Evening star., 1953-11-22
Man Is Not a 'Thinq'

The CathOnc blSflOpS OF the United States
have closed their annual meeting here with an
eloquent philosophical statement well worth
the attention of all who have the sense to
see that there is something profoundly wrong
with life in our time. The something" is a
kind of decay, spreading sickliness in society,
a mental and moral dystrophy whose symptoms
run the gamut from juvenile delinquency to
an international arms race potentially capable
of bringing about the end of the world.
AS the bishops see it, the root evil of this
situation is the fact that unprecedented num-
bers of human beings Immersed in a universe
of f1eeting and random sensations"-have lost
sight of their true nature as children of God.
They have grown increasingly hedonistic; they
have exalted the tawdriest kind of material
values above the riches of the spirit; they have
forgotten that mo man lives by his body alone"
but that "every man is sanctifed, made holy,
made more worthy and more honorable by the
enjoyment of the special spiritual life" flowing
from his own awareness that he does not begin
and end here, meaninglessly and without pur-
pose, but is headed for a far higher destiny
linked indissolubly and eternally with his
Creator.
It is this awareness, as the bishops say,
that dignifies and enobles the human being,
To argue against it, to deny the existence of
spirit and soul, is to reduce man to a mere
thing" like an inanimate rock But he is not
a mere thing" Nor is he just piece of
pulsating flesh that comes from nothing lives
for while to satisfy the senses, and then goes
back to nothing for all eternity. When he
thinks of himself in that light, he embraces
the dialectcal materialism of Marxist COM
munisn1-the purest form of secularism-and
he then debases himself, whether he realizes
it or not, to the status of a cow or worm
that has no world to look forward to but this
one, and whose ultimate destiny is nothing but
dead and pointless dust, unmourned and
inconsequential.
In the bishops judgment, the great malaise
of our time can be traced primarily to this
sort of dehumanzation and despritualization
inflicted upon humanity by humanity itself.
In our own country they warm such degrada-
tion is widespread and growing becauSe-among
other reasons-the flesh has been deifed and
because our system of education "is being
drained of moral content through the move
ment which is known as secularism" And they
warn, further, that to the extent that spiritual
ity and religious awareness "cease to energize
the sense of reverence in every man, assaults
upon the majesty of the human person must
increase and intensity" For if we consider
ourselves to be nothing but things" with no
better or nobler end than to live and die here,
the logical extreme of our thinking should lead
us to a me-firSt anarchy of jungle law under
which the fttest will survive to organize all
all-out tyranny against the mass.
Hence, according to the Catholic bishops,
if humanity is to escape its own dehumanzation
and destruction, it must recognize both its
finite limitations and its spirituality, regain
it's reverence for God, and govern itself in all
nations with certain measure of religious
as we'll as temporal sense. "The alternative is
increasing chaos. The words of contemporary
historian of culture may serve to summarize
the issues at stake: Unless we find way to
restore the contact between the life of society
and the life of the spirit our civilization will
be destroyed by forces which it has had the
knowledge to create but not the wisdom to
control"
This is message on which people of every
creed can agree, even though they may continue
to ignore it to their sorrow 1t is not new
message, of course Indeed, together with
leaders of other religious faiths, the Catholic
bishops have given voice to it many times
before, but this time they have re-emphasized
it with special force and never has it seemed
more timely or to the point. Man can be
needless of it only at the risk of becoming
something less than man.