The next figure introduced by Pope Benedict into the conversation on the impact of modern philosophy on Christian faith and hope is Immanuel Kant.  Recall a previous article when I lamented my lack of exposure to modern philosophy in my seminary formation – that regret returns with just the mention of Kant’s name!  Although I was not in the Modern Philosophy class that first year of seminary, some of my classmates were, and I recall how often they spoke about Kant, especially in a way that they found him difficult to understand.  Though glad to not have had the struggle then, it would have been helpful to me now as I read this current paragraph in Spe salvi.

In his presenting Kant’s thought as an important thinker to consider, the Holy Father draws our attention to a concerning trend that Kant was proposing.  Kant suggests that with the rapid development of rational thought and knowledge, there is a gradual transition away from what he calls “ecclesiastical faith” toward a more “pure religious faith.”

The “Kingdom of God” proclaimed by Jesus receives a new definition here and takes on a new mode of presence; a new “imminent expectation”, so to speak, comes into existence: the “Kingdom of God” arrives where “ecclesiastical faith” is vanquished and superseded by “religious faith”, that is to say, by simple rational faith. (Spe salvi, 19)

As I read this, I thought about the modern trend present in our society where people proclaim that they are “spiritual but not religious.”  It appears as though Kant’s contributions to modern thought offer some philosophical roots to this position.  

After doing a little research on some of the basic tenets of Kant’s philosophy, it is evident that he focuses on a sort of personal spirituality rooted in achieving a form of moral perfection that is supported by moral reason and autonomy, developed primarily from within.  Any sense of an external authority (Divine Revelation, Church documents, Church authority) is held in suspicion as dangerous to his views.  Kant does not outright reject the faith or the Scriptures, but he sees them helpful only insofar as they support the overall goal of living a good, reasonable, moral life.

With the “spiritual but not religious” trend we are seeing more of, we likewise have a distrust of religious organizations as imposing limits on our freedom.  There is a desire to live a good and moral life, but that comes not through obedience to fixed creeds and rules, but is open to a variety of experiences that may speak more to one’s personal preferences.  Many in this position will acknowledge the existence of God, and even pursue a meaningful personal relationship with Him, but having that be in the context of institutions and rituals is seen as unnecessary on the universal level, even if some might find it useful in their pursuit of attaining personal fulfillment and personal well-being.

Last week, I quoted a section of the homily our new Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV preached to the College of Cardinals the day after his election.  I think it is worth repeating that quote as it fits well with this current discussion.  

These are contexts where it is not easy to preach the Gospel and bear witness to its truth, where believers are mocked, opposed, despised or at best tolerated and pitied. Yet, precisely for this reason, they are the places where our missionary outreach is desperately needed. A lack of faith is often tragically accompanied by the loss of meaning in life, the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that afflict our society.  (Pope Leo XIV, Holy Mass with the College of Cardinals, 9 May 2025)

Though not mentioned specifically, one of those contexts where we are invited to share the good news of our Catholic faith, and the hope of following Jesus in the context of the Catholic Church, is our family, friends, and colleagues who may identify with this attitude of being “spiritual but not religious.”

May 25^th, 1961. It was the day when President John F. Kennedy addressed a special join session of congress and asked our whole nation for the money and commitment necessary for “achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. … I believe we should go to the moon.”  They were famous words, now with greater emotional weight than they had when he slowly and solemnly delivered them, stemming both from the success of that risk, and his being assassinated a year and a half later. 

But I would like you to focus on a different event that took place on the same day. Across the Atlantic Ocean, in a town near Paris, an expert in latex molding, Mr. Rampeau brought to market a little rotomolded rubber giraffe painted with brown spots and black eyes and sold it as a teething toy for little babies. It was a hit. 50 million of the hand-crafted squeezable and chewable figures have been sold since, in many years more of the toys are sold than new babies born in France (and its popularity has now spread around the world). It was called Sophie the Giraffe because Mr. Rampeau was a Catholic, and he sold the first one on St. Madeline Sophie Barat’s feast day in that year of 1961.

It had been almost exactly one hundred years before that Madeline had passed away in the generalate of the Society of the Sacred Heart not so far away in the middle of Paris. She knew her popularity and had refused photographs to be taken of her, so we only have pictures from her deathbed and portraits painted after her death. Still, she was a kind and holy woman, and her countenance reflected those qualities. Yet her story is one that stretches beyond a worldly kindness and into the extraordinary charity of a saint. 

She was born on December 12^th, 1779, actually about two months premature because her mother went into labor amidst the chaos of a house fire next door. She was baptized immediately given how small she was, necessitating pressing into service a local woman who just happened to be going to Mass that morning and her 10 year old brother Louis to stand in for her godparents. It was the beginning of a life that would be often marked by God’s grace in the midst of chaos. Her brother, Louis, had returned home from his seminary studies because he was not yet old enough to be ordained a deacon (he was a precocious student), leading to his becoming Madeline’s tutor and giving her an extraordinary education in philosophy, theology, languages, natural science, and rhetoric. When she was only 10 however, he was arrested as a seminarian during the beginnings of the reign of terror. He would eventually swear the required oath of loyalty to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, a year later renouncing his oath once the Pope had condemned it (and being imprisoned again, barely escaping the guillotine). 

Those same years were ones in which little Madeline grew up in a home tilted towards Jansenism in its practice of the faith. That heresy is notoriously difficult to pin down (especially given its existence for multiple centuries during this time, and the fact that its adherents ferociously rejected that pejorative title to name their standpoint). In general, it stemmed from an over-emphasis on the absolute holiness of God and a related over-emphasis on human sin, depravity, and unworthiness of grace. It led to a rigid and harsh life of faith and a reading of human weakness as a sign of moral depravity. The Little Flower is perhaps known as the best response that God gave to this perennial temptation, but I would like to propose Madeline as another one. 

As she grew, she found a growing desire to become a Carmelite. Sadly, with religious communities of all sorts abolished in 1790, this dream would never be realized. As often is the case though, it is these setbacks that actually grow our trust and openness to God and such was the case with Sophie. The rigid version of grace and tendency to seek to earn God’s love by hard work (and perhaps the hardest vocation she could think of) melted into a decision to begin a new congregation, the Society of the Sacred Heart, dedicated to the education of girls. They gained followers, and opened more and more schools – always making sure to offer a free education to poor girls alongside of the exceptional education they offered to the better-off young women. Their highest priorities were to love the girls and teach them how to carry love into the rest of their lives. She guided the order for 65 years, passing on Ascension Day in 1865 with more than 3500 members as part of that congregation.

50 million babies have been comforted Sophie the Giraffe. 650 million people were inspired by watching the moon landings. 1 million young people have been directly educated by the Society of the Sacred Heart, but how many more have been impacted by that message of love?

– Fr. Dominic is heading to Washington DC as he writes this for a quick visit to a place I will return this fall to study God’s love, and how human love reflects it. Here’s to continuing the mission!

Before returning to the next paragraph in Pope Benedict’s document on Christian hope, Spe salvi, it is worth taking a moment to acknowledge and celebrate the newest successor of St. Peter, newly elected Pope Leo XIV.  As a sort of humorous aside, since I do not normally write with Roman numerals, I fully expect to make the mistake of transposing the numbers for his name since I have become so accustomed over the years to typing the same letters used for Pope Benedict’s name, though in a different order.  So if I accidentally put XVI instead of XIV, I hope you will be patient with me!

After watching the announcement of the new pope, I found myself reading and listening to people talk about the new Holy Father.  He only spoke briefly when he came out on the loggia to offer his first Urbi et orbi (to the city and to the world) blessing.  I listened to a podcast early the next morning that commented on a variety of things regarding his track record, and what we might expect during his papacy.  But as I said, those were words about him, they were not words from him.  Later that morning, I came across the homily that he preached earlier that day to the College of Cardinals in the Sistine Chapel.  After reading it, I was put at ease, for I had now heard from the pope himself.  I was encouraged at what I read, and there was a section from his homily that really resonated with me.  In speaking about the challenges we face in our present time with preaching the Gospel, he said:

Even today, there are many settings in which the Christian faith is considered absurd, meant for the weak and unintelligent. Settings where other securities are preferred, like technology, money, success, power, or pleasure.

These are contexts where it is not easy to preach the Gospel and bear witness to its truth, where believers are mocked, opposed, despised or at best tolerated and pitied. Yet, precisely for this reason, they are the places where our missionary outreach is desperately needed. A lack of faith is often tragically accompanied by the loss of meaning in life, the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that afflict our society.  (Pope Leo XIV, Holy Mass with the College of Cardinals, 9 May 2025)

In many ways, this acknowledgment of the challenges being faced is very much in line with what we have been considering over the past two weeks from Spe salvi.  The relatively modern shift away from faith toward science and reason has made the Good News seem less and less relevant, and even foolish to the world’s “more advanced” understanding and sensibilities.

In the next paragraph for our consideration in Spe salvi, Pope Benedict notes that “two categories become increasingly central to the idea of progress: reason and freedom.” (Spe salvi, 18) But reason and freedom, according to these modern thinkers “were tacitly interpreted as being in conflict with the shackles of faith and of the Church as well as those of the political structures of the period.” (ibid.)

From the first homily of Pope Leo, it is encouraging that he sees clearly what Pope Benedict is emphasizing as to what continues to be a threat to the spread of the Gospel message in our modern times.  And thanks be to God, the Holy Father is not willing to back down from the challenge.  In his homily, he is encouraged the Cardinals to join in this effort to faithfully proclaim the Gospel in the midst of difficult settings.  Of course, this is something to which we are all called.  He said as much in the words he addressed to the world that afternoon of his election:

All of us are in God’s hands. So, let us move forward, without fear, together, hand in hand with God and with one another other! We are followers of Christ. Christ goes before us. The world needs his light. Humanity needs him as the bridge that can lead us to God and his love. Help us, one and all, to build bridges through dialogue and encounter, joining together as one people, always at peace. (Pope Leo XIV, First “Urbi et Orbi” Blessing of the Holy Father, 8 May 2025)

Address by then Bp. Robert Prevost at the Synod on Evangelization in 2012 

BISHOP PREVOST: Western mass media is extraordinarily effective in fostering within the general public enormous sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel — for example, abortion, homosexual lifestyle, euthanasia. Religion is at best tolerated by mass media as tame and quaint when it does not actively oppose positions on ethical issues that the media have embraced as their own. However, when religious voices are raised in opposition to these positions, mass media can target religion, labeling it as ideological and insensitive in regard to the so-called vital needs of people in the contemporary world. 

The sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyle choices that mass media fosters is so brilliantly and artfully ingrained in the viewing public that when people hear the Christian message, it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel by contrast to the ostensible humaneness of the anti-Christian perspective. Catholic pastors who preach against the legalization of abortion or the redefinition of marriage are portrayed as being ideologically driven, severe, and uncaring — not because of anything they say or do, but because their audiences contrast their message with the sympathetic, caring tones of media-produced images of human beings who, because they are caught in morally complex life situations, opt for choices that are made to appear as healthful and good. 

Note, for example, how alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children are so benignly and sympathetically portrayed in television programs and cinema today. If the new evangelization is going to counter these mass media-produced distortions of religious and ethical reality successfully, pastors, preachers, teachers and catechists are going to have to become far more informed about the context of evangelizing in a world dominated by mass media. 

The church fathers offered a formidable response to those non-Christian and anti-Christian literary and rhetorical forces at work throughout the Roman Empire in shaping the religious and ethical imaginations of the day. The Confessions of St. Augustine, with its central image of the cor inquietam, has shaped the way that Western Christians and non-Christians reimagine the adventure of religious conversion. In his City of God, Augustine used the tale of Alexander the Great’s encounter with a captured pirate to ironize the supposed moral legitimacy of the Roman Empire. 

Church fathers, among them John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Leo the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, were not great rhetoricians insofar as they were great preachers. They were great preachers because they were first great rhetoricians. In other words, their evangelizing was successful in 

great part because they understood the foundations of social communication appropriate to the world in which they lived. Consequently, they understood with enormous precision the techniques through which popular religious and ethical imaginations of their day were manipulated by the centers of secular power in that world. 

Moreover, the Church should resist the temptation to believe that it can compete with modern mass media by turning the sacred liturgy into spectacle. Here again, church fathers such as Tertullian remind us today that visual spectacle is the domain of the saeculum, and that our proper mission is to introduce people to the nature of mystery as an antidote to spectacle. As a consequence, evangelization in the modern world must find the appropriate means for redirecting public attention away from spectacle and into mystery. 

At least in the contemporary western world, if not throughout the entire world, the human imagination concerning both religious faith and ethics is largely shaped by mass media, especially by television and cinema. Western mass media is extraordinarily effective in fostering within the general public enormous sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel. 

However, overt opposition to Christianity by mass media is only part of the problem. The sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyle choices that mass media fosters is so brilliantly and artfully engrained in the viewing public, that when people hear the Christian message it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel by contrast to the ostensible humaneness of the anti-Christian perspective. 

If the “New Evangelization” is going to counter these mass media-produced distortions of religious and ethical reality successfully, pastors, preachers, teachers and catechists are going to have to become far more informed about the challenge of evangelizing in a world dominated by mass media. 

The Fathers of the Church, including Saint Augustine, can provide eminent guidance for the Church in this aspect of the New Evangelization, precisely because they were masters of the art of rhetoric. Their evangelizing was successful in great part because they understood the foundations of social communication appropriate to the world in which they lived. 

In order to combat successfully the dominance of the mass media over popular religious and moral imaginations, it is not sufficient for the Church to own its own television media or to sponsor religious films. The proper mission of the Church is to introduce people to the nature of mystery as an antidote to spectacle. Religious life also plays an important role in evangelization, pointing others to this mystery, through living faithfully the evangelical counsels 

– Fr. Dominic wanted to give you a taste of our new Holy Father this week.