In search of the lost sheep

Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? (Lk.15:4)

The first ones to visit the infant Jesus were the shepherds; however, to continue the work of his ministry Jesus chose fishermen so that, without losing their techniques, only changing their catch, they were transformed into fishers of men.

These fishermen in the first 300 years after Christ converted half of the population in the world of that time; it was only afterwards that, the need to have shepherds to guide and govern this flock came about. Since then, and almost up to our times, the Church has lived with the belief that, just like before, the sheep would always increase as the sheep multiply inside the sheepfold. The reality however, is that for a long time the sheep have been multiplying outside the flock. In many Christian families, the children do not live by the faith they have received from their parents. In many cases the parents themselves also end up leaving the church after their children have abandoned it.

The Church has come to terms with this reality and proclaimed a New Evangelization in countries that were once Christian. Therefore the Mission is not only going out to distant lands but also caring for those who have lost their faith and helping them see that life has no meaning without it.

We are now once again in a desperate need of fishermen or shepherds who act like fishermen, that is, good shepherds. A Good Shepherd is the one who leaves the 99 to look for the one lost sheep.  Or, ironically referring to the actual situation, leave the one to go in search of the 99.  In search of the sheep or the lost sheep, I suppose this is what is meant by the New Evangelization which, in my view, has not yet gone beyond discourses of good intentions at the level of synods, conferences, and lectures. So far little can be seen from the point of implementation of plans or concrete achievements.

In the years following the Second Vatican Council, the problem of dissension was not so contentious, and yet the Church at that time came up with solutions to cope with it. Many religious orders engaged in Popular Missions; preachers were dispatched to all parishes and as the result many rejoined the flock.  Another initiative was the “Cursilllos” which still exist today was a worldwide initiative, there were others at local level.

Now the desertion of the faith and religious practices have turned into an Exodus that is far more serious and widespread, and it is sad to realize that the Church this time does not yet have a solid strategy…

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Believing after Sigmund Freud

Religion and religious sentiment permeate all spheres of human thought and life. Karl Marx saw the effects of religion or a certain religion on the economy and the relationship between the rich and the poor. Freud saw this same religion from another perspective, from that of trauma, especially those of a sexual origin.

If, for Marx, religion alienates human beings from a sociological and economic perspective; for Freud, this alienation operates at an unconscious and psychic level. Religion, in this sense, is an ideology that prevents human beings from being free, from being themselves, from accepting reality and accepting themselves as they are.

Biography of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Sigmund Schlomo Freud was born in Freiberg, Moravia, then part of the Austrian Empire, on May 6, 1856. The son of Jacob Freud, a small-time merchant, and Amalie Nathanson, of Jewish origin, he was the eldest of seven children.

Like Marx's father, Freud's father was also a Christian convert from Judaism. In this regard, he went so far as to say that he had always considered himself a German, until the day the Jews began to be persecuted. Later, as a refugee in London, he considered himself a Jew.

At the age of four, his family moved to Vienna, where Jews had better social acceptance and economic prospects. Freud graduated in medicine from the University of Vienna, later earning a master's degree in neuropathology. From neurology, he moved to psychiatry, and from there to psychology, studying the unconscious until he dedicated himself exclusively to psychoanalysis.

Freud worked alone for ten years on the development of psychoanalysis. In 1906, he was joined by Adler, Jung, Jones, and Stekel, and in 1908, they all gathered at the First International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Salzburg.

Religion as an Obsessive Neurosis
Freud sees religion as a repression of man's basic instincts, especially sexual ones. This is because religion perverts the natural instincts of human beings, declaring them evil, impure, ugly, dirty, and animalistic, and as such, they must be repressed.

Religion is also a moral code that makes individuals feel guilty for experiencing and expressing their instincts. This topic would later be revisited by Nietzsche in his "slave morality" concept, contrasting Judaeo-Christian morality with the morality of the Lords, or, in other words, natural ethics.

According to Freud, this repression inevitably leads to an obsessive neurosis: the body begs something, the mind does not grant it, the latter ends up short-circuiting and the fuses blow. Just as Marx saw socialism and communism as solutions to the alienation of religion, Freud believed psychoanalysis would resolve this issue—by removing the past traumas, the person reconciles with himself and his true nature.

Like Marx, Freud also knew very little about religion, focusing more on its role in a repressive and puritanical society. His theory was more than anything a reaction to puritanism, just as Marx's was a reaction to the inhumane capitalism of the time, stemming from England's first industrial revolution, where even children worked in factories from dawn to dusk.

So far, the only one to address the subject of religion from a theoretical perspective was Feuerbach in his work, The Essence of Religion. To paraphrase the title of this work, Marx and Freud dealt with the subject of religion from an existential perspective, in other words, how religion served as a weapon of the rich against the poor (Marx) or as a repression of human nature by Puritan ideology to control basic instincts.

Religion as an Infantile Illusion
For Freud, religious sentiment is an infantile illusion, something like believing in Santa Claus. Human maturity occurs when the child abandons the Pleasure Principle and embraces the Reality Principle. Religion keeps human beings in an eternal state of childishness because it is an illusion and thus not real.

In his work, The Future of an Illusion, Freud is convinced that religion is nothing more than a chimera that had its function in ancient times, but which we must now get rid of in order to find truth. As science advances, the future of this illusion becomes increasingly uncertain.

His Protestant pastor friend Pfister, probably with Pascal in mind, responds to this work by saying: “If reality boils down to a materialistic and random view of life, what future can we hope for? On the other hand, if a God of wisdom and love has come into this cold and materialistic world, we can wish for happiness here and now, and hope for a brighter future.

The donkey hopes that it will be able to nibble on the carrot; hope is what motivates it, hope is what gives it a reason to live. It is the hope that it will be able to eat the carrot that motivates its present and makes it trot towards the future. The present act of trotting forward to reach the carrot is motivated by the hope of reaching it. Without this hope, the present would be stagnant and meaningless.

Whoever has no future, whoever has no hope, walks in circles. They revolve around themselves, and in this way fall easily into monotony and, the nausea that the philosophers of nothingness, Nietzsche and Sartre, talk about. Without a future, the present is nauseating no matter how pleasant it may seem. Sartre experienced this, as did Nietzsche before him and Camus after him: "If you come from nothing, there is no Faith; if you go towards nothing, there is no Hope, and most likely there is no Charity, making life meaningless and nauseating."

The life of an atheist who says that he comes from nothing and goes to nothing is meaningless. Those who live immersed in pure worldliness live in a present without a past or future, as the philosophies and spiritualities of the Far East like Buddhism recommend. Only animals have no past, no historical memory and no future purpose in life. Humans are only human if they live all three times -- past, present, and future -- in harmony.

Faith in God the Father opens us up to the Hope we find in the Son through his resurrection, and this motivates a present of Charity, leading us to see Christ in every person. And whoever sees the Son sees the Father, as Jesus said to Philip. Hope is the only begotten child of mother Faith, just as Christ is the Son of God the Father, and just as the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, so Charity proceeds from Faith and Hope.

The three virtues work in our lives like a GPS: Faith connects us with God, our guiding star or satellite, telling us where we are and what we are, that is, sinners. Hope tells us where we want to go and what we want to be, that is, saints. Charity is the only way and roadmap to holiness.

Freud Does Not Seem to Know that Dreams Command Life
They do not know that dreaming
is a constant in life
as concrete and outlined
as any other thing,
like this grayish stone
where I sit to rest,
like this calm creek
in its easy startles,
like these high pine trees
that in green and gold sway,
like these birds that crow
in drunkenness of blue.
They do not know that dreaming
is wine, is foam, is yeast,
a joyous thirsty little animal
whose sharp snout
pokes through everywhere
in endless restlessness.
(…) They do not know, nor dream of,
that dreaming commands life.
That whenever a man dreams
the world leaps forth
like a colourful ball
into a child’s little hands.—António Gedeão

As António Gedeão says in the excerpt of his poetry quoted above, dreams command life. Illusion is in fact dream; in Spanish, illusion does not have the same sense as a chimera, of imagining something false, but rather the sense of dreaming of a better future by already doing something in the present to make that dream come true.

Human beings do not pose problems that do not have a solution; if a problem exists, it is because there is a solution to it, because as the people say, what does not have a solution is already solved. Likewise, humans do not dream of the impossible; they would not dream of water if water did not exist.

Einstein's theory of relativity was a dream, an intuition. In this sense, dreams are the antechamber of reality. A dream is a utopia in the Greek sense of the word, something that is not reality now but can be, and often becomes so, in the future.

The Best is Yet to Come
The Lord likely created hope on the same day he created spring. —Bern Williams

We are not walking towards the sunset of our lives but towards the dawn of eternal life. Therefore, no matter how happy we are, the best is yet to come; no matter how much suffering we have to endure, decrepit, limited, sick, and old, the best is always yet to come. It is not in the circumstances and vicissitudes of the here and now that we place our trust, because we know that we have no permanent city here, but we seek the one that is to come (Hebrews 13:14).

It is said that a parishioner, a woman of great faith and hope in eternal life, was suffering from an incurable disease, leaving her with very little time to live. She prepared her own funeral so that it would be a lesson to everyone on the faith and hope that animated her. When she died, in the coffin, between the fingers of her hands, instead of a Rosary, were a knife and a fork.

The priest explained to the congregation, shocked by her boldness, saying that during her life, she had never missed a parish gala dinner and that whenever she returned her plate with the cutlery, she was told to keep the fork and knife because the best was yet to come.

Death is, therefore, not the end, but the passage to the best that is to come. This motivates the Christian's life, no matter how painful or limited his or her present may be.

Conclusion - Freud says religion is an infantile illusion, like believing in Santa Claus... But the Santa Claus that children believe in really does exist... He is the image of God the Father who loved the world so much that He sent His Son and it was Christmas.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Believing after Karl Marx

"Until now, philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." — Karl Marx

Karl Marx is more a sociologist and economist than a philosopher. Although he continued his atheistic philosophical reflection, he accepted Feuerbach's ideas and tried to apply them in the fields of economics and sociology in his criticism of capitalism. As he himself says, he is not interested in theories that lack practical application that can change the world.

He aims to understand how religion has performed over time, what it has served, and who it has served. He discovers that it has been an instrument of oppression used by the ruling classes against the poorest. This is a simplistic view, which even Marx himself must have recognized, but it is the one that best serves his theory. In other words, dialectical materialism is at the service of historical materialism.

Biography of Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Karl Marx was born in 1818 in the city of Trier, then a territory of Prussia, into an upper-class German family. His father was a successful lawyer and government advisor. At the age of seventeen, Marx went to study law at the University of Bonn, following in his father's footsteps.

However, the young university student got involved in parties and fell into a bohemian lifestyle. To put an end to this, his father, Heinrich Marx, transferred him to the University of Berlin. There, the defiant younger Marx discovered philosophy, the field in which he would earn his degree.

At the age of 23, Marx defended his thesis in Philosophy, obtaining a doctorate, which enabled him to enter an academic career. However, due to his criticism of the Prussian government, he was prevented from teaching at universities, forcing him to work as a journalist.

Marx's radical positions led to his expulsion from various Prussian, German, and French territories, and ultimately, he was expelled from Cologne, Germany, in 1848. In England that same year, he published the Communist Manifesto together with Friedrich Engels. From 1843 until the end of his life, Marx survived on inheritances, financial support from Engels, and from occasional articles he wrote for newspapers. It was in London that he wrote his most important work: Das Kapital.

Religion as the Opium of the People
The son of a Jewish convert to Protestant Christianity, Marx was even married in a church. However, he was a revolutionary. In his emblematic work, Das Kapital, he analyzed the evils of capitalism and viewed religion as an obstacle to progress—that is, to the evolution of capitalism towards socialism and communism.

Marx fully agrees with Feuerbach: God is a projection of man, and religion is therefore "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of a spiritless age. It is the opium of the people”. As well as being a projection, religion is a drug, an alienating behavior that prevents us from being ourselves, from taking the reins of our destiny or the helm of our boat. In short, it is an obstacle to progress.

Marx's atheism is more economic and social than philosophical. He has no interest in the essence of religion, be it Jewish or Christian, and is in fact ignorant of Christ or the social principles of Christianity.

What interests him is the role religion plays in society. Thus, Marx's atheism may be due to the type of religion practiced at that time, which in itself may have had little to do with Christ’s Christianity. Indeed, the classless communist society of the future could very well be the Promised Land of the Jews, the Kingdom of God of Jesus of Nazareth and the Christians.

What in Feuerbach was just a philosophical idea, in Marx it is a manifesto, an operative idea. However, it should be noted that Marx firmly believed that both capitalism and religion would collapse on their own, without the need of an intervention, like a fruit that ripens, rots and falls from the tree.

Nonetheless, his followers understood that they needed to be given a push, and that is precisely what Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong did with militant atheism, which resulted in the deaths of millions of people during most of the 20th century. Poor Marx, realizing while he was still alive that there were so many versions of his theories, even declared himself a non-Marxist.

Listen, Marx
To Marx, I would say that so far it has been more the religious who have brought benefits to humanity than the atheists, who brought gulags, dictatorships, and religious persecutions, resulting in the death of around 30 million people throughout the last century. Religion can be seen as the opium of the people when it is disconnected from life and social reality, but in essence, it is not the opium of the people.

As Karl Marx said, the human being is the moment when nature becomes aware of itself. Of all living beings, we are the only ones with the capacity to think and have some control over our destiny and life. It makes no sense that our fate should be the same as that of a louse or flea: nothingness. If that were so, I and many others would rather not have been born than share the same fate with lice, cockroaches, and fleas: nothingness.

Here lies the absurdity of atheism: it makes no sense that an intelligently ordered universe, which has progressed as far as human life, should suffer the same fate as the rest of living beings. Why would we have come this far? So that we would be more aware of our misery, and suffer more than all other living beings?

Precisely at the moment when we become aware of ourselves, of our existence, and the relative power we have over it, we also realize that one day we will die—that is, that one day we will cease to exist. At least animals, which also die, are spared this suffering of knowing. They do not think, they do not know they exist, and therefore, they do not know they will die.

Why, then, do we have consciousness? To masochistically experience suffering, pain, anguish and anxiety in the face of death and our miserable condition compared to other living beings?

Animals have no power over their own lives: nature has implanted a "chip" in their system known as instinct, which automatically governs their lives. Living beings travel on autopilot; they cannot err, nor are they ever right or wrong—or rather, they are always right, always fulfilling the vocation for which they were created. Unlike them, humans have some power over their life and can transform it into heaven, or hell by making mistakes. Wouldn’t it be better if we too lived on autopilot, given that we all share the same end?

To animals, nature is a prodigal mother, giving them everything, even clothing them. When they emerge from their mother’s womb, they are already equipped with everything they need to live. Human beings, on the other hand, are born as the most vulnerable and helpless of all living beings and it takes them a long time to reach adulthood: years of education, school and university, and then, in order to survive, they have to work most of the day to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, while our fellow animals eat, sleep and play, their days away. What is the point of all this? Wouldn’t the animal’s life be better if everything truly ended in insignificance?

Conclusion - Although certain types of religion can become alienating, the religion of Jesus, far from being opium, is rather the leaven of a more fraternal world, based on equality and justice.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC