christianity into the various parts of the world as if we are still witnessing the spread of the Kingdom of God, still going forth to teach all nations. And as in Veritatis Splendor, in line with Paul Johnson's remarks about the Twentieth Century being the greatest killer of men in our history, the Holy Father returns to the theme of martyrdom, both in the past and in the present. He has a lively sense of the communion of saints, of those forgotten ones who are the seeds of a new life. The Pope actually intends to update the famous Roman Martyrology (#37). "In our own century," he wrote in Tertio Millennio Adveniente, "the martyrs have returned, many of them nameless, 'unknown soldiers", as it were of God's great cause. As far as possible their witness should not be lost to the Church" (#37). One gets the impression, from such words of John Paul II, that he sees the Coming Millennium as either a new blossoming of holiness or, to follow Kreeft and Lewis, the "abolition of man", as the most disordered of times because we have chosen to continue to live with the most disordered of souls. The Pope intends to make this unsettling choice quite clear to us, whether we like it or not. This is, he thinks, what the ministry of Peter is about.

In conclusion, the times are such that we are left with a very clear alternative. Either we do return to or accept the graces that are offered from the Trinity through the Incarnation of the Word, if we be obedient to this plan of salvation designed to forgive us our sins, or we will erect an order in which the only criterion of humanity is a "freedom" that is designed to overturn the internal order of our souls and the external order of those institutions designed to preserve them. As we look directly in the eye the increased "social problems" as they are improperly called in our text books and press, on our sins, as they are often better called, things like abortion of our tiniest kind, euthanasia, genetic engineering, thought control, academic intolerance for any spiritual or revelational presence, the absolute power of a state that knows no limits but ourselves, we can begin to see that against which John Paul II has been writing and that from which we might, if we choose, find salvation and redemption. In the end, then, phrases like "there is no tomorrow," "repent and believe in the Gospel", and "the praise of the Trinity" by a mankind that has heard the Good News in the light of its own sins, all belong to the same discourse, to John Paul II's exhortation on the "Coming Third Millennium".

Endnotes

[1] John Paul II, May 15, 1991, The Pope Speaks, 36 (#6, 1991), 344.

[2] Crossing the Threshold of Hope (New York: Knopf, 1994), 131-32.

[3] L'Osservatore Romano, November 30, 1994, p. 1.

[4] John Paul II, "Reconciliation and Penance" (December 2, 1984), The Pope Speaks, 30 (#1, 1985), 42-43.

[5] Peter Kreeft, C. S. Lewis in the Third Millenium (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), p. 46.

[6] John Paul II, Apostolic Letter, "Tertio Millennio Adveniente," (November 10, 1994), L'Osservatore Romano, English, November 16, 1994.

[7] Crossing the Threshold of Hope, ibid., pp. 48-49. See also John Paul II, The Theology of the Body (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1981-86), 3 vols.

[8] Charles Schulz, And the Beagles and the Bunnies Shall Lie Down Together (New York: Holt, 1984).

[9] See James V. Schall, Does Catholicism Still Exist? (Staten Island, N. Y.: Alba House, 1994).

[10] Ibid., pp. 102-03

Footnotes 9 - 17 are missing.

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From Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Newsletter, 18 (April, 1995), 2-13.

This item 901 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org