Monday of 2nd Week in Lent
The call of Jesus in Matthew, which we heard at Mass on Saturday, was to “be perfect, as the heavenly Father.” In Luke’s redaction we heard today, the call is to “be merciful, as the heavenly Father.” If we understand that the root meaning of perfection is “completion,” then we see that there is no disagreement between the two versions. The Father, who is complete like no other being, is full of mercy and always faithful. In fact, in Exodus chapter 34, God defines Himself as full of loving kindness and fidelity.
In a blind pursuit of perfection without lovingkindness or mercy, men of the Enlightenment created a world in which human reason was supposed to predominate. Progress and reason were supposed to walk hand-in-hand and lead to a terrestrial paradise. The Holy Father considers the French Revolution to be the watershed event that hit Europe upside the head and that should have caused that continent to doubt the human validity of its Enlightenment trajectory. The Europe of Enlightenment first looked at the Revolution “with fascination.” But as events developed, they “had cause to reflect anew on reason and freedom. Immanuel Kant initially saw the Revolution as the victory of what he called pure religious faith over the Church. In 1790, for instance, the government outlawed monks and other religious, and in July required all priests to take an oath of loyalty to the state, abjuring their allegiance to the Pope. In 1792, hundreds of priests and three bishops were massacred. By 1795, Kant had changed his tune, still believing that reason and progress would eliminate the Church and bring an era of love and freedom, but acknowledging that it could also lead to the perverted end of all things.
So progress became a new form of hope for secular man in the 19th century, a progress that would lead to freedom. It was not to be. A new kind of slavery came from the Enlightenment, as the new machines demanded cheap labor and led to the emergence of a class of exploited industrial workers who lived in dreadful conditions. The reaction was the Communist Manifesto, a total rejection of any transcendent meaning or destiny for man. Trying to escape the plan of God, man had ended right back where Daniel lamented him in our first reading. Only in Christ is there relief.
