Pbro. Jose Juan Sánchez Jácome / ACN.- We live in a society marked by a climate of irritation and confrontation. Every day we are exposed to hatred, aggression, violence, disrespect, and vulgar expressions. We feel and suffer the resentment, envy, anger, and hatred that are breathed in various places. Neither homes nor school spaces are spared from an environment as decomposed as this.
In the media, on social networks, and in different places where we pass every day, we confirm and endure it. It is not only that we are affected and reached by this type of verbal aggression and hostile attitudes, but also that we ourselves are contributing to this same environment.
It happens that, in the face of attacks, we assume the same logic as the aggressor and often respond impulsively with insults and disqualifications, even in completely trivial and insignificant situations. The environment has reached us and stirs us in such a way that it costs us to restrain ourselves and react with sanity, with education, with understanding, with charity, and with intelligence.
A generalized environment of insults, aggressions, discourtesy, disrespect, and vulgar expressions is part of this process of social decomposition in which human life and dignity are ceasing to be valued. An environment like this leads us gradually to trample the truth and the deep meaning of life, as well as human values.
Evil has been systematically affecting our life and human relationships. We are not only losing the sense of good, truth, honesty, and justice, but we applaud, celebrate, and justify the evil that ends up blurring and compromising an authentically human life. We are reaching the extreme of losing even common sense.
In such an environment, consequently, the sense of the sacred is also being lost. And when the sense of the sacred is lost, it is not simply that the religious and transcendent capacity is lost, nor that worship and praise to God cease, but very soon life begins to be trampled, manipulated, and instrumentalized, disposed of for the most perverse ends.
The sense of the sacred is lost when we leave an accident victim, a sick person, and a dying person to their fate; when we downplay the reality of abortion to privatize it in the discourse of human rights, in order to demand its legalization at all costs; when in an accident greed pushes looting and pillaging, leaving the injured to their fate; when immigrants are not helped nor their extreme need and defenselessness seen, but rather they are seen as booty to kidnap, threaten, and murder them; when people are assaulted near hospitals despite their economic limitations and above all despite their sadness and pain for the illnesses and urgencies that their hospitalized relatives go through; when children and girls are enslaved and prostituted, stealing their innocence and violating their life; when there is no mercy before murdered people, simply because they did not think like us or did not belong to our ideology, when the death of these people is celebrated and applauded.
Dramatically, the sense of the sacred is being lost, generating situations of danger and risk for everyone. Many times the tragedy and pain of so many people have not mattered. Sometimes the commotion caused by murders and outbursts of violence has become a protocol of a minute of silence or a humanitarian truce, only to return to the charge with the same hatred and animosity as before.
Some years ago, Cardinal Mauro Piacenza stated that: «Man at all times perceives the experience of evil around himself and evil in himself. In the last 50 years, with emphasis on the last 20, for the first time humanity as a whole lives an experience never faced before: that of the amplification of evil through the media, first with television and then with the Internet… We can say that, for the first time, humanity finds itself facing the experience of “universal evil” for which it is not prepared, for which it has not been created, and which, theologically speaking, only Our Lord Jesus Christ has been able to experience and bear on the cross».
It is time to react as this critical moment requires, where evil has globalized, intensifies, and seeps in in many ways. We must foster a more spiritual life to rescue the most human from our existence, accepting that evil has also affected us by numbing our conscience and downplaying many sinful situations before which we must react energetically.
The sense of good, common sense, the sense of the sacred, and the sense of sin are being lost. In fact, when the sense of sin is lost, the loss of the sense of the sacred is accentuated even more.
Let us take advantage of the light, strength, and hope that the apocalyptic texts of the Sacred Scriptures bring, which are meditated on in these weeks of transition in the Church’s liturgical calendar. These texts remind us, no matter how difficult the situations we face, that Christ has overcome sin, death, and the evil that exists in the world.
To not become discouraged or succumb to fatigue, let us keep very much in mind the proclamation of the word of God to remain firm in the faith and generate hope in the people of God. As Pope Francis reflects:
“When the sky appears all cloudy, it is a blessing to speak of the sun. In the same way, the true Christian does not complain or get angry, but is convinced, by the power of the resurrection, that no evil is infinite, no night is without end, no man is definitively wrong, no hatred is invincible before love”.