The American Spectator

Countervailing the barbaric yawps of the blogosphere’s sinister side are the remarkable Good Friday meditations composed by Archbishop Angelo Comastri, which are worth reading in full. Occasionally the Archbishop succeeds in identifying exactly the worst of postmodernity’s worst ills. This timely precision is a victory for any religion. It is particularly so for Catholicism today.

But the rest of us win as well simply by hearing that such as this is, and can be, still publicly spoken: “our affluence is making us less human, our entertainment has become a drug, a source of alienation, and our society’s incessant, tedious message is an invitation to die of selfishness … Today we seem to be witnessing a kind of anti-Genesis, a counter-plan, a diabolical pride aimed at eliminating the family. There is a move to reinvent mankind, to modify the very grammar of life as planned and willed by God. … Today bodies are constantly bought and sold on the streets of our cities, on the streets of our televisions, in homes that have become like streets.”

I have worried for some time along with the enraged worryworts of the left — but I worry about their panic itself. My long meditation on this Fear is posted here; in short, under the strain of a rude reality that will not leave us be, we the leisured postmodern West are headed for a crisis of identity that cannot be treated, as is our slavish habit, by therapy. Too few seem to understand this; even fewer seem to speak it. That the heirs of a battered and dissipated Christianity are among the loudest to speak on that count is startling as it is heartening.