guest column
By Sister Constance Veit, l.s.p.
The month of October is a real bonanza for us Little Sisters of the Poor. During October we celebrate the anniversaries of the birth, beatification and canonization of our foundress, Saint Jeanne Jugan. Along with Catholics all over the United States, we also observe Respect Life Month. Rereading Pope Benedict’s canonization homily recently, I realized how appropriate it is to simultaneously celebrate Saint Jeanne Jugan and respect for life.
Inspired by Pope Francis’ greeting for England’s 2013 Day for Life, the theme chosen for our U.S. Respect Life observances this year is Each of Us is a Masterpiece of God’s Creation.
“Even the weakest and most vulnerable, the sick, the old, the unborn and the poor are masterpieces of God’s creation, made in his own image, destined to live forever, and deserving of the utmost reverence and respect,” he said. Time and time again we see Pope Francis demonstrating the truth of these words in his humility, warmth and compassion for each person he encounters.
“We want to be part of a society that makes affirmation and protection of human rights its primary objective and its boast,” Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley, O.F.M. Cap., chairman of the USCCB Committee on Pro-Life Activities, wrote in his message for Respect Life Month. “Our mission is to show each person the love of Christ. As uniquely created individuals, we each have unique gifts which we are called to use to share Christ’s love.” This is exactly what Saint Jeanne Jugan did as she devoted her life to elderly persons in need.
“Born in 1792 at Cancale in Brittany, France, Jeanne Jugan was concerned with the dignity of her brothers and sisters … whom age had made more vulnerable, recognizing in them the Person of Christ himself,” Pope Benedict XVI said at her canonization. “‘Look upon the poor with compassion,’ she would say, ‘and Jesus will look kindly upon you on your last day.’
Jeanne Jugan focused upon the elderly a compassionate gaze drawn from her profound communion with God in her joyful, disinterested service, which she carried out with gentleness and humility of heart, desiring herself to be poor among the poor.”
Pope Benedict rightly attributed Saint Jeanne’s compassionate love to her profound union with God, which she achieved through many years of prayer and an active sacramental life. Cardinal O’Malley suggests that we pursue the same course – to draw close to Jesus in prayer and the sacraments – asking God for the grace to see ourselves and others as he sees us, as masterpieces of his creation.
“When God created each of us, he did so with precision and purpose, and he looks on each of us with love that cannot be outdone in intensity or tenderness.” If we wish to help build the Culture of Life, we should reflect on these words of Cardinal O’Malley until they are assimilated into the deep recesses of our minds and our hearts. From there they will give birth to deep convictions: “We must look at ourselves and at others in light of this truth and treat all people with the reverence and respect which is due.”
This was Jeanne Jugan’s secret. She saw in each elderly person a suffering member of the Body of Christ, and she treated them as she would have treated Christ himself. Jeanne Jugan’s canonization process involved the recognition of two miracles worked through her intercession. But our foundress hasn’t stopped working miracles now that she is a Saint!
During this Respect Life Month, pray through her intercession for the miracle of a conversion of our society’s values to those of the Culture of Life. And ask Saint Jeanne Jugan to help you realize your own dignity, and the dignity of all those with whom you share your life, as masterpieces of God’s creation.
(Sister Constance Veit is director of communications for the Little Sisters of the Poor.)

Reflections on Life
By Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD
“People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.” Of spurious origin, that old dictum has been interpreted in various ways. One common understanding is that people should not criticize in others some fault that they see in themselves. Another is that people who are in a vulnerable, fragile situation should not engage in destructive actions.
In any case, the axiom’s relevance is not lost on news analysts, reporters, NOW (the National Organization for Women) and people at large who are up in arms about spousal violence in the National Football League. For days the talk of the nation, virtually everyone is hot and bothered over the antics of Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, Ray McDonald and others.
But, while 69 percent of Americans think that the NFL has a widespread epidemic of domestic violence problems, official arrest numbers for domestic violence by NFL players are less than half the arrest numbers for the general population. This ignorance amid the public of the facts of domestic violence is part of the problem. The media and the public blithely mouth clichés about the NFL’s being a major expression of America’s culture of violence, and yet the public at large is guilty of even more violence. Oh, those glass houses!
No one doubts that our ambient culture of violence is the main stage on which acts of violence take place. Yet, the individual elements that spark violence are usually an unruly will to control another, a tit-for-tat attempt at revenge for something said or done, anger at another’s opinions or attitude that conflicts badly with one’s own way of thinking. Some folks simply refuse to be content with agreeing to disagree about anything.
After a slap on Ray Rice’s wrist that created severe backlash, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell got tough, declaring a new policy of a six-game suspension for a first offense and a lifetime ban for a second offense. Subsequently, the Baltimore Ravens summarily released Rice. But should professional sports have a violence code that does not reflect the status of the general population and of organizations like law enforcement in particular?
Something is grossly wrong with all these maneuvers. If police officers, who are much more frequent domestic violence offenders than professional athletes are, are not fired and often not even taken to task for spousal abuse, why are athletes being cut off from their livelihood?
Plastered all over TV news, dozens of actors, actresses, vocalists and sundry entertainers are shown in mind-blowing episodes of fury and violence. Why are they not punished by the same fickle public who self-righteously want to punish athletes?
Now don’t get me wrong, folks! Some kind, some measure of effective punishment should be meted out to both amateur and professional athletes who engage in spousal abuse. However, the waters and solutions are left murky by the prevalence of domestic violence in the general population at a rate more than twice as frequent as in sports.
High-profile people such as superstar entertainers, actors and professional athletes definitely live in glass houses. However, so does an even higher percentage of the clueless people at large, since their percentage of spousal abuse is more than two times higher than the percentage in the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League and the world of entertainment.
It may come as a shock to learn that domestic violence is highest among members of police families. On a heavily-footnoted information sheet, the National Center for Women and Policing notes, “Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population.” Even a study among older and more experienced officers still registered a 24 percent higher incidence than among the general population.
To make matters worse, cases of domestic violence by police officers are regularly swept under the rug because of wayward, lawless influences like blind solidarity among police officers and uninformed, unethical politics of civil authorities and even judges.
In pure irony, the very group of law enforcement people to whom battered women must run for refuge and help are trained fighters and killers plagued by a high incidence of domestic violence in their own families. On a similar note, military-trained fighters and killers have a very similar rate of incidence of spousal violence in military families.
In our search for gentleness and peace, we should follow the Man himself depicted in Isaiah 42:3, “Here is my Servant whom I uphold, my chosen one with whom I am pleased.  Upon him I have put my spirit… He will not cry out, nor shout… A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench. He will faithfully bring forth justice.”
For sure, people who live in glass houses should keep their clothes on. “God is love, and all who abide in love abide in God and God in them.”   (1 John 4:16)
(Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD, is pastor of Our Mother of Mercy Parish in Fort Worth, Texas. He has written “Reflections on Life since 1969.)
(Editor’s note: October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Anthropologists tell us that father-hunger, a frustrated desire to be blessed by our own fathers, is one of the deepest hungers in the world today, especially among men. Millions of people sense that they have not received their father’s blessing. Robert Bly, Robert Moore, Richard Rohr and James Hillman, among others, offer some rich insights into this.
We suffer from being fatherless. However, in its deepest root, this suffering is something far beyond the mere absence of a blessing from our biological fathers. We tend to be fatherless in a much deeper way.
Some 25 years ago, a French philosopher, Jean-Luc Marion wrote a book entitled, God Without Being, within which he offers a very challenging interpretation of the famous parable of the Prodigal Son.
We’re all familiar with the parable: A father had two sons. The younger comes to him and says: ‘Father give me the share of the property that’s coming to me.’ His father shares out his goods. The younger son takes his share, leaves for a distant country, and squanders his property on a life of debauchery. When he has spent everything, he finds himself hungry and humiliated and sets off to return to his father’s house, where he is undeservedly greeted, embraced, and taken back by his father.
At one level, the lesson is clear: God’s mercy is so wide and compassionate that nothing we can do will ever stop God from loving us. Many wonderful books have been written to highlight this, not least Henri Nouwen’s classic, The Return of the Prodigal Son.
But Jean-Luc Marion, drawing upon the specific wording of the Greek text, emphasizes another element in this story.  The Greek text implies that the son went to his father and asked for something more than property and money. It says that he asked his father for his share of the property (ousia).
Ousia, in Greek, means “substance.” He’s asking for his life, as independent of his father. Moreover, as a son and an heir, he already has use of his share of what is rightfully his; but he wants to own it and not owe it to anyone.
He wants what is rightly his but he wants to have it as independent of his father, as cut off from his father and as his own in a way that he no longer has to acknowledge his father in the way he receives his life and freedom and uses them. And the consequence of that, as this parable makes clear, is that a gift no longer sensed or acknowledged as gift always leads to the misuse of that gift, to the loss of integrity and to personal humiliation.
With an apology for the abstractness of Marion’s language, here’s what he sees as the deepest issue inside this story: “The son requests that he no longer have to request, or rather, that he no longer have to receive the ousia.  … He asks to possess it, dispose of it, enjoy it without passing through the gift and the reception of the gift. The son wants to owe nothing to his father, and above all not owe him a gift; he asks to have a father no longer- the ousia without the father or the gift. … [And] the ousia becomes the full possession of the son only to the extent that it is fully dispossessed of the father: dispossession of the father, annulment of the gift, this is what the possession of the ousia implies.
Hence an immediate consequence: in being dispossessed of the father, the possession that censures the gift integrates within itself, indissolubly, the waste of the gift: possessed without gift, possession cannot but continue to dispossess itself. Henceforth orphan of the paternal gift, ousia finds itself possessed in the mode of dissipation.”
The prodigal son’s real issue was not so much his hunger for pleasure as his hunger for the wrong kind of independence. He wanted his life and the freedom to enjoy life completely on his own terms and, for him, that meant he had to take them outside his father’s house. In doing that, he lost his father and he also lost genuine life and freedom because these can only be had inside the acceptance a certain dependence. That’s why Jesus repeated again and again, that he could do nothing on his own. Everything he was and everything he did came from his Father.
Our lives are not our own. Our lives are a gift and always need to be received as gift. Our substance is not our own and so it may never be severed from its source, God, our Father. We can enter our lives and freedom and enjoy them and their pleasures, but as soon as we cut them off from their source, take them as our own and head off on our own, dissipation, hunger, and humiliation will follow.
There’s life only in the Father’s house and when we are outside that house we are fatherless and wasting our ousia.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Millennial Reflections
By Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem
This column has been percolating with me for some time as events in the Middle East grow consistently worse for Christians. In the West our understanding of Islam, much less Eastern Christianity, fails to grasp the seventh century split between Muslims: Shia and Sunni. With the disintegration of a pan-Arabic nationalism, after the American invasion of Iraq, these ancient religious animosities resurfaced. Christians and other minorities are suffering persecution from this regional religious war.
Our faith is a Middle Eastern religion. We sometimes forget that Jerusalem, not Rome, was the first center of our faith. It was from Jerusalem that the Apostles reached out to the world around them. Rome was the capital of the world. It was also the place where Christians were later fed to the lions.
It was in Antioch, in Syria, that we were first called ‘Christian.’ In Syria they celebrate Mass in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. Christianity spread both East and West from Jerusalem. Babylon, in what is now Iraq, was still a functioning city and both Jews and Christians lived there. The Jews composed the Babylonian Talmud while living there. The Talmud is a collection of commentaries on Scripture and Jewish law written by rabbis. Christians, too had a strong presence in the region, including thousands of monasteries. Basra, for instance, was a monastic city in Christian times. There was all this, and more, in the centuries before Mohamed.
When the Muslims came to power, they granted protection to the “religions of the book,” that is Jews and Christians. Jews and Christians had to pay a tax, but were allowed to run their institutions, churches and monasteries. The history of Eastern Christians to the present has been a history of generally amiable coexistence with the Muslim rulers. With the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the creation of modern Arab and non-Arab states in the region, and especially after WWII, a pan-Arabism brought people together, both Christian and Muslim. While this lasted, it was a time of peace for Christians. That is all gone now.
The region is rife with religious and tribal warfare. Ancient hatreds came to the surface. Fanatics kill Christians, seize everything they have, and destroy centuries-old churches, monasteries and shrines. As one Chaldean Christian reported, “For 1,600 years Christians have been in Mosul, now they are driven out!”  By the way, Chaldeans are under the jurisdiction of the Pope.
History has a way to create new memories and new realities. Our religious history separated Eastern and Western Christians. With the consolidation of the Muslim caliphates and the split between Rome and Constantinople, we in the West, disconnected ourselves from the fate of our Eastern brothers and sisters. Now is a good time to reclaim that history and remember we are all united in Christ, no matter where we live.
The Crusades were a total disaster for Eastern Christians, Muslims and Jews, and centuries later, the fallout lingers throughout the Middle East. In the West, more concerned by what separates us, we became oblivious of what unites us. We are at a point where Christianity could be eradicated from the place of its birth. That is a horrible thing to think of, that the religion of Jesus is no more in the region we read of daily in the Scripture.
Further, the Western powers who could do something do not have the fate of Christians at the top of their list. Pope Francis has been speaking out, pleading, calling for prayers to save “our brothers and sisters in the Middle East.” He continues to call world leaders to reach out with humanitarian aid to help the Christians in the Middle East. As I say, “They are us and we are them.”
We must continue to pray for peace and call upon world leaders to create lasting structures to establish and support peace between the three faiths who all claim that region as their birthplace.
(Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem, lives at the Priory of St. Moses the Black, Jackson.)

Complete The Circle
By George Evans
I am writing this after recently returning from what has become my annual retreat at Manresa Retreat House in Convent, Louisiana, located on the River Road between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Manresa is a Jesuit retreat house on the banks of the Mississippi with great facilities including an antebellum main residence building, a beautiful chapel, and wonderful new conference center, not to mention several avenues of oaks. It is a magnificent retreat setting on many acres.
Being a Jesuit institution, our retreat was based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, the Jesuit founder. Although these kinds of retreats have been conducted for 500 years, there always seems to be something new or different in the annual sojourn, at least by way of emphasis. This year was no different for me among the 16 from St. Richard Parish who joined the 95 from Baton Rouge for the retreat.
The retreat master was terrific. One of the distinguishing things he stressed was truly pondering different scriptural passages in the manner of lectio divina and putting oneself in the scene of particular gospel passages. St. Ignatius stressed this exercise, and though I had previously been encouraged to do so it had always been difficult for me to benefit from it. For some reason, perhaps the Holy Spirit, it worked better this time.
Let me share a couple of scenes we entered into on retreat and see if they are meaningful to you. Be with Jesus as he walks into the Jordan river to be baptized by John the Baptist. Feel the chill and wetness of the water. Sense the Spirit descend upon you with Jesus and hear the Father tell Jesus and you that you are His beloved Son along with Jesus in whom He is well pleased.  When we leave with Jesus we are ready to follow him. (Mt 3:13-17)
We then go into the desert with Jesus and become hot and hungry and we withstand, with Jesus, the devil’s temptation to do it his way and the world’s way by pleasing the crowd, grasping at political rule or by seeking religious power. We resist our culture’s enticement to greed, to things, to rampant pleasure and luxury. (Lk 4:1-13)
We go back home with Jesus to Nazareth where he stands  up in the Synagogue and reads from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”( Lk4:16-19) Jesus has set forth his mission and his father’s will for him and therefore for us as his followers.  He has given his inaugural address and asked us to help him complete his work.
We later go with Jesus when he sees Zacchaeus, a short man who had climbed a tree in order to see Jesus in the pressing crowd. We experience Jesus reaching out to this rich, sinful, hated tax collector asking, to the astonishment of everyone in the crowd, to stay in his house. We see and hear Zacchaeus’ conversion and promise to give half his possessions to the poor and repay four times over anything he has extorted. We are excited about the celebration we will experience with Jesus at Zacchaeus’s house that night.(Lk 19:1-10)
As time goes by we hear many parables and stories from Jesus. One is the Last Judgment in which Jesus separates the sheep on the right from the goats on the left and we hear him tell those on his right that they will inherit the kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world and those on his left to depart from him into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. And like those on the right and left we are anxious to know the reason and he tells us along with the others there:
For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me. When asked about doing or not doing these things he replied, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me…..what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.’ (Mt 25:31-46)
We leave this scene struck by its directness and simplicity. We resolve to act in accord with what we have heard. We ask to be forgiven. We go to confession at the retreat. We experience a freedom and liberation. We understand its not enough just to pray and go to Mass. We have to reach out to others in charity and justice by making the system better.  We ask for the grace to enter gospel scenes with Jesus again in the future. We invite you to join us. We go home in peace and with joy.
(George Evans is a pastoral minister at Jackson St. Richard Parish.)
Editor’s note: see retreats on page 6

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
My youth had both its strengths and its weaknesses. I grew up on a farm in heart of the Canadian prairies, a second-generation immigrant. Our family was a large one and the small farm we lived on gave us enough to live on, though just enough. There were never any extras. We were never hungry or genuinely poor, but we lived in a conscriptive frugality. You were given what you needed, but rarely anything extra.
You got just one portion of the main course at a meal and one dessert because these had to be measured out in a way that left enough for everyone. And I lived happily inside that, taking for granted that this was the way life was meant to be, assuming that all resources are limited and you shouldn’t ever be asking for or taking more than what’s necessary.
And such a background has its strengths: You grow into adulthood with the sense that there’s no free lunch, you need to earn what you eat. You know too that you shouldn’t be taking more than your share because the goods of this world are limited and meant to be shared with everyone. If you take more than your share, than there won’t be enough for everyone. Resources are limited, so if anyone gets too much, someone gets too little.
But such an upbringing also has its downside: When everything has to be measured out to ensure that there’s enough for everyone and you live with the underlying fear that there might not be enough, you can easily end-up with a sense of scarcity rather than of abundance and an inclination towards stinginess rather than generosity.
A mindset of scarcity rather than of abundance debilitates us in several ways: First, it tends to leave us standing before life’s abundance too timid to celebrate life with any exuberance. Life is too equated with frugality and you are forever haunted by guilt in the face of life’s goodness and especially before any experience of luxury, not unlike the discomfort felt by Jesus’ disciples when they are face to face with a prodigal woman lavishly anointing Jesus’ feet with expensive perfume.
Inside a mindset of scarcity there’s the perennial temptation to falsely idealize suffering and poverty and have them replace grace and abundance as God’s real gift to us. More crippling still is the fact that a sense of scarcity too often gives us a concept of a God who is limited and who is frugal rather than prodigal. But that isn’t the God of Jesus.
Allow me just one, rather pointed, illustration: a seminary professor whom I know shares this story. He’s been teaching seminarians for many years and in recent years, when teaching about the sacrament of penance, is frequently asked this question, often as the first question in the class: “When can I refuse absolution? When do I not grant forgiveness?” The anxiety expressed here is not, I believe, triggered by a need for power but by a very sincere fear that we have to be rather scrupulous in handing out God’s mercy, that we shouldn’t be handing out cheap grace. And, undergirding that fear, I believe, is the unconscious notion that God too works out of a sense of scarcity rather than of abundance, and that God’s mercies, like our own resources, are limited and need to be measured out very sparingly.
But that’s not the God whom Jesus incarnated and revealed. The Gospels rather reveal a God who is prodigal beyond all our standards and beyond our imagination. The God of the Gospels is the Sower who, because he has unlimited seeds, scatters those seeds everywhere without discrimination: on the road, in the ditches, in the thorn bushes, in bad soil, and in good soil.
Moreover that prodigal Sower is also the God of creation, that is, the God who has created and continues to create hundreds of billions of galaxies and billions and billions of human beings. And this prodigal God gives us this perennial invitation: Come to the waters, come without money, come without merit because God’s gift is as plentiful, available, and as free as the air we breathe.
The Gospel of Luke recounts an incident where Peter, just after he had spent an entire night fishing and had caught nothing, is told to cast out his net one more time and, this time, Peter’s net catches so many fish that the weight of the catch threatens to sink two boats. Peter reacts by falling on his knees and confessing his sinfulness.
But, as the text makes clear, that’s not the proper reaction in the face of over-abundance. Peter is wrongly fearful, in effect, wanting that over-abundance to go away; when what Jesus wants from him in the face of that over-abundance is to go out to the world and share with others that unimaginable grace.
What God’s over-abundance is meant to teach us is that, in the face of limitless grace, we may never refuse anyone absolution.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

By Father Robert Barron
Lois Lowry’s 1993 novel “The Giver” has garnered a very wide audience over the past two decades, since it has become a standard text in middle schools and high schools across the English-speaking world. The movie version of “The Giver” was produced by Jeff Bridges and stars Bridges and Meryl Streep. Having never even heard of the novel, I came at the film with no expectations, and I confess I was quite surprised both by the power of its societal critique and by its implicit Christian themes.
The story is set in the near future, in a seemingly utopian city, where there is no conflict, no inequality and no stress. The streets are laid out in a perfectly symmetrical grid, the domiciles and public buildings are clean, even antiseptic, and the people dress in matching outfits and ride bicycles so as not to pollute the environment. The “elders,” the leadership of the community, artificially arrange families and carefully assign vocations, all for the sake of the common good. In order to eliminate any volatile emotions that might stir up resentment or compromise the perfect equilibrium of the society, each citizen is obligated to take a daily injection of a kind of sedative.
Most chillingly, the elderly and unacceptable children are eliminated, though the people have been conditioned not to think of this as killing but only as a peaceful transition to “elsewhere.” The calm “sameness” of the city is maintained, above all, through the erasing of memory: no one is permitted to remember the colorful but conflictual world that preceded the present utopia. No one, that is, except the Giver, an elder who retains memories of the previous world for the sole purpose of consulting them in case an emergency arises and specialized knowledge is needed.
Utopian societies, maintained through totalitarian control, have been dreamed about at least since the time of Plato, and, to be sure, many attempts have been made over the centuries to realize the dream. The twentieth century witnessed quite a few of them: Mao’s China, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Third Reich, Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Indeed, there are echoes of all of these social arrangements in “The Giver’s” version of utopia, but I think what The Giver’s city most readily calls to mind is modern liberalism, especially in its European incarnation.
We find the fierce enforcement of politically correct speech, the manic attempt to control the environment, coldly modernist architecture, the prizing of equality as the supreme value, the rampant use of drugs, the denial of death and the wanton exercise of both euthanasia and abortion. Will all of this produce a balanced and peaceful society? Well, it might bring about a kind of equilibrium, but at a terrible cost.
The plot of The Giver centers on a young man named Jonas who was chosen by the elders to become the sole recipient of the suppressed memory of the previous world. Through a sort of telepathy, the Giver communicates to Jonas all of the richness, color, drama and joy of the pre-Utopian society. The most beguiling image he receives is of himself sledding down a snowy hill and coming upon a cottage from which he hears emerging the strains of a song he had never heard before (in fact, both snow and music had been excluded from his world).
In time, the Giver fills out the picture, communicating to the young man the pain and conflict of the previous world as well. Though at first he is horrified by that experience, Jonas realizes that the colorful world, even with its suffering, would be preferable to the bloodless and inhuman dystopia in which he had been raised. As the story moves to its climax, Jonas escapes from the city and ventures out into the forbidden wilderness. The weather turns fiercely cold and he wanders through the snow until he comes to a clearing where he spies the sled that he had previously seen in memory. Following the prompts of the recollection, he rides the sled down a snowy hill, comes to the quaint cottage, and listens to the song. It is only then that we hear that they are singing the best-known and best-loved Christmas hymn, “Silent Night.”
And now we see that what makes the society in “The Giver” most like contemporary Europe is precisely the forgetfulness of Christianity. What the story suggests, quite rightly, is that suppression of the good news of the Incarnation is in fact what conduces to dysfunctional and dangerous totalitarianism. The source of the greatest suffering throughout human history is the attempt to deal with original sin on our own, through our political, economic, military or cultural efforts. When we try to eliminate conflict and sin through social reform, we inevitably make matters worse.
As Pascal said long ago, “He who would turn himself into an angel, turns himself into a beast.” The key to joy at the personal level and justice at the societal level is in fact the conviction that God has dealt with original sin, by taking it on himself and suffering with us and for us. This belief allows us to embrace the world in both its beauty and its tragedy, for we see salvation as God’s project, not our own. It is the Incarnation — the event celebrated by the singing of “Silent Night” — that frees us from our self-importance and gives the lie to our programs of perfectibility.
I can’t help but think that the recovery of this lost memory — so key to the authentic renewal of contemporary society — is what “The Giver” is finally about.
(Father Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and the Rector/President of Mundelein Seminary. He is the creator of the award winning documentary series, “Catholicism”  and “Catholicism:The New Evangelization.” Learn more at www.WordonFire.org.)