This essay first appeared in Pins in the Liberal Balloon, a 1990 collection of essays from Fr. Canavan.

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The face of the earth has changed over the centuries and is changing more radically in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The world is getting smaller as rapid travel over long distances has become common. Our economies are becoming, through globalization, a world economy. Racial differences predictably will gradually disappear as persons of different races marry one another and blend into a single human race. At the same time we become more and more skilled at killing one another in large numbers, and more prone to resolve political and cultural differences by resorting to large-scale violence. Compared to us, earlier ages were pikers.

That raises the question whether we can expect the human race to renounce the use of force and violence when the stakes are, or are thought to be, high enough. Religion has not succeeded, but atheists and agnostics cannot rejoice in that. In the Middle Ages, the Church did try to mitigate the use of force. For instance, in the year 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council condemned the crossbow as a weapon too inhumane to use, but much good that did in restraining warriors engaged in contests where life and death were at stake. Today we have atomic bombs, not to mention a host of other weapons more deadly than earlier ages even imagined.

Reflecting on that is enough to make one believe in original sin. The modern mind, of course, will not hear of that. However, it might agree that there is something seriously wrong with us. But can it come to see that reason alone cannot cure our malady? The cultural elite among us claim that enlightened self-interest could, and will if we let it, convince us that willingness to reason and to compromise with our adversaries will lead us to a lasting peace.

But what do we know about human beings that would lead us to believe that? I remember that, toward the end of World War II, when it was clear that we and our allies had won it, I attended a talk by a U.S. senator. He told us that when a school has had a championship team in some sport, it will lose some of its best players when they graduate. We, the winners of the war, he said, must keep our winning team together after the war. When I heard that, I thought, “Keep the U.S., Britain, France, and the Soviet Union together? What planet is the man living on?”

I am not opposed to the United Nations; it is at least an effort, but it will not succeed if it has to rely upon enlightened self-interest. As the late Cardinal John Wright once wrote, “The wrath of the stupid has laid waste the earth quite as often as the craft of the bright.” (Even the craft of the bright has not been all that successful.) We cannot rely on reason alone to tame our selfish passions. (As Henry Kissinger has remarked, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.) Our problem is basically a moral one rather than an intellectual one. A sane philosophy will help us to deal with our passions, but it will not be enough. We cannot think ourselves out of the radical individualism and utilitarianism that afflict us in the liberal democracies. We need a deep change of heart. Nor will any merely political system do it for us.

Even God won’t do it for us. But we cannot do it without his help, Or, to put it in other and perhaps more widely acceptable terms, our problem will not have any solution without the help of a higher power that will change our hearts even more than our minds. Here, I suggest, we need to believe in a transcendent norm of morality—not of our creation but which depends upon a power greater than ourselves—that will aid us if we ask for help and guidance, not for the solution to all our problems. Yes, ACLU, I am talking about God, not suggesting an established religion, but rather for the conversion of many hearts in our people.

I am not looking forward to a mass conversion of humanity. There seems to be a psychological law of gravity that pulls us down into the satisfaction of our desires, which we may extend to those whom we love, but only so far. Jesus told us to love even our enemies. St. Thomas Aquinas explained that love is willing what is good for someone, which includes ourselves (there is a legitimate and praiseworthy love of ourselves) and love of those whom we may have to defeat but without hating them and seeking to destroy them.

How do we go about this conversion in our fellow men? It will never be fully accomplished in this world: the Garden of Eden is gone and Heaven is not yet. But we can begin with an old hymn: “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and enkindle in them the fire of your divine love. Send forth your spirit, O Lord, and they shall be created and you will renew the face of the earth.” This is not asking God to solve our problem for us, but to change human human hearts by enkindling them with his love, and so to change the face of the earth.