Spe Salvi and the Public Square

Allow me to diverge from my thoughts on the public duty for Catholic voters as I have been struck with inspiration from the Pope Benedict’s last encyclical, Spe Salvi and I may spend the next several days reflecting on the implications this message has on our conversation.  He says in paragraph 25, “On the other hand, we must also acknowledge that modern Christianity, faced with the succeses of science in progressively structuring the world, has to a large extent restricted its attention to the individual and his salvation.  In so doing it has limited the horizon of its hope and has failed to recognize sufficiently the greatness of its task…”  What is the horizon of its hope but the public square?  The Holy Father makes the point that much of what belonged the hope for building the Kingdom of God was transferred to what we know call science.  Freedom and Reason became the main forces that liberated humanity and became an absolute value for progress.  Progress itself became an absolute value as well.  In this course of human history, Christianity was relegated to the private sphere, irrelevant to establishing the Kingdom of God.  The Kingdom of God became possible merely by studying human nature, sociology, history, and science.  Then we had only to place the right kind of structures to force humanity from the outside into a perfect society…free, happy, and progressing towards greater accomplishment over nature and over itself.  The results, of course, as many have noted, not just Christians, have been disastrous.  Men such as Karl Marx and Francis Bacon neglected one thing: “human freedom.”  And human freedom deals with interior transformation rather than exterior structuring.  And this pertains to the transformation that can only take place through a response to the hope that is offered in Jesus Christ.