That must have sounded like a very ambitious and exciting goal 30 years ago. But if, having seen pictures of African villagers and Indian slum-dwellers wielding cellphones, you have the strong impression that the digital divide was bridged a while back; if the possibilities of the internet seem to you to have gone about as far as sanity will permit; and if your dearest wish is to unplug your laptop and bury your smartphone in a deep drawer — the hedonic centres of your brain may not be lighting up at the idea that there is an unfinished communication agenda.

There is unfinished business there, of course, but mere talk has become cheap — literally; just think of Skyping people around the world, for nothing. The bottom has dropped out of the information market; there is just too darn much of it. Constant chatter about daily trivia has become exhausting. What people increasingly crave is the luxury of silence: quiet spaces in which to collect their thoughts, get in touch with their own being, figure out what it all means, and come up with something that is really worth sharing.

A few months ago US writer Pico Iyer reflected on this theme in an essay in the New York Times. He noted: the rise of “black-hole resorts” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms; writer friends who “pay good money” to buy software that disables their internet connections for up to eight hours at a time (I rely on my local telecom for that); and an Intel experiment whereby company workers were guaranteed four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning. Two of Iyer’s journalist friends “observe an ‘Internet Sabbath’ every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation.” If only…

In the quest for quiet, other ancient customs are being pressed into service. Although Eastern meditation, or awareness, techniques have been around in the West for a long time, they seem to have a new lease on life. An estimated 16 million Americans sustain a $6 billion yoga industry. And there is rising interest in “mindfulness” — basically, focusing on breathing to develop increased awareness of the present — as both a therapeutic and an educational tool. Actress Goldie Hawn, author of 10 Mindful Minutes: Giving Our Children–and Ourselves–the Social and Emotional Skills to Reduce Stress and Anxiety for Healthier, Happier Lives, is the poster girl for the movement, which is in part a response to the distractions that constantly divide our attention and make us strangers not only to ourselves but even to those we live and work with.

But there is a western tradition that we can draw on too, in order to achieve inner tranquillity and richer communication. A few years ago an art film about Carthusian monks living at the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps, and conversing with one another only once a week, was an unexpected hit in Europe and North America. Into Great Silence, all two-and-a-half hours of it, has no soundtrack other than the natural sounds of the monks at work and prayer, and of their environment.

German director Philip Groning has interpreted the appreciative response to his film as a commentary on the unhappiness that results from having to “design our own personality, design our own plan for life, achieve that plan for life, and then be happy on top of that.” He suggests that being so totally responsible for ourselves is a burden that is more than a human being can bear, but this is what happens when God is not sensed in the world. The monks, by contrast, have faith in God, “faith in the sense of trust, of completely trusting that they are like children in their mother’s arms. They feel like they are in the hands of God, and this is good.”

Perhaps it is that sense that subtly draws Pico Iyer periodically to a Benedictine monastery in the hills near Big Sur to live in the hermitage for a few days at a time. He says he doesn’t attend services when he is there and has never meditated, there or anywhere. “I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness…” He finds other people doing it too. OK, he is not looking for God, but why is the stillness around the monastery better than somewhere else — like in that quiet room with no TV at the expensive hotel up the road? Is it just the money?

In any case, silence and stillness are not enough for us. They might be for a little while, as an immediate escape from the din and demands of daily life. But they are means to an end rather than ends in themselves. In his Letter for World Communications Day Pope Benedict XVI shows how silence is meant to serve relationships — with God and others.

In silence, says Benedict, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves as well as express ourselves. But in silence we also allow the other person to speak; “space is created for mutual listening and deeper human relationships become possible.” We are not just stuck in our own words and ideas but can help “build an authentic body of shared knowledge.”

Much of our communication, the Pope continues, is driven by questions in search of answers. (The search engine has an almost godlike power to deliver the information we want.) But even amid the swirling tides of information on the internet many people find the ultimate questions of life confronting them: “Who am I? What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?” These point to the desire for truth that God has inscribed in human hearts and can, through a balance of dialogue and silent reflection, lead to him.

What happens then, one might add, is like, but even more unlike, what happens in Buddhist-style meditation or mindfulness, as a 1989 letter on the subject from the Vatican makes clear. The likeness would be in whatever serenity and therapeutic benefit is achieved. The difference lies in whom one encounters: for the Buddhist meditator, it is at best the depths of the self, which, he may believe, merges with an impersonal divine; for the one reaching out to the Christian God it is another person — divine and completely other, but the kind of personal being described by the film-maker Groning, into whose arms harried netizens can throw themselves and find not only peace but love.

Of course, the search for quiet and recollection does not necessarily take a religious turn. It can happen in a multitude of ways: a walk in the country, losing oneself in a good book or in a hobby such as wood-turning or embroidery, listening to music, or just sitting in a room by oneself. As somebody famous once said, “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.”

But to have the right effect times of quiet have to be regular, as regular as our exposure to noise and activity. As Goldie Hawn, along with most meditation gurus, says, “10 mindful minutes” a day. Where do the other contemplative activities fit in, though? Pico Iyer’s friends who observe the “Internet Sabbath” give us a clue.

Remember Sunday? The way it was before shopping and sport and catching up with household chores and blobbing out in front of TV took over? Now that’s a tradition worth reclaiming. If we could spend one day a week on the old mix of community (church), family (dinner), and individual pursuits we might begin to bridge those communication gaps that are far more threatening to our wellbeing than the digital divide.

Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.

OK, I know at first glance the “Year of Faith” doesn’t seem all that exciting or noteworthy. And I know as Catholics we’re supposed to be excited about it, even though we might not think it’s a big deal. But seriously, something truly amazing is happening in the Church. We are in the midst of an unprecedented time in our history; a time that Catholics have been longing to see for decades.

For many, many years the Church has lingered in doldrums, seemingly adrift at sea without direction, without purpose, and without relevance. In fact, sometimes we tried so hard to be “relevant” that we forgot how to be Catholic. Other times we spent so much energy trying to find a “new direction” that we forgot we already have a map, a course, and a compass.

The statistics of the past several decades confirm this reality. In the turbulent years following the cultural revolution of the ’60s, the Church suffered greatly. Mass attendance, Catholic school enrollment and vocations have drastically declined. Fewer Catholic couples are getting married; fewer parents are having their children baptized. Scandals have plagued us; things have been bleak. But now the tides seem to be changing.

Catholics throughout the world are experiencing a renewed sense of purpose and mission. Thanks to the leadership of Blessed John Paul II, and now Benedict XVI, the Church is experiencing the fruits of the New Evangelization. What is the New Evangelization? Simply put, it is a movement focused on sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ to a world that has become increasingly secularized, and even hostile, to the Christian message — and is therefore in need of Christ now more than ever. It is the call to share the life-giving message of the Gospel with others by professing, celebrating, and sincerely living this message in our own lives.

This effort has been made especially fruitful by the involvement of one of the Church’s most underutilized, and yet most valuable, resources — the laity. The apostolate of the Laity is alive and well, and it is at the front lines of the New Evangelization. The same Catholics who for decades have longed to see this day have found a voice. They have taken up the cause of spreading the Gospel, and they have been training a host of evangelists to do the same. The Church no longer relies on preaching from the pulpit alone. She no longer imagines that priests and religious are the sole harbingers of the Christian message. She now relies now more than ever on witness of the laity.

As you’re reading this, you may be saying to yourself, “Great, things are looking up. The New Evangelization is well on the way!” But, you shouldn’t. Things are most certainly not looking up, at least not yet. Why? Well, because the Gospel has this funny thing about it. Yes, it likes to be shared. Yes, it is a living, breathing, life-giving reality that has the power to change the world. But it does lack one thing — you.

Even if every bishop in the world fully embraces this call to conversion and renewal, the New Evangelization can still fail. The Church, the Gospel, and the entire world need you. You are called to be the living herald of the Word. The pope, the bishops, and the priests of the Church cannot share the Gospel in the way that you can. Most people you meet are not likely to hear this Sunday’s homily, or read the pope’s next apostolic letter. But they will hear you. They will see how you embody the Gospel even in the way you pay for your groceries. This is why the Holy Father has called for the Year of Faith, “a summons to an authentic and renewed conversion to the Lord, the one Savior of the world.”[1] This call to conversion is about learning how to profess, celebrate, and live our faith in our own lives in a way that transforms those around us. In the words of Pope Benedict, “We want this Year to arouse in every believer the aspiration to profess the faith in fullness and with renewed conviction, with confidence and hope.”[2] How can we do this?

During the Year of Faith, I expect there will be many opportunities to learn how you can be a part of the New Evangelization, but I want to bring one opportunity in particular to your attention. On June 15-16, 2012, the National Catholic Bible Conference is coming to the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. For the past several years, this conference has attracted Catholics from around the world to learn how to read, understand, and share the Gospel message. In other words, it is a training course for the New Evangelization. This year’s event is especially exciting because it features some lay evangelists you might be familiar with: Scott Hahn, Jeff Cavins, Tim Gray, and Edward Sri. During the span of two days, participants of the National Catholic Bible Conference will be spiritually fed, and intellectually enriched by these and other popular Catholic speakers.

Just imagine the evangelistic potential of this; thousands of Catholics equipped with the knowledge, skill, and motivation to share the Gospel with others. Think of the difference it could make, not only in the lives of those Catholics, but in every single person they meet. Now imagine that you are one of those Catholics. You are already at the frontlines of the New Evangelization. You are face-to-face with the culture every day. It is critical for the success of the New Evangelization that you know how to share the truth and beauty of our faith with others you meet. You are the New Evangelization.

You can learn more about the 2012 National Catholic Bible Conference by visiting www.CatholicBibleConference.com.

John Harden received a bachelors degree in religious studies from Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, and his masters degree in theology from Franciscan University of Steubenville. He serves as the marketing coordinator for Ascension Press. John, his wife Meghann, and their four children live in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

In addition to recently announced guidance by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, it seems that the Holy Father’s ongoing environmental dialogues demonstrate one method of baptizing a largely scientific, timely topic that, in itself, raises a variety of social and ethical questions. Ecology straddles and informs issues of human life, social mores, and the relation between faith and reason—three areas critical to reintroducing the Gospel to Western culture.

The pontiff laid a foundation for all this in his 2007 World Peace Day message. Building on the connection made by John Paul II of a “natural and moral” structure within the cosmos, Benedict XVI continues his predecessor’s use of the secular term “human ecology,” which, he tells us, “demands a ‘social’ ecology.” Clearly, the Holy Father has much more in mind than ecosystem integrity when he speaks of ecology.

A year later, at Sydney’s World Youth Day, the pontiff explored such themes more deeply. After reflecting on the Earth’s beauty as seen during his flight to Australia—which called to his mind the goodness of nature as revealed in the Book of Genesis and the psalms of praise for creation—he noted the presence of modern global ills, such as “erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world’s mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption.” He then spoke of the link between pollution and sin, and, thus, used the former to instruct us on the latter.

“Here too, in our personal lives and in our communities, we can encounter a hostility, something dangerous; a poison which threatens to corrode what is good, reshape who we are, and distort the purpose for which we have been created.”

This link between the natural world and the human person took center stage within the environmental discussions of his 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate. “The book of nature is one and indivisible: it takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development.”

Like “human ecology,” the concept of “integral human development” is itself an example of baptizing contemporary, worldly sciences. The notion of the human person’s integral or authentic development was proposed by Paul VI to deepen notions that were in vogue in the 1960s. When pontiffs include within the magisterial lexicon technical terms from secular fields, they elevate them with the grace of revelation—and this may get peoples’ attention.

This was apparent on the floor of the German Parliament last September. There, Pope Benedict spoke of eco-political movements that had grown out of a concern for nature. He did this to offer a point of agreement with his diverse audience—which, sadly, was missing most of its left-wing members, who were protesting the pope’s appearance. He then connected this conversation to the Gospel. The point of agreement he sought was an acknowledgement that there is an order to nature, which we ignore to our peril. “If something is wrong in our relationship with reality,” the pontiff advised, building off sentiments of the idealistic German ecologists of the 1970s, “then we must all reflect seriously on the whole situation and we are all prompted to question the very foundations of our culture.”

“The importance of ecology is no longer disputed,” he continued. “We must listen to the language of nature and we must answer accordingly. Yet I would like to underline a point that seems to me to be neglected, today as in the past: there is also an ecology of man. Man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will.”

With this proposition that there is an “ecology of man”—like so many of his statements and propositions, especially in Caritas in Veritate—Pope Benedict XVI demonstrates a stunning methodology that the rest of us can use to engage post-Christian cultures. The analogy between a healthy ecosystem and a fully integrated human person and culture—of a community that thrives when its members heed physical and moral laws—invites reflection on issues at the core of Christian anthropology, such as the nature of marriage, the value of all human life, and the place of the Cross.

Indeed, given what seems to be a stalemate in the arguments for and against topics such as same-sex marriage, abortion, and embryonic stem-cell research, etc., ecology offers different and unexpected pathways for dialogue with those who dismiss Christian anthropologies.

We find this in practice in recent statements by the American bishops—most especially Bishop Stephen E. Blaire of Stockton, California, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development—who have been vocal about recent federal regulation of mercury. In addressing this largely eco-scientific issue, the bishops have reframed it to speak of cultural and scientific attitudes toward the unborn. That is, just as a buildup of mercury in human bodies (born and unborn) from contaminated foods causes severe neurological harm—and does so irrespective of one’s opinion of mercury—so it must be true that other threats to the unborn are of equivalent concern, again, regardless of one’s personal opinions.

Indeed, unalterable natural and physiological laws require that mercury harms human life. So, too, do unalterable moral laws require that, for instance, recreational drug use and extramarital sex cause suffering within friendships and families, thus harming civilization and hastening its decline. Ecological discussions are, then, not some sort of ruse to sneak the Gospel through the back door. Rather, they are a new means to present the Gospel to a world reeling from sin.

The pontiff did exactly this in his 2011 World Food Day message. Referring to the inequities in worldwide food supplies and distribution, Pope Benedict noted that the resolution of such ills requires “adopting an inner attitude of responsibility, able to inspire a different life style, with the necessary modest behavior and consumption, in order thereby: to promote the good of future generations in sustainable terms; the safeguard of the goods of creation; the distribution of resources and above all, the concrete commitment to the development of entire peoples and nations.”

This “adopting of an inner attitude of responsibility” is really just another way of saying “repent and believe in the Gospel.” Indeed, in a December 2000 address to catechists, the future pontiff spoke of the element of conversion within the New Evangelization. “The Greek word for converting means: to rethink—to question one’s own and common way of living; to allow God to enter into the criteria of one’s life.”

Ecology, then, allows the Church to communicate its understanding of sacrifice for the good of others in ways that will resonate with secular naturalists, who, in similar ways, ask for sacrifice.

Here, for instance, Catholics have something to offer with a return to meatless Friday fasting. The meat industry can be very dirty—one that uses significant amounts of water and grain to keep you and me feasting on cheeseburgers. If Catholics were to reduce their meat consumption by, theoretically, fourteen percent (one day out of seven), this penitential practice would reap ecological benefits. It would also become a means for evangelization, because such a public witness (if it were adopted by a Church the size of theUnited States’) would resonate with environmental communities, the meat industry, and, yes, the media.

Lastly, the Catholic engagement of ecology showcases the Catholic relationship with science—a relationship that many wrongly characterize as hostile. Perhaps this is why in his October 2011 Apostolic Letter announcing a Year of Faith, the Holy Father admits that evangelizing within the West’s hyper-positivistic mentality will bring new challenges. Fortunately, the Church’s perennial engagement of outside worldviews—from St. Paul to today’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences—provides 21^st century evangelizers with the tools to connect modern thought to the timeless Gospel. Indeed, the Apostolic Letter notes that “the Church has never been afraid of demonstrating that there cannot be any conflict between faith and genuine science, because both, albeit via different routes, tend towards the truth.”

This reference to Blessed John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio and Section 159 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church highlights that the re-evangelization of a post-Christian world requires, in part, engaging intellectual communities. One way of doing exactly this is to make the Church present in ongoing conversations about great scientific and moral issues of the age. And ecology is just one of them.

-Pope Benedict XVI

I have not made a careful check, but I am willing to bet that if one were to analyze word frequency in the texts of Benedict XVI, the word used most often would be “joy.”

Let’s begin with one of his many affirmations of the importance, for the Christian, of joy, and try to apply it to this pope who just after his election presented himself as a “humble laborer in the vineyard of the Lord.” It is a passage taken from the book-interview “Light of the World,” and, placed almost at the very beginning, sounds categorical:

“That Christianity gives joy and breadth is also a thread that runs through my whole life. Ultimately someone who is always only in opposition could probably not endure life at all.”

First point: joy and reason are connected. And the connection is found in this strange religion that “expands the horizon.” As Gilbert K. Chesterton wrote of his conversion, “becoming a Catholic broadens the mind,” and further on, “becoming Catholic does not mean leaving off thinking, it means learning how to think.”

Second point, a surprising one: we were perhaps accustomed to the idea of a revolutionary pope, of a pope “against,” and yet the denial comes immediately, because one cannot live “always only in opposition.”

Obviously the contrast is only apparent. Further on in the same passage, in fact, the pope clarifies: “But at the same time the fact was ever-present, albeit in varying doses, that the Gospel stands in opposition to powerful constellations. . . . Enduring hostility and offering resistance are therefore part of it – a resistance, however, that serves to bring to light what is positive.”

A resistance, then, that means abandoning all resignation, complaint, or resentment, and walking in a patient and tenacious search for “what is positive,” for that goodness which is hidden in the furrows of human history. This is the courage of Benedict, the courage of joy:

“Simple, genuine joy has become more rare. Joy is today in a certain way more and more freighted with moral and ideological baggage. [...] The world does not become better if it is deprived of joy, the world needs persons who discover the good, who are capable of feeling joy because of it and in this way also receive the prompting and the courage to do good. [...] We need that original trust which ultimately only faith can give. That, in the end, the world is good, that God exists and is good. From this stems also the courage of joy, which becomes in turn a responsibility, so that others may also rejoice and receive the glad tidings.”

Joy and humility advance or retreat in lockstep. Chesterton captured this well in his brief but dense 1901 essay on humility:

“The new philosophy of self-esteem and self-assertion declares that humility is a vice. [...] It follows with the precision of clockwork every one of the great joys of life. No one, for example, was ever in love without indulging in a positive debauch of humility. [...] If humility has been discredited as a virtue at the present day, it is not wholly irrelevant to remark that this discredit has arisen at the same time as a great collapse of joy in current literature and philosophy. [...] When we are genuinely happy, we think we are unworthy of happiness. But when we are demanding a divine emancipation we seem to be perfectly certain that we are unworthy of anything.”

Joy and humility, then. The two stand or fall together. But one piece of the puzzle is still missing, which however is very much present in the man and pope from Bavaria: humor.

For Benedict XVI, joy and humor are closely intertwined. As he writes at the conclusion of his essay on dogmatic theology “The God of Jesus Christ”:

“One of the fundamental rules for the discernment of spirits could therefore be the following: where joy is lacking, where humor dies, there the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, is not present either. And vice versa: joy is a sign of grace. The one who is profoundly serene, who has suffered without losing joy, that one is not far from the God of the Gospel, from the Spirit of God, who is the Spirit of eternal joy.”

Jacques Maritain once said that a society that loses its sense of humor is preparing its own funeral.

Humor as a conduit for joy; the “sense of humor” as an entertaining (in the soundest sense of the term) way of living life, starting from the fundamental point: the essence of Christianity is joy. In the words of Chesterton, a master of humor, “joy is the gigantic secret of the Christian.” As Benedict XVI writes in “The Salt of the Earth”:

“Faith gives joy. When God is not there, the world becomes desolate, and everything becomes boring, and everything is completely unsatisfactory. . . . To that extent it can be said that the basic element of Christianity is joy. Joy not in the sense of cheap fun, which can conceal desperation in the background.”

If the world turns its back on God, the pope-theologian and former prefect of the Holy Office tells us, it is not condemned to falsehood, to blasphemy, and not even to heresy, but to boredom. There comes to mind the quip of Clive S. Lewis from before he converted from atheism to Christianity: “Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores.”

Excerpted from the last chapter of the author’s recently published book on Benedict XVI, Andrea Monda, “Benedetta umiltà. Le virtù semplici di Joseph Ratzinger”, Lindau, Torino, 2012, pp. 192, euro 14.00.

The so-called goal of Consequentialism is to maximize the good of humanity. It operates on the Utilitarian principle that “the ends justify the means”. As a result human beings are often treated in an impersonal way i.e. not for their own sake but for the utility that can be derived from them.

Moral philosopher Bernard Williams criticized Conseqentialism on the grounds that the central idea of Consequentialism is that the only kind of thing that has intrinsic value isstates of affairs. For the consequentialist human acts have no value in and of themselves but only insofar as they produce the best states of affairs. The right act is the act, of those available to choose from, that brings about the best consequences while supposedly maximizing the overall good of everyone’s self interest.

Williams also objected to the doctrine of “negative responsibility” that follows from Consequentialism’s assigning ultimate value to states of affair. This doctrine holds that one is just as responsible for the things that he allows to happen or fails to prevent as he is for the things he brings about. Consequentialism, then, does not take seriously the distinctiveness of persons but rather treats them impartially. It totally subordinates the individual to the collectivity. This deprives persons of their identity and integrity.

Consequentialism is a dehumanizing formula for it reduces human beings to material objects which can be exploited and to commodities that can be bought and sold. It reduces them to beings whose free will has effectively been abrogated – beings upon whom a judgment of moral good or evil cannot validly be passed. Such a philosophy ends up poisoning the social structures and human relations it purports to strengthen – defeating, in turn, its own purpose.

Some like Peter Railton advanced Consequentialism to a stage that supposedly allows the individual person the freedom to pursue personal goals of happiness while remaining, at the same time, subject to the collectivity. This “sophisticated consequentialist” is not always bound to consequentialist calculating, to rules or to directly seeking the goal of maximizing the good. Instead, he may at times find it more advantageous to indirectly maximize the good by cultivating certain, necessary areas of personal interest such as human relationships – relationships whose intimacy and friendship are not subject to suffer the “loss” and “alienation” that often comes with direct consequentialism. This would mean that on an act to act basis the sophisticated consequentialist will sometimes do the wrong thing according to his criterion of right in order to achieve the overall good. Here we have the clear justification for claiming that the ends justify the means. We also have the foundation for moral relativism.

This theory necessarily entails the cultivation of certain dispositions or character traits that are the product of moral, emotional, sociological and psychological inconsistency. These include a certain weakness of will, indecisiveness, rationalization and guilt. More precisely it involves a certain form of self-deception that enables the consequentialist to live a double life.

At the level of morality however, the conscience, being one and indivisible, does not permit the acting out of parallel lives. Scripture has it that “no man can serve two masters” (Matt. 6: 24). Railton’s sophisticated consequentialist serves as a psychological artifice to disguise this fact in order to allow the consequentialist the opportunity to live comfortably in a fictitious world of his own choosing.

How often do we see this charade being played out in the real world with our Catholic politicians and even our Catholic bishops?

Politicians, in order to get elected will first compartmentalize and separate their private life from their public life – claiming, in effect that one can lead an authentic Christian life while sustaining two different realities of existence. They will claim, for example, that one can privately oppose abortion, in unison with his or her Catholic faith while politically supporting, at the same time, a woman’s right to choose. The longer this facade is upheld and sustained the more the conscience is degraded at its most core level to that of a mechanism producing excuses for one’’s conduct. Incrementally, one begins to construct a wall of resistence to anyone who might oppose this parallel existence. As one’’s guilt is pushed beneath the level of the specific judgement pronounced by conscience to that level of neglect of one’s own being one becomes dulled to the voice of truth and eventually incapable of any longer hearing the voice of conscience. This explains how our catholic politicians like U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Kathleen Sebelius can publically, and out of a hardened conviction, confuse the Catholic Church’’s teachings on such serious issues as contraception, when life begins, and abortion.

Ultimately, Consequentialism is something morally and psychologically debilitating. It eventually ends up poisoning all of society for when its’ gravely immoral policies make their way into law, they begin to incrementally, surreptitiously, almost invisibly, impose themselves on society by both coercion and force – marginalizing in the process both religion and those of religious faith.

Sadly, many of our bishops have also succumbed to this kind of mental ‘compartmentalization’ or bicameral thinking. The U.S. bishops, for example , affirmed as a group in their June 2004 statement on pro-abortion Catholics in political life that “The decision concerning the refusal of Holy Communion to an individual can best be made by the bishop in the person’s home diocese with whom he or she presumably is in conversation.” Essentially this amounts to what some might call “territorial morality” – the same general formula used by politicians who claim the right to lead a double life. In this instance, however, the conflict resides not especially in the individual person but, and perhaps at a much higher level, within the body of bishops as a whole. Further, when bishops allow well known, pro-abortion politicians to receive Holy Communion, as almost all do under the pretense that all culpability for guilt lies solely with the communicant rather than also with the minister of Communion, these bishops foster and encourage the dictatorship of relativism.

Consequentialist – utilitarian ideology, which purports to bring about the greatest good for the greatest number of people, is insufficient for it operates from within a narrow landscape of particular instances and doesn’t consider – nor can it – how different situations are ultimately connected to each other in time or how they are understood in relation to the persons that help bring them about. In other words it functions on appeal only to consequences the totality of which cannot be known but which are necessary – according to its own standard in the absence of absolute truth – to arrive at a truthful decision. What may at first appear to be clearly the best thing in a particular situation may in the long run turn out to be the worst thing and vice versa. Albeit calculated, every decision becomes little more than a shot in the dark. Consequentialism thus pretends to achieve the harmony of oneself with the cosmic “whole”, the overcoming of all separations – including the distance that separates creature from Creator. In this context, responsibility, evil, goodness and moral judgement become something collective without a clear concept or manageable moral definition. In fact Immoral acts, such as lying, dishonesty, cheating, stealing, killing, are often falsely elevated to the status of moral virtues under the description of the “right act” – that being the act required to bring about the “perceived” greater good. This is especially evident in the totalitarian regimes of the 20^th century that have been largely motivated by consequentialist ideologies. Ultimately, Consequentialism fails as an adequate moral theory worthy of human pursuit. It succeeds only in advancing what Pope Benedict XVI called “a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”

The background to this 20^th century persecution of Catholics was as revolutionary as that in 18^th century France. First Mexico achieved independence from Spain and then from the French in the 19^th century. The governments formed after these rebellions became more and more anti-clerical and anti-Catholic because they thought the Church was supportive of the foreign regimes.

The 1917 Constitution created laws that mirror the French Revolution’s attack on the Church: seizing church property, outlawing religious orders, taking control of church matters—and went even further. The Constitution also prohibited priests from voting, the Church from even commenting on any public policy, and would not allow priests to wear their clericals or vestments outside their churches. This meant that public processions, as at Corpus Christi, were prohibited. President Calles, who was virulently anti-Catholic (and a Freemason), enforced these restrictions vigorously after his election in 1924. He also required state licensing of priests; thus the state could limit the number of priests by not licensing them. When priests continued to serve the Catholics of Mexico without being licensed, they were forced underground. Evelyn Waugh wrote in the introduction to his biography of St. Edmund Campion, the English Jesuit martyr of the 16^th century, that his story – that of the hunted, fugitive priest – was being repeated. Graham Greene, whose novel The Power and the Glory is set during this period, called the situation “the fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth [I]”.

The results of this persecution were war and martyrdom. For Greater Glory depicts both aspects by telling the story of the army formed by Catholics in opposition to the Calles’ government, the execution of priests, and the martyrdom of José Luis Sánchez del Río, a young boy. The Cristeros, who took their name from the great cry, “Viva Cristo Rey!” were making progress against government troops when the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow (Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s father) intervened to negotiate a truce, which unfortunately allowed the government to continue the persecution.

Pope Pius XI wrote three encyclicals denouncing this persecution; the first, Iniquis Afflictisque, was issued in 1926. The Pope made a crucial connection between the martyrs of the French Revolution and those suffering in Mexico:

Last month on the occasion of the beatification of many martyrs of the French Revolution, spontaneously the Catholics of Mexico came to Our thoughts, for they, like those martyrs, have remained firm in their resolution to resist in all patience the unreasonable behests and commands of their persecutors rather than cut themselves off from the unity of the Church or refuse obedience to this Apostolic See. Marvelous indeed is the glory of the Divine Spouse of Christ who, through the course of the centuries, can depend, without fail, upon a brave and generous offspring ever ready to suffer prisons, stripes, and even death itself for the holy liberty of the Church!

Pope Pius XI continued his call for an end to the persecution in Acerba animi (1932), deploring government deception in negotiations and calling on Catholics in Mexico to remain steadfast and true.  The third encyclical in 1937 was Firmissiaman Constantiam; it contained an urgent call to the laity to defend the Church. The persecution finally ended when a Catholic president, Manuel Avila Camacho, was elected in 1940. When Blessed John Paul II visited Mexico in 1979 it was still illegal for him to celebrate Mass in public. In 1992, a new Constitution amended the anti-Catholic provisions of the 1917 version.

The Catholic Church has recognized the martyrs of this persecution. The most famous is Blessed Miguel Pro, the Jesuit priest executed on November 23, 1927. Just like St. Edmund Campion in Elizabethan England, Father Pro entered Mexico illegally and had to wear disguises and hide to celebrate the Sacraments. When captured, he was accused of plotting against the government and condemned without trial. President Calle ordered his execution photographed in great detail, hoping to incite fear in the Cristeros army. But the photographs had the opposite effect and Catholics began to show great devotion to the martyr—soon the government forbade the distribution of the very photos it had publicized! Pope John Paul II beatified Miguel Pro in 1998; he also canonized 25 Martyrs of this period on May 21, 2000. Thirteen more martyrs, including young José Luis Sánchez del Río were beatified in 2005 in Mexico.

Catholics in the United States are a long way from shedding our blood as we resist sin (cf. Hebrews 12:4), but we see here an example of the persecution that can come, even as a government seeks to found itself upon the cause of freedom and the common good.

Stephanie A. Mann is the author of Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation, available from Scepter Publishers. She resides in Wichita, Kansas and blogs at www.supremacyandsurvival.blogspot.com. Stephanie is working on a book about the English Catholic Martyrs from 1534 to 1681.

Fr Kevin Doran, Secretary General of IEC2012 said: “The Pope blessed the bell, rang it vigorously, and paused to admire the icons as Archbishop Martin explained their significance. He was presented with Shamrock by Colette Furlong and with the first copy of the Congress Commemorative Medal, by Sheena Darcy.”

“To the surprise of its critics, the Eucharistic congress is taking shape as a genuine moment of renewal in the church,” said Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, as he launched the “Ring for renewal” initiative earlier this week. Listen to Emer McCarthy’s report:  

Cathedrals, churches and chapels across Ireland are being asked to ring their bells for two minutes at 12 noon and 6 p.m this Saturday March 17th, St Patrick’s Day, as a symbol of renewal and a call to gather in preparation for the Congress. Archbishop Martin insists that the event “is being seen as a unique opportunity for renewal of the Christian life.”

In fact when they were thinking about a symbol to represent the Dublin Congress, the organizers decided on the symbol of the bell. Why? Because apparently St Patrick, Patron Saint of the Irish, left a bell with each of the Christian communities he founded throughout the island in the 5th century. The idea being that these communities, on hearing the bell, would be called to conversion, to prayer, to and ultimately to communion.

For the past year, a bell taken from a convent on Ireland’s North Sea Coast, has been visiting all of the communities of Ireland’s 26 dioceses. Inner city parishes, fire stations, hospitals and hospices, schools, chapels, cloistered convents and ecumenical organizations.

Through winter cold, sleet and rain and under summer sun the spectacle of men and women young and old struggling beneath the weight of the bell as they carry it literally on their backs from village to village, up mountains and along motorways has puzzled many a motorist. The sound of the bell and hymns ringing along the main streets of towns has stopped many people in their tracks. The bell has become a vibrant sign for the Irish people of the coming Congress, an invitation to them to prepare and become involved, even those who have distanced themselves from the faith and the Church over the years.

The pastoral program that has accompanied the bell’s pilgrimage reflects this. It no longer takes the faith formation of Irish people as a given, offering introductory courses on scripture, liturgy and Church teaching.

“Our main aim is to try and bring as many people as possible to closer union with Christ” says Fina Golden. She is just one example of the new Church that is emerging in Ireland. A lay Catholic, she is on the board for pastoral preparation for the diocese of Elphin. “We also want to leave a lasting legacy in the diocese after Congress is finished, that people will remember, that hey will have deepened their faith and their communion with one another”.

In the past the Church in Ireland was often accused of clericalism. However the Church that is emerging in the lead up to Dublin 2012 while dramatically reduced in numbers, is vibrant, informed and above all centered on bringing forth the laity. They are literally everywhere, and they are not all Irish.

Meet the man behind the Bell, Hungarian Gellert Merza: “It was a fantastic opportunity to be out there and to see how people are attracted to the Church, to the Eucharist. And this little bell that we are carrying about in Ireland is a great opportunity for people to come and reflect again on what the Eucharist means for themselves. The bell is not the most important thing, it was just to start something, to ring in something and of course to call people to the Congress itself”.

To date more than a quarter of a million people- including Pope Benedict – have rung the Congress Bell in Ireland, in Lourdes, France and now also in Rome.

But are they the same God?

The question is not answered by simple linguistic identity, as evidenced by St. Paul’s complaint to the Corinthians: “For if some one comes and preaches another Jesus than the one we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you submit to it readily enough” (2 Corinthians 11:4). The “other Jesus” that was being preached among the Corinthians was not a different person of the same name, but a view of Jesus of Nazareth that was so radically different from Paul’s that he termed it “another Jesus” altogether.

In the same way, it is possible that the Qur’an and Islamic tradition present a picture of God so radically different from that of the Bible and Catholic tradition that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to maintain the proposition that they are the same Being in both traditions, apart from some minor creedal differences.

But wait a minute. Don’t Catholics have to believe that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, because the Second Vatican Council says so? The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church tells us that the “plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place amongst these there are the Mohammedans, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God, who on the last day will judge mankind.” (Lumen Gentium 16)

It is almost more important to clarify what this text does not say than what it does. The first statement, that “the plan of salvation also includes” Muslims, has led some – mostly critics of the Church – to assert that the Council Fathers are saying that Muslims are saved, and thus need not be preached the Gospel, as they’ve already got just as much of a claim on Heaven as do Christians.

This is obviously false. This statement on Muslims comes as part of a larger passage that begins by speaking of “those who have not yet received the Gospel” and concludes by reaffirming “the command of the Lord, ‘Preach the Gospel to every creature.’” It speaks of the possibility of salvation for those who “through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience.”

Clearly, then, Muslims figure in the “plan of salvation” not in the sense that they are saved as Muslims, that is, by means of Islamic observance, but insofar as they strive to be attentive to and to obey the authentic voice of the Creator whom they acknowledge and who speaks to them through the dictates of their conscience.

This suggests that a Muslim who refrains from suicide bombing because he understands that it is cold-blooded murder has a better chance to be saved, and is more clearly attuned to the promptings of the Creator within whose plan of salvation he finds himself, than does a Muslim who blows himself up in a crowd of infidels because the Qur’an promises a place in Paradise to those who “kill and are killed” for Allah (9:111).

The Conciliar statement also wisely adds the caveat, all too often ignored by the Church’s critics, that “Mohammedans” (Musulmanos) are “professing” to hold the faith of Abraham. Whether or not they actually hold it is arguable, but the Vatican Council is only noting that they claim for their faith that it is that of Abraham, without discussing whether or not Islam actually is an authentically Abrahamic faith.

Likewise widely misinterpreted, or at least given a weight that it was clearly never meant to bear, is the subsequent affirmation that Muslims “along with us adore the one and merciful God, who on the last day will judge mankind.” Many see in this also an assertion that the Gospel need not be preached to Muslims, or that they are already saved, for they adore the one and merciful God. Many Catholics, including writers of some prominence, have asserted that Vatican II, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church that quotes it, teach that Catholics and Muslims worship the same God, and then proceed as if this establishes more than it actually does, or as if it were obvious that the Council was thus forbidding a critical stance toward Islam or concern about Islamic supremacist advances in Europe and the U.S.

In this vein the great Catholic writer and apologist Peter Kreeft writes disapprovingly that “many Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, do not believe what the Church says about Islam (for example, in Vatican II and the new Catechism): that Allah is not another God, that we worship the same God.” He leaves unexplained, however, what he thinks that means exactly, or what responsibilities or courses of action it sets out for Catholics.

The Council document is actually saying perhaps less than Kreeft and others of like mind would wish it to be saying. In the first place it is clearly affirming that Muslims, like Christians, are monotheists, which is a rather commonplace observation that has been noted numerous times over the fourteen centuries of Islam’s existence. As far back as 1076, Pope St. Gregory VII wrote to Anzir, the king of Mauritania, that “we believe and confess one God, although in different ways.”

What it is asserting beyond that bare fact, if anything, can best be ascertained by considering the passage in light of those “different ways” to which Pope Gregory alluded. It is noteworthy that Pope Gregory doesn’t say that the one God that he and King Anzir both worship is the same God. All he says is that both he and Anzir worship one God; in other words, they’re both monotheists. And the Second Vatican Council is not actually making a definitive statement on that issue. It is saying that both Catholics and Muslims adore the one and merciful God, and while that clearly does indicate a certain commonality, there can be no doubt about one thing it certainly doesn’t mean: that Muslims and Catholics adore the same God in every particular, for Catholics do not believe that Muhammad was a prophet or the Qur’an is God’s Word, and Muslims do not believe that Jesus is the Son of God or the Savior of the world, or that God is Triune.

The same may be said of Jews, of course: they, along with Muslims, reject the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the divinity of Christ, and yet clearly Catholics and Jews worship the same God. This, however, is because Christianity began as a form of Judaism and is in a certain sense an extension of it, affirming faith in the same Old Testament Scriptures, the same prophets, and many points of belief.

These things cannot be said about Islam, which considers itself to be less an extension of Christianity than a rejection and correction of it, such that Muslims even reject the Old and New Testament Scriptures as corruptions.

In declaring that both Muslims and Catholics adore the one and merciful God, the Council obviously did not mean that Muslims and Catholics regard that God in exactly the same way, or that the differences were insignificant. The Council is silent on the question of whether or not the Muslims’ adoration is blind or informed. So what, then, is the Council actually saying?

Vatican II was a large-scale attempt to restore relationships that had been broken for centuries and build new bridges of trust where groups had been divided from the Church by centuries of mistrust, suspicion and outright conflict. Consequently it emphasized common ground rather than differences, unlike every ecumenical council that preceded it. No case, however, can be made that its statement about the shared adoration of the one and merciful God in any way mitigated the Church’s truth claim or sense of its own responsibility to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, any more than shared monotheism removes that responsibility in regard to Protestants or anyone else, for that responsibility is reiterated in the same passage.

It is not even certain that the Council is saying that Muslims and Catholics adore the same “one and merciful God.” Muslims certainly believe that their one and merciful God is the same One whom Christians (and Jews) worship, for the Qur’an tells them so (29:46). And whether they know it or not, the only God actually available to receive their adoration and hear their prayers is the Christian one. However, the differences in how Muslims and Catholics conceive of the one and merciful God lead to the possibility that while Muslims believe that they are worshiping the same God that Catholic worship, the teachings of Islam itself, despite the Qur’an’s insistence that Muslims worship the same God as do Christians and Jews, actually paints a picture of a God who is substantially different from the God of the Bible and the Catholic Faith.

It is noteworthy in this connection that the Council speaks of “Muslims” (Musulmanos), not “Islam,” adoring with Catholics the one and merciful God. It is a manifest fact that Muslim people believe that their God and the Christians’ God is the same. It is by no means as clear that the teachings of Islam itself about God offer a picture of the same Being who is delineated in orthodox Catholic theology. Although Arabic-speaking Christians generally use the word “Allah” for the God of the Bible – the same Arabic word used for the God of the Qur’an – this identity of name does not require that the two Beings referred to in each book are one and the same. It may be so, but it is not established on the basis of the Qur’an’s declaration, or of the identity in nomenclature.

In any case, this short passage from Lumen Gentium is burdened down by a weight of assumptions. When Kreeft says that “many Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, do not believe what the Church says about Islam (for example, in Vatican II and the new Catechism): that Allah is not another God, that we worship the same God,” he apparently assumes that to affirm that Muslims and Christians worship the same God establishes an important kinship between the two groups, and may even indicate that Islam in itself is a fundamentally good thing, such that Catholics should encourage Islamic faith and Muslim piety. Kreeft, in fact, espoused such a view in a debate with me.

These assumptions, however, do not proceed as a matter of necessity or inevitability from the Conciliar text. It would do no outrage to that text if the differences between the Islamic and Catholic views of the one and merciful God, and between Islam and Catholicism in general, were such that Catholics would not wish to encourage Muslim faith or fervor. One may therefore take a jaundiced view of the prospects for Catholic/Muslim cooperation and dialogue without dissenting from the Council’s teaching.

At the same time, even if the Council Fathers did mean to affirm that Catholics and Muslims worship the same God, this would have little significance for the contemporary ecclesiastical or political situation, in which Muslims are oppressing and killing Christian believers in several countries without regard for the Qur’an’s insistence that “our Allah and your Allah is one.” And as for the assumption that the Council meant to speak of a special kinship between Catholics and Muslims, Catholics have a moral obligation to be charitable to all people, regardless of whether or not they believe in the same God we do. Genuine charity includes a concern for justice.

The second Vatican II reference to Islam comes in the Declaration on Non-Christian Religions,Nostra Aetate:

The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all- powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.

Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.

While this is a bit more descriptive about Muslim belief than was Lumen Gentium, as it includes the Islamic classification of Jesus as a non-divine prophet and Islam’s respect for the Virgin Mary, it adds nothing in terms of substance to the Dogmatic Constitution’s statements about Muslims. Here again we see that the Muslim linkage of Islam to Abraham is presented not as fact, but as something Muslims affirm, or “take pleasure” in affirming. Here again we see that they adore the one, merciful God; in other words, that they’re monotheists.

That is all that Vatican II is really saying about Muslims: they’re monotheists, they say they belong to the religion of Abraham, and they revere Jesus, but not as the Son of God, and His Blessed Mother.

The tone is very different, but not much in terms of substance is added in earlier Church statements on Muslims and Islam. And as Pope Benedict XVI has reminded us, Vatican II is not a super-council that supersedes all previous Church teaching; rather, its teachings must be understood in light of tradition. When it comes to Islam, the consistent focus in earlier statements about Islam is generally not on what Muslims believe, but on Islam as a heresy, and on the hostility of Muslims to Christians and Christianity. In that vein, Pope Benedict XIV in 1754 reaffirmed an earlier prohibition on Albanian Catholics giving their children “Turkish or Mohammedan names” in baptism by pointing out that not even Protestants or Orthodox were stooping so low: “none of the schismatics and heretics has been rash enough to take a Mohammedan name, and unless your justice abounds more than theirs, you shall not enter the kingdom of God.”

Pope Callixtus III, in a somewhat similar spirit, in 1455 vowed to “exalt the true Faith, and to extirpate the diabolical sect of the reprobate and faithless Mahomet in the East.” Neither this statement nor that of Lumen Gentium rise to the level of a dogmatic definition, but is it possible for Islam to be a “diabolical sect” that at the same time adores the “one and merciful God”? Certainly, for it is always possible that their adoration of the one and merciful God may be wrongly directed, marred by wrong emphases and outright falsehoods.

Nonetheless, many Catholics would argue that the statements of Benedict XIV and Callixtus III (and others like them from other popes) reflect a very different age from our own, and that Vatican II’s statements reflect a more mature spirit, as well as the charity toward others that Christians should properly exhibit. And that may well be so, although it must be noted that even though they are only fifty years old, the statements of Vatican II on Islam reflect the outlook of a vanished age no less than do those of the earlier popes. For in the 1960s, secularism and Westernization were very much the order of the day in many areas of the Islamic world. It was, for example, unusual in Cairo in the 1960s to see a woman wearing a hijab, an Islamic headscarf mandated by Muhammad’s command that a woman when appearing in public should cover everything except her face and hands. Now, on the other hand, one may walk down the streets of the same city and be surprised to see a woman who is not so attired.

This change has not been solely external. The hijabs in Cairo are but one visible sign of a revolution that has swept the Islamic world, or more properly, a revival. Islamic values have been revived, including not only rigor in dress codes but also a hostility toward Western ideas and principles. The “Arab Spring” uprisings have led to a reassertion of the political aspects of Islam, as opposed to Western political models, all across the Middle East. Western ideas of democracy and pluralism that were fashionable in elite circles all over the Islamic world in the first half of the twentieth century have fallen into disrepute.

One consequence of all this is that the Islamic world that the Fathers of Vatican II had in mind is rapidly disappearing. The words of Vatican II on Muslims must be accorded the respect that all Church teaching merits, and obeyed to the degree that obedience is owed to all magisterial statements. These statements must be evaluated, however, within the context of their times. The documents of Vatican II are no less a product of their age than the statements of Benedict XIV and Callixtus III are a product of theirs. Just as the age of crusading knights has vanished, so also the age of a dominant secular West striding confidently into what it terms the “modern” age is rapidly vanishing. This is not to devalue or denigrate the Council in any way, but simply to see it as what it is, no more, no less: an enunciation of certain eternal truths, to be sure, but within the context of a number of unexamined and yet decisively influential core beliefs and assumptions about the nature of the world and of mankind.

Ultimately, while it may always be the Christian’s responsibility to reach out with respect and esteem to Muslims, the hostility that the Islamic world had always displayed toward Christendom was never less in evidence than it was in the 1960s, and so a statement of friendship was never more appropriate, either before or since. That situation does not prevail today, a fact that has a great many implications for the prospects for dialogue as well: Western-minded Muslims who have a favorable attitude toward the Catholic Church no longer have nearly the influence among their coreligionists that they once had, at least in the Islamic world.

That is not to say, however, that we have returned to the world of Benedict XIV and Callixtus III, when Catholics understood that Mohammedanism, as it was then popularly styled (to the indignation of Muslims themselves) was a heresy, steeped in falsehood and perhaps even diabolical, and dedicated to the destruction of the Church and the conversion or subjugation of Christians. We are centuries away, and separated by chasms of cultural assumptions, from the world in which it was even possible to think of one’s faith as having enemies and needing to be defended. Catholics of the modern age have long assumed that that world was gone forever, and there is some reason to believe that it is indeed.

But with Muslim persecution of Christians escalating worldwide, there is also considerable evidence that that rough old world is returning, and may never have been as far away as it seemed to be.

“Science, nonetheless, is not always capable of responding to the needs of many couples, and so I would like to remind those who are experiencing infertility that their matrimonial vocation is not thereby frustrated. By virtue of their baptismal and matrimonial vocation, spouses are always called to collaborate with God in the creation of a new humanity. The vocation to love, in fact, is a vocation of self-giving and this is something which no bodily condition can impede..”

In the 19th century, Mormons in Utah forced a different debate. The Supreme Court upheld a ban on polygamy in 1885 with these words:

“Certainly no legislation can be supposed more wholesome and necessary in the founding of a free, self-governing commonwealth … than that which seeks to establish it on the basis of the idea of the family, as consisting in and springing from the union for life of one man and one woman in the holy estate of matrimony; the family is the sure foundation of all that is stable and noble in our civilization; the best guarantee of that reverent morality which is the source of all beneficent progress in social and political improvement.”

The court held what once was obvious: “traditional” marriage is the basis of a free society.

It’s a historically observable fact that we humans extrapolate our government arrangements from our domestic ones. That’s why anyone who’s ever wanted to understand — or radically change — a political culture has always started from the family. Plato and Aristotle started there. So did Rousseau and Marx.

The erotic impulse is beautiful and (Christians believe) God-given, but unregulated, it creates chaos. Marriage is the institution that takes sexual passion and stabilizes it.

There has never been a polygamous society, for example, that respected the equal dignity of each person, because the polygamous culture is that of the “Alpha” male. With multiple “wives” available, no man ever goes off the market. He sees all women as his potential lovers and all men as his sexual rivals. A winner-take-all atmosphere prevails, with weaker men (and teenage sons) driven off.

Monogamous marriage stabilizes sexual competition, making the mutual trust on which civic life is built possible.

Heterosexual marriage extends this principle of equality not only to other men, but to women.

Behind the apparently arbitrary “rule” that a man must marry a woman before bedding her lies the deeper message that a woman is precious. She is a person worth a lifetime commitment of love and service, not an object to be used.

A young woman hearing that she must “save herself” for one man learns simultaneously that a man is a person whose heart isn’t to be toyed with.

The lived experience of marriage teaches each spouse — and the children who grow up in their home — in a practical way to respect the gifts and talents of the other sex. In an unspoken way, the interior logic of traditional marriage transmits to its children a set of powerfully embedded assumptions: that all persons have equal dignity, that both sexes have unique gifts to be treasured, and that individuals often must sacrifice their own desires for the common good.

As the Holy Father put it to a group of politicians in Croatia last month, it’s in the family that children develop a conscience adequate to the task of building a just society:

This logic of gratuitousness, learnt in infancy and adolescence, is then lived out in every area of life, in games, in sport, in interpersonal relations, in art, in voluntary service to the poor and the suffering, and once it has been assimilated it can be applied to the most complex areas of political and economic life so as to build up a polis that is welcoming and hospitable, but at the same time not empty, not falsely neutral, but rich in humanity, with a strongly ethical dimension.

This is the culture created by one-man, one-woman marriage. It happens to be the only one strong enough on which to build a republican government — one where the people govern themselves. And it’s strong enough to absorb exceptions from the norm (those who never marry, widows, even the pregnant out of wedlock and sexual rebels), so long as the norm persists.

The effects of the destruction of marriage may not be immediate. A healthy culture can withstand upheavals when they’re short-lived, but we permanently change the interior logic of marriage at our peril.

If marriage is nothing more than an expression of desire and affection, then people are not persons, but objects of desire. Go ahead and treat them as you like. Which, pursued to its utmost, is another way of saying, “Might makes right.”

The equal dignity of each human person is the internal logic of heterosexual, monogamous marriage. It’s a pre-condition for self-government, and no society has ever been free without it.

Note: an earlier version of this column originally ran at Faith & Family magazine