As the Church carries the light of Christ into the dark age which the world has created in this period of history, in which the world makes the great secular claim - that humanity is limited to its own subjective being, that there is no God, let us remind ourselves about reality, objective reality. The secular claim is based upon the negation or suppression of an objective fact about humanity - its transcedence - its openness to God as an objective dimension of human nature.
The CCC, Paragraph 33, speaks about man's nature in an objective way, naming his "openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience ... his longings for the infinite and for happiness [realities] which are irreducible to the merely material ... ". Then, in paragraph 357, man is spoken of as "not just something, but someone. He is capable of self-knowledge, of self-possession and of freely giving himself and entering into communion with other persons." None of this, which the CCC speaks of, can be refuted or reduced to the level of psychology or sociology, still less to the level of feelings. No, the fact is that man has an openness to the transcendent and that this is a an objective dimension to his being.
When you look at the history of mankind in different cultures, this fact is expressed in many ways. However, most objectively of all - how can one explain the presence in the world of the Gospels, indeed, all Sacred Scripture, the Church, the Eucharist and the witness of countless human lives to these realities - which haven't blown in from Mars - as merely a subjective urge or formulation from within human beings.
No, human beings are transcendent, they have an objective openness to God, and if the secular movement is leading people to say "No" to God - then that is the objective spirituality of many people today. The overriding question is not whether God exists, but rather, have we allowed ourselves to fall under Satan's influence and to believe his lies.
(The photo above was taken in Sydney CBD and shows Cardinal Pell following the Blessed Sacrament in the Corpus Christi Procession.)
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