Recapturing the Vision: Building an Inhabitable World

Transcript (edited for readability).

I had said that I would, in my third talk, give some suggestions as to what to do. Given that we have noticed the problem round about us, and we have diagnosed the patient who suffers in the problem, how do we bring medicine to that patient? And of course I will now be telling you, especially you who are pastors, things that you already know and don't need to hear from me. In fact, you know them perhaps a great deal better than I know them.

The first principle is that you cannot give what you do not have. One alienated man cannot save another. One drowning man pulls the other drowning man down. So we must certainly regard the wisdom and the practice of St. Benedict of old. That is, we must have, by intention, because they no longer spring up among us, as it were, naturally and spontaneously, we have to have these things by deliberation.

We have to have communities of healthy prayer. And the more often we get together in prayer and in song, the better off we are, and the richer we will be, and the more we will have to give others. We have to have, by intention now and deliberation, because again they do not spring up spontaneously among us, communities of healthy family life. Because we are ministering to people, many of whom have never witnessed a healthy family — or many of them who have witnessed, from the outside and rather distantly, a healthy family, but who have not the experience of it in their own bones.

We have to have, by intention — because it's not happening by the promptings of ordinary people, certainly not by the promptings of people who run our schools, whether they are public or private, in most cases — communities of what is now called classical learning, but what before the day before yesterday would simply have been called education. A human education. I mean a humane education in arts and letters.

In this last regard, we may reform some long-established schools and colleges and social organizations here and there. It is possible. It has happened in the last twenty-five years that this or that school, college, or even beneficent organization has been pulled out of the fire, or been cleaned up, punched up, and reminded of its original mission, and has undertaken that mission. Again, it's possible. The case may admit of it. Sometimes the limb can be saved, and we should save those limbs if they can be, for no other reason than that sometimes we're talking about institutions that do reach a lot of people. But sometimes, as I suggested earlier, the limb is full of gangrene, and it has to be cut off, and the sooner it's cut off, the better. It depends upon the case.

But whatever we do with the old established institutions, it is urgent that Christians build — always build. We have to be doing that. In some fashion or other, every single one of us has to be building. We may have very different talents, very different areas of expertise or of love. It doesn't matter. Take the shovel that's nearest your hand and do the work that you can do. Everyone can do something. No one can do everything. No one can even do most of what needs to be done. Everybody can do something.

We need to build. We need to build new schools. Perhaps we need to build new beneficent societies to aid the poor, the sick, and the dying. How many of the hospitals in our nation were founded by religious orders, by religious communities? And most of those places now have lost any connection to their original mission. Some of them have become breeding grounds for the culture of death.

My wife was just talking to me on the telephone last night about something that nurses now habitually do for patients dying in hospitals — something she noticed the nurses were doing when my mother-in-law was dying. They check the soles of their feet. This puzzled my wife, but she found out the rationale for it only yesterday. When the people in our hospitals are being dehydrated — deliberately dehydrated to hasten their death — when they are made to suffer the cracked lips and the cracking esophagus and the nosebleeds that go along with dehydration (by the way, their breathing and their sensations are suppressed by morphine, because it would be agonizing for any of us to die a death of dehydration) — well, nurses check the feet because as the body is being dehydrated, the blood retreats from the extremities to the vital organs in the center, and you will get cracking and mottling of the feet — mottling from little places of blood that now are not flowing but coagulate. They produce little clots. That's what they're testing for. It's only because they're dehydrating the patients in our midst, for no particular reason having to do with the amelioration of pain. Anyway, that's what our hospitals have become.

So maybe we need to found new hospitals, new social organizations, so that people can rely upon their fellow Christians for defraying the expenses of medicine and medical care, rather than upon the all-competent and all-devouring state.

New groups — I think of this particularly; you mustn't think that I think girls are doing very well in our society either — it is not possible to corrupt one sex without corrupting the other. The sexes stand and fall together. But we do need new groups where boys can learn to be men. We do not have the YMCA anymore. It's not for young men, and it's not Christian. I don't even know if it's an association. Whatever it is, we don't have it. Boys need these new institutions, whether formal or informal — that does not, at this point, matter to me — under the tutelage of true men, and not, to be blunt, effeminate predators.

Read real books. They have never, in the history of mankind, been cheaper and easier to obtain. I'll tell you a little anecdote here. Where I live in New Hampshire there is no income tax. However, the property taxes are enormous — they almost compensate for having no income tax. You would be shocked to find out how much I pay just in property taxes in the little town where we live. For all that we pay in property tax, almost all of it goes to the school. We don't even have garbage pickup in the town — you take your garbage to the town dump, which turns out to be a fairly nice place where you meet your neighbors taking their garbage there. You're also supposed to recycle plastics and cardboard and paper, so they have a large building where you go inside and divide up this and that and the other. In that large building, people leave old clothes, old tools, and books.

At the town dump of Warner, New Hampshire — which I've taken to calling the Warner Book Exchange — a few days ago I found a hardcover edition of the Talmud in Hebrew and English. You just pick it up. It's right there. Last year, at the same town dump, I found a complete hardcover collection of the works of Washington Irving. At the same town dump I found a complete hardcover collection of the works of George Eliot. There are all kinds of great books that go into the dumpster, that go to be shredded or made into mulch. Libraries especially get rid of them. From the castoffs of your local library, a town library, a school library, you can build up, for nothing, a library that would have been the envy of anyone alive during the time of Jefferson and Adams. The books are there. The readers are wanting.

Build the imagination. The imagination is the driver of man. Make no mistake about this. You may have excellent catechesis in your schools, excellent sermons on a Sunday, but if the kids' imagination is being formed by what comes out of Hollywood and the television studios, or by bad books in school, then I can predict fairly confidently what the child's future will be in the church. The imagination is the driver. Don't take my word for it — read C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man. The head rules the belly through the chest. We are making human beings without chests and allowing the development of the imagination to be dominated by the things that kids see on screens.

We have plenty of allies in this business. We have all the classics of literature on our side, especially literature written before the madness of the 1960s. We even have the Golden Age of Hollywood on our side — 1935 to 1965. You want a movie, you want maybe the greatest pro-life film that Hollywood ever made without intending to be pro-life? Find the screwball comedy The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. It's either that or Some Like It Hot as the greatest screwball comedy Hollywood ever made. Find it. Watch it. You'll roll on the floor laughing, and you won't know what the miracle is until thirty seconds before the movie ends. When you find out, you'll be rolling on the floor, roaring with laughter.

If you want a great movie to enter the imagination about what it means to be in a difficult marriage, and to be on the brink of divorce, but not to divorce, find the movie with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne called Penny Serenade. But don't watch the movie if you are depressed, because it'll tear your heart out and stamp on it. You want a great movie about a boy learning to become a man? Get the movie The Yearling. Get a movie called Goodbye, My Lady, about a boy and a dog. I won't say more about these movies, because I'd spoil them.

We have allies with names like Dickens, Hawthorne, Milton, Goethe, Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy. We have more recent allies with names like John Ford, William Wyler, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, Howard Hawks. By all means, enlist the aid of these allies. You want a great movie about someone who walks the Via Dolorosa, who walks his own way to crucifixion and to triumph, by becoming a real human being again — and, it's implied, also a real child of God again? Get the movie On the Waterfront, and see Marlon Brando in the central role of a bad man becoming a human being again. They're all allies. Bring them on. Because the opposition has garbage, and we've got giants.

We must, above all, build families. We can't expect them any longer simply to occur, as naturally and inevitably as the sun rises. It's not happening. In 1960 — and by the way, things had already begun to go bad in the United States in many ways by 1960 — but in 1960, most people were married by age twenty-five. Almost nobody is married now by age twenty-five. Frankly, a minority of people are married by age thirty. This is not a recipe for alienation. This is alienation, pure and simple. But it's not happening — people are not getting married, they're not having families. That's where our vocations crisis really is in all of the churches.

In my Roman Catholic Church, the most pressing vocations crisis is one nobody's noticing. It's not shortages in the priesthood — it's the fact that young people aren't getting married. Their natural vocation is to marriage, and they are not married. Why? All of the traditions of courtship — all of the more recent traditions, not all of them healthy, but a heck of a lot generally healthier than the nothing that we have now — even the traditions of dating have been forgotten. As long ago as forty years, when I was at Princeton, nobody dated. It was either loneliness or you-know-what. To say to a young man, even a young man of goodwill, "You should go mingle with the girls and ask one of them on a date" — I'm repeating something I said last night — is like handing a wrench or a blowtorch to a boy with soft hands and saying, "Go downstairs, fix the pipes." It doesn't even rise to the level of obedience or disobedience here. He doesn't know where to begin. How can he? He may not even know what the command means.

We've got to intervene. And one of the things I suggested last night — I'll just mention this again, it's the best idea that I have — you've got boys and girls of goodwill. They're not going to ask each other out. Today they're scared to death of it. They don't even know what it means. They don't even know what it is. And there's all kinds of pressure — the more traditional kids think, "If I ask this girl on a date, I'm proposing marriage to her," so they don't even begin. Put the names of the boys in one hat, the names of the girls in the other hat. Say you're going to have a lottery beforehand and pick them out at random. And then say, "Okay, you guys are going on a date, and this is what you do, boy — this, this, this, this, this — and girl, this is what you do — this, this, this, this, this." Two weeks from now we're going to have another lottery. We're going to mix up the names again. We're going to make sure you pick a different name — if the same names accidentally crop up, we'll just pick another. And we can do this all over — relieve them of the intense pressure, and begin to take them by the hand with baby steps towards being comfortable around people of the opposite sex, not just as guys and friends, but as real, full members of the opposite sex, with the ultimate end in mind — somewhere, if not with this person, then with some person, to have the ultimate end as marriage.

We need to do this, because it's not happening by itself. It happens, of course — it happens sometimes. But when you have a majority of people who are still unmarried by age thirty, I think the blame can be laid not just at their feet, but at the feet of the previous generation. Divorce is a scandal of our time, but unmarriage may be even worse. It is not good to be alone. If we do not arrange marriages, we may yet arrange dances, socials, dates. And in the meantime, always raise boys and girls with the clear expectation that they will marry — not with the sort of vague expectation that somewhere down the line they're going to get married, but as the aim for their being raised as boys and girls. It's aimed at marriage; otherwise it doesn't really have its fulfillment. And think of most of what they do in school as, in some fashion or other, a preparation for marriage. We have to raise young people as pre-married people — people we want to make marriageable, and sooner rather than later. The home, not the place of employment, is where the heart must lie, if the heart is to beat warmly at all. You're not going to lie on your deathbed and have warm, sentimental reflections about your workplace. Some of us may even enjoy where we work, but we won't have those reflections. "Yeah, but that's the best you can come up with — my gosh, shoot me now."

We must build, always build. Always be building. We must build the arts. And if there are Roman Catholics in the audience here — I aim this at us — do you sing trash in your churches? If there are Pentecostals here, I mean you too. Do you sing trash in your churches? There is no reason for it. And if somebody says to me, "Well, God will accept all of our gifts, and really, you know, you're just being kind of an elitist, aren't you, because God doesn't really care about things like painting and sculpture" — really? Then explain to me all those detailed instructions about the construction of the Ark of the Covenant and so forth in the Torah, and then about the temple in the books of Kings, and about temple worship in Chronicles. Explain all that to me then. We are told that the spirit of God — a spirit of ingenuity — placed wisdom in the very hands of Bezalel and the others who made the tent and the ark and so on. There's no reason for the trash.

Stupidity and ugliness are always vices. They do not please the Lord. The Lord is not the author of confusion. He is also not the creator of stupid and ugly things. Even worms are not ugly — Aristotle says they're fascinating if you look at them and think about what you are seeing. Slovenliness gets no praise out of Scripture. Abel was careful in his sacrifice; Cain was slovenly.

So you say to me, "I can't play a musical instrument." Fine. But maybe it's not really true, because there is one instrument we can all play. I heard everyone playing it just a few minutes ago. This would be news to Roman Catholics in the United States and Canada — that they actually possess a musical instrument they can play. And if you think about it, it's a musical instrument of extraordinary power and beauty. It's the human voice. Why, there's even a stop on that organ up there, I'll bet — a stop linked to a kind of crazy set of pipes with crazy vibrations to them, called vox humana. It's supposed to imitate the human voice. We all have the instrument and we can all play it. But about the other instruments: learn to play the strings or the keys, if you have a talent for it. Learn to paint. Learn to write real English verse. Learn to turn marble into the body and the living breath of man. Do things. Don't expect greatness — we're working in a bad time. Expect goodness. Demand fidelity. Be humble enough to admit that we have more to recover than we can begin to name.

I'll give an example from my own field of expertise as a teacher. If there is one thing I am most qualified to teach young people, it is English poetry. I know all the forms, I know all the meters, and I have at my fingertips the great, expansive wealth of English verse from its beginnings in Anglo-Saxon to the twentieth century. I can even throw Anglo-Saxon poetry at you right now — you wouldn't understand a bit of it, but it's English. I know, because of that, just how many techniques have been lost to contemporary poets, so that when people in my own time try to write in the old vein, they don't know what they're doing. I cheer them on, but I have much to teach them about the very stuff they're working with. I'm like a guy who knows what you can do with clay — I know a lot of things you can do with clay, so to speak — and you want to work with clay, and that's been abandoned, and you're trying your hardest. Well, you have a lot to recover. Be humble enough to admit it. And if there is somebody hanging around who may be the last living person who actually knows about the things you can do with clay, find that person and learn.

Build. Then there is what I called earlier today the Boethius option. It's not one that I find congenial to my personality — I don't like this option, but it's absolutely necessary that some people take it. That's the option of combining the hard work of preservation, perhaps the hard work of enhancement of learning, with the foul and nasty work of politics — working with a few good people, but also with a lot of traitors, trimmers, grifters, demagogues, egotists, and blockheads. If you are going to work in politics, you will have to work with traitors, trimmers, grifters, demagogues, egotists, and blockheads. Where else are you going to go? Boethius worked with and against murderous Goths — and again, they were not pagans, but Arian Christians; at least they had that in common, that they were Christians of some sort. We have to work with and against the addled and the vicious. We must do so — it's an imperative, because we love our country, and because we want to pull as many people out of the quicksand as we can.

I have to confess: I would not have said so ten or eleven years ago. I was much more hopeful about the vibrancy of Christian cultures springing up from beneath to bypass political systems altogether. I'm not as optimistic now, perhaps not as naive. We must do so because our political enemies will not stop until even the small, intentional communities and organizations I have described are crushed, or are so slandered and vilified that if you are merely associated with them, it would make it impossible for you to become a doctor, a lawyer, a college professor, an actor with work, a basketball player, or even a man digging ditches for the county. We have to do this. And I'm afraid too that the sheer massiveness of state and corporate power — even if it's not exercised against any particular person — that sheer massiveness will draw many weak souls towards the madness of the time. It's hard to be a flower against a skyscraper. And again, I say this as somebody who is really disinclined to that line of work. I admire people who do it. I don't know how they sleep at night. I don't know how they keep their sanity. But it's work that has to be done.

But neither Benedict nor Boethius will do all that much for men already alienated. So I'm going now to finish my talk today by describing another line of attack, which I will call the Bosco option, for St. John Bosco — nineteenth-century Catholic priest in northern Italy, mainly in Turin, who ministered to the street boys in Turin, who built schools and founded a whole order of teachers called the Salesians. Now, of course, the Salesians are corrupt and dying, so we need the John Boscos of the world all over again.

John Bosco combined kindness — and we always have to be kind, even if kindness sometimes comes at the end of a knuckle sandwich, which is possible — with absolute cleanness of life, absolute honesty, and real shrewdness about the boys he wanted to save. That is, he knew who they were. He diagnosed their problems, and he sought to win them over in ways that would work for them. He knew what they were by nature — they were boys. He knew what their evil habits were, where they were going wrong. He knew what they needed to heal them and make them into strong men.

The first point is, he went among them in the streets. He didn't stay aloof from them — he went out to them. That's a scary thing, and a lot of his fellow priests of the time didn't like him for that. "These boys are dirty. These boys are filthy. They've got filthy habits. You should be a priest — you're degrading yourself by going out among them." Human nature is the same everywhere — you're going to hear similar things wherever you go.

He went among them and appealed directly to their boyish natures — these were the people he wanted to pull out of the fire, so he appealed to their peculiar nature. John Bosco was an athlete and an acrobat, so he would get a couple of posts and sling a rope across them and do acts of dexterity on the rope. He would walk a tightrope. He would juggle while walking a tightrope. He performed magic tricks. He won them over. What bunch of boys, no matter what they might be doing in their spare time — like breaking windows and robbing things — are not going to stop to watch a guy walk a tightrope? Of course they will.

He fed them. He gave them whatever he could manage for a warm roof over their heads. He taught them. He never held back the truth. He was never going to lie to them or participate in their lies. He taught them straightforwardly and confidently, and that's what boys really do respond to. Boys don't want to be told lies to make them feel good. They want to be told the truth. They respect you for telling the truth.

He loved them. Love — I'm not talking here about feeling. It's the motive for action, and it may be important, but without knowledge, without the truth, that feeling can do more harm than good. If you're sick, you want someone who knows what's wrong with you, not someone who has no notion of disease but who is eager to help by giving you the latest oil-and-alcohol concoction from a traveling huckster, because they care so much. If you are sick in the soul, someone who knows what is wrong with you but does not love you will do you no good — he may do real harm if you come to associate his diagnosis with his contempt or his indifference. We have to be like John Bosco was to the boys — we must love them. But we must be clear about the fact of their profound alienation, as to its causes and its character and its prognosis. We have to be. You can't be somebody cutting somebody up with all the goodwill in the world if you don't know surgery. We have to know what's wrong, but we also have to love them, and vice versa.

"Which man among you," says Jesus, "if his son should ask him for an egg, would give him a scorpion?" We have people now without fathers to ask for anything. We also have people who demand scorpions instead of eggs — they do so partly from perversity, mainly from ignorance and alienation and despair. Pope Francis has called the church a field hospital. He's right about that. Whether he himself knows the diseases and has the remedies for them — well, those are other questions. He is right that it should be a field hospital in our time especially. We should know the diseases, and on a human level we should have the remedies ready. The son is asking for an egg, not a scorpion. But he's also not asking for the bread from heaven, at least not yet. We've got to give him the egg.

On the streets of this new and terrible Turin — polished without, but full of corruption and dead men's bones within — we will meet young men who have never had a close male friend in their lives. That was not true of the street boys in Turin in the days of John Bosco. It is true of the men in our time, in this new and terrible Turin. That's a new thing in the world, and it is profoundly sad. Some of these men will turn toward other men in a sexual way to relieve the alienation. Others will not, but they will shy away from friendship for fear of its being misunderstood, or being made the object of scorn. That is a wound to heal, and John Bosco must see to it. He knows what the sufferer of the wound does not know — that this kind of friendship, so rare in our time, is an ordinary and natural thing. It's ordinary — it is part of the created order, part of the order with which God created us, male and female. He knows, as a matter of fact, that every civilization in the world has been built upon the bonds of male friendship — the friendship of the team, the platoon, the work crew, the men aboard ship, the hunters and fishermen, the lumbermen, the linemen, the drovers, the guildsmen, even guilds of professors.

This new John Bosco will remember that Jesus himself, in his humanity, called round about him a band of brothers. If anybody says to you, "Well, Jesus just chose men for his apostles because he didn't want to offend the people of his time" — he offended the people of his time left and right. Imagine Jesus being afraid of such a thing when he knew that what he preached among them would get him crucified. What was he afraid of — that they would reject him and crucify him? They rejected him and crucified him. We've got to think that he did it on purpose, because it was a good and wonderful thing to do. He called that band of brothers — they are the apostles. He called them to be ambassadors to the world, to put their lives at risk, to baptize all nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Ghost.

In the streets of this new Turin, my John Bosco will meet people who have never read a good book in all their lives. That's probably true of the majority of Americans — they've never read a good book in all their lives. Such few as they may have read, they read in high school, or they pretended to read, and those books were ruined for them. That was where they learned to hate reading good books. You know how, if you get an inoculation of cowpox, it protects you against smallpox? That's what introducing high school students to Shakespeare is in our schools — it's the inoculation of Shakespeare that ensures they will never read another play of his in all their lives.

They have no poetry. They have no long-loved folk songs by heart. That's a new thing in the world. They are alienated from culture itself. They can decipher words on a page, sure — it would maybe be easier to heal them if they could not decipher words on a page, because the people we're talking about here believe, inaccurately, that they know how to read. We must teach them to read. They can't read the magazine I talked about this morning. Kids in 1890 could — you've got to believe that after they were done with Huckleberry Finn, they might leaf through the magazine and read the article about the new reservoir they were building in New York State, a big architectural article about the new Croton Dam, or they might read a travelogue about men going into the interior of the Congo and meeting cannibals. You've got to think they'd be reading this stuff — it was really sophisticated. We have to teach them to read. It's not going to be easy.

Children like to read, because reading opens up to them the whole universe. But our street people believe they know all there is to know about the world already. They've been taught to think that nobody alive before yesterday has anything to teach them. They know it all. They're like people who believe they know the stars because they once saw them reflected in a puddle. But slowly and patiently, we must teach them to read good things. Maybe the first step will be to get them to watch a good movie — artfully crafted, and true, and good for the soul of man. Not a really well-made work of art that is essentially evil, like some of the best movies of the 1970s — masterpieces of art that are evil, such as Dog Day Afternoon, or perhaps The Godfather. Movies like that are amazing works of art, but they are fundamentally evil. We want actually good movies that are also great movies, or great movies that are also good — good for the soul.

Always keep in mind that they do not know what they do not know, but they think they know a great deal. They will hesitate before the book of books, the Bible. They will believe they know what is in it, but they will be afraid of it — do not underestimate that. They may show you a show of braggadocio, of bravado, but deep down there may be some real fear. They know that if they begin to read it, they will find it embarrassingly difficult, and it will challenge their way of life. Somebody — a new convert, I can't remember which one, he's still alive, I don't remember who it was — read the New Testament as an agnostic, intending to enter into judgment upon it, and found, to his dismay, as he read, that he could not enter into judgment upon it, because it was judging him. They may, on some level, be aware of this, and their scorn for the Bible might mask a real fear of the Bible.

It should strike them as strange, because it should strike us as strange, and whenever we think we are familiar with the Bible, we should catch ourselves up short. We are not calling for familiarity that ends in indifference — not even if I'm talking about great works of human art. Great works of human art and thought seem to hurl the earth out from under our feet. That is the proper reaction to a great work of art. Well, so should a real encounter with the Bible do ten times over. "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." I believe it. I rejoice in it. Far be it from me to say that I comprehend it. The creature cannot comprehend the Creator, and that is one of the great joys of being a creature — to know that we cannot comprehend the Creator.

In the streets of this new Turin of stainless steel and glass, the John Bosco I have in mind sees people hurrying off to work, and the work they do seems to have, as its great result, only this — this city of stainless steel and glass. Alienated people build up an alien city. We talk a lot about community — where is it to be found? In the churches, maybe, we hope. In cubicles, in the workspace — forget it. Why do we work? The alienated man does not know why we work. We work, he thinks, because otherwise we're worthless — and I mean work for a salary. We work for money, and what's that for? It's for the pursuit of your pleasure. Many a commentator has compared modern man — nameless, faceless, swept by millions into their places of work, then swept by the millions back to the places where they sleep — to ants in an anthill. And as I've suggested before, that is unfair to ants. Ants do what they do by the nature God gave them — kick the anthill, and the ants will scurry about until they build it again. Why do we build what we build? Does it give us joy? Why, with our vast wealth, do we build things that are ugly, or that express a strange, vindictive desire to obliterate man himself, to make man feel like a bug by comparison with the structure in front of him?

We must then bring to this alienated man the nourishing reality of leisure — not vacant time, not the vacation, he has enough of those, he is vacuous enough already. I mean leisure that partakes of the feast. When has this street person, this jacketed and tied-up white-collar laborer amid steel and glass, ever known a feast? Large parties, sure, and debauches, sure — unless his very loneliness has protected him from debauchery. But a feast? Every French peasant hoeing potatoes knew what it was to celebrate a feast — the church bells ringing the Angelus every day in France would remind him of the feast. Every Russian serf cutting the barley with his sickle knew what it was to celebrate a feast — the little icon on his shelf at home would remind him of it. Our alienated man does not know it. So we have to bring the feast his way. And the feast implies the presence of the divine.

This, of course, does not mean that we hang a flag outside our church, hugging ourselves for it and declaring that all are welcome. That is a piece of self-congratulation, and it doesn't heal the wound — it just puts a little oil on it while it festers all the more beneath. It means that we take the mystery and the joy of the feast into his streets. Our enemies will not use the phrase "freedom of religion," but only "freedom of worship." They are afraid that freedom of religion will be too public a thing. They are terrified that Christian ideals of moral behavior might actually have a formative influence in our politics and what's left of our culture. They are afraid of heights, so they want to give us freedom of worship instead. Then let freedom of worship be a public thing.

And again, I'm recommending something I would shy away from, because believe it or not, I am a shy person — I'm Italian and I'm shy, what's up with that? Bring it forth. Bring it outdoors. It's going to make people uncomfortable — so let them, and let us, be made uncomfortable. All truly great things make us uncomfortable, or should. It's not a comfortable thing to gaze upon the vast cycle of paintings with which Michelangelo covered the Sistine Chapel. Not comfortable. You don't say, "Oh, well, paintings — oh, look, there's Adam, he's naked, oh, very interesting." That's not a full human response to that grandeur. The fully human response is, "My God in heaven, that you should give a gift to a mere man to make that." It is not comfortable to listen to Bach's St. Matthew Passion and the chorale pieces that punctuate it. They are not comfortable. True love is beyond comfort. You want to marry somebody who says, "Well, my great ambition in life — daddy says, and daddy has lots of wealth so he didn't work — but my great ambition in life is to be comfortable"? Are you going to marry somebody like that? Because when pain comes, that person's out of there. True love is beyond comfort. So is true sorrow. So is true joy.

Does it ever occur to us that outside of our congregations — and for Roman Catholics, even within our congregations — most people alive have never heard a group of their neighbors singing from a full heart, singing about what stirs them to the core of their beings, and never experienced it? This, again, is an experience human beings have always known until our time. Never to have had it — that would be like never having beheld a sunrise, or water rushing in a stream.

In this new Turin, no one is home. I'm not the first to say it — this has been said by commentators, theologians, and philosophers for at least seventy-five years. Romano Guardini said it shortly after World War II. He noted that modern man, whom he dates from the end of the Renaissance, had slowly lost the sense that the world, the cosmos, was a haven for man — even the Christian cosmos was a haven, though it had torn the firmament in two from top to bottom, when Christ our life was made flesh to dwell among us, and when he rose triumphant to prepare a place for us with him. Man has not been made humble by the accomplishments of modern science. He has been made proud, and he has been humiliated — the two of those go together. Gabriel Marcel, another writer of the same time, said it when he wrote against mass man, suffering the techniques of mass manipulation and degradation, the techniques of advertising and mass politics.

Our task is to bring the street kids home, to bring man home. Every man we meet is an orphan. We too are orphans. We too are lost. And if we relied upon our own intelligence and strength of will, we would achieve nothing. But we have one who has gone before us to mark the way. He is not John Bosco, and John Bosco himself would have joyfully acknowledged it. He is the way, the truth, and the life. He does not merely give us the answers we seek — he is not a sage or a guru, he is not the Buddha, he is not Confucius, he is not Socrates. He is the answer we seek. His cross is the span above the abyss, and the only one. Ultimately we, and the other lost souls whom we wish to help, must meet that cross. Let us do so with good cheer and bold and open faith. There's no alternative. Thank you.