Drowning evil with good

WE have just celebrated the feast (April 29) of St. Catherine of Siena, the 14th-century gutsy Dominican tertiary credited for bringing back the Pope from Avignon, France to Rome, and for establishing peace among the warring Italian city-states then.

She was the 25th child of an Italian wool dyer. Poor, she hardly had any education. She was practically unschooled. But by a special grace of God, she enjoyed such great knowledge and wisdom as to become a philosopher and theologian. The Catholic Church even proclaimed her doctor of the Church in 1970.

She knew how to argue and convince, using both homespun, commonsensical arguments and sophisticated theological reasoning. A brave woman, she was not afraid to face anyone to transmit what she thought ought to be told to that person, be he the Pope or any public official.

Opus Dei founder, St. Josemaria Escriva, made her intercessor for the apostolate of public opinion, precisely because of her feats. To me, she is worth emulating. A devotion to her that includes being inspired by her example is what we badly need these days, because we too are gripped in a similar terrible crisis.

There’s a lot of doctrinal ignorance, error and confusion around. Aggravating this is the moral and ethical anomalies that are slowly hardening up into the attitudes, mentalities, lifestyle and cultures of people.

Just visit some of the blogs in the Internet these days. You´ll immediately have an idea of the runaway, wild and rotten ideas many people, even the young, are having. There´s a lot of verbal rage. Not knowing spiritual and supernatural realities, many roar into mockery, the mockery of the impious, complete with obscenities and vulgarities.

Sad to say, this gutter level of opinion-making is daily reinforced by a subtle but powerful air of secularism, materialism and the like. Just read the papers, look at the billboards, watch the movies and TV, etc.

People are incessantly bombarded with purely worldly values, locking them with exclusively materialistic and temporal messages that are blind and deaf to faith and religion, to the things of God.

Their sensibilities are so constantly titillated as to inure them to mundane pleasures, while their spiritual faculties are left to hang in the air. People do not know anymore to relate whatever they are doing to God and to others. They are increasingly held captive in their own world, intoxicated by their own aroused passions.

Those who manage to extricate themselves from the grip of passions and start to use their intelligence, yet short of faith, can come out with brilliant ideas and even with practical initiatives that pose a greater danger to their spiritual lives.

Here, the predicament sinks into a deeper level, harder to handle and resolve. This is where people start to rationalize in the wide sea of relativism and secularism, paving the way to atheism and agnosticism. They only have space in their head for their ideas. Faith is not welcome. In fact, it is often hunted and attacked.

We can go on and on in describing this horrifying scenario we are seeing in the world today. But we cannot remain in that stage only, let alone, in simply lamenting. We have to recognize the challenge and be prepared to tackle it. We need to drown evil with an abundance of good.

There´s a great need to wage an unrelenting apostolate of public opinion. Everyone has a role to play in this effort. We need to get our act together, consolidating first our spiritual life and then going all out to master the doctrinal aspect so as to enter into a meaningful dialogue and debate in today´s many Areopagi.

The search for truth and justice, as dramatized in the many issues that confront us today, cannot and should not be limited to purely human reasoning alone. We need to bring in the light of faith, the designs of God in these issues.

To be sure, these questions are not simply earthly affairs with exclusively temporal dimensions and effects. In spite of their autonomous character as human affairs, they have deep relation to faith and to God himself. They do possess eternal effects and cosmic dimensions.

This is what we need to highlight these days. The prospect, of course, is truly daunting, but that is just how the ball bounces. We need to acknowledge this reality and start to act accordingly.

We can ask St. Catherine of Siena to intercede for us. She was literally a nobody who made a big impact in history.