A World of Bestiality

The media - newspapers (yes), television, internet, all - have facilitated the near-global dehumanization of what was once the gradual Christianization of the world. How?

By definition, "news" is not normal, true, good, or beautiful. These don't sell advertisements which are the economic engine that drive the media. What sells ads is the ab-normal, the ugly, sordid, and bizarre. Add to the mix of the public mind the Gospel's mandate to "love one another," which gets truncated into "tolerate all," which is further diluted to "everything is equally acceptable." The last of these, however, is not true or helpful or, even from the viewpoint of natural selection, sustainable.

But the economic "necessity" (?) to sell ads ever puts before our collective attention the ab-normal. With the God-less bait-and-switch of Christian charity for "toleration" we have the oh-so "righteous" secular state's marginalization of revealed Truth and the Church's Magisterium as it clings to its single-commandment of toleration (Who gave the state this commandment? No one). Couple with these two discernible traits the sheer, brute amount of information bombarding us daily and we come to the present state of human culture: namely, a bestiality (high-tech, though it is) with no appreciation for interiority, nor an abiding awareness of our individual mortality, nor our common need for that which all this muddle cannot provide - a Savior, Christ our Lord.

We are caught - right and left, secular, Muslim, Jew, Christian, etc. - in a growing pagan clamor for which only the sacred has appeal (sacred as René Girard has defined it, "false transcendence").

The only way back to sanity will be a kind of monasticism still waiting to be born in these dark, evil, sub-human days. Pray that the light can still get in.