First Thoughts at 6.00 a.m. on May 17, 2024, Anniversary of the Beatification of St. Josemaria Escriva: “To be = to be in relation: To be who one is means to be out of self and to be out of self = to find oneself = to be “another Christ.”.

Published on May 17, 2024May 17, 2024 by actingpersonblogLeave a comment

And the reason why one must be our of self: the Father is the action of the Father engendering the Son, and we, images of the Son, must always be in the act of being engendered and engendering the others. Therefore, human reality is a dance of relations.

In the homily , given by John Paul II during the Mass, he emphasized how our Founder preached untiringly, “with supernatural intuition… the universal call to holiness and the apostolate. Christ calls everyone to become holy in the realities of everyday life. Hence, work too is a means of personal holiness and apostolate when it is done in union with Jesus Christ, for the Son of God, in the Incarnation, has united himself, in a way, with the whole reality of man and with the whole of creation. In a society in which an unbridled craving for material tings turns them into idols and cause of separation from God, the new Blessed reminds us that these same realities, created by God and the product of human industry, if used correctly for the glory of the Creator and the service of one’s brothers and sisters can be a way for men and women to meet Christ. “All the things of the earth, including the earthly and temporal activities of men, must be directed to God.” (John Paul II, Homily May 17, 1992).

Recall that only persons “work.” Machines don’t work. animals don’t work. Persons work in that the person makes the gift of himself to another. Only persons are “I.”The product of that gift is the person himself and the subdued part of creation that the person offers. Such is the dignity of human work.

The prototype of human work is the Son of God the Father who, in subduing His human will, makes the gift of Himself in obedience on the Cross. That is the meaning of all work, and the reason the Mass is the center of all human work. This is the meaning of the common priesthood of the baptized laity and the reason any activity of man that is work is a priestly activity as mediation of self to the Father.

Population Crash – and therefore everything else!

Published on May 16, 2024 by actingpersonblogLeave a comment

The world is at a startling demographic milestone. Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened.

Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation. The falling birthrates come with huge implications for the way people live, how economies grow and the standings of the world’s superpowers.

Demographics are supposed to be a slow-moving force, but the baby bust is happening so quickly and so widely that it’s taken many by surprise.

Some estimates now put the number of babies each woman has below the global replacement rate of about 2.2. The U.S. long ago passed that level. South Korea’s rate, the world’s lowest, was once unimaginable.

Rosie Ettenheim/ THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

In high-income nations, fertility fell below replacement in the 1970s, and took a leg down during the pandemic. It’s dropping in developing countries, too. India surpassed China as the most populous country last year, yet its fertility is now below replacement.

“The demographic winter is coming,” said Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economist specializing in demographics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Many government leaders see this as a matter of national urgency. They worry about shrinking workforces, slowing economic growth and underfunded pensions; and the vitality of a society with ever-fewer children. Smaller populations come with diminished global clout, raising questions in the U.S., China and Russia about their long-term standings as superpowers.

Some demographers think the world’s population could start shrinking within four decades—one of the few times it’s happened in history.

Donald Trump, this year’s presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has called collapsing fertility a bigger threat to Western civilization than Russia. A year ago Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida declared that the collapse of the country’s birthrate left it “standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has prioritized raising the country’s “demographic GDP.”

Governments have rolled out programs to stop the decline—but so far they’ve barely made a dent.

A father held his baby in a newborn care unit in Patiala, India. PHOTO: ELKE SCHOLIERS/GETTY IMAGES

Demographic surprise

In 2017, when the global fertility rate—a snapshot of how many babies a woman is expected to have over her lifetime—was 2.5, the United Nations thought it would slip to 2.4 in the late 2020s. Yet by 2021, the U.N. concluded, it was already down to 2.3—close to what demographers consider the global replacement rate of about 2.2. The replacement rate, which keeps population stable over time, is 2.1 in rich countries, and slightly higher in developing countries, where fewer girls than boys are born and more mothers die during their childbearing years.

While the U.N. has yet to publish estimated fertility rates for 2022 and 2023, Fernández-Villaverde has produced his own estimate by supplementing U.N. projections with actual data for those years covering roughly half the world’s population. He has found that national birth registries are typically reporting births 10% to 20% below what the U.N. projected.

Total fertility rates

U.S.

MEXICO

INDIA

CHINA

SOUTH KOREA

HUNGARY

JAPAN

1980

’90

2000

’10

’20

Sources: United Nations; U.S. Centers for Disease Control; national estimates compiled by Jesús Fernández-Villaverde
Rosie Ettenheim/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

China reported 9 million births last year, 16% less than projected in the U.N.’s central scenario. In the U.S., 3.59 million babies were born last year, 4% less than the U.N. projected. In other countries, the undershoot is even larger: Egypt reported 17% fewer births last year. In 2022, Kenya reported 18% fewer.

Fernández-Villaverde estimates global fertility fell to between 2.1 and 2.2 last year, which he said would be below global replacement for the first time in human history. Dean Spears, a population economist at the University of Texas at Austin, said while the data isn’t good enough to know precisely when or if fertility has fallen below replacement, “we have enough evidence to be quite confident about…the crossing point not being far off.”

In 2017 the U.N. projected world population, then 7.6 billion, would keep climbing to 11.2 billion in 2100. By 2022 it had lowered and brought forward the peak to 10.4 billion in the 2080s. That, too, is likely out of date. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington now thinks it will peak around 9.5 billion in 2061 then start declining.

U.N. estimates and projections for world population

12 billion

PROJECTION

2017

2022

1950

’60

’70

’80

’90

2000

’10

’20

’30

’40

’50

’60

’70

’80

’90

2100

Notes: 2022 data are estimates (1950-2021) and projections (2022-2100), medium variant
2017 data are estimates (1950-2015) and projections (2016-2100), medium variant

Source: United Nations
Rosie Ettenheim/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

In the U.S., a short-lived pandemic baby boomlet has reversed. The total fertility rate fell to 1.62 last year, according to provisional government figures, the lowest on record.

Had fertility stayed near 2.1, where it stood in 2007, the U.S. would have welcomed an estimated 10.6 million more babies since, according to Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire.

In 2017, when the fertility rate was 1.8, the Census Bureau projected it would converge over the long run to 2.0. It has since revised that down to 1.5. “It has snuck up on us,” said Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland specializing in demographics.

A second demographic transition?

Historians refer to the decline in fertility that began in the 18th century in industrializing countries as the demographic transition. As lifespans lengthened and more children survived to adulthood, the impetus for bearing more children declined. As women became better educated and joined the workforce, they delayed marriage and childbirth, resulting in fewer children.

Now, said Spears, “the big-picture fact is that birthrates are low or are falling in many diverse societies and economies.”

Some demographers see this as part of a “second demographic transition,” a societywide reorientation toward individualism that puts less emphasis on marriage and parenthood, and makes fewer or no children more acceptable.

U.S. birthrates by age group

300

250

200

150

100

30-34

25-29

20-24

35-39

15-19

40-44

1940

’50

’60

’70

’80

’90

2000

’10

’20

Note: Rates are per 1,000 women in specified age group. 2023 data is provisional.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Rosie Ettenheim/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

In the U.S., some thought at first that women were simply delaying childbirth because of lingering economic uncertainty from the 2008 financial crisis.

In research published in 2021, the University of Maryland’s Kearney and two co-authors looked for possible explanations for the continued drop. They found that state-level differences in parental abortion notification laws, unemployment, Medicaid availability, housing costs, contraceptive usage, religiosity, child-care costs and student debt could explain almost none of the decline. “We suspect that this shift reflects broad societal changes that are hard to measure or quantify,” they conclude.

Kearney said while raising children is no more expensive than before, parents’ preferences and perceived constraints have changed: “If people have a preference for spending time building a career, on leisure, relationships outside the home, that’s more likely to come in conflict with childbearing.”

Meanwhile, time-use data show that mothers and fathers, especially those that are highly educated, spend more time with their children than in the past. “The intensity of parenting is a constraint,” Kearney said.

Erica Pittman, a 45-year-old business banker in Raleigh, N.C., said she and her husband opted to have only one child because of demands on their time, including caring for her mother, who died last year after a long battle with multiple sclerosis. Their 8-year-old son is able to participate in theater workshops, soccer and summer camps because the couple, with a combined income of about $225,000 a year, has more time and money.

The Pittman family in Raleigh, N.C. PHOTO: ANGELA OWENS/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The Pittmans outside their home. PHOTO: ANGELA OWENS/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

“I feel like a better mom,” Pittman said. “I feel like I can go to work—because I have a fairly demanding job—but I can also make time to volunteer at his school, be the chaperone for the field trip and do those kinds of things, because I only have one to coordinate with my schedule.”

Pittman said she only questions their decision when her son says he wishes he had a sibling to play with. In response, she and her husband, a middle-school history teacher, pick vacation destinations with a kids’ club, such as a Disney cruise, so her son can play with others his age.

‘Plugged into the global culture’

Fertility is below replacement in India even though the country is still poor and many women don’t work—factors that usually sustain fertility.

Urbanization and the internet have given even women in traditional male-dominated villages a glimpse of societies where fewer children and a higher quality of life are the norm. “People are plugged into the global culture,” said Richard Jackson, president of the Global Aging Institute, a nonprofit research and education group.

Mae Mariyam Thomas, 38, who lives in Mumbai and runs an audio production company, said she’s opted against having children because she never felt the tug of motherhood. She sees peers struggling to meet the right person, getting married later and, in some instances, divorcing before they have kids. At least three of her friends have frozen their eggs, she said.

“I think now we live in a really different world, so I think for anyone in the world it’s tough to find a partner,” she said.

Sub-Saharan Africa once appeared resistant to the global slide in fertility, but that too is changing. The share of all women of reproductive age using modern contraception grew from 17% in 2012 to 23% in 2022, according to Family Planning 2030, an international organization.

Mae Mariyam Thomas, at her house in Mumbai, India, has opted to not have children. PHOTO: ATUL LOKE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Mothers held their premature babies at a hospital in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. PHOTO: ISSOUF SANOGO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Jose Rimon, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, credits that to a push by national leaders in Africa which, he predicted, would drive fertility down faster than the U.N. projects.

Once a low fertility cycle kicks in, it effectively resets a society’s norms and is thus hard to break, said Jackson. “The fewer children you see your colleagues and peers and neighbors having, it changes the whole social climate,” he said.

Danielle Vermeer grew up third in a family of four children on Chicago’s North Side, where her neighborhood was filled with Catholics of Italian, Irish and Polish descent and half her close friends had as many siblings as her or more. Her Italian-American father was one of four children who produced 14 grandchildren. Now her parents have five grandchildren, including Vermeer’s two children, ages 4 and 7.

The 35-year-old, who is the co-founder of a fashion thrifting app, said that before setting out to have children, she consulted dozens of other couples and her Catholic church and read at least eight books on the subject, including one by Pope Paul VI. She and her husband settled on two as the right number.

“The act of bringing a child into this world is an incredible responsibility,” she said.

U.N. 2023 projections on top 12 most-populous countries and their total fertility

TOTAL FERTILITY RATE

Brazil

Bangladesh

Japan

Population, hundred million

Indonesia

Nigeria

Ethiopia

U.S.

China

India

Pakistan

Russia

Mexico

Source: United Nations
Rosie Ettenheim/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

New policies

Governments have tried to reverse the fall in fertility with pronatalist policies.

Perhaps no country has been trying longer than Japan. After fertility fell to 1.5 in the early 1990s, the government rolled out a succession of plans that included parental leave and subsidized child care. Fertility kept falling.

In 2005, Kuniko Inoguchi was appointed the country’s first minister responsible for gender equality and birthrate. The main obstacle, she declared, was money: People couldn’t afford to get married or have children. Japan made hospital maternity care free and introduced a stipend paid upon birth of the child.

Japan’s fertility rate climbed from 1.26 in 2005 to 1.45 in 2015. But then it started declining again, and in 2022 was back to 1.26.

This year, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida rolled out yet another program to increase births that extends monthly allowances to all children under 18 regardless of income, free college for families with three children, and fully paid parental leave.

Inoguchi, now a member of parliament’s upper house, said the constraint on would-be parents is no longer money, but time. She has pressed the government and businesses to adopt a four-day workweek. She said, “If you’re a government official or manager of a big corporation, you should not worry over questions of salary now, but that in 20 years time you will have no customers, no clients, no applicants to the Self-Defense Forces.”

An event celebrating Children’s Day in Tokyo on May 5. PHOTO: GU YIPING/XINHUA/ZUMA PRESS

Doctors and nurses took care of a baby in Nyiregyhaza, Hungary. PHOTO: ATTILA BALAZS/EPA-EFE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has pushed one of Europe’s most ambitious natality agendas. Last year he expanded tax benefits for mothers so that women under the age of 30 who have a child are exempt from paying personal income tax for life. That’s on top of housing and child-care subsidies as well as generous maternity leaves.

Hungary’s fertility rate, though still well below replacement, has risen since 2010. But the Vienna Institute of Demography attributed this primarily to women delaying childbirth because of a debt crisis that hit around 2010. Adjusted for that, fertility has risen only slightly, it concluded.

In the U.S., while state and federal legislators have pushed to expand child-care subsidies and parental leave, they have generally not set a higher birthrate as an explicit goal. Some Republicans, though, are leaning in that direction. Last year, Trump said he backed paying out “baby bonuses” to prop up U.S. births, and GOP Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake recently endorsed the idea.

Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio said falling fertility matters beyond the economic pressures of a smaller labor force and unfunded Social Security. “Do you live in communities where there are smiling happy children, or where people are just aging?” he said in an interview. Lack of siblings and cousins, he said, contributes to children’s social isolation.

He’s studied potential solutions, in particular Hungary’s approach, but hasn’t seen proof of anything that works over the long term.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found little evidence that pronatalist policies lead to sustained rebounds in fertility. A woman may get pregnant sooner to capture a baby bonus, researchers say, but likely won’t have more kids over the course of her lifetime.

Economic pressure

With no reversal in birthrates in sight, the attendant economic pressures are intensifying. Since the pandemic, labor shortages have become endemic throughout developed countries. That will only worsen in coming years as the postcrisis fall in birthrates yields an ever-shrinking inflow of young workers, placing more strain on healthcare and retirement systems.

Neil Howe, a demographer at Hedgeye Risk Management, has pointed to a recent World Bank report suggesting that worsening demographics could make this a second consecutive “lost decade” for global economic growth.

The usual prescription in advanced countries is more immigration, but that has two problems. As more countries confront stagnant population, immigration between them is a zero-sum game. Historically, host countries have sought skilled migrants who enter through formal, legal channels, but recent inflows have been predominantly unskilled migrants often entering illegally and claiming asylum.

High levels of immigration have also historically aroused political resistance, often over concerns about cultural and demographic change. A shrinking native-born population is likely to intensify such concerns. Many of the leaders keenest to raise birthrates are most resistant to immigration.

A woman helped her mother-in-law in Hoengseong, South Korea. PHOTO: JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

As birthrates fall, more regions and communities experience depopulation, with consequences ranging from closed schools to stagnant property values. Less selective colleges will soon struggle to fill classrooms because of the plunge in birthrates that began in 2007, said Fernández-Villaverde. Vance said rural hospitals can’t stay open because of the falling local population.

An economy with fewer children will struggle to finance pensions and healthcare for growing ranks of elderly. South Korea’s national pension fund, one of the world’s largest, is on track to be depleted by 2055. A special legislative committee recently presented several possible pension reforms, but there’s only a short window to act before the next presidential election campaign heats up.

There’s been little public pressure to act, said Sok Chul Hong, an economist at Seoul National University. “The elderly are not very interested in pension reform, and the youth are apathetic towards politics,” he said. “It is truly an ironic situation.”

Anthony DeBarros contributed to this article

Appeared in the May 14, 2024, print edition as ‘There Aren’t Enough Babies, Alarming the Whole World’.

Suddenly There Aren’t Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed.

Published on May 16, 2024 by actingpersonblogLeave a comment

Birthrates are falling fast across countries, with economic, social and geopolitical consequences

Children played on swings at a school in Tamba, Japan. BUDDHIKA WEERASINGHE/BLOOMBERG NEWS

By Greg Ip

and Janet Adamy

May 13, 2024 12:01 am ET

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The world is at a startling demographic milestone. Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened.

Demographics are supposed to be a slow-moving force, but the baby bust is happening so quickly and so widely that it’s taken many by surprise.

Rosie Ettenheim/ THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

“The demographic winter is coming,” said Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economist specializing in demographics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Some demographers think the world’s population could start shrinking within four decades—one of the few times it’s happened in history.

Governments have rolled out programs to stop the decline—but so far they’ve barely made a dent.

A father held his baby in a newborn care unit in Patiala, India. PHOTO: ELKE SCHOLIERS/GETTY IMAGES

Demographic surprise

Total fertility rates

https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/9810ee06-fa5d-4c32-abf3-fe6ab9919b73-BirthRates_Nation-_700px.jpg

U.S.

MEXICO

INDIA

CHINA

SOUTH KOREA

HUNGARY

JAPAN

1980

’90

2000

’10

’20

Sources: United Nations; U.S. Centers for Disease Control; national estimates compiled by Jesús Fernández-Villaverde
Rosie Ettenheim/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

U.N. estimates and projections for world population

https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/6db289f8-c25b-4bef-95a0-5cc494a17d82-BirthRates_WorldPopulation-_700px.jpg

12 billion

PROJECTION

2017

2022

1950

’60

’70

’80

’90

2000

’10

’20

’30

’40

’50

’60

’70

’80

’90

2100

Notes: 2022 data are estimates (1950-2021) and projections (2022-2100), medium variant
2017 data are estimates (1950-2015) and projections (2016-2100), medium variant

Source: United Nations
Rosie Ettenheim/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

In the U.S., a short-lived pandemic baby boomlet has reversed. The total fertility rate fell to 1.62 last year, according to provisional government figures, the lowest on record.

A second demographic transition?

Now, said Spears, “the big-picture fact is that birthrates are low or are falling in many diverse societies and economies.”

U.S. birthrates by age group

https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/3c25914c-9936-4c2c-aade-0b117bd6b9b9-Birthrates_ages-_700px.jpg

300

250

200

150

100

30-34

25-29

20-24

35-39

15-19

40-44

1940

’50

’60

’70

’80

’90

2000

’10

’20

Note: Rates are per 1,000 women in specified age group. 2023 data is provisional.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Rosie Ettenheim/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

In the U.S., some thought at first that women were simply delaying childbirth because of lingering economic uncertainty from the 2008 financial crisis.

The Pittman family in Raleigh, N.C. PHOTO: ANGELA OWENS/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The Pittmans outside their home. PHOTO: ANGELA OWENS/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

‘Plugged into the global culture’

Fertility is below replacement in India even though the country is still poor and many women don’t work—factors that usually sustain fertility.

“I think now we live in a really different world, so I think for anyone in the world it’s tough to find a partner,” she said.

Mae Mariyam Thomas, at her house in Mumbai, India, has opted to not have children. PHOTO: ATUL LOKE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Mothers held their premature babies at a hospital in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. PHOTO: ISSOUF SANOGO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

“The act of bringing a child into this world is an incredible responsibility,” she said.

U.N. 2023 projections on top 12 most-populous countries and their total fertility

https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/f8eab25d-02ff-4aa1-9776-c952ab5fb1a2-BirthRates_TopCountries-_700px.jpg

TOTAL FERTILITY RATE

Brazil

Bangladesh

Japan

Population, hundred million

Indonesia

Nigeria

Ethiopia

U.S.

China

India

Pakistan

Russia

Mexico

Source: United Nations
Rosie Ettenheim/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

New policies

Governments have tried to reverse the fall in fertility with pronatalist policies.

Japan’s fertility rate climbed from 1.26 in 2005 to 1.45 in 2015. But then it started declining again, and in 2022 was back to 1.26.

An event celebrating Children’s Day in Tokyo on May 5. PHOTO: GU YIPING/XINHUA/ZUMA PRESS

Doctors and nurses took care of a baby in Nyiregyhaza, Hungary. PHOTO: ATTILA BALAZS/EPA-EFE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

He’s studied potential solutions, in particular Hungary’s approach, but hasn’t seen proof of anything that works over the long term.

Economic pressure

A woman helped her mother-in-law in Hoengseong, South Korea. PHOTO: JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Anthony DeBarros contributed to this article

Appeared in the May 14, 2024, print edition as ‘There Aren’t Enough Babies, Alarming the Whole World’.

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Letter from the Prelate, 5/15/24

Published on May 15, 2024 by actingpersonblogLeave a comment

As I frequently remind you, I count on the prayer of each and every one, cor unum et anima una (Acts 4:32) – it is everyone’s concern – for the ongoing study of our Statutes. At the beginning of this month, a first meeting took place of four members of the Dicastery and four canonists of Opus Dei, three men professors and one woman professor. A second meeting of this type is planned for the end of June and this work will surely continue after the summer. The goal is to finalize, in the best possible way, the Statutes of the Work, following the indication given by the Pope to “safeguard the charism” (Ad charisma tuendum). That is, to safeguard its essential elements (its secular and mainly lay character, the unity of vocation between lay people – men and women – and priests, etc.). The solemnity of Pentecost helps us to entrust ourselves to the action of the Paraclete also in this work, and to live it, each one and as a family, with the spirit of filiation that I just spoke about.

On the 25th, God willing, the priestly ordination of twenty-nine members of the Work will take place. May they also be very present in our prayer, especially during the upcoming days.

We will celebrate Pentecost in the middle of the month of May. We may find it helpful to consider that our Lady, as the mediator of all grace, is (as Saint Andrew of Crete said) “the mother from whom the Spirit descends upon all men and women” (Marian Homily II).

Your Father blesses you with all his affection.

Rome, May 15, 2024

Pope Francis and Elon Musk on the need for Babies

Published on May 13, 2024May 13, 2024 by actingpersonblogLeave a comment

Pope: Consumerism, not overpopulation, to blame for world hunger

Speaking at a conference in Rome on boosting birth rates, Pope Francis says that “The problem is not how many of us there are in this world, but rather what kind of world we’re building.”

By Joseph Tulloch

Pope Francis on Friday addressed the General States of Natality, an annual conference in Rome organised by the Italian government to discuss the country’s declining birth rate.

This year’s meeting had the title “Being there: More youth, more future.”

Babies, consumerism, and world hunger

Pope Francis began his address to the conference by noting that, in the past, there was “no shortage of studies” warning of the dangers of overpopulation.

“I was always struck”, the Pope said, “by how these theses, which are now outdated, talked about human beings as if they were problems.”

Pollution and world hunger, the Pope emphasised, are not caused by the birth of children, but rather by “the choices of those who only think about themselves, the delirium of an unbridled, blind and rampant materialism, and of consumerism.”

“The problem”, Pope Francis noted, “is not how many of us there are in this world, but rather what kind of world we’re building.”

He went on to note that, in Italy – which has one of the lowest birthrates in Europe – the average age is now 47 years old. The Pope warned that the country, like the rest of Europe, is “slowly losing its hope in tomorrow”.

“The Old Continent,” Pope Francis said, “is becoming an elderly continent.”

Pope Francis with participants in the conference

Ways forward

The Pope recommended two solutions to the crisis, one institutional and the other social.

“At the institutional level,” he said, “there is an urgent need for effective policies, courageous, concrete and long-term choices, to sow today so that children can reap tomorrow. A greater commitment is needed from all governments, so that the younger generations are put in a position to realise their legitimate dreams.”

It is also important, the Pope added, to promote “a culture of generosity and intergenerational solidarity”.

This would involve, he said, “reconsidering habits and lifestyles” and “renouncing what is superfluous”, in order to “give the youngest hope for tomorrow.”

Courage

The Pope then moved on to consider the topic of hope, addressing his words on the subject to young people in particular.

“I know that for many of you,” he said, “the future may seem ominous, and that amidst the collapse in the birth rate, wars, pandemics and climate change it is not easy to keep hope alive.”

“But do not give up,” the Pope urged them, “have faith, because tomorrow is not something inescapable: we build it together.”

Abandonment of the elderly ‘cultural suicide’

Towards the end of his speech, the Pope laid his prepared remarks to one side and spoke off-the-cuff on the subject of society’s treatment of the elderly.

“Lonely grandparents, discarded grandparents: this is cultural suicide”, he said.

“The future is built by the young and the old, together,” the Pope continued. “Please, when talking about the birth rate, which is the future, let us also talk about grandparents, who are not the past, but help the future.”

“Have children, lots of them,” Pope Francis concluded, “but also look after your grandparents.”

Pope Francis with participants in the conference

The Truth Will Make You Free

Tesla’s Elon Musk: ‘Population collapse’ is ‘biggest problem’ facing world

PUBLISHED ON March 12, 2024

‘Most people think we have too many people on the planet, but actually this is an outdated view.’

Elon MuskMark Brake/Getty Images

Pete Baklinski

Fri Aug 30, 2019 – 12:51 pm EDT

August 30, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – The “biggest problem” facing the world is not population explosion, but “population collapse,” said Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk.

Musk made the comment in a live-streamed debate with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. chairman Jack Ma at the August 29 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.

When Ma reflected on the low birth rate in China — which formerly had a one-child policy but now has a two-child policy — Musk agreed that there is a “birth rate” problem.

“Most people think we have too many people on the planet, but actually this is an outdated view,” said Musk.

“Assuming that AI (artificial intelligence) is fine — we’re assuming there’s a benevolent future with AI — I think the biggest problem the world will face in 20 years is population collapse,” he continued.

“Collapse: I want to emphasize this. The biggest issue in 20 years will be population collapse, not explosion, collapse,” he added.

Ma said in response: “I absolutely agree with that, the population will be facing a huge challenge.”

Musk said the “accelerating collapse” will not be able to be checked by immigration.

“The common rebuttal is: ‘Well, what about immigration?’” he said.

“Like from where?” he added.

Demographers have for years already been warning Western countries with below replacement-level birth rates about what some call the “demographic winter” as a result of the decline. In such a collapse, the old outnumber the young, creating severe imbalances. Economies suffer. Some could even crash. The result could negatively impact, and could prove detrimental, to some of the main infrastructures — such as financial systems and healthcare — that contribute to living in a western democracy.

Population Research Institute president Steven Mosher said Musk’s comments on population collapse are accurate.

“An old-age tsunami is hitting not just the West and China, but all of humanity. China is now facing a demographic repression caused by the wanton elimination of 400 million people. So will the world as a whole in decades to come. Elon Musk is right,” he told LifeSiteNews.

Mosher said that governments should follow Hungary’s example where pro-family policies are making it easier for young people to marry and have children. Some of these measures include massive tax breaks for families, housing programs, interest-free loans for married couples, and many other incentives, all geared toward encouraging Hungarians to have children.

“People should be advocating for robust, very robust pro-natal policies,” he said.

Mosher noted that it is also “God advice,” as can be found in the Bible, that babies are a blessing. And, he added, it turns out that this advice is true “even in our secular age.”

“Scripture tells us that babies are blessings and not burdens. And they’re blessings for everybody. They’re blessings for their family, for the parents, for their community, for their society, for the economy, and for the nation as a whole. So, I think that if people kept that scriptural perspective in mind, they’d be better: they themselves would be better off, and their countries would be better off in the long run,” he said.

This is not the first time Musk has warned about population collapse.

In a July 2017 tweet, Musk noted that the world’s population is “accelerating towards collapse, but few seem to notice or care.”

His comment was in relation to a November 2016 New Scientist article titled “The world in 2076: The population bomb has imploded” that projected a measured decline of global population over the next 60 years, because half of the countries in the world have fertility rates below the replacement rate. The replacement fertility rate is 2.1 children per woman. Most developed countries are far below this.

Musk also told CCCMoney in a March 2017 interview that people “should be concerned about demographic implosion.”

“So if you look at countries like Japan, most of Europe, China,” Musk said, “and you look at the birth rates, in a lot of those places it is only at about half of the sustaining rate.”

He described an inverted demographic pyramid, where older people are on top who are not able to be sustained by the too few numbers of young people beneath them.

“So it will sort of fall over,” he said, “it will not stand.”

Ex-Mayor of New York at the time of 9/11, a major source of unity and consolation to all New Yorkers, Rudolf Giuliani is denied freedom of speech and taken down.

Published on May 13, 2024May 14, 2024 by actingpersonblogLeave a comment

WABC Cancels Giuliani’s Radio Show Over False Election Claims

The station’s owner, John Catsimatidis, a Republican billionaire, said he suspended the former mayor for persisting in talking about the legitimacy of the 2020 election on the air.

Listen to this article · 6:38 min Learn more

Rudolph W. Giuliani’s suspension from WABC deprives him of one of his largest platforms to reach his followers.Credit…Bonnie Cash/Reuters

By Nicholas Fandos

Published May 10, 2024Updated May 11, 2024

Rudolph W. Giuliani was suspended by WABC radio on Friday and his daily talk show was abruptly canceled after the station said he violated its policy by trying to discuss discredited claims about the 2020 presidential election on air.

John Catsimatidis, the billionaire Republican businessman who owns the station, said he had made the decision after Mr. Giuliani refused to avoid the topic despite repeated warnings.

“We’re not going to talk about fallacies of the November 2020 election,” Mr. Catsimatidis said in a brief phone interview. “We warned him once. We warned him twice. And I get a text from him last night, and I get a text from him this morning that he refuses not to talk about it.”

Conversation with Elon Musk: Criterion: the Dignity of the Human Person: Take Notes

Published on May 13, 2024May 13, 2024 by actingpersonblogLeave a comment

The Holy Spirit

Published on May 12, 2024 by actingpersonblogLeave a comment

Finding God in Everyday Life

The Mission of the Holy Spirit is not to create an age of the Spirit. There is no “age of the Spirit.” Jesus Christ as God-man is the meaning of “age.” Ratzinger-Benedict XVI writes that “For the first thousand Christ is not the turning-point of history at which a transformed and redeemed world begins, nor is He the point at which the unredeemed history prior to His appearance is terminated. Rather, Christ is the beginning of the end. He is ‘salvation’ in so far as in Him the ‘end’ has already broken into history. Viewed from an historical perspective, salvation consists in this end which He inaugurates while history will run on for a time…and will bring the old aeon of this world to an end.”[1]

We are not called to a detached mysticism as might be found in Buddhism, Confucius or Lao-tzu. Even Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are not “great religious personalities.”[2] We are not called to rise up to God by being individually drawn. Rather, God has come down to us as man, and asked us to make the gift of ourselves to Him in His own lowliness as man. Guardini once said: “We are not great religious personalities; we are servants of the Word.” We are not called to a transcendent mystical life in solitude. Rather we are called to the far greater reality of becoming God-incarnate in the humdrum and quotidian actions of everyday life. As the risen Christ spoke to Paul: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?” (Acts…) the “Me” being the Christians of Damascus.

Magisterium and Scripture testify to this truth: “The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father… At the same time he is the Spirit of the Son: he is the Spirit of Jesus Christ, as the Apostles and particularly Paul of Tarsus will testify”[3] (emphasis mine). “Many things yet I have to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when he, the Spirit of truth, has come, he will teach you all the truth…. He will glorify me, because he will receive of what is mine, and will declare it to you.” And, of course, Jesus Christ is “the Way, and the Truth, and the Life” (Jn. 14, 6).

The Eschatological Crisis of the Present Day:

We do not know experientially today that God exists, because the culture is positivist and reductive. Since we cannot “see God as we see an apple tree or a neon sign, that is, in a purely external way that requires no interior commitment,”[4] there is no God in any significant transcendent sense. And there is no knowing God without becoming God.[5] Like is known by like. Unless there is a conversion to seeking sanctity in the ordinary things of each day experientially, we are practical atheists.

We may go through the motions of religiosity, but it is empty. The technology has aided and abetted the turning back on self which is the meaning of original sin and the real crisis of the moment. Because of the present state of unremitting sensible distraction, it is possible to be living in a state of continuous sin without realizing it. This is why there is an urgent need to clarify the eschatological theology introduced by Joachim of Fiore which dominates Christian consciousness and a fortiori the secular consciousness that is formed by it. Said differently: Christ lived 2000 years ago. He ascended into heaven. He is neither visible in the world nor apparently acting in the world now except for the administration of sacraments as signs. We believe the profession of faith that declares that He has sent the Holy Spirit who moves us and assists us individually to develop the Kingdom of God here on earth in this the last stage of history. At the end, He will return in the Parousia for the final reckoning to judge the living and the dead: “Dies Irae.”

Ratzinger-Benedict has proclaimed the above to be the scandal of the ineffectiveness of Christianity. He writes that “It has been asserted that our century 20^th) is characterized by an entirely new phenomenon: the appearance of people incapable of relating to God. As a result of spiritual and social developments, it is said, we have reached the stage where a kind of person has developed in whom there is no longer any starting point for the knowledge of God.”[6]Since Christ spoke, and the people understood, that He was to make an immediate return, the discrepancy between the kingdom of God being among you and nothing apparently not changing at all was theorized in the 12^th century as Christ’s being a turning point in history and that there was to be a new age of the Spirit in which there was to be the new world of the accomplished kingdom.

Ratzinger-Benedict suggests that the result of this was the pronouncement over time by the theologians that the kingdom of God was a kingdom of heaven up there outside of this world, and that the well-being of men became the salvation of souls, which comes to pass beyond this life, after death. In a word, the Christian message was “clericalized.” Salvation and sanctification takes place outside the world and at the end of history. World history becomes de-christianized.[7]

This false Christian eschatology is a widespread error that has spawned the early Enlightenment utopias, Marxism as a Christian heresy, the secularism that dominates our culture of individualist capitalism and the conceit that financial success equates with human value. This drive for intramundane perfectibility drives us deeper into this proud self-sufficiency that renders us unspeakably lonely while attending to our visual and audible gadgetry. We may speak against abortion, but we do not see through to its metaphysical root in contraception that undermines spouses as persons. It is this that has spawned everything from the abortions to the homosexuality of the gay culture.

Ratzinger’s Theological Evaluation of Joachim and Forerunners:

There is no such thing as the third Age of the Holy Spirit following the Age of the Father and the Age of the Son. Such a thought was the product of the imagination and untraditional theology of Joachim of Fiore and antecedents.

The scholarship of Joseph Ratzinger offers the following: “(Rupert of Deutz [1070-1135]) treats history in its entirety from creation to the final judgment, and attempts to give it a theological interpretation based on Scripture. Like the Fathers, he also constructs his historical typology on the creation account; but unlike the Fathers, he attributes to this account a three-fold historical meaning instead of the two-fold meaning. First of all, this account indicates the work of creation itself, which is the work of the Father. It indicates further the history of salvation which was worked out in the well-known six ages of history; this is the work of the Son. And finally, as a new dimension, it points to the history of salvation determined by the Holy Spirit in the world-epoch of grace opened by Christ. Thus there arises a trinitarian super-structure above the seven-part patristic schema. The time of the Father reaches from the first ‘Let there be’ to the Fall; the time of the Son extends from the Fall to the completion of His saving work on the Cross. With the resurrection, the time of the Holy Spirit begins; and it reaches to the end of the world. The eschatological character of the age of the Spirit is expressly maintained. It is called the time of the resurrection, following the inspiration of St. Augustine. First, there is the resurrection of souls; then follows the resurrection of bodies.”[8]

Thus, world history is neatly divided into three parts: creation (the Father); salvation (the Son), and sanctification (the Holy Spirit). Ratzinger goes on: “From this it follows that there is a proper time of the Holy Spirit, and that the history of the world can be divided into three world weeks, each of which is divided into seven parts….

“It is clear, on the one hand, that the eschatological character of the Church is fully preserved, and, on the other hand, that something new has already begun in the Church.” That novelty consists in this:“the entire period of time from the passion of Christ to the final judgment is of the same character; it is the ‘time of the Spirit,’ a time of the greatest fulfillment. If we were to view any one of these periods as especially singled out, then it would have to be the time of the intellectus, that is, the time of the Apostils; for this age is seen to be normative by reason of the gift proper to it.[9]

The problem here is that history is explained in terms of gifts of the Spirit. “But as soon as we set aside the gifts of the Spirit or make use of another typology, as we might easily be tempted to do, then the entire interpretation is destroyed.

“In place of the unity of the Spirit, we will then have a temporal sequence. Church history then becomes simply one period of time that takes its place among the other periods of history; it is no longer the final age. Instead, it is simply the second age which comes after the first age of the Old Testament History. At the same time, the unity of the time of Christ, which Rupert had maintained, is destroyed.”

The next precursor of Joachim is Honorius of Autun. He rejects Rupert’s strict division of history. Instead, “history is set up perhaps for the first time as a continuous line from Adam up to the present” such that there are five ages before Christ and five after Christ.” Something new appears now: “The history of the church is depicted as a time of a developing history of salvation. This history does not find its end in Christ but enters into a new stage with Him.”[10] The formulation of this new stage in which Christ is a turning point in history, but not the center and meaning thereof, is Joachim of Fiore.

Considering the secularist crisis that has culturally – and unwittingly – captured us all, Ratzinger now centers on the hidden theoretician of this de-Christianization: Joachim. As Anselm had formulated the erroneous theory of redemption that captured the entire Christian world,[11] so also Joachim has matched him with the erroneous introduction of the third stage of world history as that of the Spirit. He writes: “Joachim became the pathfinder within the church for a new understanding of history which to us today appears to be so self-evident that it seems to be the Christian understanding. It may be difficult for us to believe that there was a time when this was not the case. It is here that the true significance of Joachim is to be found…. (A) new eschatological consciousness develops here, and it is demanded precisely by the new manner in which the church as it has exited up to the present[12] as interpreted historically.”[13]

The large point made here is that “Joachim concludes that a truly good and redeemed history is yet to come since an unredeemed and defective history continues after Christ. This is the significant point. History continues after Christ’s Ascension as “unredeemed.” Nothing redemptive is perceived by the external senses to have happened. Ratzinger will latter see this in his exegesis of the message sent by the imprisoned John the Baptist to Christ: “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (Lk. 7, 19). The reason for the message was: “No fire fell from heaven to consume sinners and bear definitive witness to the just; in fact, nothing changed at all in the present world. Jesus went about preaching and doing good in the land, but the ambiguity remained. Human life continued to be a dark mystery to which people had to entrust themselves with faith and hope amid the world’s darkness.”[14] Ratzinger’s point: “Clearly, it was this utterly different personality of Jesus that most tormented John during the long nights in prison: The eclipse of God continued, and the imperturbable advance of a history that was so often a slap in the face to believers.”[15] Hence, the question: “Are you really he: the Redeemer of the world? Are you really here now as the Redeemer? Was that really all that God had to say to us?”[16]

And the supernatural response from Christ: “Go and report to John what you have heard and seen: the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise, the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he who is not scandalized in me” (Lk. 7, 23). John Paul II makes the exegesis: “Love is present in the world in which we live,”[17] but we cannot recognize it until we go through the conversions of self to Love and therefore see Love. The Baptist was still looking for a theocracy. Christ was revealing the Father as Agape.

Fatigued by the failure to sensibly perceive the presence of the Redemption in the world as the work of Christ, Joachimism after Joachim transformed the post Ascension and the coming of the Spirit into a “mingling of rational planning with suprarational goals, already observable in the Old Testament and in Judaism.” [18] The supernatural dimension that is in the Joachim-of-intention is quickly slipped off to be turned into the political history of Europe “where it will take the form of messianism through planning.”[19] The early Enlightenment Utopias, “Hegel’s logic of history and Marx’s historical scheme are the end products of these beginnings.”[20]

This was basically chiliasm (the belief that Christ would return and rule for a millennium) that was rejected by the patristic church, and in our own day, the Marxist theologies of liberation. Ratzinger raises the question: “But just why did the Church reject that chiliasm which would allow one to take up the practical task of realizing on earth Parousia-like conditions?”[21] The answer is that Christ wants man free and rational so that he can love with the giving of himself. Without freedom there can be no self-gift, and without self-gift there can be no ultimate light for reason since it is the very being of the person in the self-gift of faith that is the absolute light of reason. As Ratzinger says in another place, “What is essential is that reason shut in on itself does not remain reasonable or rational, just as the state that aims at being perfect becomes tyrannical. Reason needs revelation in order to be able to be effective as reason.” [22] If you remove the presence of Jesus Christ from history, you remove the metaphysically transforming experience of self-transcendence that is Christian faith. Doing so, you remove freedom.

Joachimism was condemned by the Church[23]

Understand what Benedict XVI and the content of the spirit of Opus Dei are about. Jesus Christ is not to be found in the past or in the future, but in the “now.” Christ Lives!![24] He is not a figure of the past. We are not looking forward nor embarking on a post-Christian era. Jesus Christ is the God-man. He is not reducible to an individual who appeared in the past and will come again in the future. His very Person is divine. He is an existing absolute. He is heaven. He himself is the Kingdom of God. He is the Kingdom already come. There is not such thing as “progress” beyond Him. “He [the Spirit of truth] will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (Jn. 16, 14).

The resurrected Christ and the return of Christ (Parousia) are one and the same thing, since the Person of Christ is divine and transcends time. To rise is already to return. T o understand this, one must live on a transcendent level which consists in being out of self relationally. Ratzinger wrote: “The ancient Israelite prayed turned towards the Jerusalem temple. The early Christian prayed turned towards the East, the rising sun, which is the symbol of the risen Christ who rose from death’s night into the glory of the Father and now reigns over all. At the same time, the rising sun is also the sign of the returning Christ who makes his definitive epiphany out of hiddenness, thus establishing the Kingdom of God in this world. The fusing together of these two kinds of symbolism in the image of the rising sun suggests how intimately related faith in the resurrection and hope for the Parousia really are. The two are one in the figure of the Lord who has already returned as the risen One, continues to return in the Eucharist, and so remains he who is to come, the hope of the world.”[25]

But this divinity is the “I Am” of the God speaking to Moses in the burning bush, and the “I Am” of Jesus Christ who announces: “Before Abraham came to be, I am” (Jn. 8, 58).

The problem is the anthropology of being constitutively relational (as Trinitarian Person) and therefore epistemologically inaccessible to sensible perception. Christ lives and is present here and now. But He cannot be seen and recognized except by someone who has become like Him. That is, to know Him, one must become prayer by changing every small act into gift. Hence, the total endeavor of Benedict XVI is to form the Church in living faith – not “supposing” it but “proposing”[26] it instanter (without ceasing). This cannot be done except by preaching the Word clearly and courageously by the ministerial priesthood, and laity impregnating their professional work with its truth. This means that Revelation is not achieved merely by reading Scripture but by hearing the action of preaching and responding to that preaching with faith that is deed.

Note that Revelation is the divine Person as act that is imparted to the believing subject as freely accepted act. The believer received the Person of Christ by becoming His action of Self-gift. When that happens, the veil between the divinity and the human is lifted and re-vel-ation takes place. The “I” of the believer becomes “light” as consciousness of being “another Christ.” In that case, revelation takes place from within the believing subject. “The person who receives it also is a part of the revelation to a certain degree, for without him it does not exist. You cannot put revelation in your pocket like a book you carry around with you. It is a living reality that requires a living person as the locus of its presence.”[27]

This could at first look like Modernism whereby revelation would be a “subterranean effervescence” wafting up from the medulla of human nature, and therefore the negation of the supernatural. But it is just the opposite. It is the transformation of the self into Christ by a radical self-abandonment. It then does waft up from within because the “I” has died to itself and become another “I” who in reality is the Prototype of the true self. The self has been supernaturalized, and one becomes contemplative by making gift of ordinary work. Ephesians 1, 4: “Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and without blemish in his sight in love. He predestined us to be adopted through Jesus Christ as his sons…”

Comparison of Ratzinger and Escriva

The Eschatology: Ratzinger affirms that the critical problem of our day is God. He may have been experienced in the past in the Flesh of Jesus Christ, and will be experience again in the future, but in the meantime we do not see or sense Him. We have lost the experience of God. We know that He exists, but we do not experience Him. And since the culture values only what can be experienced sensibly and subjected to scientific verification, God is trivialized and cannot be known with certitude. God may or may not exist; but if He does, He is an accessory. The great task, then, is the recovery of the experience of God.

Ratzinger writes: 1) “Metz is right: the ‘unum necessarium’ to man is God. Everything changes, whether, whether God exists or not. Unfortunately – we Christians also often live as if God did not exist (‘si Deus non daretur’). We live according to the slogan: God does not exists, and if He exists, He does not belong.

“Therefore, evangelization must, first of all, speak about God, proclaim the one true God: the Creator – the Sanctifier – The Judge.

“Here we too must keep the practical aspect in mind. God cannot be made known with words alone. One does not really know a person if one knows about this person second-handedly. To proclaim God is to introduce to the relation with God: to teach how to pray. Prayer is faith in action. And only by experiencing life with God does the evidence of His existence appear.”[28]

2) Ratzinger and Escriva both make the same observation on the apparent ineffectiveness of Christianity over the millennia.

Ratzinger gives an example of the ennui caused by the culture originating from this third stage of history – the age of the Spirit – awaiting the return of Christ at the end but not present now: “What really torments us today, what bothers us much more is the inefficacy of Christianity: after two thousand years of Christian history, we can see nothing that might be a new reality in the world; rather, we find it sunk in the same old horrors, the same despair, and the same hopes as ever. And in our own lives, too, we inevitably experience time and again how Christian reality is powerless against all the other forces that influence us and make demands on us.”[29] The temptation that comes with this is to clericalize the Christian message and Ratzinger gives it voice: “Christian theology…turned the kingdom of God into a kingdom of heaven that is beyond this mortal life: the well-being of men became a salvation of souls, which again comes to pass beyond this life, after death.”[30] Hence the message of the call to holiness in the world here and now, that is so evident in the New Testament, is postponed and transferred.

Escriva was told: “Look, from North to South, from East to West.” H responded: “What do yo want me to look at?” The answer was: “The failure of Christ. For twenty centuries people have been trying to bring his doctrine to men’s lives, and look at the result.” The response of Escriva was first sadness. Then “love and thankfulness, because Jesus has wanted every man to cooperate freely in the work of redemption. He has not failed.His doctrine and life are effective in the world at all times…. The work of redemption is still going on, and each one of us has a part in it… It is worthwhile putting our lives on the line, giving ourselves completely, so as to answer to the love and the confidence that God has placed in us.”

3) Ratzinger comments on Escriva’s Christ-centered experience which is fruit of the Spirit: “there is something which one immediately notices when one comes in contact with the life of Monsignor Escrivá de Balaguer and his writings – a very vivid sense of the presence of Christ. ‘Stir up that fire of faith. Christ is not a figure that has passed. He is not a memory that is lost in history. He lives! “Jesus Christus heri et hodie, ipse et in saecula”, says Saint Paul, – “Jesus Christ is the same today as he was yesterday, and as he will be for ever”,’ wrote Josemaría Escrivá in The Way (584). This Christ who is alive is also a Christ who is near, a Christ in whom the power and majesty of God make themselves present through ordinary, simple human beings.

One can, then, speak of Josemaría Escrivá having a marked and special type of Christ-centeredness, in which contemplation of Jesus’ life on earth and contemplation of his living presence in the Eucharist lead one to discover God; and from God they throw light onto the circumstances of our everyday life. ‘The fact that Jesus grew up and lived just like us shows us that human existence and all the ordinary activities of men have a divine meaning. No matter how much we may have reflected on this’, he goes on, ‘we should always be surprised when we think of the thirty years of obscurity which made up the greater part of Jesus’ life among men. He lived in obscurity, but for us that period is full of light. It illuminates our days and fills them with meaning, for we are ordinary Christians who lead an ordinary life, just like millions of other people all over the world.’(Christ is Passing By, 14).

There are two things we can learn from these reflections on the life of Jesus, from the deep mystery of the fact that God not only became man but also took on the human condition, making himself the same as us, except for sin (Heb 4:15). First of all is the universal call to holiness, to whose proclamation Josemaría Escrivá made such a contribution, as Pope John Paul II recalled in his homily during the beatification Mass. But also, to give body to this call, there is the recognition that holiness is reached, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, through ordinary life.

Holiness consists in this – living our daily life with our sights fixed on God; shaping all our actions to accord with the Gospel and the spirit of Faith. Each and every theological understanding of the world and of history derives from this core reality, as many passages in the writings of Josemaría Escrivá so clearly and incisively show. ‘This world of ours,’ he proclaimed in a homily, ‘is good, for so it came from God’s hands. It was Adam’s offence, the sin of human pride, which broke the divine harmony of creation. But God the Father, in the fullness of time, sent his only-begotten Son to take flesh in Mary ever Virgin, through the Holy Spirit, and re-establish peace.

In this way, by redeeming man from sin, “we receive adoption as sons” (Gal 4:5). We become capable of sharing the intimacy of God. In this way the new man, the new line of the children of God (cf. Rom 6:4-5), is enabled to free the whole universe from disorder, restoring all things in Christ (cf. Eph 1:9-10), as they have been reconciled with God (cf. Col 1:20).’(Christ is Passing By, 183).

In this splendid passage, the great truths of the Christian faith (the infinite love of God the Father, his goodness which is responsible for creation, the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, divine filiation, identification of the Christian with Christ…), are linked up to shed light on the life of the Christian, particularly the Christian living in the midst of the world, with all his complex secular involvements. Underlying dogmatic insights are projected onto everyday life, and that life is encouraged to rethink, to really take to heart, the Christian message in its entirety; a spiral movement is set in motion, which involves and supports theological reflection.[31]

Escriva writes:

“In the spiritual life, there is no new era to come. Everything is already there, in Christ who died and rose again, who lives and stays with us always. But we have to join him through faith, letting his life show forth in ours to such an extent that each Christian is not simply alter Christus, another Christ, but ipse Christus: Christ himself!”[32]

Signature Statement of St. Josemaria Escriva:

“You must realize now, more clearly than ever, that God is calling you to serve him in and from the ordinary, secular, and civil activities of human life. He waits for us everyday, in the laboratory, in the operating theater, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home, and in all the immense panorama of work. Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.”

“I often said to the university students and workers who were with me in the thirties that they had to know how to materialize their spiritual lives. I wanted to warn them of the temptation, so common then and now, to lead a kind of double life: on the one hand, an inner life, a life related to God; and on the other, as something separate and distinct, their professional, social, and family lives, made up of small earthly realities.

“No, my children! We cannot lead a double life. We cannot have a split personality if we want to be Christians. There is only one life, made of flesh and spirit. And it is that life which has to become, in both body and soul, holy and filled with God: we discover the invisible God in the most visible and material things.

There is no other way, my daughters and sons: either we learn to find our Lord in ordinary, everyday life, or we shall never find him. That is why I tell you that our age needs to give back to matter and to the apparently trivial events of life their noble, original meaning. It needs to place them at the service of the kingdom of God; it needs to spiritualize them, turning them into a means and an occasion for a continuous meeting with Jesus Christ.”[33]

Eschatological Context of BXVI’s Three Encyclicals

The three encyclicals of Benedict XVI, “Deus Caritas Est,” “Spe Salvi” and “Caritas in Veritate” are situated in an epistemological drought of the experience and consciousness of God. That being so, the hope of “development” into becoming “another Christ” has morphed into an itch for “progress.” Instead of an “attitude” of relation to other, there is absorption with self, aided and abetted by information technology. Bored and alienated because of imprisonment in the self, one agitates for distraction by sound and screen in the enforced solipsism of self-sufficiency.

Benedict XVI sets the intellectual provenance of this state of affairs to be the work of Joachim of Fiore in the 13^th century. He remarked: “I have tried to show in my professorial dissertation that this was what was believed concerning the theology of history throughout the first millennium of Christianity. The division of history into ‘before Christ’ and ‘after Christ,’ into redeemed and unredeemed time that seems to us nowadays the essential expression of the Christian consciousness of history, for we think we cannot formulate any concept of the redemption, thus of the keystone of Christianity, without it – this division of history into periods is in fact simply the result of the great change in thinking about the theology of history that occurred in the thirteenth century. This was prompted by the writings of Joachim of Fiore: his teaching about the three epochs was indeed rejected, but the understanding of the Christ-event as a point in time separating different periods within history was adopted from him. The change in the overall understanding of everything to do with Christianity that results from this has to be seen as one of the most significant turnarounds in the history of Christian consciousness. A reappraisal of this will constitute an urgent task for theological study in our time.”[34]

It is principally Bonaventure who explicitly rejects Joachim’s ‘third age’ of the Spirit because it destroys the central position of Christ. Ratzinger wrote in his thesis: “If is justified to say that for Joachim, Christ is merely one point of division among others, it is no less justified to say that for Bonaventure, Christ is the ‘axis of the world history,’ the center of time. Even though Bonaventure accepts and affirms the parallel structure of the ages which had been rejected by Thomas [Aquinas], he is led in this by a completely different tendency than that which led Joachim to his structuring of time. If Joachim was above all concerned with bringing out the movement of the second age to the third, Bonaventure’s purpose is to show on the basis of the parallel between the two ages, that Christ is the true center and the turning point of history. Christ is the center of all. This is the basic concept of Bonaventure’s historical schema, and it involves a decisive rejection of Joachim.”[35]

Ratzinger understands the Parousia (the “advent” – “presence” of Christ) to be “already-not yet.” We cannot see Him because we have lost the likeness to Him whereby we experience Him in ourselves, and therefore, “know” Him. Not experiencing Him in ourselves we cannot re-cognize Him with our external senses. We are scandalized by His “absence” and we lose hope. We are alone, thrown back on ourselves, and alienated in the world. The three encyclicals are calling us to conversion so that we begin to experience Him as Love, hope in His presence and power, and exercise that presence and power as self-gift in the world.

The Most Concrete Proposal: to live the spirit of becoming “another Christ” in the exercise of intramundane, ordinary, professional work as communicated to the Founder of Opus Dei. And since the Kingdom of God is not “up there” or “at the end of history” but a “Person with the fact and name of Jesus of Nazareth”[36] who is present in the world now – and working -, not only in the Eucharist or grace, but in all the persons who make the gift of themselves to God and the others in the service of ordinary work and rest, the Kingdom of God is present “already” – “not yet.” “Not yet” in the sense that, although Christ has come and is present, the number of those who are to become “other Christs” is not yet complete. The Kingdom is not a structure, certainly not an ideology, not even the Church, but the continuous conversion of persons into Christ by beginning again and again to make the gift of self in work and ordinary affairs.

Such action is the subjective experience that creates a change in “attitude” and consciousness of everything. It is the response of a call to holiness in the world. And of course, the rub is here. What is at stake in the pope’s mind is the universal call to holiness. Who today would agree that these world crises are crises of saints? Yet, that is exactly what is up at the present moment. The relationality of the human person in the image of the Triune God, turning work into an experience of gift and gratuitousness, “a new trajectory of thinking” (#53) which will be the “presence of God” is the deep work of a radical transformation into Christ in the middle of the world. Fundamentally, this is what’s up.

End pieces: Joseph Ratzinger writes: “Joachim was convinced that God’s plan for his human creatures could triumph only if it also succeeded on earth. It seemed to follow, then, that the time of the Church, as men have experience it since the apostles, cannot be the definitive form of salvation. Joachim transformed the earlier periodization of history, which reflected the seven days of the week, into the idea of a multiplicand: history contains three times seven days. This he did by linking the venerable inherited schema with the doctrine of the Trinity. In this way, it appeared to be possible to calculate the third ‘week’ of history, the time of the Holy Spirit. The immanence of this third age created the obligation to work towards it: something Joachim tried to do though his monastic foundations. The mingling of rational planning with supra-rational goals already observable in the Old Testament and in Judaism, now receives systematic form. It will soon slough off the spiritual dreams of Abbot Joachim and emerge into the political history of Europe, where it will take the form of messianism through planning. Such planned messianism became ever more fascinating as the potential of planning waxed and religion waned, though continuing, inevitably, to form human motives and hopes. Hegel’s logic of history and Marx’s historical scheme are the end products of these beginnings. Those messianic goals in which Marxism’s fascination lies rest upon a faulty underlying synthesis of religion and reason.”[37]

Notice that in the light of this, the crises of the world are theological and can be solved only by a correctly resonating epistemology and anthropology

The coming of the Spirit does not inaugurate the age of the Spirit. It inaugurates the age of persons-becoming-Christ. As past, now and always, we are in the age of Christ because Christ is the meaning of man, and the meaning of all history. He is not a turning point to the Spirit.

More: Jesus Christ Is the Meaning of World History, not Its Axis:

Joachim understood Jesus Christ to be the turning point of history between two parallel testaments: the Old and the New. Ratzinger wrote: “The idea of seeing Christ as the axis of world history was prepared for by Rupert, Honorius and Anselm. But it appears clearly for the first time in Joachim; and even here it is somewhat hidden at first by the fact that the history of the world has not one but two axes, and that it is made up not of two but of three great periods. The rejection of this latter notion was effected forcibly by the triumph of orthodox dogma; but the other idea remained. Consequently, Joachim became the path-finder within the church for a new understanding of history which to us today appears to be so self-evident that it seems to be the Christian understanding. It may be difficult for us to believe that there was a time when this was not the case. It is here that the true significance of Joachim is to be found.”[38]

[1] J. Ratzinger, “The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure,” Franciscan Herald Press (1971 – 1989) 106-107.

[2] J. Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance, Ignatius (2004) 42 (quoting J. Danielou).

[3] John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantem #14.

[4] J. Ratzinger, Dogma and Preaching, Franciscan Herald Press (1985) 76.

[5] Benedict XVI: “Yet here a further question immediately arises: who knows God? How can we know him? (…) For a Christian, the nucleus of the reply is simple: only God knows God, only his Son who is God from God, true God, knows him. And he ‘who is nearest to the Father’s heart has made him known’ (John 1:18). Hence the unique and irreplaceable importance of Christ for us, for humanity. If we do not know God in and with Christ, all of reality is transformed into an indecipherable enigma; there is no way, and without a way, there is neither life nor truth.

God is the foundational reality, not a God who is merely imagined or hypothetical, but God with a human face; he is God-with-us, the God who loves even to the Cross. When the disciple arrives at an understanding of this love of Christ “to the end”, he cannot fail to respond to this love with a similar love: “I will follow you wherever you go” (Luke 9:57),” Brazil: CELAM 2007 (Conference of the Episcopate of Latin America and the Caribbean).

[6] J. Ratzinger, “What It Means to Be a Christian,” Ignatius (2006) 24-25.

[7] Ratzinger notes that “Christ was not just looking forward to another life, but was talking about real people” and that “when we look at real history,” it is in fact no kingdom of God. “What It Means….” Ibid 29.

[8] J. Ratzinger, “The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure,” Franciscan Herald Press (1971-1989) 98.

[9] Ibid 101.

[10] Ibid 104.

[11] That God had to become man to redress the infinite injustice done to an infinite God: cf. “Introduction to Christianity” (Ignatius 1990) 173-174 and 214: “This picture is as false as it is widespread…”

[12] “For the first thousand years of Christian theology, Christ is not the turning-point of history at which a transformed and redeemed world begins, nor is He the point at which the unredeemed history prior to His appearance is terminated. Rather, Christ is the beginning of the end. He is ‘salvation’ in as far as in Him the ‘end’ has already broken into history. Viewed from an historical perspective salvation consists in this end which he inaugurates, while history will run on for a time, so to say, per nefas and will bring the old aeon of this world to an end. The idea of seeing Christ as the axis of world history was prepared for by Rupert, Honorius and Anselm. But it appears clearly for the first time in Joachim;” J. Ratzinger, “The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure,” op. cit. 106-107.

[13] Ibid 107.

[14] J. Ratzinger, Dogma and Preaching Franciscan Herald Press (1985) 75.

[15] Ibid 75.

[16] Ibid 76.

[17] John Paul II Dives in Misericordia #3 (DSP p. 12).

[18] J. Ratzinger, Eschatology CUA (1988) 212.

[19] Ibid

[20] Ibid

[21] Ibid

[22] J. Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism and Politics Crossroad (1988) 218.

[23] The Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215 condemned some of his ideas about the nature of the Trinity. Pope Alexander IV condemned his writings and those of his follower Gerardo of Borgo San Donnino and set up a commission that in 1263 at the Synod of Arles declared Joachim’s theories heretical.

[24] Josemaria Escriva The Way #584: “Stir up the fire of your faith. – Christ is not a figure who has passed. He is not a memory that is lost in history.

“He lives!: Iesus Christus heri et hodie: ipse et in saecula! Says Saint Paul: Jesus Christ yesterday and today and for ever!”

[25] J. Ratzinger, Eschatology CUA (1988) 6-7.

[26] A remark of Hans Urs von Balthasar to Ratzinger: “I sent a small work of mine to Hans Urs von Balthasar, who, as always, immediately thanked me with a post card and with his thanks added a pregnant phrase which I have never forgotten: ‘Don’t “presuppose,” but “pro-pose” the faith’” The Catholic World Report, March 1993, 26.

[27] J. Ratzinger, “The Question of the Concept of Tradition,” God’s Word Ignatius (2008) 52.

[28] J. Ratzinger, “The New Evangelization,” (Zenit) June 23, 2001 from 2000 Address given to Catechists

[29] J. Ratzinger, “What It Means to Be a Christian,” Ignatius (2006) 25-26.

[30] Ibid. 28.

[31] Inaugural message at the Opening Ceremony of the symposium “Holiness and the World,” Rome, May 19, 1992 Pontifica Università della Santa Croce.

[32] Josemaria Escriva, “Christ’s Presence in Christians,” Christ is Passing By #104.

[33] St. Josemaria Escriva, “Passionately Loving the World,” A homily delivered at a Mass celebrated for the Friends of the University of Navarre in October, 1967 (5-6.).

[34] J. Ratzinger, “What It Means to Be a Christian,” Ignatius (2006) ftn. 35-36

[35] J. Ratzinger, “The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure,” Franciscan Herald Press (1989) 118.

[36] John Paul II, “Redemptoris Missio” #18.

[37] J. Ratzinger, Eschatology, CUA (1988) 212

[38] J. Ratzinger, “The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure,” op. cit 107.

The days between the Resurrection and the Ascension of the Lord

Published on May 8, 2024May 8, 2024 by actingpersonblogLeave a comment

Dearly beloved, those days which intervened between the Lord’s Resurrection and Ascension did not pass by in uneventful leisure, but great mysteries were ratified in them and deep truths were revealed.

From a sermon of Saint Leo the Great, pope

In those days the fear of death was removed with all its terrors, and the immortality not only of the soul but also of the flesh was established. In those days the Holy Ghost is poured upon all the Apostles through the Lord’s breathing upon them, and to the blessed Apostle Peter, set above the rest, the keys of the kingdom are entrusted and the care of the Lord’s flock.

It was during that time that the Lord joined the two disciples as a companion on the way, and, to sweep away all the clouds of our uncertainty, reproached them for the slowness of their timid and trembling hearts. Their enlightened hearts catch the flame of faith, and lukewarm as they have been, they are made to burn while the Lord unfolds the Scriptures. In the breaking of bread also their eyes are opened as they eat with him. How much more blessed is that opening of their eyes, to the glorification of their nature, than the time when our first parents’ eyes were opened to the disastrous consequences of their transgression.

Dearly beloved, through all this time which elapsed between the Lord’s Resurrection and Ascension, God’s Providence had this in view, to teach his own people and impress upon their eyes and their hearts that the Lord Jesus Christ had risen, risen as truly as he had been born and had suffered and died.

Hence the most blessed Apostles and all the disciples, who had been both bewildered at his death on the cross and backward in believing his Resurrection, were so strengthened by the clearness of the truth that when the Lord entered the heights of heaven, not only were they affected with no sadness, but were even filled with great joy.

Truly it was great and unspeakable, that cause of their joy, when in the sight of the holy multitude the Nature of mankind went up: up above the dignity of all heavenly creatures, to pass above the angels’ ranks and to rise beyond the archangels’ heights, and to have its uplifting limited by no elevation until, received to sit with the Eternal Father, it should be associated on the throne with his glory, to whose Nature it was united in the Son.

Responsory

℟. I am going now to prepare a place for you.* I shall return to take you with me, so that where I am you may be too, alleluia.

℣. I shall ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you for ever, the Spirit of truth. I will not leave you orphans.* I shall return to take you with me, so that where I am you may be too, alleluia.

Let us pray.

God and Father,

we honour the yearly feast of your Son’s resurrection

by celebrating it in the sacramental mystery.

Give us likewise the grace

to rejoice with all the saints

when he comes in glory.

Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

God, for ever and ever.

Amen.

From a sermon of Saint Leo the Great, pope

The days between the resurrection and the ascension of the Lord

Published on May 8, 2024 by actingpersonblogLeave a comment

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The days between the resurrection and the ascension of the Lord

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